Economics was not Trotsky's strength: fudging economic policy was. At times, he appeared to favour Lenin's New Economic Policy — a temporary reintroduction of markets in the early 1920s — at others it was a rightist deviation. So wilful was his oppositionism that it is hard to avoid a twinge of sympathy for his arch-enemy, Stalin. Nothing he could do could satisfy the man. In 1928-29, Stalin shifted Comintern policy leftwards towards the preparation of seizures of power in the West, but it wasn't leftist enough for Trotsky. And when, in the early 1930s, Stalin conducted the break-neck industrialisation of the Soviet Union, he was denounced as an unprincipled
adventurer. 

The contrast between the extent of Tsarist and Soviet repression emerges starkly from Trotsky's career. Revolutionaries under the Tsar had it easy compared to the treatment meted out later by the Bolsheviks. Trotsky's early exile to Siberia was pleasant compared to what millions endured in the Gulag: he enjoyed freedom to earn money, to publish, to travel locally and eventually to escape. Later, in Mexico, where he fretted about the safety of his family in Russia and abroad, he had the grace to acknowledge that the Bolsheviks had murdered the entire family of the Romanovs, just as the OGPU (a forerunner of the KGB) was trying to eliminate the Bronsteins, children and all — though typically he sought to obscure his own role in that decision.

The charm of being a European or American sympathiser with Trotsky was that you were always pretty safe from the consequences of your own beliefs, and a full list of his intellectual fan-base would be long and distinguished. It included H. L. Mencken, H. G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw (who also admired Stalin), John Dewey, Edmund Wilson and John Dos Passos. None of them seems to have appreciated the depth of Trotsky's contempt for their values, or — something Service is one of the few not to overlook — the virulence of his Russian nationalism, which had led him to play down his Jewish origins from an early age. 

The contradiction here was that Trotsky the super-patriot was forever chiding his fellow Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Stalin, for being too preoccupied with the security of the new Soviet state to give world revolution the priority it deserved. Had the red flag flown over Western Europe (as it was to do in the East), with Trotsky we would swiftly have discovered who was top dog among the internationalist brothers. 

His death can be seen as a kind of long suicide. It was more than a case of the revolution eating up its votaries: Trotsky was a prime mover in setting up the terror state, the system that killed him, and to that extent he engineered his own death. Though, like a suicide bomber, before he succumbed he took a lot of people with him.