The book is based on a collection of biographical essays on Trotsky, “Portraits,” published in 1984 in the USA. It includes essays about Lenin, Stalin, Bukharin, Lunacharsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, Vorovsky, Gorky and others. A special section contains materials from Trotsky’s unfinished book “We and They.” The collection is compiled from documents stored in the Trotsky archive at the Hogton Library at Harvard University.