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Lev Davidovich Bronstein ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky,; ; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky'' was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist. He was a key figure in the 1905 Revolution, October Revolution of 1917, Russian Civil War, and the establishment of the Soviet Union, from which he was exiled in 1929 before Assassination of Leon Trotsky, his assassination in 1940. Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were widely considered the two most prominent figures in the Soviet state from 1917 until Death and state funeral of Vladimir Lenin, Lenin's death in 1924. Ideologically a Marxist and a Leninist, Trotsky's ideas inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.
Trotsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898, being arrested and exiled to Siberia for his activities. In 1902 he escaped to London, where he met Lenin. Trotsky initially sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks in the party's 1903 schism, but declared himself non-factional in 1904. During the 1905 Revolution, Trotsky was elected chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. He was again exiled to Siberia, but escaped in 1907 and lived abroad. After the February Revolution of 1917, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. He helped lead the October Revolution, and as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I. He served as People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, People's Commissar for Military Affairs from 1918 to 1925, during which he built the Red Army and led it to victory in the Russian Civil War, civil war. In 1922, Lenin formed a bloc with Trotsky against the growing Soviet Bureaucracy, Soviet bureaucracy and proposed that he become a Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union, deputy premier, but Trotsky declined. Beginning in 1923, Trotsky led the party's Left Opposition faction, which opposed the market concessions of the New Economic Policy.
After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky emerged as a prominent critic of Joseph Stalin, who soon politically outmaneuvered him. Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Politburo in 1926 and from the party in 1927, exiled to Alma Ata in 1928, and deported in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937. In exile, Trotsky wrote polemics against Stalinism, advocating proletarian internationalism against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution held that the revolution could only survive if spread to more advanced capitalist countries. In ''The Revolution Betrayed'' (1936), he argued that the Soviet Union had become a "degenerated workers' state", and in 1938 founded the Fourth International as an alternative to the Comintern. After being sentenced to death Trial in absentia, in absentia at the Moscow show trials in 1936, Trotsky Assassination of Leon Trotsky, was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader.
Damnatio memoriae, Written out of official history under Stalin, Trotsky was one of the few of his rivals who was never Rehabilitation (Soviet), politically rehabilitated by later Soviet leaders. In the West, Trotsky emerged as a hero of the anti-Stalinist left for his defense of a more Socialist democracy, democratic, internationalism (politics), internationalist form of socialism against Stalinist totalitarianism, and for his intellectual contributions to Marxism. While some of his wartime actions are controversial, such as his ideological defence of the Red Terror and violent suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, scholarship ranks Trotsky's leadership of the Red Army highly among historical figures, and he is credited for his major involvement with the military history of the Soviet Union, military, Economic history of the Soviet Union, economic, culture of the Soviet Union, cultural and Lenin's First and Second Government, political development of the Soviet Union.
Trotsky became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896 after moving to the port town of Mykolaiv, Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv) on the Black Sea. Initially a ''narodnik'' (revolutionary agrarian socialist populist), he opposed Marxism but was converted by his future first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya. He graduated from high school with first-class honours the same year. His father had intended for him to become a mechanical engineer.
Trotsky briefly attended Odessa University, studying engineering and mathematics. A university colleague noted his exceptional mathematical talent. However, bored with his studies, he increasingly focused on political philosophy and underground revolutionary activities. He dropped out in early 1897 to help organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev. Using the name "Lvov",chapter XVII of his autobiography
''My Life''
, Marxist Internet Archive he wrote and printed leaflets, distributed revolutionary pamphlets, and popularized socialist ideas among industrial workers and students. In January 1898, over 200 union members, including Trotsky, were arrested. He spent the next two years in prison awaiting trial, first in Nikolayev, then Kherson, Odessa, and finally Moscow. In Moscow, he encountered other revolutionaries, learned of Lenin, and read Lenin's ''The Development of Capitalism in Russia''. Two months into his imprisonment, the first Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was held (1–3 March 1898). From then on, Trotsky identified as an RSDLP member.
While imprisoned in Moscow in the summer of 1899, Trotsky married Aleksandra Sokolovskaya (1872–1938), a fellow Marxist, in a ceremony performed by a Jewish chaplain. In 1900, he was sentenced to four years of exile in Siberia. Due to their marriage, Trotsky and his wife were exiled together to Ust-Kut and Verkholensk in the Lake Baikal, Baikal region. They had two daughters, Zinaida Volkova, Zinaida (1901–1933) and Nina (1902–1928), both born in Siberia.
In Siberia, Trotsky studied history, philosophy, economics, sociology, and the works of Karl Marx to solidify his political stance. He became aware of internal party differences, particularly the debate between "Economism, economists", who focused on workers' economic improvements, and those who prioritized overthrowing the monarchy through a disciplined revolutionary party. The latter position was advocated by the London-based newspaper ''Iskra'' (''The Spark''), founded in 1900. Trotsky quickly sided with ''Iskra'' and began writing for it.
In the summer of 1902, urged by his wife, Trotsky escaped from Siberia hidden in a load of hay. Aleksandra later escaped with their daughters. Both daughters married and had children but died before their parents. Nina Nevelson died from tuberculosis in 1928. Zinaida Volkova, also suffering from tuberculosis and depression (mood), depression, followed her father into exile in Berlin but committed suicide in 1933. Aleksandra disappeared in 1935 during Stalin's Great Purge and was murdered by Soviet forces in 1938.
Following Bloody Sunday, Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in February 1905 via Kiev. He wrote for an underground press in Kiev before moving to Saint Petersburg. There, he worked with Bolsheviks like Leonid Krasin and the local Menshevik committee, pushing the latter in a more radical direction. A police raid in May forced him to flee to rural Grand Duchy of Finland, Finland, where he further developed his theory of permanent revolution.
On 19 September 1905, typesetters at Ivan Sytin's Moscow printing house struck for shorter hours and higher pay. By 24 September, 50 other Moscow printing shops joined. On 2 October, Saint Petersburg typesetters struck in solidarity. On 7 October, railway workers of the Moscow–Kazan Railway also struck. Amidst this turmoil, Trotsky returned to Saint Petersburg on 15 October. He addressed the Saint Petersburg Soviet (Council) of Workers' Deputies at the Technological Institute, with an estimated 200,000 people gathered outside—about half the city's workers.
After his return, Trotsky and Parvus took over the newspaper ''Russian Gazette,'' increasing its circulation to 500,000. Trotsky also co-founded "Nachalo" ("The Beginning") with Parvus, Julius Martov, and other Mensheviks, which became a successful newspaper during the 1905 revolutionary climate in Saint Petersburg.
Before Trotsky's return, Mensheviks had independently conceived of an elected, non-party revolutionary body representing the capital's workers: the first Soviet (council), Soviet. By Trotsky's arrival, the Saint Petersburg Soviet was functioning, headed by Georgy Stepanovich Khrustalev-Nosar, Khrustalyev-Nosar (Georgy Nosar, alias Pyotr Khrustalyov), a lawyer chosen as a compromise figure. Khrustalyev-Nosar became popular and was the Soviet's public face. Trotsky joined the Soviet as "Yanovsky" (after his birthplace) and was elected vice-chairman. He performed much of the practical work and, after Khrustalyev-Nosar's arrest on 26 November 1905, became its chairman. On 2 December, the Soviet issued a proclamation on Tsarist government debts:
The following day, 3 December 1905, government troops surrounded the Soviet, and its deputies were arrested. Trotsky and other leaders were tried in 1906 for supporting an armed rebellion. On 4 October 1906, he was convicted and sentenced to internal exile in Siberia.
En route to exile in Obdorsk, Siberia, in January 1907, Trotsky escaped at Beryozovo, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Berezov and made his way to London. He attended the 5th Congress of the RSDLP. In October, he moved to Vienna, Austria-Hungary. For the next seven years, he participated in the activities of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and occasionally the Social Democratic Party of Germany, German Social Democratic Party. In Vienna, he became close to Adolph Joffe, his friend for the next 20 years, who introduced him to psychoanalysis.
In October 1908, Trotsky joined the editorial staff of ''Pravda'' ("Truth"), a bi-weekly, Russian-language social democratic paper for Russian workers, co-editing it with Adolph Joffe and Matvey Skobelev. It was smuggled into Russia. The paper appeared irregularly, with only five issues in its first year. Avoiding factional politics, it proved popular with Russian industrial workers. After the 1905–1907 revolution's failure, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks experienced multiple splits. Funding for ''Pravda'' was scarce. Trotsky sought financial backing from the RSDLP Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Central Committee throughout 1909.
In 1910, a Bolshevik majority controlled the Central Committee. Lenin agreed to finance ''Pravda'' but required a Bolshevik co-editor. When various factions tried to reunite at the January 1910 RSDLP Central Committee meeting in Paris (over Lenin's objections), Trotsky's ''Pravda'' was made a party-financed 'central organ'. Lev Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, joined the editorial board from the Bolsheviks. However, unification attempts failed by August 1910. Kamenev resigned amid mutual recriminations. Trotsky continued publishing ''Pravda'' for another two years until it folded in April 1912.
The Bolsheviks launched a new workers' newspaper in Saint Petersburg on 22 April 1912, also named ''Pravda''. Trotsky, upset by what he saw as the usurpation of his newspaper's name, wrote a bitter letter to Nikolay Chkheidze, a Menshevik leader, in April 1913, denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Though he quickly moved past the disagreement, the letter was intercepted by the Okhrana (secret police) and archived. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky's opponents within the Communist Party publicized the letter to portray him as Lenin's enemy.
The 1910s were a period of heightened tension within the RSDLP. A major disagreement between Trotsky and the Mensheviks on one side, and Lenin on the other, concerned "expropriations"—armed robberies of banks and businesses by Bolshevik groups to fund the Party. These actions, banned by the 5th Congress, were continued by Bolsheviks.
In January 1912, most of the Bolshevik faction, led by Lenin, held a conference in Prague, broke away from the RSDLP, and formed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks). In response, Trotsky organized a "unification" conference of social democratic factions in Vienna in August 1912 (the "August Bloc") to reunite Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, but this attempt was largely unsuccessful.
In Vienna, Trotsky published articles in radical Russian and Ukrainian newspapers like ''Kievskaya Mysl,'' using pseudonyms such as "Antid Oto", a name chosen randomly from an Italian dictionary. Trotsky joked he "wanted to inject the Marxist antidote into the legitimate newspapers". In September 1912, ''Kievskaya Mysl'' sent him to the Balkans as its war correspondent, where he covered the two Balkan Wars for the next year. There, Trotsky chronicled ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbian army Massacres of Albanians in the Balkan Wars, against Albanian civilians. He became a close friend of Christian Rakovsky, later a leading Soviet politician and Trotsky's ally. On 3 August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, with Austria-Hungary fighting the Russian Empire, Trotsky was forced to flee Vienna for neutral Switzerland to avoid arrest as a Russian émigré.
As a war correspondent for ''Kievskaya Mysl'', Trotsky moved to France on 19 November 1914. In January 1915 in Paris, he began editing ''Nashe Slovo'' ("Our Word"), an internationalist socialist newspaper, initially with Martov (who soon resigned as the paper moved left). He adopted the slogan "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered." Lenin advocated Russia's defeat and demanded a complete break with the Second International.
Trotsky attended the Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in September 1915, advocating a middle course between those like Martov, who would stay in the Second International, and those like Lenin, who would break from it and form a Third International. The conference adopted Trotsky's proposed middle line. Lenin, initially opposed, eventually voted for Trotsky's resolution to avoid a split among anti-war socialists.
In September 1916, Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his anti-war activities. Spanish authorities, not wanting him, deported him to the United States on 25 December 1916. He arrived in New York City on 13 January 1917, staying for over two months at 1522 Vyse Avenue in The Bronx. In New York, he wrote articles for the local Russian language, Russian-language socialist newspaper ''Novy Mir (1916 magazine), Novy Mir'' and, in translation, for the Yiddish-language daily The Jewish Daily Forward, ''Der Forverts'' ("Forward"). He also gave speeches to Russian émigrés.
Trotsky was in New York City when the February Revolution of 1917 led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. He left New York aboard SS ''Kristianiafjord'' on 27 March 1917, but his ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Trotsky was arrested and detained for a month at the Amherst Internment Camp in Nova Scotia. In the camp, he befriended workers and sailors among his fellow inmates, describing his month there as "one continual mass meeting".''Leon Trotsky: My Life – In a Concentration Camp''
, ns1758.ca; accessed 31 January 2018. His speeches and agitation angered German inmates, who complained to the camp commander, Colonel Morris, about Trotsky's "anti-patriotic" attitude. Morris subsequently forbade Trotsky from making public speeches, leading to 530 prisoners protesting and signing a petition against the decision. In Russia, after initial hesitation and under pressure from workers' and peasants' Soviets, Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov demanded Trotsky's release as a Russian citizen. The British government freed him on 29 April 1917.
He reached Russia on 17 May 1917. Upon his return, Trotsky largely agreed with the Bolshevik position but did not immediately join them. Russian social democrats were split into at least six groups, and the Bolsheviks awaited the next party Congress to decide on mergers. Trotsky temporarily joined the Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in Petrograd, becoming one of its leaders. At the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Congress of Soviets in June, he was elected a member of the first All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) from the Mezhraiontsy faction.
After an unsuccessful pro-Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd in July (the July Days), Trotsky was arrested on 7 August 1917. He was released 40 days later following the failed counter-revolutionary Kornilov affair, uprising by Lavr Kornilov. After the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky was elected its chairman on . He sided with Lenin against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev when the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed staging an armed uprising, and he led the efforts to overthrow the Russian Provisional Government headed by socialist Aleksandr Kerensky.
Joseph Stalin wrote the following summary of Trotsky's role in 1917 in ''Pravda'' on 6 November 1918:In One And The Same Issue
New International, Vol. 2 No. 6, October 1935, p. 208. Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book ''The October Revolution'' (1934), it was expunged from Stalin's ''Works'' (1949). After the success of the October Revolution on 7–8 November 1917, Trotsky led efforts to repel a Kerensky–Krasnov uprising, counter-attack by Cossacks under General Pyotr Krasnov and other troops loyal to the overthrown Provisional Government at Gatchina. Allied with Lenin, he defeated attempts by other Bolshevik Central Committee members (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Rykov, etc.) to share power with other moderate socialist parties. Trotsky advocated for a predominantly Bolshevik government and was reluctant to recall Mensheviks as partners after their voluntary withdrawal from the Congress of Soviets. However, he released several socialist ministers from prison. Neither Trotsky nor his colleagues in 1917 initially wished to suppress these parties entirely; the Bolsheviks reserved vacant seats in the Soviets and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Central Executive Committee for these parties in proportion to their vote share at the Congress. Concurrently, prominent Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Left Socialist Revolutionaries assumed positions in Lenin's government, leading commissariats such as agriculture (Andrei Kolegayev), property (Vladimir Karelin), justice (Isaac Steinberg), posts and telegraphs (Prosh Proshian), and local government (Vladimir Trutovsky). According to Deutscher, Menshevik and Social Revolutionary demands for a coalition government included disarming Bolshevik detachments and excluding Lenin and Trotsky, which was unacceptable even to moderate Bolshevik negotiators like Kamenev and Grigori Sokolnikov, Sokolnikov. By the end of 1917, Trotsky was unquestionably the second most powerful man in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin, overshadowing Zinoviev, who had been Lenin's top lieutenant for the previous decade.
In preparation for peace talks with the Central Powers, Trotsky appointed his old friend Adolph Joffe to represent the Bolsheviks. When the Soviet delegation learned that Germany and Austria-Hungary planned to annex Polish territory, establish a rump Polish state, and turn the Baltic provinces into client states ruled by German princes, the talks were recessed for 12 days. The Soviets hoped that, given time, their allies would join the negotiations or that the Western European proletariat would revolt; thus, prolonging negotiations was their best strategy. As Trotsky wrote, "To delay negotiations, there must be someone to do the delaying". Consequently, Trotsky replaced Joffe as head of the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk from 22 December 1917 to 10 February 1918.
The Soviet government was divided. Left Communists (Soviet Russia), Left Communists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, believed no peace was possible between a Soviet republic and a capitalist empire, advocating a revolutionary war for a pan-European Soviet republic. They cited early Red Army successes against Polish forces, White movement, White forces, and Ukrainian People's Republic, Ukrainian forces as proof of its capability, especially with propaganda and asymmetrical warfare. They were willing to negotiate to expose German imperial ambitions but opposed signing any peace treaty, favouring a revolutionary war if faced with a German ultimatum. This view was shared by the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Left Socialist Revolutionaries, then junior partners in the coalition government.Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (Left SRs)
; Glossary of organizations on Marxists.org
Lenin, initially hopeful for a swift European revolution, concluded that the German Imperial government remained strong and that, without a robust Russian military, armed conflict would lead to the Soviet government's collapse. He agreed a pan-European revolution was the ultimate solution but prioritized Bolshevik survival. From January 1918, he advocated signing a separate peace treaty if faced with a German ultimatum. Trotsky's position was between these factions. He acknowledged the old Russian army's inability to fight:
However, he agreed with the Left Communists that a separate peace treaty would be a severe morale and material blow, negating recent successes, reviving suspicions of Bolshevik-German collusion, and fuelling internal resistance. He argued that a German ultimatum should be refused, which might trigger an uprising in Germany or inspire German soldiers to disobey orders if an offensive was a naked land grab. Trotsky wrote in 1925:
In a letter to Lenin before 18 January 1918, Trotsky outlined his "no war, no peace" policy: announce war termination and demobilization without signing a treaty, placing the fate of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland on the German working people. He believed Germany would find it difficult to attack due to internal conditions and opposition from various German political factions.
Lenin initially responded on 18 January: "Stalin has just arrived; we will look into the matter with him and let you have a joint answer right away," and "please adjourn proceedings and leave for Petrograd. Send a reply; I will wait. Lenin, Stalin." Trotsky, sensing disagreement, returned to Petrograd. During their debate, Lenin concluded: "In any case, I stand for the immediate signing of peace; it is safer."
On 10 February 1918, Trotsky and the Russian delegation withdrew from peace talks, declaring an end to the war on Russia's side without signing a peace treaty. Privately, Trotsky had expressed willingness to relent to peace terms if Germany resumed its offensive, albeit with moral dissent. Germany resumed Operation Faustschlag, military operations on 18 February. The Red Army detachments proved no match for the German army. On the evening of 18 February, Trotsky and his supporters abstained in a Central Committee vote, and Lenin's proposal to accept German terms was approved 7–4. The Soviet government sent a Radiogram (message), radiogram accepting the final Brest-Litovsk terms.
Germany did not respond for three days, continuing its offensive. The response on 21 February contained such harsh terms that even Lenin briefly considered fighting. However, the Central Committee again voted 7–4 on 23 February to accept. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March and ratified on 15 March 1918. Closely associated with the previous "no war, no peace" policy, Trotsky resigned as Commissar for Foreign Affairs.
On 13 March 1918, Trotsky's resignation as Foreign Affairs Commissar was accepted. He was appointed People's Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs, replacing Podvoisky, and chairman of the Supreme Military Council. The post of commander-in-chief was abolished, giving Trotsky full control of the Red Army, responsible only to the Communist Party leadership, whose Left Socialist Revolutionary allies had left the government over the treaty.
The entire Bolshevik Red Army leadership, including former Defence Commissar Nikolai Podvoisky and commander-in-chief Nikolai Krylenko, vigorously protested Trotsky's appointment and eventually resigned. They believed the Red Army should consist only of dedicated revolutionaries, rely on propaganda and force, and have elected officers. They viewed former imperial officers as potential traitors. Their views remained popular, and their supporters, including Podvoisky (who became one of Trotsky's deputies), were a constant source of opposition. Discontent with Trotsky's policies of strict discipline, conscription, and reliance on supervised non-Communist military experts led to the Military Opposition, active within the Party in late 1918–1919.
The military situation tested Trotsky's organizational skills. In May–June 1918, the Czechoslovak Legions revolted, leading to the loss of most of Russia's territory, increasingly organized resistance from anti-Communist forces (the White movement, White Army), and widespread defections by military experts Trotsky relied on.
Trotsky and the government responded with a full mobilization, increasing the Red Army from under 300,000 in May 1918 to one million by October, and introducing political commissars to ensure loyalty of military experts (mostly former Imperial officers) and co-sign their orders. Trotsky viewed the Red Army's organization as built on October Revolution ideals. He later wrote:
A controversial measure was hostage-taking of relatives of ex-Tsarist officials in the Red Army to prevent defection or betrayal. Service noted this practice was used by both Red and White armies. Trotsky later defended this, arguing no families of betraying ex-officials were executed and that such draconian measures, if adopted earlier, would have reduced overall casualties. Deutscher highlights Trotsky's preference for exchanging hostages over execution, recounting General Pyotr Krasnov's release on parole in 1918, only for Krasnov to take up arms again shortly thereafter.
The Red Terror was enacted following assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin, assassination attempts on Lenin and Trotsky, and the assassinations of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and party editor V. Volodarsky. The French Reign of Terror is seen as an influence.Wilde, Robert. 2019 February 20.
The Red Terror
" ''ThoughtCo''. Retrieved 24 March 2021. The decision was also driven by early White Army massacres of "Red" prisoners in 1917, allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, Allied intervention, and massacres of Reds during the Finnish Civil War (10,000–20,000 workers killed by Finnish Whites)." In ''Terrorism and Communism'', Trotsky argued the terror in Russia began with the White Terror (Russia), White Terror under White Guard forces, to which the Bolsheviks responded with the Red Terror. Felix Dzerzhinsky, director of the Cheka (predecessor to the KGB), was tasked with rooting out counter-revolutionary threats. From early 1918, Bolsheviks began eliminating opposition, including anarchists. On 11 August 1918, Lenin Lenin's Hanging Order, telegraphed orders "to introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod and to "crush" landowners resisting grain requisitioning. «Красный и Белый террор в России в 1917—1922 годах» . On 30 August, Fanny Kaplan, a Socialist Revolutionary Party, Socialist Revolutionary, unsuccessfully Assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin, attempted to assassinate Lenin. In September, Trotsky rushed from the eastern front to Moscow; Stalin remained in Tsaritsyn. Kaplan cited growing Bolshevik authoritarianism. These events persuaded the government to heed Dzerzhinsky's calls for greater terror. The Red Terror officially began thereafter, between 17 and 30 August 1918. Trotsky wrote:
Given manpower shortages and 16 opposing foreign armies, Trotsky insisted on using former Tsarist officers as military specialists, combined with Bolshevik political commissars. Lenin commented:
In September 1918, facing military difficulties, the Bolshevik government declared martial law and reorganized the Red Army. The Supreme Military Council was abolished, and the position of commander-in-chief restored, filled by Jukums Vācietis, commander of the Latvian Riflemen. Vācietis handled day-to-day operations. Trotsky became chairman of the new Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, retaining overall military control. Despite earlier clashes with Vācietis, Trotsky established a working relationship. This reorganization caused another conflict between Trotsky and Stalin in late September. Trotsky appointed former imperial general Pavel Sytin to command the Southern Front, but Stalin refused to accept him in early October, and Sytin was recalled. Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov tried to reconcile Trotsky and Stalin, but their meeting failed.
In 1919, 612 "hardcore" deserters out of 837,000 draft dodgers and deserters were executed under Trotsky's draconian measures. According to Orlando Figes, most "deserters...were handed back to the military authorities, and formed into units for transfer to one of the rear armies or directly to the front". Even "malicious" deserters were returned to the ranks when reinforcements were desperate. Figes noted the Red Army instituted amnesty weeks, prohibiting punitive measures against desertion, which encouraged the voluntary return of 98,000–132,000 deserters.
Throughout late 1918 and early 1919, Trotsky's leadership faced attacks, including veiled accusations in Stalin-inspired newspaper articles and a direct attack by the Military Opposition at the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), VIIIth Party Congress in March 1919. He weathered them, being elected one of five full members of the first Politburo after the Congress. But he later wrote:
In mid-1919, the Red Army had grown from 800,000 to 3,000,000 and fought on sixteen fronts, providing an opportunity for challenges to Trotsky's leadership. At the 3–4 July Central Committee meeting, after a heated exchange, the majority supported Kamenev and Ivar Smilga, Smilga against Vācietis and Trotsky. Trotsky's plan was rejected, and he was criticized for alleged leadership shortcomings, many personal. Stalin used this to pressure LeninChapter XXXVII o
''My Life''
to dismiss Trotsky. Significant changes were made to Red Army leadership. Trotsky was temporarily sent to the Southern Front, while Smilga informally coordinated work in Moscow. Most non-day-to-day Revolutionary Military Council members were relieved of duties on 8 July, and new members, including Smilga, were added. The same day, Vācietis was arrested by the Cheka on suspicion of an anti-Soviet plot and replaced by Sergey Kamenev (commander), Sergey Kamenev. After weeks in the south, Trotsky returned to Moscow and resumed control. A year later, Smilga and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Tukhachevsky were defeated at the Battle of Warsaw (1920), Battle of Warsaw, but Trotsky's refusal to retaliate against Smilga earned his friendship and later support during 1920s intra-Party battles. By October 1919, the government faced its worst crisis: Denikin's troops approached Tula, Russia, Tula and Moscow from the south, and General Nikolay Yudenich's troops approached Petrograd from the west. Lenin decided Petrograd had to be abandoned to defend Moscow. Trotsky argued Petrograd needed to be defended, partly to prevent Estonia and Finland from intervening. In a rare reversal, Trotsky, supported by Stalin and Zinoviev, prevailed against Lenin in the Central Committee.
In early 1920, Soviet–Polish tensions led to the Polish–Soviet War. Trotsky argued the Red Army was exhausted and the government should sign a peace treaty with Poland quickly, not believing the Red Army would find much support in Poland. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders believed Red Army successes meant "The defensive period of the war with worldwide imperialism was over, and we could, and had the obligation to, exploit the military situation to launch an offensive war." Poland defeated the Red Army, turning back the offensive at the Battle of Warsaw (1920), Battle of Warsaw in August 1920. Back in Moscow, Trotsky again argued for peace, and this time prevailed.
In March 1921, during the Kronstadt Rebellion, sailors and soldiers at the Kronstadt naval base revolted against the Bolshevik government, demanding greater freedom for workers and peasants, an end to one-party rule, and restoration of civil rights. The rebellion, occurring simultaneously with the 10th Party Congress, further destabilized the fragile political situation.
Trotsky, as Commissar of War, was instrumental in ordering the rebellion's suppression. On 18 March 1921, after failed negotiations, the Red Army stormed the island, resulting in thousands of Kronstadt sailors' deaths. Trotsky justified the action by presenting evidence of foreign backing, a claim contested by several historians. His role has been criticized, with anarchists like Emma Goldman accusing him of betraying the revolution's democratic ideals.
Historian Vladimir Cherniaev sums up Trotsky's main contributions:
Historian Geoffrey Swain argues:
Lenin said in 1921 that Trotsky was "in love with organisation," but in working politics, "he has not got a clue." Swain explains this by arguing Trotsky was not good at teamwork, being a loner who had mostly worked as a journalist, not a professional revolutionary like others.
In late 1922, Trotsky allied with Lenin against Stalin and the emerging Soviet bureaucracy. Stalin had recently engineered the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), further centralising state control. The alliance was effective on foreign trade but was hindered by Lenin's progressing illness.
In January 1923, Lenin amended his Testament to suggest Stalin's removal as General Secretary, while also mildly criticising Trotsky and other Bolsheviks. The Stalin-Lenin relationship had completely broken down, demonstrated when Stalin crudely insulted Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. In March 1923, days before his third stroke, Lenin asked Trotsky to denounce Stalin and his "Great-Russian nationalistic campaign" at the 12th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), XIIth Party Congress.
At the XIIth Party Congress in April 1923, after Lenin's final stroke, Trotsky did not raise the issue. Instead, he spoke about intra-party democracy, avoiding direct confrontation with the ''troika.'' Stalin had prepared by replacing many local delegates with his loyalists, mostly at the expense of Zinoviev and Kamenev's backers. Delegates, mostly unaware of Politburo divisions, gave Trotsky a standing ovation. This upset the ''troika'', already infuriated by Karl Radek's article, "Leon Trotsky – Organiser of Victory," published in ''Pravda'' on 14 March 1923. Stalin delivered key reports on organisational structure and nationalities; Zinoviev delivered the Central Committee political report, traditionally Lenin's prerogative. Resolutions calling for greater party democracy were adopted but remained vague and unimplemented.
The Stalin's rise to power, power struggle also impacted prospects for world revolution. The German Communist Party leadership requested Trotsky be sent to Germany to direct the German October, 1923 insurrection. The Politburo, controlled by Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, rejected this, sending a commission of lower-ranking Russian Communist party members instead.
From mid-1923, the Soviet economy faced significant difficulties, leading to widespread strikes. Two secret groups within the Communist Party, "Workers' Truth" and "Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party, Workers' Group", were suppressed by the secret police. On 8 October 1923, Trotsky wrote to the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Central Control Commission, attributing these problems to a lack of intra-Party democracy:
Other senior communists with similar concerns sent ''The Declaration of 46'' to the Central Committee on 15 October, stating:
Though secret at the time, these letters significantly impacted the Party leadership, prompting a partial retreat by the ''NKVD troika, troika'' and its supporters, notably in Zinoviev's ''Pravda'' article of 7 November. Throughout November, the ''troika'' sought a compromise to placate Trotsky and his supporters (made easier by Trotsky's illness in November–December). Trotsky rejected the first draft resolution, leading to a special group (Stalin, Trotsky, Kamenev) to draft a mutually acceptable compromise. On 5 December, the Politburo and Central Control Commission unanimously adopted this final draft. On 8 December, Trotsky published an open letter expounding on the resolution's ideas. The ''troika'' used this letter to launch a campaign against Trotsky, accusing him of factionalism, setting "the youth against the fundamental generation of old revolutionary Bolsheviks," and other "sins".
Trotsky defended his position in seven letters collected as ''The New Course'' in January 1924. The illusion of a "monolithic Bolshevik leadership" shattered, and a lively intra-Party discussion ensued in local organizations and ''Pravda'' pages through December and January, until the XIIIth Party Conference (16–18 January 1924). Opponents of the Central Committee's position became known as the Left Opposition.Left Opposition
; Glossary of organizations on Marxists.org In 1924, at Sverdlov University conferences, Stalin critically cited "the Permanentists" as Trotsky's followers of 'Permanent revolution'.
Since the ''troika'' controlled the Party apparatus via Stalin's Secretariat and ''Pravda'' via editor Bukharin, it directed the discussion and delegate selection. Though Trotsky's position prevailed within the Red Army, Moscow universities, and received about half the votes in the Moscow Party organization, it was defeated elsewhere. The Conference was packed with pro-''troika'' delegates. Only three delegates voted for Trotsky's position, and the Conference denounced "Trotskyism" as a "petty bourgeois deviation".
Left Opposition members, representing many international elements, held high-ranking posts, with Christian Rakovsky, Adolph Joffe, and Nikolay Krestinsky serving as ambassadors in London, Paris, Tokyo, and Berlin. Internationally, Trotsky's opposition received support from several Central Committee members of foreign communist parties, including Rakovsky (Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Ukraine), Ukrainian Sovnarkom), Boris Souvarine of the French Communist Party, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Poland, Polish Communist Party (led by Maksymilian Horwitz, Maria Koszutska, and Adolf Warski).
Throughout most of 1924, there was little overt political disagreement within the Soviet leadership. Publicly, Trotsky remained a prominent Bolshevik leader, though his "mistakes" were often alluded to by ''troika'' partisans. Behind the scenes, he was cut off from decision-making. Politburo meetings were formalities; key decisions were made beforehand by the ''troika'' and its supporters. Trotsky's control over the military was undermined by reassigning his deputy, Ephraim Sklyansky, and appointing Mikhail Frunze, groomed to replace him.
At the 13th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), XIIIth Party Congress in May, Trotsky delivered a conciliatory speech:
Meanwhile, the Left Opposition, which had formed somewhat unexpectedly in late 1923 and lacked a definite platform beyond general dissatisfaction with the intra-Party "regime," began to crystallise. It lost some less dedicated members due to ''troika'' harassment but started formulating a program. Economically, the Left Opposition opposed capitalist elements in the Soviet economy and advocated accelerated industrialization through state-led policies, putting them at odds with Bukharin and Rykov (the "Right" wing) who supported the ''troika''. On world revolution, Trotsky and Karl Radek saw stability in Europe, while Stalin and Zinoviev predicted an "acceleration" of revolution in Western Europe in 1924. Theoretically, Trotsky remained committed to the idea that the Soviet Union could not create a true socialist society without world revolution, while Stalin gradually developed the policy of "socialism in one country". These ideological divisions formed the basis of the political divide.
At the XIIIth Congress, Kamenev and Zinoviev helped Stalin defuse Lenin's Testament, which had belatedly surfaced. Shortly after, the ''troika'', an alliance of convenience, showed signs of weakness. Stalin began making veiled accusations against Zinoviev and Kamenev. In October 1924, Trotsky published ''Lessons of October,'' a summary of the 1917 revolution. He described Zinoviev and Kamenev's opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, something they preferred left unmentioned. This started a new intra-party struggle, the ''Literary Discussion'', with Zinoviev and Kamenev again allied with Stalin against Trotsky. Their criticism of Trotsky focused on:
* Trotsky's pre-1917 disagreements with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
* Trotsky's alleged distortion of 1917 events to emphasize his role and diminish others'.
* Trotsky's harsh treatment of subordinates and other alleged Civil War mistakes.
Trotsky, ill again, was unable to respond while his opponents mobilized to denounce him. They damaged his military reputation enough to force his resignation as People's Commissar of Army and Fleet Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council on 6 January 1925. Zinoviev demanded Trotsky's expulsion from the Party, but Stalin, playing the moderate, refused. Trotsky kept his Politburo seat but was effectively on probation.
1925 was a difficult year for Trotsky. After the ''Literary Discussion'' and losing his Red Army posts, he was effectively unemployed through winter and spring. In May 1925, he received three posts: chairman of the Concessions Committee, head of the electro-technical board, and chairman of the scientific-technical board of industry. Trotsky wrote in ''My Life''Chapter 22 o
''My Life''
that he "was taking a rest from politics" and "naturally plunged into the new line of work up to my ears". He also delivered a tribute to Lenin in his 1925 short book, ''Lenin''. Some contemporary accounts depict a remote and distracted man. Later in the year, Trotsky resigned his two technical positions, citing Stalin-instigated interference and sabotage, and concentrated on the Concessions Committee. One of the few political developments affecting Trotsky in 1925 was American Marxist Max Eastman's book ''Since Lenin Died'' (1925), which described the controversy over Lenin's Testament. Trotsky publicly denied Eastman's statements in an article. Meanwhile, the ''troika'' finally broke up. Bukharin and Rykov sided with Stalin, while Krupskaya and Soviet Commissar of Finance Grigory Sokolnikov aligned with Zinoviev and Kamenev. The struggle became open at the September 1925 Central Committee meeting and peaked at the 14th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), XIVth Party Congress in December 1925. Zinoviev and Kamenev, dubbed ''The New Opposition'', with only the Leningrad Party organization behind them, were thoroughly defeated. Trotsky refused to get involved and did not speak at the Congress.
Trotsky wanted the Communist Party to complete an orthodox proletarian revolution and maintain clear class independence from the KMT. Stalin funded the KMT during the expedition. He countered Trotskyist criticism in a secret speech, saying Chiang Kai-shek's right-wing KMT were the only ones capable of defeating imperialists, that Chiang had funding from rich merchants, and his forces should be used until "squeezed for all usefulness like a lemon before being discarded". However, Chiang reversed the tables in the Shanghai massacre of 12 April 1927, massacring the Communists in Shanghai midway through the Northern Expedition.
