Voronsky was an outstanding figure of post-revolutionary Soviet intellectual life, editor of the most important literary journal of the 1920s in the USSR and a supporter of Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the struggle against Stalinism. He was executed by Stalin in 1937. He was one of the authentic representatives of classical Marxism in the field of literary criticism in the 20th century.

First published in 1924, these essays by Trotsky illuminate the problem of literary creation in the first workers state.Trotsky was perhaps the greatest representative in history of the Marxist school of literary criticism, which itself incorporated what was most farsighted in the aesthetic criticism produced by the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In The Commissar Vanishes (1997), David King investigates and exposes the falsification of Soviet history practiced by the Stalinist regime, as inconvenient figures were excised from photographs and art works.King commented: "The physical eradication of Stalin's political opponents at the hands of the secret police was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence."