It is hard to imagine why a writer who has not published a single work on the workers’ movement and had no previous connection to a revolutionary organisation would accept the complex task of writing a biography of Leon Trotsky.
One clue as to why Josh Ireland would accept the daunting challenge can be found on his acknowledgement page. Apart from Isaac Deutcher, Ireland thanked several right-wing historians and writers, including Stephen Kotkin. Recently, the politically loathsome Kotkin wrote:
“Why should anyone care about Leon Trotsky in this day and age? A Marxist revolutionary who opposed but ultimately joined forces with Vladimir Lenin, he fought his entire life against markets and private property, parliaments and the rule of law, defending the Soviet state even as he denounced its leader, Joseph Stalin. That utopia imploded in ignominy decades ago.[1]
Kotkin’s love of Stalin notwithstanding, one reason for these right-wingers’ ire at Trotsky’s popularity lies in a recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov. A significant number, 62 per cent of Americans aged 18–29, say they hold a “favourable view” of socialism, and 34 per cent say the same of communism.
These statistics and others caused the rapid right-wing Cato Institute and one of its attack dogs, Michael Chapman, to vomit up this unhinged comment: “This is shocking given that communism is responsible for 100 million deaths worldwide and is rooted in socialism, the same philosophy that spawned both Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism. To favour socialism is to flirt with tyranny. Therefore, libertarians must educate more Americans to recognise the socialist actions of big government and fight against them. As Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, “the rise of fascism and Marxism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.” He also noted that both Mussolini and Hitler started as socialists.”[2]
Ireland’s ideological friend, Kotkin, who wrote a multi-volume biography of Joseph Stalin, has received widespread attention in both bourgeois and academic circles. From a Marxist standpoint, Kotkin’s work and Ireland’s work, for that matter, must be judged not as neutral scholarship but as political interventions. Kotkin’s method and conclusions, like Ireland’s, distort class relations, which serve the ruling-class and petit-bourgeois ideological needs.
Ireland adopts a historiographical posture that substitutes personality-centred narration and postmodern relativism for a class analysis of social forces. This method raises the fundamental question: which social classes and material relations produced Stalinism and made the bureaucratic caste politically dominant? By treating Stalin as the decisive, almost autonomous actor—rather than a product and amplifier of objective social transformations and bureaucratic interests Ireland reproduces a bourgeois individualised account of history that obscures the social foundations of political power. His book contains factual distortions and a very selective use of sources.
Ireland’s The Death of Trotsky joins a very crowded market of books that adopt a journalistic tone or are popular history treatments, such as Allan Todd’s Trotsky: The Passionate Revolutionary.[3] Ireland’s book from the very start treats Leon Trotsky’s murder in Mexico in 1940 in the manner of an individual crime story rather than a political episode which was the product of social forces, state power, in the form of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
One of Ireland’s more monstrous claims is that Stalinism was historically inevitable and that Trotsky would have acted in the same way had he defeated Stalin. Ireland’s is a teleological and ahistorical argument that collapses political struggle into fatalism. The rise of the bureaucracy was conditioned by objective isolation and by social forces inside the USSR; it was not the only possible outcome. I would offer a Marxist counterfactual viewpoint, based on the program and documented alternatives of the Left Opposition, which reveals genuine strategic alternatives that were politically feasible yet suppressed by the bureaucracy.[4]
One of the hallmarks of a serious historian is examining all the most important documents or books relevant to the subject matter. This extensive search entails copious reading and attending to the most significant archival research. However, on the latter, it is perhaps extraordinary, though not entirely fatal, that Ireland only visited two archives.
Ireland’s book examines a limited amount of standard facts, such as the GPU (Stalin’s secret police), conducting a prolonged campaign of infiltration, frame-ups and political preparation that culminated in the May 24, 1940, raid led by David Alfaro Siqueiros and the successful August 20–21 assassination by Ramón Mercader.
These stand-out facts are available almost anywhere on the internet. What troubles me greatly is that Ireland and a host of other historians writing about the assassination of Leon Trotsky refuse, point-blank, to either look at or mention the copious amounts of detailed information, including a major ongoing investigation called Security and the Fourth International, available on the World Socialist Website. Writers from the International Committee of the Fourth International and the WSWS have reviewed the facts of the case. Much of the work is groundbreaking and contains information about the assassination that no one else has uncovered. (See, for example, the ICFI’s investigation and David North’s “Trotsky’s Last Year”.[5] The ICFI/WSWS lectures and reports on the GPU plot and its methods, and Eric London’s Agents, The FBI and GPU Infiltration of the Trotskyist Movement. Ireland is either a lazy historian or is ideologically driven to ignore sources from a left-wing perspective that would counter his right-wing narrative.
