Information is based on dossiers from the Service historique de la Défense (Archives militaires, Château de Vincennes) Paris. It adds nuance to the topic of collaboration because it deals with Paris rather than Vichy. This booklet details military help to Germany by Georgians in Paris and other forms of collaboration with the German occupiers in France by Georgians and non-Georgians-including Frenchmen and women, Jews, and Corsicans-like Étienne Léandri-during World War II. Together, therefore, with the facts of Trotsky's life, I have had to narrate the tremendous social and political events of the period: the turmoil of industrialization and collectivization in the U.S.S.R, and the Great Purges the collapse of the German and European labor movements under the onslaught of Nazism and the outbreak of the Second World War. The biographer has had to show how this had come about and to delve into the complete circumstances and relationships which, while enabling Stalin to 'strut about in the hero's garb', made Trotsky into the symbol and sole mouthpiece of opposition to Stalinism.

It was as if a huge historic conflict had become compressed into a controversy and feud between two men.

Consequently, Trotsky appeared to stand quite alone against Stalin's autocracy. and not even an echo could be heard of the earlier intense struggles, except in the grovelling confessions of guilt to which so many of Stalin's adversaries had been reduced. From 1929 to 1940, no voice could be raised against Stalin in the U.S.S.R.

Modern Times by Paul Johnson