Renton also effectively charts the factors that led to the degeneration of the Russian revolution.
He gives a sense of how civil war and the resulting near-extinction of the Russian working class set the scene for the ascendency of Stalin and the bureaucratic strata that coalesced around him.
He shows how the fate of the revolution was eventually sealed by the fact that revolution failed to materialise in the more advanced economies of Western Europe.
Renton's presentation raises difficult questions about how things would have been different if Trotsky's oppositional faction in the Communist Party had triumphed in the 1920s over the Stalinist bureaucracy.
If Stalinism was the product of isolation and the failure of revolutionary socialism in Western Europe, factors outside the control of the Russians, wouldn't trying to save the revolution by overthrowing Stalin be like trying to put out a fire by blowing away the smoke?
Would the victory of the Opposition have resulted in just another form of bureaucratic degeneration?
Moreover, Renton writes 'Stalin's success compelled the people of the Soviet Union to live in conditions of isolation and blockade, under a leadership committed to the most extraordinary policies of shock industrialization.'
How does the claim that Stalin's success led to isola1932: Trotsky cracks a joke in a meeting in Copenhagen tion and blockade square with the claim that it was isolation and blockade that led to Stalin's success?
Renton is perhaps too hard on the old Bolsheviks slaughtered in Stalin's purges of the 1930s. He says 'Almost none of Lenin's former colleagues had the courage to deny the charges. Instead they showed a mistaken loyalty to the Party of 1917. Most of the old Bolsheviks had already recanted and they were too far along this road to stop now. Others were motivated by loyalty to the party.
Although their own lives were lost, they could see no alternative to Communism. Had they won, it would have meant the defeat of the Party, which was unthinkable.'
This is unconvincing. The confessions were tortured out of the old Bolsheviks, many of whose families were also under threat of torture and death from Stalin's thugs How many of us would refuse to "confess" in the face of such threats?
That Renton's book throws these difficult questions into relief is in the end no criticism.
The questions are real, and need to be faced square on by socialists following the revolutionary road in the 21st century.
Anyone looking for a quick and inexpensive introduction to Trotsky's contribution to the socialist journey could do far worse than start with Renton's engaging and well-produced biography.