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Trotsky: A Biography is a biography of the Marxist theorist and revolutionary Leon Trotsky — written by the English historian Robert Service , then a professor in Russian history at the University of Oxford. It was first published by Macmillan in and later republished in other languages. Having converted to the Marxist revolutionary movement in early life, Trotsky had been a member of the Bolshevik Party and a significant figure in the October Revolution of which brought the Bolsheviks to power in the Russian Empire.

Following the death of Vladimir Lenin , Trotsky's rival Joseph Stalin ascended to the Soviet leadership, with Trotsky fleeing into exile, where he was murdered in Mexico.

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Following his death, various biographers produced works studying Trotsky; Service's differs from many of these in its emphasis. He argues that Trotsky has been romanticized by western leftists for decades, instead claiming that Trotsky laid the groundwork for the Stalinist totalitarian state in the Soviet Union and that had he become Soviet leader rather than Stalin, the end result would have been very similar.

The book received a mixed reception upon publication. The mainstream British and American press was overwhelmingly positive. Service is of the opinion, controversial among Trotskyists and anti-Stalinist Leninists, that politically the difference between Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin was only marginal and that excessive antidemocratic attitudes and use of terror as a mean of politics, was an embedded attitude with all three men and a significant portions of the Bolshevik leadership from the earliest days.

The excesses of Stalin was mainly a matter of personality and background such as ruthlessness, jealousy, a deep feeling of anger emanating from being continually overlooked and disregarded, a level of personal paranoia, and never failing memory regarding hurt and perceived enemies and a deep lust for vengeance on a personal level. Lenin favoured Stalin until, too late, their fallout in really opened Lenin's eyes to the danger of a future with Stalin in power.

Trotsky failed to form alliances and was socially inept and never fully accepted in the Bolshevik party leadership, which he had joined late. However, Stalin, contrary to his opponent, was a brilliant politician and political tactician, who was among the few who genuinely understood the consequences and means of political maneuvering in an environment in which appeals to the masses where the other leaders were strong had been systematically cut out of the equation by the means of the red-terror and prohibition of most means and vehicles of opposition that they had themselves promoted and embraced.

The ability to think theoretically, appeal in writing or speech to the public had rapidly diminished in political value by and was steadily declining in political value, and only alliances counted, which was Stalin's strength. Trotsky had himself aided the cutting off the only branch which might have supported him. His biography of Trotsky was positively reviewed in the British and American press on its publication, but two years later was strongly criticized by Service's Hoover Institution colleague Bertrand Patenaude in a review for The American Historical Review.

Service responded that the book's factual errors were minor and that Patenaude's own book on Trotsky presented him as a "noble martyr".