On the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1927, the Opposition held a street demonstration in Moscow against Stalin's government. It was dispersed by Soviet authorities, and Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party shortly thereafter. Trotsky delivered the eulogy at his friend Adolph Joffe's funeral in November 1927; it was his last public speech in the Soviet Union. When the XVth Party Congress made United Opposition views incompatible with Communist Party membership, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their supporters capitulated and renounced their alliance with the Left Opposition. Trotsky and most of his followers refused to surrender. Trotsky was exiled to Almaty, Alma Ata (now Almaty), Kazakhstan, on 31 January 1928. He was expelled from the Soviet Union to Turkey in February 1929, accompanied by his wife Natalia Sedova and their eldest son, Lev.
After Trotsky's expulsion, Trotskyists within the Soviet Union began to waver. Between 1929 and 1932, most leading Left Opposition members surrendered to Stalin, "admitted their mistakes," and were reinstated in the Communist Party. An initial exception was Christian Rakovsky, who inspired Trotsky from 1929 to 1934 with his refusal to capitulate as state suppression increased. In late 1932, Rakovsky failed to flee the Soviet Union and was exiled to Yakutia in March 1933. At Trotsky's request, French mathematician and Trotskyist Jean Van Heijenoort, with Pierre Frank, unsuccessfully appealed to influential Soviet author Maxim Gorky to intervene for Rakovsky, boarding Gorky's ship near Constantinople.Tova Yedlin, ''Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography'', Praeger/Greenwood, Westport, Connecticut, Westport, 1992, pp. 201–02. According to Heijenoort, they only met Gorky's son, Maxim Peshkov, who promised to pass on their request. Rakovsky was the last prominent Trotskyist to capitulate, in April 1934. His letter to ''Pravda'', titled ''There Should Be No Mercy'', depicted Trotsky and his supporters as "agents of the German Gestapo". Rakovsky was appointed to high office in the Commissariat for Health and allowed to return to Moscow, also serving as Soviet ambassador to Japan in 1935. However, he was implicated in allegations concerning Sergey Kirov's murder and was arrested and imprisoned in late 1937 during the Great Purge.Fagan, Gus; Biographical Introduction to Christian Rakovsky; chapter
Opposition and Exile
'' Almost all Trotskyists remaining in the Soviet Union were executed in the Great Purges of 1936–1938. Rakovsky survived until the Medvedev Forest massacre of September 1941, where he was shot with 156 other prisoners on Stalin's orders, less than three months into the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. Trotsky's sister and Kamenev's first wife, Olga Kameneva, was also among the Medvedev Forest victims.
Soon after arriving in Turkey, Trotsky established the ''Bulletin of the Opposition'', a Russian-language journal first published in July 1929 in Paris. In a 1931 letter titled "What is Fascism," he attempted to Definitions of fascism#Leon Trotsky, define fascism, asserting the Communist International wrongly described Miguel Primo de Rivera, Primo de Rivera's dictatorship as "fascist" because it lacked a mass movement base in the lower classes.
On 20 February 1932, Trotsky and his family lost their Soviet citizenship and were forbidden to enter the Soviet Union. In 1932, he entered fascist Kingdom of Italy, Italy en route to a socialist conference in Denmark. By late 1932, Trotsky contacted the anti-Stalin opposition inside the USSR to discuss forming a bloc. There was no evidence of any alliance with Nazi Germany or the Empire of Japan, Empire of Japan, as the Soviet government claimed. Alleged bloc members included Zinovievites, Right Opposition, rightists, and "capitulated" Trotskyists like Kamenev and Zinoviev. Trotsky feared the right gaining too much power within the bloc. Historian Pierre Broué concluded the bloc dissolved in early 1933, as some members like Zinoviev and Kamenev rejoined Stalin, and Trotsky's Harvard archive letters do not mention the bloc after 1932.
In late 1939, Trotsky agreed to appear as a witness before the Dies Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, a precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee, House Committee on Un-American Activities. Representative Martin Dies Jr., the committee chairman, sought the suppression of the American Communist Party. Trotsky intended to use the forum to expose NKVD activities against him and his followers. He also planned to argue against suppressing the American Communist Party and to call for transforming World War II into a world revolution. Many supporters opposed his appearance. When the committee learned the nature of Trotsky's intended testimony, it refused to hear him, and he was denied a U.S. visa. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union immediately accused Trotsky of being paid by oil magnates and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
(27 February 1940) Retrieved 12 June 2011. Forcefully denying Stalin's accusations of betraying the working class, he thanked his friends and, above all, his wife, Natalia Sedova, for their loyal support:
After a failed assassination attempt in March 1939, Stalin assigned NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov to organize Trotsky's murder. Sudoplatov, in turn, co-opted Nahum Eitingon. According to Sudoplatov's ''Special Tasks'', the NKVD set up three autonomous agent networks for the task, separate from existing U.S. and Mexican spy networks.
On 24 May 1940, Trotsky survived a raid on his villa by armed assassins led by NKVD agent Iosif Grigulevich and Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. Trotsky's 14-year-old grandson, Vsevolod Platonovich "Esteban" Volkov (7 March 1926 – 16 June 2023), was shot in the foot. A young assistant and bodyguard, Robert Sheldon Harte, disappeared with the attackers and was later found murdered; it is probable he was an accomplice who granted them access. Trotsky's other guards fended off the attackers. Following this, Trotsky wrote an article, "Stalin Seeks My Death" (8 June 1940), stating another attempt was certain.
On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was attacked in his study by Spanish-born NKVD agent Ramón Mercader, who used an ice axe. The operation was codenamed "Utka" (Duck) within the NKVD.
A mountaineering ice axe has a narrow pick and a flat, wide adze. The adze struck Trotsky, fracturing his parietal bone and penetrating into his brain. The blow was bungled and failed to kill him instantly. Witnesses stated Trotsky spat on Mercader and struggled fiercely, breaking Mercader's hand. Hearing the commotion, Trotsky's bodyguards burst in and nearly beat Mercader to death, but Trotsky stopped them, laboriously stating the assassin should be made to answer questions. Trotsky was taken to a hospital and operated on but died at age 60 on 21 August 1940 from blood loss and shock. Mercader later testified:
According to James P. Cannon, secretary of the American Socialist Workers Party (United States), Socialist Workers Party, Trotsky's last words were, "I will not survive this attack. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before." Mercader was convicted and spent 20 years in a Mexican prison. Stalin claimed the assassin was a dangerous Trotskyist. Mercader initially received no awards, though his mother was presented with the Order of Lenin for her role. Upon his release in 1960 and arrival in the USSR in 1961, Leonid Brezhnev signed a decree awarding Mercader the Order of Lenin, the Gold Star, and the title Hero of the Soviet Union "for the special deed." KGB boss Alexander Shelepin presented these awards to Mercader personally.
An estimated 300,000 people passed by Trotsky's funeral casket in Mexico City over several days by 27 August 1940.
Trotsky was regarded as an outstanding orator, preeminent theoretician, and organiser who, in historian Michael Kort's view, "forged and directed the Red Army". He was an original Politburo member in Lenin's government. Biographer Isaac Deutscher considered him the "prompter of [the] planned economy and industrialization" in the early Soviet Union.
Old Bolshevik Anatoly Lunacharsky viewed Trotsky as the best-prepared Social Democratic leader during the Russian Revolution of 1905, 1905–1907 revolution, stating he "emerged from the revolution having acquired an enormous degree of popularity, whereas neither Lenin nor Martov had effectively gained any at all". His personal secretary and later historian of mathematical logic, Jean van Heijenoort, found him amicable, inquisitive, and occasionally charming with new acquaintances in his final years in Mexico.
Historian Dmitri Volkogonov characterised him as a "vivid, complex, multi-faceted personality... remembered with hatred and respect, anger and admiration" decades after his assassination. Volkogonov considered Trotsky "far superior" to figures like Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Andrei Zhdanov, Zhdanov, and "also superior to Stalin and Stalin knew it".
Biographer Robert Service (historian), Robert Service described him as "volatile and untrustworthy", an "arrogant individual" who impressed supporters even during "personal adversity in the 1920s and 1930s" but failed to "coax and encourage them to the full". Service stated Trotsky gave "minimum time to the Jewish question" and believed "he ceased to be a Jew in any important sense because Marxism had burned out the fortuitous residues of his origins".
Political scientist August Nimtz regarded Trotsky as having better foresight than many Marxist and non-Marxist observers with his work ''The Revolution Betrayed'' (1936), arguing the Stalinist regime was an "ephemeral phenomenon," a view Nimtz believed was proven by the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Soviet collapse after 1989. Other scholars have similarly described Trotsky's prescient judgment on events like the Shanghai massacre, Stalinist alliance with the Kuomintang, the rise of Nazi Germany, and The Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Civil War. Deutscher also referenced his "uncanny clear sightedness" in predicting the emergence of a single dictator who would "substitute himself" for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Central Committee, the party, and the working class.
Trotsky was a Marxist intellectual. Russian historian Vladimir Buldakov considered Trotsky, in some respects, a "typical representative" of "Russia's radical intelligentsia" with "elements of bourgeois origin". His diverse and profound interests exceeded those of other Bolshevik theoreticians like Nikolai Bukharin. Aside from political activism, Trotsky worked as a statistician and journalist. He loved Literature and Revolution, literature, particularly French novels. He and Natalia Sedova enjoyed Viennese galleries and visited museums like the Louvre and Tate Gallery. He retained a personal interest in science from his youth studying engineering, mathematics, and physics.
His arch-enemy, Stalin, read and sometimes appreciated much of his writing. According to Rubenstein, Stalin acknowledged that "after Lenin, Trotsky was the most popular figure in the country" at the Civil War's end. Stalin himself wrote in a 1918 ''Pravda'' editorial: "All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the president of the Petrograd Soviet".
Upon his 1929 exile, eighteen close relatives remained in the Soviet Union; all faced repression. Seven family members, including his son Sergei Sedov, sister Olga Kameneva, and brother Aleksandr Bronstein, were shot. He spoke several European languages "with a markedly Russian accent" and identified as a cosmopolitan and internationalist. Trotsky wrote about 30,000 documents, most now in archives. Deutscher stated Trotsky wrote most Saint Petersburg Soviet, Soviet manifestos and resolutions, edited its ''Izvestia'' newspaper, and composed the Red Army's oath of loyalty.
His enmity with Stalin developed during the Civil War due to Stalin's disregard for military specialists whom Trotsky considered indispensable. In Tsaritsyn, Stalin ordered several specialists imprisoned on a barge in the Volga River, Volga; the floating prison was sunk, and the officers perished. Another instance was Stalin's disobedience of Trotsky's order to march on Warsaw, contributing to the Red Army's defeat at the Battle of Warsaw (1920), Battle of Warsaw in 1920. Former Politburo secretary Boris Bazhanov claimed Stalin's antagonism also stemmed from Trotsky's Jewishness and that Stalin refused to obey his military orders during the Civil War. According to Rogovin, Trotsky received hundreds of letters reporting the use of antisemitism, antisemitic methods during the inter-party struggle between Stalin and the United Opposition.
Rubenstein regarded Trotsky's position among Soviet elites as largely dependent on Lenin, adding that he had an outsider image within party circles as he had previously been an "outspoken critic of Lenin". Conversely, Volkogonov stated Trotsky had the support of many party intellectuals, but this was overshadowed by Stalin's control of the vast party apparatus, including the GPU and party cadres.
Trotsky attributed his political defeat to external, objective conditions rather than Stalin's individual qualities. He argued that failed international insurrections (e.g., September Uprising, Bulgaria 1923, Shanghai massacre, China 1927) diminished prospects for world socialism and demoralised the Russian working class, strengthening internal Soviet bureaucracy. Russian historian Vadim Rogovin remarked that Trotsky, in the 1930s, did not abandon hope for revolutionary spread, arguing his prognosis was plausible as many European countries (Germany, France, especially Spain) "went through a period of revolutionary crisis". However, Daniels contended Trotsky would have been no more prepared than other Bolsheviks to risk war or lose trade opportunities, despite his support for world revolution.
In 1923, the historic town of Gatchina in Petrograd Governorate (now Leningrad Oblast) was renamed Trotsk () by Soviet authorities after Leon Trotsky. After Joseph Stalin became General Secretary, Trotsky was gradually exiled, and the town was renamed Krasnogvardeysk (, ''Red Guard City'') in 1929. In 1944, to boost morale, its historic name Gatchina was restored.
Trotsky's house in Coyoacán is preserved much as it was on the day of his assassination and is now the Leon Trotsky House Museum, run by a board that included his grandson Esteban Volkov (1926–2023). His grave is on its grounds. The "International Friends of the Leon Trotsky Museum" foundation raises funds to improve the museum.
Shortly before his assassination, Trotsky agreed to sell most of his remaining papers to Harvard University. After his death, his widow, Natalya Sedova, collected his remaining papers and sent them to Harvard. Over the years, Harvard acquired additional papers hidden from Soviet and Nazi agents in Europe. These papers now occupy of shelf space in Harvard's Houghton Library.
Trotsky was never Rehabilitation (Soviet), rehabilitated by the Soviet government, despite de-Stalinization-era rehabilitations of most other Old Bolsheviks. His son, Sergei Sedov (died 1937), was rehabilitated in 1988, as was Nikolai Bukharin. Beginning in 1989, Trotsky's books, forbidden until 1987, were published in the Soviet Union. Trotsky was rehabilitated on 16 June 2001 by the Prosecutor General of Russia, General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.
Historian Harold Shukman assessed conflicting perspectives on Trotsky's legacy:
Political theorist and chairmen of the International Editorial Board of the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site, associated with the International Committee of the Fourth International, David North (socialist) attributed Trotsky's diminished historical influence to the "virtually unlimited resources of the Soviet regime, and of Marxism–Leninism, Stalinist-run parties throughout the world, [which] were devoted to blackguarding Trotsky as an anti-Soviet saboteur, terrorist and fascist agent. Within the Soviet Union, his political co-thinkers, past and present, were ruthlessly exterminated". North also criticized biographical literature on Trotsky by some historians (Ian Thatcher, Geoffrey Swain, Robert Service), viewing these trends as a "confluence of neo-Stalinist falsification and traditional Anglo-American anti-Communism".
In 2018, John Kelly wrote that "almost 80 years after Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International, there are now Trotskyite organisations in 57 countries, including most of Western Europe and Latin America". However, he argued no Trotskyist group had ever led a revolution or built an enduring mass political party. British historian Christian Høgsbjerg countered that academic literature on Trotskyism minimized its historical role in building social movements, stressing British Trotskyists' key role in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (1966–1971), Anti-Nazi League (1977–1981), All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation (1989–1991), and Stop the War Coalition (from 2001).
Outside the Fourth International, Trotsky has been admired by figures including philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, military general Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg, economist Paul Sweezy, philosopher John Dewey, historian A. J. P. Taylor, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, literary critic Edmund Wilson, painter Diego Rivera, political leader Martin Tranmæl, and literary writer Lu Xun.
Trotsky's legacy in modern historiography has evoked a range of conflicting and diverse interpretations. Before the October Revolution, he was part of an old radical democracy movement including Left Mensheviks and Left Bolsheviks. By 1917, Bolshevik figures like Anatoly Lunacharsky, Moisei Uritsky, and Dmitry Manuilsky held him in comparable stature to Lenin; the October insurrection was carried out according to Trotsky's plan. Contemporaries and later historians viewed him as a hero of the revolution.
In the Soviet Union, his reputation deteriorated during the succession struggle, his views presented as sectarian and anti-Leninist. Throughout the Stalin era, his name and image were erased from history books, museums, and films, becoming a bogeyman associated with ideological heresy. His works remained banned until the Gorbachev era. After de-Stalinization, later Soviet and Russian historians re-evaluated his role with varying interpretations.
Scholarly consensus holds Trotsky demonstrated remarkable leadership of the Red Army during the Civil War. He received the Order of the Red Banner for his role, including Battle of Petrograd, organising Petrograd's defence when other Bolshevik leaders were prepared to abandon it. Swain asserted the Bolsheviks would certainly have lost the Civil War within a year without Trotsky leading the Red Army.
Some scholars and Western socialists argue Trotsky represented a more democracy, democratic Anti-Stalinist Left, alternative to Stalin, emphasizing his pre-Civil War activities and leadership of the Left Opposition. Deutscher described Trotsky as the "Saint Petersburg Soviet, Soviet's moving spirit" in 1905, representing Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and other Soviets. Trotsky proposed electing a new Soviet presidium with other socialist parties based on proportional representation in September 1917. Rogovin argued the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, represented a "real alternative to Stalinism," which was Stalin's primary motive for the Great Terror. Daniels stated that the most distinctive features of Stalin's rule such as his campaigns against "technician, bourgeois experts" as seen with "the Shakhty Trial, Shakhty trials, his contemptuous anti-intellectualism and the dogma, dogmatization of Marxism, Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the purges—run totally counter to Trotsky's thought".
Conversely, figures such as Volkogonov have strongly criticised his defence of the Red Terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Service argued that his "ideas and practices laid several foundation stones for the erection of the Stalinist political, economic, social and even cultural edifice". Cherniaev considered Trotsky largely responsible for establishing a one-party, authoritarian state and initiating military practices like summary executions, which later became standard in the Stalinist era. Thatcher cited Trotsky's defence of terror in ''Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky'' but acknowledged his capacity for pardon, leniency, noting he personally urged humane treatment for White army deserters.
Other writers believe Trotsky has been maligned and caricatured, necessitating historical reappraisal. French socialist Pierre Broué criticised Western representations of Trotsky's role in the Kronstadt rebellion, arguing they falsely presented him as the principal figure responsible for the repression. Broué added that military tribunals and executions for desertion were common features of all wars, not exclusive to the Red Army under Trotsky. Historian Bertrand Patenaude regarded Service's characterisation of Trotsky as a "mass murderer and a terrorist" as reflective of a wider attempt to character assassination, discredit him, noting Service's work featured inaccuracies and distortions of the historical record.
Various historians credit Trotsky and the Left Opposition with shifting Soviet economic orientation from the New Economic Policy, NEP towards a planned economy through their proposals for mass industrialization. Trotsky delivered a joint report to the April 1926 Central Committee Plenum proposing national industrialization and replacing annual plans with Five-year plans of the Soviet Union, five-year plans. His proposals were rejected by the Central Committee majority (controlled by the troika) and derided by Stalin at the time. The eventual adoption of five-year plans in 1928 served as the basis for Soviet economic development, modernization.