As the great historian E.H Carr would always say, study the historian before you study the history. In Ireland’s case, this is put on a plate when he made the following comments: “Some writers are frauds, a good number are competent, a select few are geniuses, but all of them are procrastinators. I was a procrastinator long before I was a writer; I think it was my talent for procrastination that made me believe I might have what it took to become one. And now that I am, theoretically, paid to put words on a page, procrastination still occupies the bigger part of my day. My most productive form of procrastination is looking at old photos, specifically of the men and women I’m writing about, even more specifically, the clothes that they wear. Some of this is similar to the pleasure one gets from scrolling through a chic person’s Instagram account or a well-styled lookbook: it’s nice to see interesting people wearing interesting clothes! But I also see it as a valuable avenue of historical and psychological enquiry.
The aesthetic choices people make are as revealing of their personality and predilections as other sources, such as diaries or letters. When we dress, we make a series of choices. Even when we think we’re not making a choice – perhaps because we dress conventionally, according to the fashions or conventions of our time or place; or because we tell ourselves that we don’t care about what we wear – we are showing people something about how we view the world and how we want to engage with it.[6] This quote tells a lot about how Ireland sees the world.
The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was one of the most important political events of the 20th century and still has a contemporary resonance. Ireland presents this struggle as a personal one. However, the conflict between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin was not merely a personal rivalry. It was a political-ideological struggle rooted in concrete class interests and the social transformations set in motion by the October Revolution, the Civil War, and the New Economic Policy (NEP). Read dialectically, the confrontation expressed opposing responses to the objective problems of building proletarian power amid economic backwardness, bureaucratic growth and international capitalist restoration.
Josh Ireland’s book, like other contributions from the milieu of post‑Soviet revisionism, must be assessed not as isolated quarrels over biography but as political products of a social and ideological conjuncture. From a Marxist, materialist standpoint, the central question is: what class interests and social forces underlie attempts to belittle Trotsky and erase the political alternatives he represented?
Definite social forces produce the post‑Soviet revisionism and the diminishment of Trotsky’s role. Ireland’s work serves bourgeois material interests and distorts the concrete historical record.
Leon Trotsky is not merely a biographical subject; his work and most importantly, the Theory of Permanent Revolution, his critique of bureaucratic degeneration, and the founding program of the Fourth International, represent an alternative political program to both capitalist restoration and Stalinist bureaucracy. Attempts to reduce Trotsky to a marginal, unreliable, or merely rhetorical figure are not neutral scholarly disputes. They are political operations that, intentionally or not, assist bourgeois ideological currents by obscuring revolutionary perspectives and legitimating the outcomes of Stalinism and post‑Soviet capitalism.
Josh Ireland’s writings participate in the post‑Soviet critique and reproduce its tendencies—then they must be read as part of that broader ideological current. Whether the aim is to reduce Trotsky to a marginal figure, to treat his writings as unreliable, or to portray Stalinist outcomes as inevitable, these propositions are political positions rooted in the shifting balance of class forces since 1991: the restoration of capitalist power in the former USSR, the triumph of market ideology, and the need among sections of the intelligentsia to reconcile with the new order.
The revival of post‑Soviet falsification is not an abstract scholarly quarrel; it corresponds to real political danger today—weakening the capacity of workers to recognise the need for independent organisation and a revolutionary program.
[1] The moral squalor stemming from communist conviction-www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/02/20/leon-trotsky-soviet-communism/
[2] Young Americans Like Socialism Too Much—That’s a Problem Libertarians Must Fix-https://www.cato.org/blog/young-americans-socialism-too-much-thats-problem-libertarians-must-fix
[3] See-keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2026/02/trotsky-passionate-revolutionary-by.html
[4] Was There An Alternative -Vadim Rogovin-Mehring Books 2021
[5] Trotsky’s Last Year-1-6 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/20/anni-a20.html
[6] On Trotsky & Procrastination-www.williamcrabtree.co.uk/blogs/news
A Trumpet of Sedition 