first edition in English

The first edition in English of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky's autobiography, My Life. The Rise and Fall of a Dictator.

Trotsky (1879-1940) wrote the text during his exile from the Soviet Union following his expulsion in 1929. The book contains a frank account from his fall from power in the years following Lenin's death in 1924, after which a 'division began to reveal itself between the leaders who expressed the historical line of the class and could see beyond the apparatus, and the apparatus itself—a huge, cumbrous, heterogeneous thing that easily sucked in the average communist' (p.428).

First edition in English; large 8vo (24 x 16.5 cm); portrait frontispiece, occasional light spotting, more pronounced to prelims, offsetting to final f. of text; modern half red morocco, spine lettered in gilt, top-edge gilt, others rough-trimmed, very good; 512pp.