Several scholars regard his historical writings on the Soviet bureaucracy as having considerable influence in shaping the receptive attitudes of later Marxists and many non-Marxists. Trotsky associated bureaucratism with authoritarianism, excessive centralism, and conservatism. Political scientist Baruch Knei-Paz argued Trotsky did more than any other political figure to "show the historical and social roots of Stalinism" as a bureaucratic system. British cybernetician Stafford Beer, who worked on the decentralized economic planning project Project Cybersyn (1970–1973), was reportedly influenced by Trotsky's critique of the nomenklatura, Soviet bureaucracy. Professional historians have noted the literary value of his social analysis in works like ''1905 (book), 1905'' and ''The History of the Russian Revolution'' for wider historiography.
Trotsky was an early proponent of economic planning (from 1923) and favoured accelerated industrialization. In 1921, he supported strengthening Gosplan to guide balanced economic reconstruction after the Civil War. He also urged economic decentralisation between the state, oblast regions, and factories to counter inefficiency and bureaucracy.
He had proposed the principles underlying the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1920 to mitigate urgent economic problems from war communism, later privately reproaching Lenin for the delayed government response in 1921–1922. His position differed from the majority who fully supported the NEP. Trotsky believed planning and NEP should coexist in a mixed framework until the socialist sector gradually superseded private industry. He found allies among economic theorists and administrators like Yevgeni Preobrazhensky and Georgy Pyatakov (deputy chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy). Intellectuals formed the core of the Left Opposition during the succession period.
Trotsky specified the need for "overall guidance in planning i.e. the systematic co-ordination of the fundamental sectors of the state economy in the process of adapting to the present market" and urged for a national plan alongside currency stabilization. He rejected the Stalinist focus on heavy industry, proposing instead the use of foreign trade as an accelerator and directing investments via comparative coefficients.
In response to the Scissors Crisis (1923–1924), which strained worker-peasant relations, Trotsky and the Left Opposition developed economic proposals including a progressive tax on wealthier groups (kulaks, NEPman, NEPmen), balancing import-export to purchase machinery abroad, and accelerating industrialization. In 1932–1933, Trotsky maintained the need for mass participation in economic planning. When questioned by the Dewey Commission in 1937 about Industrialization in the Soviet Union, industrialization, he emphasized the need for Soviet democracy:
According to Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus is that Stalin appropriated the Left Opposition's position on industrialization and collectivisation. Other scholars argue Trotsky's economic programme differed from Stalin's forced Collectivization in the Soviet Union, collectivisation (post-1928) due to the latter's brutality.
Permanent Revolution theory holds that in countries with delayed bourgeois democratic revolution, bourgeois democratic development, these tasks can only be accomplished by establishing a workers' state, which inevitably involves inroads against capitalist property. Thus, bourgeois democratic tasks transition into proletariat, proletarian ones. Though closely associated with Trotsky, the call for "Permanent Revolution" first appeared in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' March 185
Address
of the Central Committee to the Communist League: Trotsky's conception, drawing on Russian Marxist founder Georgy Plekhanov, argued that in "backward" countries, the bourgeoisie itself could not achieve bourgeois democratic tasks. Trotsky developed this with Alexander Parvus in 1904–1905. Relevant articles were collected in Trotsky's ''1905 (book), 1905'' and ''Permanent Revolution'' (which includes his essay "Results and Prospects"). Some Trotskyists argue the state of the Third World demonstrates capitalism offers no way forward for underdeveloped countries, proving the theory's central tenet. According to Deutscher, Trotsky supported revolution through proletarian internationalism but opposed achieving it via military conquest. Deutscher cites Trotsky's opposition to the Polish–Soviet War (1920), his proposed armistice with the Allies of World War I, Entente, and his temperance regarding staging British foreign policy in the Middle East, anti-British revolts in the Middle East.
Trotsky was a central figure in the Comintern during its first four congresses, helping generalize Bolshevik strategy and tactics to new Communist parties. From 1921, the united front—a method uniting revolutionaries and reformists in common struggle while winning workers to revolution—was the central tactic advocated by the Comintern after the German revolution's defeat.
Trotsky strongly criticized the shifting Comintern policy under Stalin that directed German Communists to treat social democrats as "social fascism, social fascists". Historian Bertrand Patenaude believed this Comintern policy facilitated Hitler's rise. Marxist theorist Hillel Ticktin argued Trotsky's political strategy, emphasizing an organizational bloc between the Communist Party of Germany, German Communist Party and Social Democratic Party of Germany, Social Democratic Party during the interwar period, likely would have prevented Hitler's Adolf Hitler's rise to power#Weimar parties fail to halt Nazis, ascent to power. Trotsky formulated a theory of fascism, analyzing Italian Fascism and the early emergence of Nazi Germany (1930–1933) through a dialectical interpretation.
After exile, Trotsky continued advocating a united front against fascism in Germany and Spain. According to Joseph Choonara of the British Socialist Workers Party (UK), Socialist Workers Party, his articles on the united front represent an essential part of his political legacy.
Trotsky in Havana
by Dimitri Prieto from ''Havana Times''
''The Contradiction of Trotsky''
by Claude Lefort
''Uncommon Knowledge''
Interview with Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service (historian), Robert Service about Leon Trotsky *
"How We Made the October Revolution"
by Leon Trotsky. ''The New York Times'', 1919.
Childhood and family (1879–1895)
Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born on 7 November 1879 in Yanovka, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire (now Bereslavka, Ukraine), into a wealthy but illiterate History of the Jews in Ukraine, Jewish farming family. He was the fifth child of David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847–1922), a Russified Jewish colonist, and Anna Lvovna (née Zhivotovskaya, 1850–1910). Trotsky's younger sister, Olga Kameneva, Olga (1883–1941), also became a Bolshevik and Soviet politician, and married fellow Bolshevik Lev Kamenev. Some authors, notably Robert Service (historian), Robert Service, claim Trotsky's childhood first name was the Yiddish ''Leiba''. However, Trotskyist writer David North (socialist), David North argues this is an assumption based on Trotsky's Jewish heritage, lacking documentary evidence, especially as Yiddish was not spoken by his family. Both North and historian Walter Laqueur state Trotsky's childhood name was ''Lyova'', a standard Russian diminutive of ''Lev''. North likens the speculation to an undue emphasis on Trotsky's Jewish surname. The family spoke a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian (Surzhyk), not Yiddish. Although Trotsky acquired good proficiency in French, English, and German, he stated in his autobiography ''My Life (Leon Trotsky autobiography), My Life'' that he was truly fluent only in Russian and Ukrainian. Raymond Molinier noted Trotsky spoke French fluently. When Trotsky was eight, his father sent him to Odessa for education. He enrolled in a Lutheran German-language school (St. Paul's Realschule), which admitted students of various faiths and became increasingly Russified during his time there due to the Imperial government's Russification policy. Trotsky and his wife Natalia later registered their children as Lutheran, as Austrian law then required children to receive religious education "in the faith of their parents". Odessa, a bustling cosmopolitan port city, differed greatly from typical Russian cities and contributed to the development of young Trotsky's international outlook. He excelled academically, particularly in science and mathematics, and was a voracious reader, often disciplined for reading non-curriculum books during class.Early political activities and life (1896–1917)
Revolutionary activity and imprisonment (1896–1898)
Trotsky became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896 after moving to the port town of Mykolaiv, Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv) on the Black Sea. Initially a ''narodnik'' (revolutionary agrarian socialist populist), he opposed Marxism but was converted by his future first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya. He graduated from high school with first-class honours the same year. His father had intended for him to become a mechanical engineer.
Trotsky briefly attended Odessa University, studying engineering and mathematics. A university colleague noted his exceptional mathematical talent. However, bored with his studies, he increasingly focused on political philosophy and underground revolutionary activities. He dropped out in early 1897 to help organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev. Using the name "Lvov",chapter XVII of his autobiography''My Life''
, Marxist Internet Archive he wrote and printed leaflets, distributed revolutionary pamphlets, and popularized socialist ideas among industrial workers and students. In January 1898, over 200 union members, including Trotsky, were arrested. He spent the next two years in prison awaiting trial, first in Nikolayev, then Kherson, Odessa, and finally Moscow. In Moscow, he encountered other revolutionaries, learned of Lenin, and read Lenin's ''The Development of Capitalism in Russia''. Two months into his imprisonment, the first Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was held (1–3 March 1898). From then on, Trotsky identified as an RSDLP member.
First marriage and Siberian exile (1899–1902)
While imprisoned in Moscow in the summer of 1899, Trotsky married Aleksandra Sokolovskaya (1872–1938), a fellow Marxist, in a ceremony performed by a Jewish chaplain. In 1900, he was sentenced to four years of exile in Siberia. Due to their marriage, Trotsky and his wife were exiled together to Ust-Kut and Verkholensk in the Lake Baikal, Baikal region. They had two daughters, Zinaida Volkova, Zinaida (1901–1933) and Nina (1902–1928), both born in Siberia.
In Siberia, Trotsky studied history, philosophy, economics, sociology, and the works of Karl Marx to solidify his political stance. He became aware of internal party differences, particularly the debate between "Economism, economists", who focused on workers' economic improvements, and those who prioritized overthrowing the monarchy through a disciplined revolutionary party. The latter position was advocated by the London-based newspaper ''Iskra'' (''The Spark''), founded in 1900. Trotsky quickly sided with ''Iskra'' and began writing for it.
In the summer of 1902, urged by his wife, Trotsky escaped from Siberia hidden in a load of hay. Aleksandra later escaped with their daughters. Both daughters married and had children but died before their parents. Nina Nevelson died from tuberculosis in 1928. Zinaida Volkova, also suffering from tuberculosis and depression (mood), depression, followed her father into exile in Berlin but committed suicide in 1933. Aleksandra disappeared in 1935 during Stalin's Great Purge and was murdered by Soviet forces in 1938.
First emigration and second marriage (1902–1903)
Until this point, Trotsky had used his birth name, Lev (Leon) Bronstein. He adopted the surname "Trotsky"—reportedly the name of a jailer in the Odessa prison where he had been held—which he used for the rest of his life. This became his primary revolutionary pseudonym. After escaping Siberia, Trotsky moved to London, joining Georgi Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov, and other editors of ''Iskra''. Writing under the pen name ''Pero'' ("quill" or "pen"), Trotsky soon became one of the paper's leading writers. The six editors of ''Iskra'' were split between an "old guard" led by Plekhanov and a "new guard" led by Lenin and Martov. Lenin, seeking a majority against Plekhanov, expected the 23-year-old Trotsky to side with the new guard. In March 1903, Lenin proposed Trotsky's co-option to the editorial board: Due to Plekhanov's opposition, Trotsky did not become a full board member but participated in an advisory capacity, earning Plekhanov's animosity. In late 1902, Trotsky met Natalia Sedova (1882–1962), who soon became his companion. They married in 1903 and remained together until his death. They had two sons, Lev Sedov (1906–1938) and Sergei Sedov (1908–1937), both of whom predeceased their parents. Trotsky later explained that, for "citizenship" requirements after the 1917 revolution, he "took on the name of my wife" so his sons would not have to change their name. However, he never publicly or privately used the name "Sedov". Natalia Sedova sometimes signed her name "Sedova-Trotskaya".Split with Lenin (1903–1904)
In August 1903, ''Iskra'' convened the RSDLP's 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Second Congress in London. Trotsky attended with other ''Iskra'' editors. After defeating the "economist" delegates, the congress addressed the Jewish Bund, Bund's desire for autonomy within the party.Trotsky, Leon. ''My life: an attempt at an autobiography''. Courier Corporation, 2007. Subsequently, the pro-Iskra delegates unexpectedly split. The initial dispute was organisational: Lenin and his supporters (the Bolsheviks) advocated for a smaller, highly organized party of committed members, while Martov and his supporters (the Mensheviks) favoured a larger, less disciplined party that included sympathizers. Trotsky and most ''Iskra'' editors supported Martov, while Plekhanov backed Lenin. During 1903–1904, allegiances shifted; Trotsky left the Mensheviks in September 1904, disagreeing with their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. From 1904 to 1917, Trotsky described himself as a "non-factional social democrat". He attempted to reconcile party factions, leading to clashes with Lenin and others. Trotsky later admitted he was wrong to oppose Lenin on party organization. During this period, he developed his theory of permanent revolution and worked closely with Alexander Parvus (1904–1907). During their split, Lenin referred to Trotsky as "Judas" (''Iudushka'', after a character in Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel ''The Golovlyov Family''), a "scoundrel", and a "swine".1905 revolution and trial (1905–1906)
Anti-government unrest culminated in Saint Petersburg on 3 January 1905 (O.S.), when a strike began at the Putilov Works. This escalated into a general strike, with 140,000 strikers in Saint Petersburg by 7 January 1905. On Sunday, 9 January 1905, Father Georgi Gapon led a procession to the Winter Palace, ostensibly to petition the Tsar. Accounts differ, but the Palace Guard fired on the demonstration, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries. This event, known as Bloody Sunday (1905), Bloody Sunday, intensified revolutionary fervour. Gapon's own biography suggests a degree of provocation by radicals within the crowd, a claim later echoed by some police records.
Following Bloody Sunday, Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in February 1905 via Kiev. He wrote for an underground press in Kiev before moving to Saint Petersburg. There, he worked with Bolsheviks like Leonid Krasin and the local Menshevik committee, pushing the latter in a more radical direction. A police raid in May forced him to flee to rural Grand Duchy of Finland, Finland, where he further developed his theory of permanent revolution.
On 19 September 1905, typesetters at Ivan Sytin's Moscow printing house struck for shorter hours and higher pay. By 24 September, 50 other Moscow printing shops joined. On 2 October, Saint Petersburg typesetters struck in solidarity. On 7 October, railway workers of the Moscow–Kazan Railway also struck. Amidst this turmoil, Trotsky returned to Saint Petersburg on 15 October. He addressed the Saint Petersburg Soviet (Council) of Workers' Deputies at the Technological Institute, with an estimated 200,000 people gathered outside—about half the city's workers.
After his return, Trotsky and Parvus took over the newspaper ''Russian Gazette,'' increasing its circulation to 500,000. Trotsky also co-founded "Nachalo" ("The Beginning") with Parvus, Julius Martov, and other Mensheviks, which became a successful newspaper during the 1905 revolutionary climate in Saint Petersburg.
Before Trotsky's return, Mensheviks had independently conceived of an elected, non-party revolutionary body representing the capital's workers: the first Soviet (council), Soviet. By Trotsky's arrival, the Saint Petersburg Soviet was functioning, headed by Georgy Stepanovich Khrustalev-Nosar, Khrustalyev-Nosar (Georgy Nosar, alias Pyotr Khrustalyov), a lawyer chosen as a compromise figure. Khrustalyev-Nosar became popular and was the Soviet's public face. Trotsky joined the Soviet as "Yanovsky" (after his birthplace) and was elected vice-chairman. He performed much of the practical work and, after Khrustalyev-Nosar's arrest on 26 November 1905, became its chairman. On 2 December, the Soviet issued a proclamation on Tsarist government debts:
The following day, 3 December 1905, government troops surrounded the Soviet, and its deputies were arrested. Trotsky and other leaders were tried in 1906 for supporting an armed rebellion. On 4 October 1906, he was convicted and sentenced to internal exile in Siberia.
Second emigration (1907–1914)
En route to exile in Obdorsk, Siberia, in January 1907, Trotsky escaped at Beryozovo, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Berezov and made his way to London. He attended the 5th Congress of the RSDLP. In October, he moved to Vienna, Austria-Hungary. For the next seven years, he participated in the activities of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and occasionally the Social Democratic Party of Germany, German Social Democratic Party. In Vienna, he became close to Adolph Joffe, his friend for the next 20 years, who introduced him to psychoanalysis.
In October 1908, Trotsky joined the editorial staff of ''Pravda'' ("Truth"), a bi-weekly, Russian-language social democratic paper for Russian workers, co-editing it with Adolph Joffe and Matvey Skobelev. It was smuggled into Russia. The paper appeared irregularly, with only five issues in its first year. Avoiding factional politics, it proved popular with Russian industrial workers. After the 1905–1907 revolution's failure, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks experienced multiple splits. Funding for ''Pravda'' was scarce. Trotsky sought financial backing from the RSDLP Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Central Committee throughout 1909.
In 1910, a Bolshevik majority controlled the Central Committee. Lenin agreed to finance ''Pravda'' but required a Bolshevik co-editor. When various factions tried to reunite at the January 1910 RSDLP Central Committee meeting in Paris (over Lenin's objections), Trotsky's ''Pravda'' was made a party-financed 'central organ'. Lev Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, joined the editorial board from the Bolsheviks. However, unification attempts failed by August 1910. Kamenev resigned amid mutual recriminations. Trotsky continued publishing ''Pravda'' for another two years until it folded in April 1912.
The Bolsheviks launched a new workers' newspaper in Saint Petersburg on 22 April 1912, also named ''Pravda''. Trotsky, upset by what he saw as the usurpation of his newspaper's name, wrote a bitter letter to Nikolay Chkheidze, a Menshevik leader, in April 1913, denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Though he quickly moved past the disagreement, the letter was intercepted by the Okhrana (secret police) and archived. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky's opponents within the Communist Party publicized the letter to portray him as Lenin's enemy.
The 1910s were a period of heightened tension within the RSDLP. A major disagreement between Trotsky and the Mensheviks on one side, and Lenin on the other, concerned "expropriations"—armed robberies of banks and businesses by Bolshevik groups to fund the Party. These actions, banned by the 5th Congress, were continued by Bolsheviks.
In January 1912, most of the Bolshevik faction, led by Lenin, held a conference in Prague, broke away from the RSDLP, and formed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks). In response, Trotsky organized a "unification" conference of social democratic factions in Vienna in August 1912 (the "August Bloc") to reunite Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, but this attempt was largely unsuccessful.
