My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography

Trotsky explicitly rejects the pretense of objectivity. In the foreword he writes, 'This book is not an objective photograph of my life, but a component of it... Recounting events, I analyse and appraise them; telling my story, I defend myself, and even more frequently attack' [citation:12]. The autobiography is therefore a continuation of his political struggle by literary means. It is also the only memoir written by a Bolshevik leader, making it a unique firsthand document of the revolution's inner workings [citation:2][citation:6].

Trotsky wrote the book in 1929, the first year of his exile in Turkey, after being expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and deported from the Soviet Union [citation:1][citation:2]. He was fifty years old, stripped of power, with his allies dead, exiled, or capitulated. His face was being excised from official photographs and his writings from circulation. The autobiography was thus written under conditions of political defeat and historical erasure, which explains its dual character as both a personal testimony and a counter-narrative against the Stalinist rewriting of revolutionary history.

The reception was mixed but largely respectful of its literary and historical value. William L. Langer, reviewing it in Foreign Affairs in July 1930, described it as 'an intensely human document' and 'a very valuable contribution to the recent history of Russia, full of facts and of revealing judgments of men' [citation:4]. Langer noted, however, that much of the book was taken up with Trotsky's polemic against Stalin, and that 'the main lines of this dispute have been long known' [citation:4]. The review captures the tension between the book's literary merits and its partisan purpose.

Scholars have noted that Trotsky's autobiography exerts a 'disproportionate influence' on scholarship about his early life, largely because alternative sources for his childhood and youth are scarce [citation:5]. This means historians have often relied on Trotsky's own carefully constructed narrative without sufficient external corroboration. The text also smooths over his early conflicts with Lenin and manages his class origins—his parents were landowners—and religious and ethnic background in ways that require critical reading [citation:12].

It should be read alongside his three-volume History of the Russian Revolution and The Revolution Betrayed. The History, written in the early 1930s, is a defense of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks' role in leading the masses to power. The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is a diagnosis of Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration. My Life, written between them, is the personal and political bridge: it explains how Trotsky came to his positions, recounts the revolutionary events he helped lead, and sets up the argument that Stalin's rise constituted a Thermidorian reaction against the revolution's original aims.

According to the book's publication history, Trotsky tried out several alternatives: 'Half A Century (1879-1929),' 'An Experiment in Autobiography,' 'Flood Tides and Ebb Tides: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary,' 'In the Service of the Revolution,' 'A Life of Struggle,' and 'To Live is to Struggle' [citation:9]. The final choice of the simple, almost ironic title My Life suggests a deliberate understatement, perhaps acknowledging that the life in question was never solely his own—it had been, and remained, subordinated to the revolution.