My Life. The Rise and Fall of a Dictator.

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).

For sixty years, owning, smuggling, or quoting 'My Life' inside the USSR was considered a severe counter-revolutionary crime that could result in imprisonment, a sentence to a Gulag labour camp, or execution. The total ban on 'My Life' and other Trotsky's political texts was only fully lifted around 1989–1990, during the final collapse of the Soviet Union.

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 full burgundy morocco, with one-line gilt border, spine in 6 compartments, lettered and lined in gilt, all edges gilt, very good; 512pp.