In Vienna, Trotsky published articles in radical Russian and Ukrainian newspapers like ''Kievskaya Mysl,'' using pseudonyms such as "Antid Oto", a name chosen randomly from an Italian dictionary. Trotsky joked he "wanted to inject the Marxist antidote into the legitimate newspapers". In September 1912, ''Kievskaya Mysl'' sent him to the Balkans as its war correspondent, where he covered the two Balkan Wars for the next year. There, Trotsky chronicled ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbian army Massacres of Albanians in the Balkan Wars, against Albanian civilians. He became a close friend of Christian Rakovsky, later a leading Soviet politician and Trotsky's ally. On 3 August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, with Austria-Hungary fighting the Russian Empire, Trotsky was forced to flee Vienna for neutral Switzerland to avoid arrest as a Russian émigré.
World War I (1914–1917)
World War I caused a sudden realignment within the RSDLP and other European social democratic parties over issues of war, revolution, pacifism, and internationalism. The RSDLP split into "defeatists" and "defencists". Lenin, Trotsky, and Martov advocated various internationalist anti-war positions, viewing defeat for their own country's ruling class as a "lesser evil" and opposing all imperialists in the war. "Defencists" like Plekhanov supported the Russian government to some extent. Trotsky's former colleague Parvus, now a defencist, sided so strongly against Russia that he wished for a German victory. In Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked with the Swiss Socialist Party, prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution. He wrote ''The War and the International,'' opposing the war and the pro-war stance of European social democratic parties, especially the German party.
As a war correspondent for ''Kievskaya Mysl'', Trotsky moved to France on 19 November 1914. In January 1915 in Paris, he began editing ''Nashe Slovo'' ("Our Word"), an internationalist socialist newspaper, initially with Martov (who soon resigned as the paper moved left). He adopted the slogan "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered." Lenin advocated Russia's defeat and demanded a complete break with the Second International.
Trotsky attended the Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in September 1915, advocating a middle course between those like Martov, who would stay in the Second International, and those like Lenin, who would break from it and form a Third International. The conference adopted Trotsky's proposed middle line. Lenin, initially opposed, eventually voted for Trotsky's resolution to avoid a split among anti-war socialists.
In September 1916, Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his anti-war activities. Spanish authorities, not wanting him, deported him to the United States on 25 December 1916. He arrived in New York City on 13 January 1917, staying for over two months at 1522 Vyse Avenue in The Bronx. In New York, he wrote articles for the local Russian language, Russian-language socialist newspaper ''Novy Mir (1916 magazine), Novy Mir'' and, in translation, for the Yiddish-language daily The Jewish Daily Forward, ''Der Forverts'' ("Forward"). He also gave speeches to Russian émigrés.
Trotsky was in New York City when the February Revolution of 1917 led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. He left New York aboard SS ''Kristianiafjord'' on 27 March 1917, but his ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Trotsky was arrested and detained for a month at the Amherst Internment Camp in Nova Scotia. In the camp, he befriended workers and sailors among his fellow inmates, describing his month there as "one continual mass meeting".''Leon Trotsky: My Life – In a Concentration Camp'', ns1758.ca; accessed 31 January 2018. His speeches and agitation angered German inmates, who complained to the camp commander, Colonel Morris, about Trotsky's "anti-patriotic" attitude. Morris subsequently forbade Trotsky from making public speeches, leading to 530 prisoners protesting and signing a petition against the decision. In Russia, after initial hesitation and under pressure from workers' and peasants' Soviets, Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov demanded Trotsky's release as a Russian citizen. The British government freed him on 29 April 1917.
He reached Russia on 17 May 1917. Upon his return, Trotsky largely agreed with the Bolshevik position but did not immediately join them. Russian social democrats were split into at least six groups, and the Bolsheviks awaited the next party Congress to decide on mergers. Trotsky temporarily joined the Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in Petrograd, becoming one of its leaders. At the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Congress of Soviets in June, he was elected a member of the first All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) from the Mezhraiontsy faction.
After an unsuccessful pro-Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd in July (the July Days), Trotsky was arrested on 7 August 1917. He was released 40 days later following the failed counter-revolutionary Kornilov affair, uprising by Lavr Kornilov. After the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky was elected its chairman on . He sided with Lenin against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev when the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed staging an armed uprising, and he led the efforts to overthrow the Russian Provisional Government headed by socialist Aleksandr Kerensky.
Joseph Stalin wrote the following summary of Trotsky's role in 1917 in ''Pravda'' on 6 November 1918:In One And The Same IssueNew International, Vol. 2 No. 6, October 1935, p. 208. Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book ''The October Revolution'' (1934), it was expunged from Stalin's ''Works'' (1949). After the success of the October Revolution on 7–8 November 1917, Trotsky led efforts to repel a Kerensky–Krasnov uprising, counter-attack by Cossacks under General Pyotr Krasnov and other troops loyal to the overthrown Provisional Government at Gatchina. Allied with Lenin, he defeated attempts by other Bolshevik Central Committee members (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Rykov, etc.) to share power with other moderate socialist parties. Trotsky advocated for a predominantly Bolshevik government and was reluctant to recall Mensheviks as partners after their voluntary withdrawal from the Congress of Soviets. However, he released several socialist ministers from prison. Neither Trotsky nor his colleagues in 1917 initially wished to suppress these parties entirely; the Bolsheviks reserved vacant seats in the Soviets and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Central Executive Committee for these parties in proportion to their vote share at the Congress. Concurrently, prominent Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Left Socialist Revolutionaries assumed positions in Lenin's government, leading commissariats such as agriculture (Andrei Kolegayev), property (Vladimir Karelin), justice (Isaac Steinberg), posts and telegraphs (Prosh Proshian), and local government (Vladimir Trutovsky). According to Deutscher, Menshevik and Social Revolutionary demands for a coalition government included disarming Bolshevik detachments and excluding Lenin and Trotsky, which was unacceptable even to moderate Bolshevik negotiators like Kamenev and Grigori Sokolnikov, Sokolnikov. By the end of 1917, Trotsky was unquestionably the second most powerful man in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin, overshadowing Zinoviev, who had been Lenin's top lieutenant for the previous decade.
Russian Revolution and aftermath
Commissar for Foreign Affairs and Brest-Litovsk (1917–1918)
After the Bolsheviks seized power, Trotsky became People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He published the secret treaties previously signed by the Triple Entente, which detailed plans for post-war reallocation of colonies and redrawing state borders, including the Sykes–Picot Agreement. This revelation on 23 November 1917 caused considerable embarrassment to Britain and France.Brest-Litovsk
In preparation for peace talks with the Central Powers, Trotsky appointed his old friend Adolph Joffe to represent the Bolsheviks. When the Soviet delegation learned that Germany and Austria-Hungary planned to annex Polish territory, establish a rump Polish state, and turn the Baltic provinces into client states ruled by German princes, the talks were recessed for 12 days. The Soviets hoped that, given time, their allies would join the negotiations or that the Western European proletariat would revolt; thus, prolonging negotiations was their best strategy. As Trotsky wrote, "To delay negotiations, there must be someone to do the delaying". Consequently, Trotsky replaced Joffe as head of the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk from 22 December 1917 to 10 February 1918.
The Soviet government was divided. Left Communists (Soviet Russia), Left Communists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, believed no peace was possible between a Soviet republic and a capitalist empire, advocating a revolutionary war for a pan-European Soviet republic. They cited early Red Army successes against Polish forces, White movement, White forces, and Ukrainian People's Republic, Ukrainian forces as proof of its capability, especially with propaganda and asymmetrical warfare. They were willing to negotiate to expose German imperial ambitions but opposed signing any peace treaty, favouring a revolutionary war if faced with a German ultimatum. This view was shared by the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Left Socialist Revolutionaries, then junior partners in the coalition government.Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (Left SRs); Glossary of organizations on Marxists.org
Lenin, initially hopeful for a swift European revolution, concluded that the German Imperial government remained strong and that, without a robust Russian military, armed conflict would lead to the Soviet government's collapse. He agreed a pan-European revolution was the ultimate solution but prioritized Bolshevik survival. From January 1918, he advocated signing a separate peace treaty if faced with a German ultimatum. Trotsky's position was between these factions. He acknowledged the old Russian army's inability to fight:
However, he agreed with the Left Communists that a separate peace treaty would be a severe morale and material blow, negating recent successes, reviving suspicions of Bolshevik-German collusion, and fuelling internal resistance. He argued that a German ultimatum should be refused, which might trigger an uprising in Germany or inspire German soldiers to disobey orders if an offensive was a naked land grab. Trotsky wrote in 1925:
In a letter to Lenin before 18 January 1918, Trotsky outlined his "no war, no peace" policy: announce war termination and demobilization without signing a treaty, placing the fate of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland on the German working people. He believed Germany would find it difficult to attack due to internal conditions and opposition from various German political factions.
Lenin initially responded on 18 January: "Stalin has just arrived; we will look into the matter with him and let you have a joint answer right away," and "please adjourn proceedings and leave for Petrograd. Send a reply; I will wait. Lenin, Stalin." Trotsky, sensing disagreement, returned to Petrograd. During their debate, Lenin concluded: "In any case, I stand for the immediate signing of peace; it is safer."
On 10 February 1918, Trotsky and the Russian delegation withdrew from peace talks, declaring an end to the war on Russia's side without signing a peace treaty. Privately, Trotsky had expressed willingness to relent to peace terms if Germany resumed its offensive, albeit with moral dissent. Germany resumed Operation Faustschlag, military operations on 18 February. The Red Army detachments proved no match for the German army. On the evening of 18 February, Trotsky and his supporters abstained in a Central Committee vote, and Lenin's proposal to accept German terms was approved 7–4. The Soviet government sent a Radiogram (message), radiogram accepting the final Brest-Litovsk terms.
Germany did not respond for three days, continuing its offensive. The response on 21 February contained such harsh terms that even Lenin briefly considered fighting. However, the Central Committee again voted 7–4 on 23 February to accept. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March and ratified on 15 March 1918. Closely associated with the previous "no war, no peace" policy, Trotsky resigned as Commissar for Foreign Affairs.
Head of the Red Army (spring 1918)
On 13 March 1918, Trotsky's resignation as Foreign Affairs Commissar was accepted. He was appointed People's Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs, replacing Podvoisky, and chairman of the Supreme Military Council. The post of commander-in-chief was abolished, giving Trotsky full control of the Red Army, responsible only to the Communist Party leadership, whose Left Socialist Revolutionary allies had left the government over the treaty.
The entire Bolshevik Red Army leadership, including former Defence Commissar Nikolai Podvoisky and commander-in-chief Nikolai Krylenko, vigorously protested Trotsky's appointment and eventually resigned. They believed the Red Army should consist only of dedicated revolutionaries, rely on propaganda and force, and have elected officers. They viewed former imperial officers as potential traitors. Their views remained popular, and their supporters, including Podvoisky (who became one of Trotsky's deputies), were a constant source of opposition. Discontent with Trotsky's policies of strict discipline, conscription, and reliance on supervised non-Communist military experts led to the Military Opposition, active within the Party in late 1918–1919.
Civil War (1918–1920)
1918
The military situation tested Trotsky's organizational skills. In May–June 1918, the Czechoslovak Legions revolted, leading to the loss of most of Russia's territory, increasingly organized resistance from anti-Communist forces (the White movement, White Army), and widespread defections by military experts Trotsky relied on.
Trotsky and the government responded with a full mobilization, increasing the Red Army from under 300,000 in May 1918 to one million by October, and introducing political commissars to ensure loyalty of military experts (mostly former Imperial officers) and co-sign their orders. Trotsky viewed the Red Army's organization as built on October Revolution ideals. He later wrote:
A controversial measure was hostage-taking of relatives of ex-Tsarist officials in the Red Army to prevent defection or betrayal. Service noted this practice was used by both Red and White armies. Trotsky later defended this, arguing no families of betraying ex-officials were executed and that such draconian measures, if adopted earlier, would have reduced overall casualties. Deutscher highlights Trotsky's preference for exchanging hostages over execution, recounting General Pyotr Krasnov's release on parole in 1918, only for Krasnov to take up arms again shortly thereafter.
= Red Terror
=
The Red Terror was enacted following assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin, assassination attempts on Lenin and Trotsky, and the assassinations of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and party editor V. Volodarsky. The French Reign of Terror is seen as an influence.Wilde, Robert. 2019 February 20.The Red Terror
" ''ThoughtCo''. Retrieved 24 March 2021. The decision was also driven by early White Army massacres of "Red" prisoners in 1917, allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, Allied intervention, and massacres of Reds during the Finnish Civil War (10,000–20,000 workers killed by Finnish Whites)." In ''Terrorism and Communism'', Trotsky argued the terror in Russia began with the White Terror (Russia), White Terror under White Guard forces, to which the Bolsheviks responded with the Red Terror. Felix Dzerzhinsky, director of the Cheka (predecessor to the KGB), was tasked with rooting out counter-revolutionary threats. From early 1918, Bolsheviks began eliminating opposition, including anarchists. On 11 August 1918, Lenin Lenin's Hanging Order, telegraphed orders "to introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod and to "crush" landowners resisting grain requisitioning. «Красный и Белый террор в России в 1917—1922 годах» . On 30 August, Fanny Kaplan, a Socialist Revolutionary Party, Socialist Revolutionary, unsuccessfully Assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin, attempted to assassinate Lenin. In September, Trotsky rushed from the eastern front to Moscow; Stalin remained in Tsaritsyn. Kaplan cited growing Bolshevik authoritarianism. These events persuaded the government to heed Dzerzhinsky's calls for greater terror. The Red Terror officially began thereafter, between 17 and 30 August 1918. Trotsky wrote:
= Desertions
= Trotsky appealed politically to desertion, deserters, arousing them with revolutionary ideas. The Red Army first used punitive barrier troops in summer/autumn 1918 on the Eastern Front (RSFSR), Eastern Front. Trotsky authorized Mikhail Tukhachevsky, commander of the 1st Army (RSFSR), 1st Army, to station blocking detachments behind unreliable infantry regiments, with orders to shoot if front-line troops deserted or retreated without permission. These troops comprised personnel from Cheka punitive detachments or regular infantry regiments. In December 1918, Trotsky ordered more barrier troops raised for each infantry formation. Barrier troops were also used to enforce Bolshevik control over food supplies, earning civilian hatred.
Given manpower shortages and 16 opposing foreign armies, Trotsky insisted on using former Tsarist officers as military specialists, combined with Bolshevik political commissars. Lenin commented:
In September 1918, facing military difficulties, the Bolshevik government declared martial law and reorganized the Red Army. The Supreme Military Council was abolished, and the position of commander-in-chief restored, filled by Jukums Vācietis, commander of the Latvian Riflemen. Vācietis handled day-to-day operations. Trotsky became chairman of the new Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, retaining overall military control. Despite earlier clashes with Vācietis, Trotsky established a working relationship. This reorganization caused another conflict between Trotsky and Stalin in late September. Trotsky appointed former imperial general Pavel Sytin to command the Southern Front, but Stalin refused to accept him in early October, and Sytin was recalled. Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov tried to reconcile Trotsky and Stalin, but their meeting failed.
In 1919, 612 "hardcore" deserters out of 837,000 draft dodgers and deserters were executed under Trotsky's draconian measures. According to Orlando Figes, most "deserters...were handed back to the military authorities, and formed into units for transfer to one of the rear armies or directly to the front". Even "malicious" deserters were returned to the ranks when reinforcements were desperate. Figes noted the Red Army instituted amnesty weeks, prohibiting punitive measures against desertion, which encouraged the voluntary return of 98,000–132,000 deserters.
1919
Throughout late 1918 and early 1919, Trotsky's leadership faced attacks, including veiled accusations in Stalin-inspired newspaper articles and a direct attack by the Military Opposition at the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), VIIIth Party Congress in March 1919. He weathered them, being elected one of five full members of the first Politburo after the Congress. But he later wrote:
In mid-1919, the Red Army had grown from 800,000 to 3,000,000 and fought on sixteen fronts, providing an opportunity for challenges to Trotsky's leadership. At the 3–4 July Central Committee meeting, after a heated exchange, the majority supported Kamenev and Ivar Smilga, Smilga against Vācietis and Trotsky. Trotsky's plan was rejected, and he was criticized for alleged leadership shortcomings, many personal. Stalin used this to pressure LeninChapter XXXVII o''My Life''
to dismiss Trotsky. Significant changes were made to Red Army leadership. Trotsky was temporarily sent to the Southern Front, while Smilga informally coordinated work in Moscow. Most non-day-to-day Revolutionary Military Council members were relieved of duties on 8 July, and new members, including Smilga, were added. The same day, Vācietis was arrested by the Cheka on suspicion of an anti-Soviet plot and replaced by Sergey Kamenev (commander), Sergey Kamenev. After weeks in the south, Trotsky returned to Moscow and resumed control. A year later, Smilga and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Tukhachevsky were defeated at the Battle of Warsaw (1920), Battle of Warsaw, but Trotsky's refusal to retaliate against Smilga earned his friendship and later support during 1920s intra-Party battles. By October 1919, the government faced its worst crisis: Denikin's troops approached Tula, Russia, Tula and Moscow from the south, and General Nikolay Yudenich's troops approached Petrograd from the west. Lenin decided Petrograd had to be abandoned to defend Moscow. Trotsky argued Petrograd needed to be defended, partly to prevent Estonia and Finland from intervening. In a rare reversal, Trotsky, supported by Stalin and Zinoviev, prevailed against Lenin in the Central Committee.
1920
With Denikin and Yudenich defeated in late 1919, government emphasis shifted to the economy. Trotsky spent winter 1919–1920 in the Urals region restarting its economy. A false rumour of his assassination circulated internationally on New Year's Day 1920. Based on his experiences, he proposed abandoning War Communism policies, including grain confiscation, and partially restoring the grain market. Lenin, still committed to War Communism, rejected his proposal.
In early 1920, Soviet–Polish tensions led to the Polish–Soviet War. Trotsky argued the Red Army was exhausted and the government should sign a peace treaty with Poland quickly, not believing the Red Army would find much support in Poland. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders believed Red Army successes meant "The defensive period of the war with worldwide imperialism was over, and we could, and had the obligation to, exploit the military situation to launch an offensive war." Poland defeated the Red Army, turning back the offensive at the Battle of Warsaw (1920), Battle of Warsaw in August 1920. Back in Moscow, Trotsky again argued for peace, and this time prevailed.
