Service calls Trotsky a chancer, a felicitous word, but of course he was more than that. He was also a visionary, writing that with the revolution triumphant throughout the world, "the average human type will rise to the level of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx." If so, like Trotsky himself, the average man would be a mightily conflicted person. Meanwhile, what did it matter if a few million sub-average, non-revolutionary types were eliminated in the pursuit of the vision?

Not that he was afraid to get his hands dirty or reluctant to condone the most bestial aspects of the Soviet regime. A recurring theme of the biography is that this revolutionary genius had personality problems. It wasn't just his taste for vicious sarcasm and abuse, but something deeper. Max Eastman, an American communist who knew him, was to say that he lacked feeling for others as individuals. This could be a useful quality in Trotsky's line of work. Even his acolytes in the West were worried by his bloody repression of the Kronstadt revolt of 1921 — by sailors demanding political pluralism — and the ease with which he dispensed summary death sentences in the Civil War. 

Fiercely opposed to the bourgeois "fetishism" of legal procedures, he would have been upset to learn of the bourgeois leniency enjoyed by his murderer, Ramon Mercader. In his Mexican prison, the Soviet hireling lived cosily, his cell unlocked, on a mysterious allowance of $100 a month. On release, he was secretly made a general in the KGB. Disappointed by Russia, he spent his last years in the comfort of Cuba.

"Lenin and Trotsky", Service comments, "had become the Siamese twins of Russian politics, joined at the hip in their determination to use state terror against enemies." Any notion of Stalin the hangman and Trotsky the humanist- despite-himself is efficiently demolished. Hearing of the early show-trials of Social Revolutionaries and ex-Mensheviks after his exile to Turkey in 1929, he raised no objection, any more than he did to the mass murder of priests or kulaks. 

The irony that the crimes of which the Mensheviks were accused were surpassed in outlandishness by the show trials of 1937-8, in which Trotsky himself was condemned to death in absentia, does not appear to have crossed his mind. Only incurable Trotsky junkies would deny that, had he stayed in Russia in a leadership role he would, with or without Stalin, have been more deeply steeped in blood than he was.