MYTH DEFIED

Asked to explain the success of the blockbuster 1962 film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," an adaptation of her 1949 short story, Dorothy M. Johnson quipped, "If the myth is bigger than the man, write the myth."

That is precisely what the biographers of Leon Trotsky have done, until now.

Robert Service's iconoclastic yet rigorously balanced portrait of the fiery intellectual who helped Lenin cement Bolshevik power in Russia strips away the elaborate myths and lies that have buttressed Trotsky's place in the pantheon of revolutionary martyrs.

Using new archival resources -- including family letters, party and military correspondence, confidential notes, and, perhaps most interesting of all, medical records -- Service gives us a keen understanding of the character and intellect, peccadilloes and virtues of one of the key, yet wildly misunderstood figures in 20th century history.

Service shows us that Lev Davidovich Bronstein -- he took Trotsky, the name of a jailer in pre-revolutionary Moscow, as his nom de guerre -- was very much of the same murderous cloth as Lenin and Stalin. That contradicts the view long held by his admirers that he was a pure revolutionary who was hounded into exile and subsequently assassinated by his nemesis, Stalin.

Western historians and left-wing intellectuals have largely accepted Trotsky's account of his opposition to Stalin's policies, but the record shows that the differences between the two were surprisingly minute. In fact, no one was a more avid champion of state terror than Trotsky, who vigorously endorsed the elimination of anyone whom he perceived to be opposed to Soviet power. Indeed, the shockingly brutal 1921 repression of the Krondstat sailors and workers, who had demanded free elections and democratic government, was Trotsky's work.

Trotsky's ruthlessness was not equaled by finesse, and Service provides a detailed account of the ineptitude and vanity that sealed his fate. That vanity manifested itself in a most unproletarian predilection for fashionable clothing and the perquisites of power, as well as his appalling treatment of women. Yet they would flock to his bed, most notably artist Frida Kahlo, who was married to the painter Diego Rivera. The two provided Trotsky a haven in Mexico when he fled Stalin's henchmen.

While Service provides the broad canvas of Trotsky's life and work, Bertrand Patenaude, in his book, focuses almost exclusively on the revolutionary's death. It was the stuff of legend, and Patenaude also strips away the bunkum to give us an excellent account of Trotsky's final months. Particularly impressive is the way he interweaves episodes from Trotsky's past into the account of his final days to give the story context and dimension.

With his impressive book, Service, who is a member of the British Academy and a professor of Russian history at Oxford, completes his trilogy of the giants -- Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky -- who fashioned the Soviet state. There is no facet of Trotsky's life that hasn't been examined in detail, from his character and finances to his quarrels with party comrades over the minutiae of Communist dogma and his struggle with his Jewish roots. Encyclopedic is the word, and it is oh, so well written.

Patenaude, a lecturer at Stanford and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is equally felicitous in handling the almost stultifying complexity of Trotsky's final months. Together they have closed the book, so to speak, on this most extraordinary figure.

Bonafield, who studied at Harvard University's Russian Research Center, has been to Russia five times.