Trade union debate (1920–1921)
During the 1920–1921 trade union debate, Trotsky argued that trade unions should be integrated directly into the state apparatus, advocating for a "militarization of labour" to rebuild the Soviet economy. He believed that in a workers' state, the state should control unions, with workers treated as "soldiers of labour" under strict discipline. This position was sharply criticized by Vladimir Lenin, who argued unions should retain some independence and act as "schools of communism" rather than state instruments. Lenin's view prevailed at the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 10th Congress in 1921. Several of Trotsky's supporters, including Nikolay Krestinsky, lost leadership positions.Kronstadt rebellion
In March 1921, during the Kronstadt Rebellion, sailors and soldiers at the Kronstadt naval base revolted against the Bolshevik government, demanding greater freedom for workers and peasants, an end to one-party rule, and restoration of civil rights. The rebellion, occurring simultaneously with the 10th Party Congress, further destabilized the fragile political situation.
Trotsky, as Commissar of War, was instrumental in ordering the rebellion's suppression. On 18 March 1921, after failed negotiations, the Red Army stormed the island, resulting in thousands of Kronstadt sailors' deaths. Trotsky justified the action by presenting evidence of foreign backing, a claim contested by several historians. His role has been criticized, with anarchists like Emma Goldman accusing him of betraying the revolution's democratic ideals.
Trotsky's contribution to the Russian Revolution
Historian Vladimir Cherniaev sums up Trotsky's main contributions:
Historian Geoffrey Swain argues:
Lenin said in 1921 that Trotsky was "in love with organisation," but in working politics, "he has not got a clue." Swain explains this by arguing Trotsky was not good at teamwork, being a loner who had mostly worked as a journalist, not a professional revolutionary like others.
Lenin's illness (1922–1923)
In late 1921, Lenin's health deteriorated. He suffered three strokes between 25 May 1922 and 9 March 1923, causing paralysis, loss of speech, and eventual death on 21 January 1924. With Lenin increasingly sidelined, Stalin was elevated to the new position of Central Committee General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, General Secretary in April 1922. Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev formed a triumvirate (''List of leaders of the Soviet Union#List of troikas, troika'') with Stalin to prevent Trotsky, publicly number two and Lenin's heir presumptive, from succeeding Lenin. The rest of the expanded Politburo (Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky, Bukharin) initially remained uncommitted but eventually joined the ''troika''. Stalin's patronage power as General Secretary played a role, but Trotsky and his supporters later concluded a more fundamental reason was the slow bureaucratisation of the Soviet regime after the Civil War. Much of the Bolshevik elite desired 'normality,' while Trotsky personified a turbulent revolutionary period they wished to leave behind. Evidence suggests the ''troika'' initially nominated Trotsky for minor government departments (e.g., Gokhran, the State Depository for Valuables). In mid-July 1922, Kamenev wrote to the recovering Lenin that "(the Central Committee) is throwing or is ready to throw a good cannon overboard". Lenin, shocked, responded: Until his final stroke, Lenin tried to prevent a split in the leadership, reflected in ''Lenin's Testament.'' On 11 September 1922, Lenin proposed Trotsky become his deputy at the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom). The Politburo approved, but Trotsky "categorically refused". This proposal is interpreted by some scholars as Lenin designating Trotsky his successor as head of government.
In late 1922, Trotsky allied with Lenin against Stalin and the emerging Soviet bureaucracy. Stalin had recently engineered the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), further centralising state control. The alliance was effective on foreign trade but was hindered by Lenin's progressing illness.
In January 1923, Lenin amended his Testament to suggest Stalin's removal as General Secretary, while also mildly criticising Trotsky and other Bolsheviks. The Stalin-Lenin relationship had completely broken down, demonstrated when Stalin crudely insulted Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. In March 1923, days before his third stroke, Lenin asked Trotsky to denounce Stalin and his "Great-Russian nationalistic campaign" at the 12th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), XIIth Party Congress.
At the XIIth Party Congress in April 1923, after Lenin's final stroke, Trotsky did not raise the issue. Instead, he spoke about intra-party democracy, avoiding direct confrontation with the ''troika.'' Stalin had prepared by replacing many local delegates with his loyalists, mostly at the expense of Zinoviev and Kamenev's backers. Delegates, mostly unaware of Politburo divisions, gave Trotsky a standing ovation. This upset the ''troika'', already infuriated by Karl Radek's article, "Leon Trotsky – Organiser of Victory," published in ''Pravda'' on 14 March 1923. Stalin delivered key reports on organisational structure and nationalities; Zinoviev delivered the Central Committee political report, traditionally Lenin's prerogative. Resolutions calling for greater party democracy were adopted but remained vague and unimplemented.
The Stalin's rise to power, power struggle also impacted prospects for world revolution. The German Communist Party leadership requested Trotsky be sent to Germany to direct the German October, 1923 insurrection. The Politburo, controlled by Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, rejected this, sending a commission of lower-ranking Russian Communist party members instead.
Left Opposition (1923–1924)
From mid-1923, the Soviet economy faced significant difficulties, leading to widespread strikes. Two secret groups within the Communist Party, "Workers' Truth" and "Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party, Workers' Group", were suppressed by the secret police. On 8 October 1923, Trotsky wrote to the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Central Control Commission, attributing these problems to a lack of intra-Party democracy:
Other senior communists with similar concerns sent ''The Declaration of 46'' to the Central Committee on 15 October, stating:
Though secret at the time, these letters significantly impacted the Party leadership, prompting a partial retreat by the ''NKVD troika, troika'' and its supporters, notably in Zinoviev's ''Pravda'' article of 7 November. Throughout November, the ''troika'' sought a compromise to placate Trotsky and his supporters (made easier by Trotsky's illness in November–December). Trotsky rejected the first draft resolution, leading to a special group (Stalin, Trotsky, Kamenev) to draft a mutually acceptable compromise. On 5 December, the Politburo and Central Control Commission unanimously adopted this final draft. On 8 December, Trotsky published an open letter expounding on the resolution's ideas. The ''troika'' used this letter to launch a campaign against Trotsky, accusing him of factionalism, setting "the youth against the fundamental generation of old revolutionary Bolsheviks," and other "sins".
Trotsky defended his position in seven letters collected as ''The New Course'' in January 1924. The illusion of a "monolithic Bolshevik leadership" shattered, and a lively intra-Party discussion ensued in local organizations and ''Pravda'' pages through December and January, until the XIIIth Party Conference (16–18 January 1924). Opponents of the Central Committee's position became known as the Left Opposition.Left Opposition; Glossary of organizations on Marxists.org In 1924, at Sverdlov University conferences, Stalin critically cited "the Permanentists" as Trotsky's followers of 'Permanent revolution'.
Since the ''troika'' controlled the Party apparatus via Stalin's Secretariat and ''Pravda'' via editor Bukharin, it directed the discussion and delegate selection. Though Trotsky's position prevailed within the Red Army, Moscow universities, and received about half the votes in the Moscow Party organization, it was defeated elsewhere. The Conference was packed with pro-''troika'' delegates. Only three delegates voted for Trotsky's position, and the Conference denounced "Trotskyism" as a "petty bourgeois deviation".
Left Opposition members, representing many international elements, held high-ranking posts, with Christian Rakovsky, Adolph Joffe, and Nikolay Krestinsky serving as ambassadors in London, Paris, Tokyo, and Berlin. Internationally, Trotsky's opposition received support from several Central Committee members of foreign communist parties, including Rakovsky (Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Ukraine), Ukrainian Sovnarkom), Boris Souvarine of the French Communist Party, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Poland, Polish Communist Party (led by Maksymilian Horwitz, Maria Koszutska, and Adolf Warski).
After Lenin's death (1924)
Throughout most of 1924, there was little overt political disagreement within the Soviet leadership. Publicly, Trotsky remained a prominent Bolshevik leader, though his "mistakes" were often alluded to by ''troika'' partisans. Behind the scenes, he was cut off from decision-making. Politburo meetings were formalities; key decisions were made beforehand by the ''troika'' and its supporters. Trotsky's control over the military was undermined by reassigning his deputy, Ephraim Sklyansky, and appointing Mikhail Frunze, groomed to replace him.
At the 13th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), XIIIth Party Congress in May, Trotsky delivered a conciliatory speech:
Meanwhile, the Left Opposition, which had formed somewhat unexpectedly in late 1923 and lacked a definite platform beyond general dissatisfaction with the intra-Party "regime," began to crystallise. It lost some less dedicated members due to ''troika'' harassment but started formulating a program. Economically, the Left Opposition opposed capitalist elements in the Soviet economy and advocated accelerated industrialization through state-led policies, putting them at odds with Bukharin and Rykov (the "Right" wing) who supported the ''troika''. On world revolution, Trotsky and Karl Radek saw stability in Europe, while Stalin and Zinoviev predicted an "acceleration" of revolution in Western Europe in 1924. Theoretically, Trotsky remained committed to the idea that the Soviet Union could not create a true socialist society without world revolution, while Stalin gradually developed the policy of "socialism in one country". These ideological divisions formed the basis of the political divide.
At the XIIIth Congress, Kamenev and Zinoviev helped Stalin defuse Lenin's Testament, which had belatedly surfaced. Shortly after, the ''troika'', an alliance of convenience, showed signs of weakness. Stalin began making veiled accusations against Zinoviev and Kamenev. In October 1924, Trotsky published ''Lessons of October,'' a summary of the 1917 revolution. He described Zinoviev and Kamenev's opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, something they preferred left unmentioned. This started a new intra-party struggle, the ''Literary Discussion'', with Zinoviev and Kamenev again allied with Stalin against Trotsky. Their criticism of Trotsky focused on:
* Trotsky's pre-1917 disagreements with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
* Trotsky's alleged distortion of 1917 events to emphasize his role and diminish others'.
* Trotsky's harsh treatment of subordinates and other alleged Civil War mistakes.
Trotsky, ill again, was unable to respond while his opponents mobilized to denounce him. They damaged his military reputation enough to force his resignation as People's Commissar of Army and Fleet Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council on 6 January 1925. Zinoviev demanded Trotsky's expulsion from the Party, but Stalin, playing the moderate, refused. Trotsky kept his Politburo seat but was effectively on probation.
A year in the wilderness (1925)
1925 was a difficult year for Trotsky. After the ''Literary Discussion'' and losing his Red Army posts, he was effectively unemployed through winter and spring. In May 1925, he received three posts: chairman of the Concessions Committee, head of the electro-technical board, and chairman of the scientific-technical board of industry. Trotsky wrote in ''My Life''Chapter 22 o''My Life''
that he "was taking a rest from politics" and "naturally plunged into the new line of work up to my ears". He also delivered a tribute to Lenin in his 1925 short book, ''Lenin''. Some contemporary accounts depict a remote and distracted man. Later in the year, Trotsky resigned his two technical positions, citing Stalin-instigated interference and sabotage, and concentrated on the Concessions Committee. One of the few political developments affecting Trotsky in 1925 was American Marxist Max Eastman's book ''Since Lenin Died'' (1925), which described the controversy over Lenin's Testament. Trotsky publicly denied Eastman's statements in an article. Meanwhile, the ''troika'' finally broke up. Bukharin and Rykov sided with Stalin, while Krupskaya and Soviet Commissar of Finance Grigory Sokolnikov aligned with Zinoviev and Kamenev. The struggle became open at the September 1925 Central Committee meeting and peaked at the 14th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), XIVth Party Congress in December 1925. Zinoviev and Kamenev, dubbed ''The New Opposition'', with only the Leningrad Party organization behind them, were thoroughly defeated. Trotsky refused to get involved and did not speak at the Congress.
United Opposition (1926–1927)
In early 1926, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their "New Opposition" supporters gravitated towards Trotsky's supporters. The two groups soon formed an alliance, incorporating some smaller opposition groups, known as the United Opposition (Soviet Union), United Opposition. The United Opposition faced repeated threats of sanctions from the Stalinist leadership. Trotsky had to agree to tactical retreats, mainly to preserve his alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev. The opposition remained united against Stalin throughout 1926 and 1927, especially regarding the Chinese Revolution of 1925–1927, Chinese Revolution. Stalinist methods against the Opposition became increasingly extreme. At the XVth Party Conference in October 1926, Trotsky could barely speak due to interruptions and catcalls; at its end, he lost his Politburo seat. In 1927, Stalin began using the Joint State Political Directorate, GPU (Soviet secret police) to infiltrate and discredit the opposition. Rank-and-file oppositionists were increasingly harassed, sometimes expelled from the Party, and even arrested. Soviet policy toward the Chinese Revolution became the ideological demarcation line. The revolution began on 10 October 1911, leading to Emperor Puyi's abdication on 12 February 1912. Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic of China, but it controlled little of the country, much of which was divided among warlords. The Republican government formed the Kuomintang (KMT). In 1920, the KMT opened relations with Soviet Russia. With Soviet help, the KMT built up its army. The planned Northern Expedition to crush northern warlords became a point of contention. Stalin urged the small Communist Party of China, Chinese Communist Party to merge with the KMT for a bourgeois revolution before attempting a Soviet-style workers' revolution.
Trotsky wanted the Communist Party to complete an orthodox proletarian revolution and maintain clear class independence from the KMT. Stalin funded the KMT during the expedition. He countered Trotskyist criticism in a secret speech, saying Chiang Kai-shek's right-wing KMT were the only ones capable of defeating imperialists, that Chiang had funding from rich merchants, and his forces should be used until "squeezed for all usefulness like a lemon before being discarded". However, Chiang reversed the tables in the Shanghai massacre of 12 April 1927, massacring the Communists in Shanghai midway through the Northern Expedition.
Defeat and exile (1927–1928)
On the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1927, the Opposition held a street demonstration in Moscow against Stalin's government. It was dispersed by Soviet authorities, and Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party shortly thereafter. Trotsky delivered the eulogy at his friend Adolph Joffe's funeral in November 1927; it was his last public speech in the Soviet Union. When the XVth Party Congress made United Opposition views incompatible with Communist Party membership, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their supporters capitulated and renounced their alliance with the Left Opposition. Trotsky and most of his followers refused to surrender. Trotsky was exiled to Almaty, Alma Ata (now Almaty), Kazakhstan, on 31 January 1928. He was expelled from the Soviet Union to Turkey in February 1929, accompanied by his wife Natalia Sedova and their eldest son, Lev.
Fate of Left Oppositionists after Trotsky's exile (1929–1941)
After Trotsky's expulsion, Trotskyists within the Soviet Union began to waver. Between 1929 and 1932, most leading Left Opposition members surrendered to Stalin, "admitted their mistakes," and were reinstated in the Communist Party. An initial exception was Christian Rakovsky, who inspired Trotsky from 1929 to 1934 with his refusal to capitulate as state suppression increased. In late 1932, Rakovsky failed to flee the Soviet Union and was exiled to Yakutia in March 1933. At Trotsky's request, French mathematician and Trotskyist Jean Van Heijenoort, with Pierre Frank, unsuccessfully appealed to influential Soviet author Maxim Gorky to intervene for Rakovsky, boarding Gorky's ship near Constantinople.Tova Yedlin, ''Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography'', Praeger/Greenwood, Westport, Connecticut, Westport, 1992, pp. 201–02. According to Heijenoort, they only met Gorky's son, Maxim Peshkov, who promised to pass on their request. Rakovsky was the last prominent Trotskyist to capitulate, in April 1934. His letter to ''Pravda'', titled ''There Should Be No Mercy'', depicted Trotsky and his supporters as "agents of the German Gestapo". Rakovsky was appointed to high office in the Commissariat for Health and allowed to return to Moscow, also serving as Soviet ambassador to Japan in 1935. However, he was implicated in allegations concerning Sergey Kirov's murder and was arrested and imprisoned in late 1937 during the Great Purge.Fagan, Gus; Biographical Introduction to Christian Rakovsky; chapter Opposition and Exile
'' Almost all Trotskyists remaining in the Soviet Union were executed in the Great Purges of 1936–1938. Rakovsky survived until the Medvedev Forest massacre of September 1941, where he was shot with 156 other prisoners on Stalin's orders, less than three months into the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. Trotsky's sister and Kamenev's first wife, Olga Kameneva, was also among the Medvedev Forest victims.
Exile (1929–1940)
Turkey
Deported from the Soviet Union in February 1929, Trotsky arrived in Turkey. For his first two months, he lived with his wife and eldest son at the List of diplomatic missions of Russia, Soviet Consulate in Istanbul and then a nearby hotel. In April 1929, Turkish authorities moved them to the island of Büyükada (Prinkipo), into a house called the Yanaros mansion. During his Turkish exile, Trotsky was under surveillance by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal Pasha's police. He was also at risk from former White Army officers on Prinkipo. However, his European supporters volunteered as bodyguards, ensuring his safety. He requested entry to Belgium, France, Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom, but all refused.
Soon after arriving in Turkey, Trotsky established the ''Bulletin of the Opposition'', a Russian-language journal first published in July 1929 in Paris. In a 1931 letter titled "What is Fascism," he attempted to Definitions of fascism#Leon Trotsky, define fascism, asserting the Communist International wrongly described Miguel Primo de Rivera, Primo de Rivera's dictatorship as "fascist" because it lacked a mass movement base in the lower classes.
On 20 February 1932, Trotsky and his family lost their Soviet citizenship and were forbidden to enter the Soviet Union. In 1932, he entered fascist Kingdom of Italy, Italy en route to a socialist conference in Denmark. By late 1932, Trotsky contacted the anti-Stalin opposition inside the USSR to discuss forming a bloc. There was no evidence of any alliance with Nazi Germany or the Empire of Japan, Empire of Japan, as the Soviet government claimed. Alleged bloc members included Zinovievites, Right Opposition, rightists, and "capitulated" Trotskyists like Kamenev and Zinoviev. Trotsky feared the right gaining too much power within the bloc. Historian Pierre Broué concluded the bloc dissolved in early 1933, as some members like Zinoviev and Kamenev rejoined Stalin, and Trotsky's Harvard archive letters do not mention the bloc after 1932.
