In the years and decades since, Trotsky’s name became anathema in Russia, used as a bludgeon for Stalin’s bloody purges. When Lenin died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1924, Trotsky was outmaneuvered by Stalin as Lenin’s successor as leader of the Soviet Union. Then, in October of 1917, he engineered an armed coup on behalf of the Bolsheviks, overthrowing the provisional government of liberal reformer Alexander Kerensky. As Soviet Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, he led the young, embattled Red Army against the counter-revolutionary Whites.Īt the height of his power and influence, Trotsky says in the dramatization, “The Revolution is me.”īy now, Trotsky’s story is familiar: how he roused the masses in Petrograd with his fiery oratory in 1905-a rising that nonetheless failed. It was a Ukrainian Jew named Lev Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. The headline for the web site read “The Prophet Perverted: Netflix’s Trotsky miniseries demonizes its namesake with anti-Semitic themes and rank nationalism.”īetween 19, one of the most powerful Jews on the face of the earth was not a Rothschild, or any of the rising German Jews on Wall Street, a counselor to the Ottoman sultan, or any elected or appointed political figure. The World Socialist web site headline read: “A degraded spectacle of historical falsification and anti-Semitism,” which the review said “portrays Trotsky as the Judeo-Bolshevik anti-Christ… presented as a young Jewish upstart who doesn’t understand the Russian people… Another fictional explanation for the formation of Trotsky’s ‘bloodthirsty’ personality is the personal torment caused by his Jewish identity.” Jacobin, the Marxist journal, wrote that within the first 40-minute episode, “wildly anti-Semitic imagery from a long and terrible tradition of Russian reactionary thought has set the course for the rest of the series.” Ironically, some reviewers charged that this searing portrayal of Russian anti-Semitism was exaggerated, or itself anti-Semitic.
#TROTSKY MODELS SERIES#
What is surprising-and to me, compelling-about the series is its near-constant focus on Trotsky’s Judaism, and, although he was an atheist, how much his ethnic identity affected his life as a revolutionary. So it poses no threats to such scholarly classics as Isaac Deutscher’s definitive, three-volume biography, The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky.
While the Netflix series is intelligently done, it does telescope history, and so is rife with oversimplification, not to mention malnourished crowd shots.
Created by Russia’s Channel One with a big budget, it won a clutch of the Russian equivalent of Emmys. The one-season, eight-episode saga originally aired in 2017, to mark the 100 th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, in which Leon Trotsky played a central role. Take Trotsky, a Russian-made, Russian-language mini-series airing on Netflix. As the stock of unwatched streaming content thins out, trolling the Netflix byways can yield some fascinating, if otherwise obscure, fare.
0 kommentar(er)
