Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power

Lenin is the focus of this study of three figures whose psychologies of leadership and political interactions played such central roles in shaping the Soviet Union. First tracing Lenin's personal and political development until his emergence as a leader of Russian Social Democracy, Pomper's psychologically oriented book then introduces Trotsky and Stalin. In each case, he shows the impact of family history and adolescent experience upon political commitment. Though psychoanalytically oriented, this study avoids technical jargon and presents both personal development and political behavior in easily grasped terms.

Pomper examines early personal and political traumas and their contribution to matters as diverse as styles of leadership and dialectical method. A historian of the Russian revolutionary movement as well as psycho-biographer, Pomper embeds his subject in the events of late imperial Russia, with special focus on the intersection of the biographies of the three men with processes in the revolutionary subculture and with the mass explosions of 1905 and 1917. Pomper then analyzes the struggles among the Bolshevik oligarchs during the early Soviet period (1917–1924) and the critical months after Lenin's death.

Documents in Trotsky's and Max Eastman's archives previously unused by Trotsky's biographers enrich Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power. The author has also exploited valuable new information on Lenin, Stalin, and the history of the CSPU provided in official Soviet publications and the published writings of émigrés and dissidents. A widely known scholar of Russian and Soviet history, Pomper is the first historian in decades systematically to integrate the lives of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in a single study. His skillful integration of these three figures, his original interpretations, and his lucid writing style make Philip Pomper's Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin engaging, illuminating, and significant.