France
In July 1933, Prime Minister Édouard Daladier offered Trotsky asylum in France. Trotsky accepted but was forbidden to live in Paris and was soon under French police surveillance. From July 1933 to February 1934, Trotsky and his wife lived in Royan. Philosopher and activist Simone Weil arranged for them and their bodyguards to stay briefly at her parents' house. Following the 6 February 1934 crisis, French Minister of Internal Affairs Albert Sarraut signed a decree to deport Trotsky. However, no foreign government would accept him. French authorities then instructed Trotsky to move to a residence in the village of Barbizon under strict police surveillance, where his contact with the outside world became even more restricted than in Turkey. In May 1935, soon after France agreed to the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, Trotsky was officially told he was no longer welcome. He applied to move to Norway.Norway
After Justice Minister Trygve Lie granted permission, Trotsky and his wife became guests of Konrad Knudsen at Norderhov, near Hønefoss, living at Knudsen's house from 18 June 1935 to 2 September 1936. Trotsky was hospitalized for a few weeks at Oslo University Hospital, Ullevål, Oslo Community Hospital from 19 September 1935.Geoffrey Swain, ''Trotsky'' (Taylor & Francis, 2014) pp.199-202 Following French media complaints about Trotsky's role in encouraging the Matignon Agreements (1936), May–June 1936 mass strikes in France with his articles, the Norwegian government, led by Johan Nygaardsvold, grew uneasy. In summer 1936, Trotsky's asylum became a political issue for the fascist Nasjonal Samling, led by Vidkun Quisling,Oddvar Høidal's ''Trotsky in Norway: Exile, 1935–1937.'' alongside increased Soviet pressure. On 5 August 1936, Nasjonal Samling fascists burgled Knudsen's house while Trotsky and his wife were out. The burglars targeted Trotsky's works and archives. The raid was largely thwarted by Knudsen's daughter, Hjørdis, though some papers were taken. "Evidence" from the burglary was used by the government against Trotsky. On 14 August 1936, the Soviet Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, TASS agency announced a "Trotskyist–Zinovievist" plot and the imminent start of the Moscow Trials. Trotsky demanded a full, open inquiry. The accused, including Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, were sentenced to death and executed on 25 August 1936. On 26 August, eight policemen arrived at Knudsen's house, demanding Trotsky sign new residency conditions: no writing on current politics, no interviews, and all correspondence inspected. Trotsky refused and was told he and his wife would be moved. The next day, police interrogated him about his political activities, officially citing him as a "witness" to the 5 August fascist raid. On 2 September 1936, Trygve Lie ordered Trotsky and his wife transferred to a farm in Hurum, where they were under house arrest. Treatment at Hurum was harsh: confined indoors 22 hours daily under constant guard, with only one hour twice daily for walks. Trotsky was prevented from posting letters or responding to critics. Only his lawyers and Norwegian Labour Party Parliamentary leader Olav Scheflo were allowed visits. From October 1936, even outdoor walks were prohibited. Trotsky smuggled out one letter on 18 December 1936, ''The Moscow "Confessions"''. On 19 December 1936, they were deported on the Norwegian oil tanker ''Ruth'', guarded by Jonas Lie (government minister), Jonas Lie. Later, in Mexico, Trotsky scathingly criticized his treatment, accusing the Norwegian government of trying to silence his opposition to the Moscow Trials:Mexico
The ''Ruth'' arrived in Mexico on 9 January 1937. President Lázaro Cárdenas welcomed Trotsky and arranged a special train, ''The Hidalgo'', to bring him to Mexico City from Tampico. From January 1937 to April 1939, Trotsky and his wife lived in Coyoacán at La Casa Azul (The Blue House), home of painter Frida Kahlo (with whom Trotsky had an affair) and her husband, fellow painter Diego Rivera.Patenaude, Bertrand M. (2009) ''Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary'' New York: HarperCollins. Kahlo later presented him with ''Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky'' on his birthday, the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution. His final move, after a break with Rivera, was to a residence on Avenida Viena in April 1939. Trotsky wrote prolifically in exile, including ''History of the Russian Revolution'' (1930) and ''The Revolution Betrayed'' (1936), a critique of the Soviet Union under Stalinism. He argued the Soviet state had become a "degenerated workers' state" controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy, which would either be overthrown via a Political revolution (Trotskyism), political revolution establishing workers' democracy, or degenerate into a capitalist class. In Mexico, Trotsky worked closely with James P. Cannon, Joseph Hansen (socialist), Joseph Hansen, and Farrell Dobbs of the Socialist Workers Party (United States), Socialist Workers Party of the United States, and other supporters. Cannon, a long-time leader in the American communist movement, had supported Trotsky since reading his criticisms of the Soviet Union in 1928. Trotsky's critique of Stalinism, though banned, was distributed to Comintern leaders. Chen Duxiu, founder of the Chinese Communist Party, was another supporter. Trotsky collaborated with André Breton and Diego Rivera on the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art (1938), emphasizing artistic freedom outside capitalist and Stalinist constraints. This inspired the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI) in 1938, though it was short-lived, ending before 1940.Moscow show trials
In August 1936, the first Moscow show trial of the "Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center" was staged. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and 14 other prominent Old Bolsheviks confessed to plotting with Trotsky to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. The court found all defendants guilty, sentencing them, including Trotsky Trial in absentia, in absentia, to death. The second show trial (Karl Radek, Grigori Sokolnikov, Yuri Pyatakov, and 14 others) in January 1937 linked more alleged conspiracies and crimes to Trotsky. These trials were widely seen as fabrications. In response, an independent Commission of Inquiry, chaired by American philosopher John Dewey, was established. After investigating the allegations, the Dewey Commission found Trotsky not guilty of the charges made against him in the Moscow Trials. Its findings were published in the book ''Not Guilty''.Fourth International
Initially, Trotsky opposed establishing parallel communist parties or a parallel international organization to compete with the Third International (Comintern), fearing it would split the communist movement. He changed his mind in mid-1933 after the Nazi Party, Nazi takeover in Germany and the Comintern's response. He stated: In 1938, Trotsky and his supporters founded the Fourth International, intended as a revolutionary and internationalist alternative to the Stalinist Comintern.The Dies Committee
In late 1939, Trotsky agreed to appear as a witness before the Dies Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, a precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee, House Committee on Un-American Activities. Representative Martin Dies Jr., the committee chairman, sought the suppression of the American Communist Party. Trotsky intended to use the forum to expose NKVD activities against him and his followers. He also planned to argue against suppressing the American Communist Party and to call for transforming World War II into a world revolution. Many supporters opposed his appearance. When the committee learned the nature of Trotsky's intended testimony, it refused to hear him, and he was denied a U.S. visa. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union immediately accused Trotsky of being paid by oil magnates and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Final months
After quarrelling with Diego Rivera, Trotsky moved to his final residence on Avenida Viena in April 1939. On 27 February 1940, he wrote "Trotsky's Testament," expressing his final thoughts. Suffering from high blood pressure, he feared a cerebral haemorrhage. He reiterated his "unshaken faith in a World communism, communist future.""Trotsky's Testament"(27 February 1940) Retrieved 12 June 2011. Forcefully denying Stalin's accusations of betraying the working class, he thanked his friends and, above all, his wife, Natalia Sedova, for their loyal support:
Assassination
After a failed assassination attempt in March 1939, Stalin assigned NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov to organize Trotsky's murder. Sudoplatov, in turn, co-opted Nahum Eitingon. According to Sudoplatov's ''Special Tasks'', the NKVD set up three autonomous agent networks for the task, separate from existing U.S. and Mexican spy networks.
On 24 May 1940, Trotsky survived a raid on his villa by armed assassins led by NKVD agent Iosif Grigulevich and Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. Trotsky's 14-year-old grandson, Vsevolod Platonovich "Esteban" Volkov (7 March 1926 – 16 June 2023), was shot in the foot. A young assistant and bodyguard, Robert Sheldon Harte, disappeared with the attackers and was later found murdered; it is probable he was an accomplice who granted them access. Trotsky's other guards fended off the attackers. Following this, Trotsky wrote an article, "Stalin Seeks My Death" (8 June 1940), stating another attempt was certain.
On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was attacked in his study by Spanish-born NKVD agent Ramón Mercader, who used an ice axe. The operation was codenamed "Utka" (Duck) within the NKVD.
A mountaineering ice axe has a narrow pick and a flat, wide adze. The adze struck Trotsky, fracturing his parietal bone and penetrating into his brain. The blow was bungled and failed to kill him instantly. Witnesses stated Trotsky spat on Mercader and struggled fiercely, breaking Mercader's hand. Hearing the commotion, Trotsky's bodyguards burst in and nearly beat Mercader to death, but Trotsky stopped them, laboriously stating the assassin should be made to answer questions. Trotsky was taken to a hospital and operated on but died at age 60 on 21 August 1940 from blood loss and shock. Mercader later testified:
According to James P. Cannon, secretary of the American Socialist Workers Party (United States), Socialist Workers Party, Trotsky's last words were, "I will not survive this attack. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before." Mercader was convicted and spent 20 years in a Mexican prison. Stalin claimed the assassin was a dangerous Trotskyist. Mercader initially received no awards, though his mother was presented with the Order of Lenin for her role. Upon his release in 1960 and arrival in the USSR in 1961, Leonid Brezhnev signed a decree awarding Mercader the Order of Lenin, the Gold Star, and the title Hero of the Soviet Union "for the special deed." KGB boss Alexander Shelepin presented these awards to Mercader personally.
An estimated 300,000 people passed by Trotsky's funeral casket in Mexico City over several days by 27 August 1940.
Personality and characteristics
Trotsky was regarded as an outstanding orator, preeminent theoretician, and organiser who, in historian Michael Kort's view, "forged and directed the Red Army". He was an original Politburo member in Lenin's government. Biographer Isaac Deutscher considered him the "prompter of [the] planned economy and industrialization" in the early Soviet Union.
Old Bolshevik Anatoly Lunacharsky viewed Trotsky as the best-prepared Social Democratic leader during the Russian Revolution of 1905, 1905–1907 revolution, stating he "emerged from the revolution having acquired an enormous degree of popularity, whereas neither Lenin nor Martov had effectively gained any at all". His personal secretary and later historian of mathematical logic, Jean van Heijenoort, found him amicable, inquisitive, and occasionally charming with new acquaintances in his final years in Mexico.
Historian Dmitri Volkogonov characterised him as a "vivid, complex, multi-faceted personality... remembered with hatred and respect, anger and admiration" decades after his assassination. Volkogonov considered Trotsky "far superior" to figures like Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Andrei Zhdanov, Zhdanov, and "also superior to Stalin and Stalin knew it".
Biographer Robert Service (historian), Robert Service described him as "volatile and untrustworthy", an "arrogant individual" who impressed supporters even during "personal adversity in the 1920s and 1930s" but failed to "coax and encourage them to the full". Service stated Trotsky gave "minimum time to the Jewish question" and believed "he ceased to be a Jew in any important sense because Marxism had burned out the fortuitous residues of his origins".
Political scientist August Nimtz regarded Trotsky as having better foresight than many Marxist and non-Marxist observers with his work ''The Revolution Betrayed'' (1936), arguing the Stalinist regime was an "ephemeral phenomenon," a view Nimtz believed was proven by the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Soviet collapse after 1989. Other scholars have similarly described Trotsky's prescient judgment on events like the Shanghai massacre, Stalinist alliance with the Kuomintang, the rise of Nazi Germany, and The Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Civil War. Deutscher also referenced his "uncanny clear sightedness" in predicting the emergence of a single dictator who would "substitute himself" for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Central Committee, the party, and the working class.
Trotsky was a Marxist intellectual. Russian historian Vladimir Buldakov considered Trotsky, in some respects, a "typical representative" of "Russia's radical intelligentsia" with "elements of bourgeois origin". His diverse and profound interests exceeded those of other Bolshevik theoreticians like Nikolai Bukharin. Aside from political activism, Trotsky worked as a statistician and journalist. He loved Literature and Revolution, literature, particularly French novels. He and Natalia Sedova enjoyed Viennese galleries and visited museums like the Louvre and Tate Gallery. He retained a personal interest in science from his youth studying engineering, mathematics, and physics.
His arch-enemy, Stalin, read and sometimes appreciated much of his writing. According to Rubenstein, Stalin acknowledged that "after Lenin, Trotsky was the most popular figure in the country" at the Civil War's end. Stalin himself wrote in a 1918 ''Pravda'' editorial: "All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the president of the Petrograd Soviet".
Upon his 1929 exile, eighteen close relatives remained in the Soviet Union; all faced repression. Seven family members, including his son Sergei Sedov, sister Olga Kameneva, and brother Aleksandr Bronstein, were shot. He spoke several European languages "with a markedly Russian accent" and identified as a cosmopolitan and internationalist. Trotsky wrote about 30,000 documents, most now in archives. Deutscher stated Trotsky wrote most Saint Petersburg Soviet, Soviet manifestos and resolutions, edited its ''Izvestia'' newspaper, and composed the Red Army's oath of loyalty.
Political stature and conflicts with Stalin
Trotsky lacked the political acumen to succeed against Stalin's machinations. Lenin had encouraged Trotsky to challenge Stalin at the 12th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Twelfth Party Congress over the Georgian Affair (1922), Georgian Affair, but Trotsky relented. Historian Martin McCauley (historian), Martin McCauley commented that Trotsky "displayed a lamentable lack of political judgement" on multiple occasions, such as declining Lenin's proposal to become Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union, deputy chairman of Sovnarkom, failing to build a power base before forming a bloc with Lenin against the Orgburo, and not immediately recognising the ''troika'' established to prevent his succession. Biographer Joshua Rubenstein attributed Trotsky's decision to decline Lenin's proposal to his belief the position had "little authority of its own" and overlapped with other government and party officials. Deutscher believed he underestimated Stalin's cunning, ruthlessness, and tenacity on several occasions.
His enmity with Stalin developed during the Civil War due to Stalin's disregard for military specialists whom Trotsky considered indispensable. In Tsaritsyn, Stalin ordered several specialists imprisoned on a barge in the Volga River, Volga; the floating prison was sunk, and the officers perished. Another instance was Stalin's disobedience of Trotsky's order to march on Warsaw, contributing to the Red Army's defeat at the Battle of Warsaw (1920), Battle of Warsaw in 1920. Former Politburo secretary Boris Bazhanov claimed Stalin's antagonism also stemmed from Trotsky's Jewishness and that Stalin refused to obey his military orders during the Civil War. According to Rogovin, Trotsky received hundreds of letters reporting the use of antisemitism, antisemitic methods during the inter-party struggle between Stalin and the United Opposition.
Rubenstein regarded Trotsky's position among Soviet elites as largely dependent on Lenin, adding that he had an outsider image within party circles as he had previously been an "outspoken critic of Lenin". Conversely, Volkogonov stated Trotsky had the support of many party intellectuals, but this was overshadowed by Stalin's control of the vast party apparatus, including the GPU and party cadres.
Trotsky attributed his political defeat to external, objective conditions rather than Stalin's individual qualities. He argued that failed international insurrections (e.g., September Uprising, Bulgaria 1923, Shanghai massacre, China 1927) diminished prospects for world socialism and demoralised the Russian working class, strengthening internal Soviet bureaucracy. Russian historian Vadim Rogovin remarked that Trotsky, in the 1930s, did not abandon hope for revolutionary spread, arguing his prognosis was plausible as many European countries (Germany, France, especially Spain) "went through a period of revolutionary crisis". However, Daniels contended Trotsky would have been no more prepared than other Bolsheviks to risk war or lose trade opportunities, despite his support for world revolution.
Relations with Lenin
Trotsky's relationship with Lenin is a source of intense historical debate. Historian Paul Le Blanc (historian), Paul Le Blanc and philosopher Michael Löwy, Michael Löwy described Lenin and Trotsky as the "widely leading figures in the Russia's Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as well as in the final years of the rising world communist movement". Swain, however, viewed the notion of Trotsky as Lenin's natural heir as a myth, citing scholars like Erik Van Ree, James D. White, and Richard B. Day who challenged the traditional characterization of their relationship. Le Blanc disputed Swain's representation, referencing historians across generations including E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Moshe Lewin, Ronald Grigor Suny, Ronald Suny, and W. Bruce Lincoln. According to Le Blanc, these historians generally supported the view that Lenin desired a collective leadership in which Trotsky played an important role, and within which Stalin would be dramatically demoted or removed. Historian Roy Medvedev noted the close association of Trotsky and Lenin in the Soviet republic from 1921 to 1924, mentioning public commendations where "greetings in honour of comrades Lenin and Trotsky were announced at many political demonstration, rallies and meetings, and portraits of Lenin and Trotsky hung on the walls of many Soviet and party institutions".Lenin's succession
Trotsky was generally viewed as Lenin's choice as a successor in 1923. He had been nominated as Lenin's deputy in 1922 and 1923 and was expected to assume responsibility over the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy, Council of National Economy or Gosplan. Lenin and Trotsky were the only Soviet leaders elected honorary presidents of the Communist International. Before the 1921 Ban on factions in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, factional ban, Trotsky had considerable support among party activists and Central Committee members against Lenin's narrow majority. His supporters also controlled the Orgburo and Party Secretariat before Stalin's appointment as General Secretary. McCauley states Lenin planned to retire and arranged for Trotsky to speak on his behalf as his natural successor, which triggered the ''troika's'' formation. Historian Orlando Figes highlighted the increasing alignment between Lenin and Trotsky in 1923, citing Lenin's testament (critical of Stalin and bureaucracy) and their shared positions on Foreign trade of the Soviet Union, foreign trade, party reform, and the Georgian Affair (1922), Georgian affair. Soviet historian Victor Danilov believed Lenin's proposed appointment of Trotsky as deputy "would have made him order of succession, in effect Lenin's successor". Danilov cited Politburo Secretary Bazhanov's notes of Trotsky's concluding speech in 1923, where Trotsky explained declining the deputy position due to concerns his "Jewish origins" could accentuate antisemitic attitudes towards the Soviet Union. McCauley stated Trotsky would "almost certainly" have become successor had Lenin died after his first stroke in 1922. Deutscher noted Zinoviev was Lenin's closest disciple from 1907 to 1917, but Zinoviev's opposition to the October Revolution strained his relations with Lenin. Opponents like Winston Churchill argued "Lenin [had] indeed regarded Trotsky as his political heir" and sought to protect him before his 1924 death. In ''My Life (Leon Trotsky autobiography), My Life'', Trotsky maintained Lenin intended him as successor as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, beginning with his proposed appointment as deputy. He explained this process would have started after their 1923 alliance with a Central Control Commission of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, commission to mitigate bureaucracy, state bureaucracy, facilitating his party succession. During the dispute about whether to maintain the state monopoly on foreign trade in particular Lenin and Trotsky closed ranks. Too sick to attend the meeting himself Lenin, in a letter addressed to Stalin on 15 December 1922, stated, “I have also come to an arrangement with Trotsky to stand up for my views of the foreign trade monopoly” and “If the idea should arise, … to postpone it until the next plenum, I should most resolutely object to this, because I am sure that Trotsky will be able to stand up for my views just as well as I myself”. Following the plenum rescinding their proposal to relax the foreign trade monopoly, Lenin wrote to Trotsky on 18 December 1922, “It looks as though it has been possible to take the position without a single shot, by a simple maneuver. I suggest that we should not stop and should continue the offensive”.Legacy
In 1923, the historic town of Gatchina in Petrograd Governorate (now Leningrad Oblast) was renamed Trotsk () by Soviet authorities after Leon Trotsky. After Joseph Stalin became General Secretary, Trotsky was gradually exiled, and the town was renamed Krasnogvardeysk (, ''Red Guard City'') in 1929. In 1944, to boost morale, its historic name Gatchina was restored.
