This collection gathers Trotsky’s portraits of revolutionary allies, adversaries and fellow travellers, including Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Georgi Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, Lenin, Maxim Gorky, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Stalin.

Some pieces are memorials, others political reckonings; nearly all combine sharply observed personality with an argument about history. Trotsky treats temperament, private conduct and political judgment as inseparable, asking how vanity, courage, indecision and loyalty become historical forces once people enter a revolutionary organisation.

The book is valuable both as political testimony and as an exercise in partisan portraiture. Trotsky is vivid, funny and often merciless, but never neutral: friends and enemies are arranged within his account of how the Russian revolutionary movement developed, fractured and hardened into Stalinism. Published posthumously by Pathfinder Press, it sits alongside the publisher’s broader project of collecting Trotsky’s dispersed writings in English.  Best for readers interested in revolutionary history, political character and memoir written with an axe already embedded in the table.

First edition. Pathfinder Press, 1977 paperback, edited by George Breitman and George Saunders. No underlining/markings aside from a heavily inscribed first page. Good condition with cover soiling, rubbing, creasing and moderate edge and corner wear.