The book is based on Trotsky's biographical essays Portraits, published in 1984 in the USA. It includes essays about Lenin, Stalin, Bukharin, Lunacharsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, Vorovsky, Gorky and others. The materials of the book "We and Them" not completed by Trotsky are placed in a special section. The collection is compiled from documents stored in the Trotsky archive at the Hogton Library of Harvard University.