This completes Robert Service’s trilogy on the Bolshevik leaders. Together with Comrades, his general survey of world communism, and two further volumes on 20th-century Russian history and social democracy, they offer all a non-specialist reader might want on the subject. Anyone who needs to dig deeper can be directed to Service’s brilliant organisational study, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, and an earlier three-volume political biography of Lenin.

Things have moved quickly in this field and in sometimes ironic directions. Twenty years ago, editorials consigned Communism to the dustbin of history, but with fashion-page brusqueness, as if dialectical materialism was no more substantial a phenomenon than tank-tops or eight-track stereo. A cursory scan of the Russian political scene reveals Communism as an active, and, for many, highly desirable, political force. However, writing Russian revolutionary history as if the political philosophies of Mensheviks and Kadets were merely failed catwalk statements rather than genuine alternatives to Bolshevism has been forced to surrender in the face of a steady tide from the recently opened archives.

Communism was supposed to transcend mere personal authority, but the peculiarities of Russian culture – mystical, didactic, emblematic – gave the Bolshevik leaders an opaque and lasting charisma that defined wider understanding of the Revolution and guaranteed that subsequent revisionism would have a personal colouring.

Attitudes to Lenin have been shifting since the 1950s, when Sidney Hook argued that ‘Stalinism’ was Leninism in a new uniform, its oppressions merely a refinement of Lenin’s brutal methodology. No-one is surprised any more to encounter a Lenin compounded of charm, high intelligence and querulousness, enforcing Enlightenment ideals with what used to be called ‘Asiatic cruelty’ (Lesley Chamberlain’s recent The Philosophy Steamer revealed how ruthlessly Lenin purged dissidence in the new Russia).

More startling is the attempted rehabilitation of Stalin: his grandson has been touring Britain on what is easily dismissed as a perverse charm campaign, but which unearths long-buried insights into Stalin’s remarkable political qualities. It’s an uphill task, and works against a strong gravity of prejudice, from left and right.

Which leaves Trotsky. How does he emerge from Service’s detailed and carefully inflected account? And how does its narrative square with the earlier books on Lenin and Stalin? The last question requires specialised comparison, but it’s worth returning for a moment to how the Bolsheviks saw themselves. Lenin was cast as Russia’s Robespierre, and Stalin, who promulgated a new Terror, its Danton. Trotsky, though, was not Saint-Just but Napoleon Bonaparte, the charismatic soldier whose ambitions all returned to the self and thus betrayed the cause.

Chronology spoiled the scheme. Lenin was older by almost a decade, but died in 1924. Stalin and Trotsky were of an age, born 1878 and 1879 respectively, but Trotsky was cheated of his imperial destiny in 1940, while Stalin enjoyed a solitary eminence for another dozen years.

All three practised a “cult of the personality’” a phrase Khrushchev used of Stalin in his personality as Red Tsar. Lenin created a mystique of absences, hiding away until the psychological moment and then making a messianic reappearance. It was Trotsky who pursued personal fame most assiduously. A brilliant orator, he took extraordinary pains with his appearance, even in extreme circumstances. Auburn-haired, piercingly blue-eyed, goateed and sharply dressed, Trotsky was ubiquitous in the early revolutionary period and Civil War, diminishing the size of the country, and the Bolshevik task, by covering extraordinary distances in his train, addressing the crowds. His message was constant and remained so to the end of his life. Trotskyism is the science of universal and permanent uprising.

Service offers a strong challenge to the partisan and sympathetic presentation of Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography (1954-1963). Instead of the pure and unwavering revolutionary flame, Trotsky emerges as a master of self-invention and spin. He subtly exaggerated the difficulties he had overcome. His gift for effortful gesture found expression as Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, a role that usefully combined frontline courage and high rhetoric. One never quite senses him as a complete man, not because Service’s portrayal is sketchy, but because Trotsky is always playing a new version of himself, unlikeable underneath the obvious gifts and superficial charm.

Of 28 index entries under ‘CHARACTER’ more than 20 are negative or neutral: the list begins with ‘alienating others’, ‘arrogance’, ‘aversion to sentimentality’.

All of these are evident. Although cast as the great unifier, standing above squabbles, Trotsky was a contradictory presence in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. He flirted with Menshevism, but had an ability to rationalise changes of ideological direction as if no previous position existed.

The lifelong anti-war spokesman redefined militarism in the service of revolution when appointed Military Commissar in 1918, and then bloodily suppressed the Kronstadt rebellion. If volte-face is a signature of Stalinist politics, Trotsky made it a fine art. Always, though, under the aegis of international revolution, which is where he and Stalin, the creator of the USSR, most fundamentally differed.

Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks only at the eleventh hour. The reputation he had made during the 1905 revolution carried him forward while Lenin, no less formidable a writer but a less impetuous performer, stayed behind Trotsky, who criticised what he thought of Lenin’s organisational fetishism, a Jacobin trait. Trotsky was never a party man, and it was his eventual downfall.

Service has pulled together too much information for anyone not familiar with the general trajectories of pre-war social democracy, but Trotsky is always at its heart: protean, perverse, charismatic. It will take time to see how this final corner of the trilogy adjusts our overall view of the Bolsheviks. For the moment, it delivers a Trotsky all too human, not the auto-icon of posthumous myth, but a man of formidable powers who fell victim not to Stalin but to his own beliefs and self-belief.