Trotsky's house in Coyoacán is preserved much as it was on the day of his assassination and is now the Leon Trotsky House Museum, run by a board that included his grandson Esteban Volkov (1926–2023). His grave is on its grounds. The "International Friends of the Leon Trotsky Museum" foundation raises funds to improve the museum.
Shortly before his assassination, Trotsky agreed to sell most of his remaining papers to Harvard University. After his death, his widow, Natalya Sedova, collected his remaining papers and sent them to Harvard. Over the years, Harvard acquired additional papers hidden from Soviet and Nazi agents in Europe. These papers now occupy of shelf space in Harvard's Houghton Library.
Trotsky was never Rehabilitation (Soviet), rehabilitated by the Soviet government, despite de-Stalinization-era rehabilitations of most other Old Bolsheviks. His son, Sergei Sedov (died 1937), was rehabilitated in 1988, as was Nikolai Bukharin. Beginning in 1989, Trotsky's books, forbidden until 1987, were published in the Soviet Union. Trotsky was rehabilitated on 16 June 2001 by the Prosecutor General of Russia, General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.
Historian Harold Shukman assessed conflicting perspectives on Trotsky's legacy:
Political theorist and chairmen of the International Editorial Board of the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site, associated with the International Committee of the Fourth International, David North (socialist) attributed Trotsky's diminished historical influence to the "virtually unlimited resources of the Soviet regime, and of Marxism–Leninism, Stalinist-run parties throughout the world, [which] were devoted to blackguarding Trotsky as an anti-Soviet saboteur, terrorist and fascist agent. Within the Soviet Union, his political co-thinkers, past and present, were ruthlessly exterminated". North also criticized biographical literature on Trotsky by some historians (Ian Thatcher, Geoffrey Swain, Robert Service), viewing these trends as a "confluence of neo-Stalinist falsification and traditional Anglo-American anti-Communism".
In 2018, John Kelly wrote that "almost 80 years after Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International, there are now Trotskyite organisations in 57 countries, including most of Western Europe and Latin America". However, he argued no Trotskyist group had ever led a revolution or built an enduring mass political party. British historian Christian Høgsbjerg countered that academic literature on Trotskyism minimized its historical role in building social movements, stressing British Trotskyists' key role in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (1966–1971), Anti-Nazi League (1977–1981), All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation (1989–1991), and Stop the War Coalition (from 2001).
Outside the Fourth International, Trotsky has been admired by figures including philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, military general Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg, economist Paul Sweezy, philosopher John Dewey, historian A. J. P. Taylor, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, literary critic Edmund Wilson, painter Diego Rivera, political leader Martin Tranmæl, and literary writer Lu Xun.
Historical reputation
Trotsky's legacy in modern historiography has evoked a range of conflicting and diverse interpretations. Before the October Revolution, he was part of an old radical democracy movement including Left Mensheviks and Left Bolsheviks. By 1917, Bolshevik figures like Anatoly Lunacharsky, Moisei Uritsky, and Dmitry Manuilsky held him in comparable stature to Lenin; the October insurrection was carried out according to Trotsky's plan. Contemporaries and later historians viewed him as a hero of the revolution.
In the Soviet Union, his reputation deteriorated during the succession struggle, his views presented as sectarian and anti-Leninist. Throughout the Stalin era, his name and image were erased from history books, museums, and films, becoming a bogeyman associated with ideological heresy. His works remained banned until the Gorbachev era. After de-Stalinization, later Soviet and Russian historians re-evaluated his role with varying interpretations.
Scholarly consensus holds Trotsky demonstrated remarkable leadership of the Red Army during the Civil War. He received the Order of the Red Banner for his role, including Battle of Petrograd, organising Petrograd's defence when other Bolshevik leaders were prepared to abandon it. Swain asserted the Bolsheviks would certainly have lost the Civil War within a year without Trotsky leading the Red Army.
Some scholars and Western socialists argue Trotsky represented a more democracy, democratic Anti-Stalinist Left, alternative to Stalin, emphasizing his pre-Civil War activities and leadership of the Left Opposition. Deutscher described Trotsky as the "Saint Petersburg Soviet, Soviet's moving spirit" in 1905, representing Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and other Soviets. Trotsky proposed electing a new Soviet presidium with other socialist parties based on proportional representation in September 1917. Rogovin argued the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, represented a "real alternative to Stalinism," which was Stalin's primary motive for the Great Terror. Daniels stated that the most distinctive features of Stalin's rule such as his campaigns against "technician, bourgeois experts" as seen with "the Shakhty Trial, Shakhty trials, his contemptuous anti-intellectualism and the dogma, dogmatization of Marxism, Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the purges—run totally counter to Trotsky's thought".
Conversely, figures such as Volkogonov have strongly criticised his defence of the Red Terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Service argued that his "ideas and practices laid several foundation stones for the erection of the Stalinist political, economic, social and even cultural edifice". Cherniaev considered Trotsky largely responsible for establishing a one-party, authoritarian state and initiating military practices like summary executions, which later became standard in the Stalinist era. Thatcher cited Trotsky's defence of terror in ''Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky'' but acknowledged his capacity for pardon, leniency, noting he personally urged humane treatment for White army deserters.
Other writers believe Trotsky has been maligned and caricatured, necessitating historical reappraisal. French socialist Pierre Broué criticised Western representations of Trotsky's role in the Kronstadt rebellion, arguing they falsely presented him as the principal figure responsible for the repression. Broué added that military tribunals and executions for desertion were common features of all wars, not exclusive to the Red Army under Trotsky. Historian Bertrand Patenaude regarded Service's characterisation of Trotsky as a "mass murderer and a terrorist" as reflective of a wider attempt to character assassination, discredit him, noting Service's work featured inaccuracies and distortions of the historical record.
Various historians credit Trotsky and the Left Opposition with shifting Soviet economic orientation from the New Economic Policy, NEP towards a planned economy through their proposals for mass industrialization. Trotsky delivered a joint report to the April 1926 Central Committee Plenum proposing national industrialization and replacing annual plans with Five-year plans of the Soviet Union, five-year plans. His proposals were rejected by the Central Committee majority (controlled by the troika) and derided by Stalin at the time. The eventual adoption of five-year plans in 1928 served as the basis for Soviet economic development, modernization.
Several scholars regard his historical writings on the Soviet bureaucracy as having considerable influence in shaping the receptive attitudes of later Marxists and many non-Marxists. Trotsky associated bureaucratism with authoritarianism, excessive centralism, and conservatism. Political scientist Baruch Knei-Paz argued Trotsky did more than any other political figure to "show the historical and social roots of Stalinism" as a bureaucratic system. British cybernetician Stafford Beer, who worked on the decentralized economic planning project Project Cybersyn (1970–1973), was reportedly influenced by Trotsky's critique of the nomenklatura, Soviet bureaucracy. Professional historians have noted the literary value of his social analysis in works like ''1905 (book), 1905'' and ''The History of the Russian Revolution'' for wider historiography.
Political ideology and contributions to Marxism
Trotsky considered himself a "Bolshevik-Leninist", advocating for the establishment of a vanguard party. He viewed himself as an advocate of orthodox Marxism. Trotsky adhered to scientific socialism, seeing it as a conscious expression of historical processes. His politics differed from those of Stalin or Mao Zedong, most importantly in his rejection of "socialism in one country" and his insistence on the need for an international "permanent revolution". In the post-Lenin struggle, Trotsky and the Left/United Opposition advocated rapid industrialization, voluntary agricultural collectivisation, and the expansion of soviet democracy, workers' democracy. In 1936, Trotsky called for restoring the right of criticism in areas like economic policy, revitalizing trade unions, and allowing free elections involving multiple List of political parties in the Soviet Union, Soviet parties. In the ''The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Transitional Program'' (drafted for the 1938 founding congress of the Fourth International), Trotsky reiterated the need for political pluralism and workers' control of production. Supporters of the Fourth International echo Trotsky's opposition to Stalinist totalitarianism, advocating political revolution and arguing socialism cannot sustain itself without democracy.Economic programme
Trotsky was an early proponent of economic planning (from 1923) and favoured accelerated industrialization. In 1921, he supported strengthening Gosplan to guide balanced economic reconstruction after the Civil War. He also urged economic decentralisation between the state, oblast regions, and factories to counter inefficiency and bureaucracy.
He had proposed the principles underlying the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1920 to mitigate urgent economic problems from war communism, later privately reproaching Lenin for the delayed government response in 1921–1922. His position differed from the majority who fully supported the NEP. Trotsky believed planning and NEP should coexist in a mixed framework until the socialist sector gradually superseded private industry. He found allies among economic theorists and administrators like Yevgeni Preobrazhensky and Georgy Pyatakov (deputy chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy). Intellectuals formed the core of the Left Opposition during the succession period.
Trotsky specified the need for "overall guidance in planning i.e. the systematic co-ordination of the fundamental sectors of the state economy in the process of adapting to the present market" and urged for a national plan alongside currency stabilization. He rejected the Stalinist focus on heavy industry, proposing instead the use of foreign trade as an accelerator and directing investments via comparative coefficients.
In response to the Scissors Crisis (1923–1924), which strained worker-peasant relations, Trotsky and the Left Opposition developed economic proposals including a progressive tax on wealthier groups (kulaks, NEPman, NEPmen), balancing import-export to purchase machinery abroad, and accelerating industrialization. In 1932–1933, Trotsky maintained the need for mass participation in economic planning. When questioned by the Dewey Commission in 1937 about Industrialization in the Soviet Union, industrialization, he emphasized the need for Soviet democracy:
According to Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus is that Stalin appropriated the Left Opposition's position on industrialization and collectivisation. Other scholars argue Trotsky's economic programme differed from Stalin's forced Collectivization in the Soviet Union, collectivisation (post-1928) due to the latter's brutality.
Permanent Revolution
Permanent Revolution theory holds that in countries with delayed bourgeois democratic revolution, bourgeois democratic development, these tasks can only be accomplished by establishing a workers' state, which inevitably involves inroads against capitalist property. Thus, bourgeois democratic tasks transition into proletariat, proletarian ones. Though closely associated with Trotsky, the call for "Permanent Revolution" first appeared in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' March 185Address
of the Central Committee to the Communist League: Trotsky's conception, drawing on Russian Marxist founder Georgy Plekhanov, argued that in "backward" countries, the bourgeoisie itself could not achieve bourgeois democratic tasks. Trotsky developed this with Alexander Parvus in 1904–1905. Relevant articles were collected in Trotsky's ''1905 (book), 1905'' and ''Permanent Revolution'' (which includes his essay "Results and Prospects"). Some Trotskyists argue the state of the Third World demonstrates capitalism offers no way forward for underdeveloped countries, proving the theory's central tenet. According to Deutscher, Trotsky supported revolution through proletarian internationalism but opposed achieving it via military conquest. Deutscher cites Trotsky's opposition to the Polish–Soviet War (1920), his proposed armistice with the Allies of World War I, Entente, and his temperance regarding staging British foreign policy in the Middle East, anti-British revolts in the Middle East.
United front and theory of fascism
Trotsky was a central figure in the Comintern during its first four congresses, helping generalize Bolshevik strategy and tactics to new Communist parties. From 1921, the united front—a method uniting revolutionaries and reformists in common struggle while winning workers to revolution—was the central tactic advocated by the Comintern after the German revolution's defeat.
Trotsky strongly criticized the shifting Comintern policy under Stalin that directed German Communists to treat social democrats as "social fascism, social fascists". Historian Bertrand Patenaude believed this Comintern policy facilitated Hitler's rise. Marxist theorist Hillel Ticktin argued Trotsky's political strategy, emphasizing an organizational bloc between the Communist Party of Germany, German Communist Party and Social Democratic Party of Germany, Social Democratic Party during the interwar period, likely would have prevented Hitler's Adolf Hitler's rise to power#Weimar parties fail to halt Nazis, ascent to power. Trotsky formulated a theory of fascism, analyzing Italian Fascism and the early emergence of Nazi Germany (1930–1933) through a dialectical interpretation.
After exile, Trotsky continued advocating a united front against fascism in Germany and Spain. According to Joseph Choonara of the British Socialist Workers Party (UK), Socialist Workers Party, his articles on the united front represent an essential part of his political legacy.
Uneven and combined development
The concept of uneven and combined development derived from Trotsky's political theories. Developed alongside permanent revolution theory to explain Russia's historical context, he later elaborated on it to explain specific laws of uneven development (1930) and conditions for possible revolutionary scenarios. According to Thatcher, this theory was later generalized to "the entire history of mankind". Political scientists Emanuele Saccarelli and Latha Varadarajan valued his theory as a "signal contribution" to international relations, arguing it presented "a specific understanding of capitalist development as 'uneven', insofar as it systematically featured geographically divergent 'advanced' and 'backward' regions" across the world economy.Literary criticism and socialist culture
In ''Literature and Revolution'' (1924), Trotsky examined aesthetic issues related to class and the Russian revolution. Soviet scholar Robert Bird considered it the "first systematic treatment of art by a Communist leader" and a catalyst for later Marxist cultural and critical theories. Trotsky defended intellectual autonomy regarding literary movements and scientific theories like Sigmund Freud, Freudian psychoanalysis and Albert Einstein, Einstein's theory of relativity, theories increasingly marginalised during the Stalin era. He later co-authored the 1938 ''Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art'' with endorsements from André Breton and Diego Rivera. Trotsky's writings on literature, advocating tolerance, limited censorship, and respect for literary tradition (e.g., his 1923 survey), strongly appealed to the New York Intellectuals. Trotsky critiqued contemporary literary movements like Futurism and emphasized cultural autonomy for developing socialist culture. According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, Trotsky recognized, "like Lenin on the need for a socialist culture to absorb the finest products of bourgeois art". Trotsky viewed proletarian culture as "temporary and transitional," providing foundations for a classless culture. He argued economic well-being and emancipation from material constraints were prerequisites for artistic creativity. Political scientist Baruch Knei-Paz characterised The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, Trotsky's view of the party's role as transmitting culture, raising educational standards, and facilitating entry into the cultural sphere, but leaving artistic creation (language, presentation) to the practitioner. Knei-Paz noted key distinctions between Trotsky's approach and Socialist realism#Soviet Union, Stalin's cultural policy in the 1930s.In popular culture
* The characters Snowball (Animal Farm), Snowball in George Orwell's ''Animal Farm'' (1945) and Emmanuel Goldstein in ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (1949) are based on Trotsky. * Punk band The Stranglers refer to Trotsky in their 1977 single "No More Heroes (The Stranglers song), No More Heroes" with the lyric "Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky? / He got an ice pick / That made his ears burn". * Playwright David Ives wrote a short play, ''Variations on the Death of Trotsky'', published in his 1994 collection ''All in the Timing''. * Trotsky's final days were dramatized in the film ''The Assassination of Trotsky'' (1972), directed by Joseph Losey and starring Richard Burton as Trotsky. * The 1980s UK band The Redskins (band), The Redskins' debut single was titled "Lev Bronstein", released on the CNT record label in 1982. * The comedy film ''The Trotsky'' (2009) centres on a protagonist named Leon Bronstein (played by Jay Baruchel) who believes himself the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. * The 8-episode biographical drama ''Trotsky (TV series), Trotsky'' debuted on Russia's Channel One Russia, Channel One in 2017. Netflix acquired distribution rights in 2018. * Leon Trotsky is a character in the short film ''A Historical Mistake'' (2019) by Mikhail Mestetsky. The role of Tortsky was played by Mikhail Gorevoy.Biographies
* ''Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life'' by Joshua Rubenstein (2011). * ''The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky'' by Isaac Deutscher (1954–1963). * ''The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921'' by Isaac Deutscher (1954). * ''The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929'' by Isaac Deutscher (1959). * ''The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940'' by Isaac Deutscher (1963). * ''Trotsky: A Biography'' by Robert Service (historian), Robert Service (2009).See also
* Entryism * French Turn * Predictions of the collapse of the Soviet Union ; In popular culture * ''The Assassination of Trotsky'', 1972 film * ''Reds (film), Reds'', 1981 film about the October Revolution * ''Variations on the Death of Trotsky'', 1991 play * ''Trotsky (TV series), Trotsky'', 2017 TV seriesNotes
References
Works by Trotsky
*Bibliography
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*Trotsky in Havana
by Dimitri Prieto from ''Havana Times''
''The Contradiction of Trotsky''
by Claude Lefort
''Uncommon Knowledge''
Interview with Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service (historian), Robert Service about Leon Trotsky *
"How We Made the October Revolution"
by Leon Trotsky. ''The New York Times'', 1919.
Works
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