Article: BOOK OF THE WEEK BIOGRAPHY Trotsky By Robert Service MACMILLAN, pounds 25, 600 pp Being Stalin's great enemy does not make Trotsky in any way a good man, says Simon Sebag Montefiore

Trotsky, like Mao and to some extent Lenin, has long been one of those Communist titans who, for some, achieved the status of fashionable radical saints, even in the democracies that they would have destroyed in an orgy of bloodletting. Trotsky's glamour derives from his role as Stalin's greatest enemy, but he was also wonderfully equipped for his role as revolutionary statesman - and to be a hero to misguided Westerners and schoolboys.

He possessed the necessary looks and style - the blue eyes, the shock of hair, the round glasses, the fine suits - to go with the wizardly oratory and flamboyant writing. He was the coiner of many a felicitous sentence - Stalin was the 'most eminent ...

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