I'm interested in reading about various personalities and disputes taking place at the time that resulted in the infighting within the communist party at the time. Most of the books i've looked at only concentrate on one specific person, or on the overall mess and misery that was the end result. Are there a good books on the philosophical and political dimensions of that era that will help me understand why Trotsky was exiled, why so many writers were suppressed, and why Stalin felt the need for the Purges of 1936-1938 etc? Something of a reading list would be great.
Thank you.
Robert Service has written thorough biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, which will give you a good picture of these three prominent figures and how they acted in relation to one another.
For a good general overview of the whole revolutionary period (1917 - ~1937) I would definitely recommend Sheila Fitzpatrick's The Russian Revolution, she puts the purges in the context of a larger revolutionary period.
Fitzpatrick also recently wrote, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, where she looks in detail the figures surrounding Stalin in government and looks at the Stalin period through the idea of collective leadership. This book especially should help you understand some of the personalities at work in the Soviet decision-making process.
(Fitzpatrick is one of the big names in the field of Soviet history and, in my opinion, her work is generally of a very high quality. She's written several other books that may interest you.)
Finally, I would cautiously recommend The road to terror: Stalin and the self-destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, with the caution that their take on the terror takes a 'top-heavy' approach, focusing on Stalin and the Bolshevik elites, which is only one view in the wider historiography. That said, I hope these recommendations will serve as a good starting point.