Leon Trotsky (Author) Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940) was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist who became one of the leaders of the Russian October Revolution, second only to Lenin. He was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and eventually assassinated in Mexico by a Stalinist agent in 1940.Max Eastman (Translator) Max Eastman (1883-1969) was an American writer, editor and prominent radical. In 1922, he travelled to Russia to study the Soviet regime and witnessed the power struggles between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. On his return to the United States, he wrote prolifically about socialism and Stalinist Russia. His many books include Since Lenin Died (1925), Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (1926), The End of Socialism in Russia (1937) and Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1939).

The History is his crowning work, both in scale and power and as the fullest expression of his ideas on revolution. As an account of a revolution, given by one of its chief actors, it stands unique in world literature.