An official Soviet portrait of Leon Trotsky Leon Trotsky (
Russian:
Лeв Давидович Трóцкий (help·info),
Lev Davidovich Trotsky, also
transliterated Leo,
Lyev,
Trotskii,
Trotski,
Trotskij,
Trockij and
Trotzky) (
November 7 [
O.S. October 26]
1879 –
August 21,
1940), born
Lev Davidovich Bronstein (
Лeв Давидович Бронштéйн), was a
Ukrainian-born
Bolshevik revolutionary and
Marxist theorist. He was an influential politician in the early days of the
Soviet Union, first as
People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the
Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also among the first members of the
Politburo.
After leading the failed struggle of the
Left Opposition against the policies and rise of
Joseph Stalin in the
1920s and the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet Union, Trotsky was expelled from the
Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the
Great Purge. As the head of the
Fourth International, he continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in
Mexico by
Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of
Trotskyism, a variation of
communist theory, which remains a major school of
Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of
Stalinism.
Before the 1917 Revolution Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (alternative English spelling: Bronshtein) on
November 7,
1879, in
Yanovka,
Kherson Province of the
Russian Empire (today's
Ukraine), a small village 15 miles from the nearest post office. He was the fifth child of a wealthy, but illiterate,
Jewish farmer, David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847–1922) and Anna Bronstein (d. 1910). Although the family was ethnically Jewish, it was not religious, and the languages spoken at home were
Russian and
Ukrainian instead of
Yiddish. Trotsky's younger sister,
Olga, married
Lev Kamenev, a leading Bolshevik.
When Trotsky was nine, his father sent him to
Odessa to be educated, and he was enrolled in a historically
German school, which became Russified during his years in Odessa, consequent to the Imperial government's policy of
Russification.
Childhood and family (1879-1896) Trotsky became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896 after moving to Nikolayev (now
Mykolaiv). At first a
narodnik (revolutionary
populist), he was introduced to
Marxism later that year and was originally opposed to it. But during periods of exile and imprisonment he gradually became a Marxist. Instead of pursuing a
mathematics degree, Trotsky helped organize the
South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev in early 1897. Using the name 'Lvov' , he wrote and printed leaflets and proclamations, distributed revolutionary pamphlets and popularized socialist ideas among industrial workers and revolutionary students.
In January 1898, over 200 members of the union, including Trotsky, were arrested, and he spent the next two years in prison awaiting trial. Two months after his imprisonment, the first Congress of the newly formed
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) was held, and from then on Trotsky considered himself a member of the party. While in prison, he married fellow Marxist
Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, and studied philosophy. In 1900 he was sentenced to four years in exile in
Ust-Kut and
Verkholensk (see
map) in the
Irkutsk region of
Siberia, where his first two daughters,
Nina Nevelson and
Zinaida Volkova, were born.
In Siberia Trotsky became aware of the differences within the party, which had been decimated by arrests in 1898 and 1899. Some social democrats known as "economists" argued that the party should focus on helping industrial workers improve their lot in life. Others argued that overthrowing the monarchy was more important and that a well organized and disciplined revolutionary party was essential. The latter were led by the
London-based newspaper
Iskra, which was founded in 1900. Trotsky quickly sided with the
Iskra position.
Revolutionary activity and exile (1896-1902) Trotsky escaped from Siberia in the summer of 1902. It is said he adopted the name of a jailer of the Odessa prison in which he had earlier been held after the 1917 revolution:
In order not to oblige my sons to change their name, I, for "citizenship" requirements, took on the name of my wife. But the name change remained a technicality and he never used the name "Sedov" either privately or publicly. Natalia Sedova sometimes signed her name "Sedova-Trotskaya". Trotsky and his first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, maintained a friendly relationship until she disappeared in 1935 during the
Great Purges.
First emigration and second marriage (1902-1903) In the meantime, after a period of secret police repression and internal confusion that followed the first party Congress in 1898,
Iskra succeeded in convening the party's 2nd congress in London in August 1903, and Trotsky and other
Iskra editors attended. At first the congress went as planned, with
Iskra supporters handily defeating the few "economist" delegates. Then the congress discussed the position of the
Jewish Bund, which had co-founded the RSDLP in 1898 but wanted to remain autonomous within the party. In the heat of the debate, Trotsky made a controversial statement to the effect that he and eleven other non-Bund
Jewish delegates who had signed an anti-Bund statement
while working in the Russian party, regarded and still do regard themselves also as representatives of the Jewish proletariat. As Trotsky explained two months later, his statement was just a tactical maneuver made on Lenin's request.
Shortly thereafter, pro-
Iskra delegates unexpectedly split into two factions. Lenin and his supporters (known as "
Bolsheviks") argued for a smaller but highly organized party. Martov and his supporters (known as "
Mensheviks") argued for a larger and less disciplined party. In a surprise development, Trotsky and most of the
Iskra editors supported Martov and the Mensheviks while Plekhanov supported Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
During 1903 and 1904, many members changed sides in the factions. Plekhanov soon parted ways with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky left the Mensheviks in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. From then until 1917 he described himself as a "non-factional social democrat".
Trotsky spent much of his time between 1904 and 1917 trying to reconcile different groups within the party, which resulted in many clashes with Lenin and other prominent party members. Trotsky later conceded he had been wrong in opposing Lenin on the issue of the party. During these years Trotsky began developing his theory of
permanent revolution, which led to a close working relationship with
Alexander Parvus in 1904-1907.
Split with Lenin (1903-1904) After the events of
Bloody Sunday (1905), Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in February 1905. At first he wrote leaflets for an underground printing press in
Kiev, but soon moved to the capital,
Saint Petersburg. There he worked with both
Bolsheviks like Central Committee member
Leonid Krasin, and the local
Menshevik committee which he pushed in a more radical direction. But the latter was betrayed by a secret police agent in May, and Trotsky had to flee to rural
Finland. There he worked on fleshing out his theory of permanent revolution until October, when a nationwide strike made it possible for him to return to St. Petersburg.
After returning to the capital, Trotsky and
Parvus took over the newspaper
Russian Gazette and increased its circulation to 500,000. Trotsky also co-founded
Nachalo ("The Beginning") with Parvus and the Mensheviks, which proved to be very successful.
Just before Trotsky's return, the Mensheviks had independently come up with the same idea that Trotsky had -- an elected non-party revolutionary organization representing the capital's workers, the first
Soviet ("Council") of Workers. By the time of Trotsky's arrival, the
St. Petersburg Soviet was already functioning headed by
Khrustalyov-Nosar (Georgy Nosar, alias Pyotr Khrustalyov), a compromise figure, and proved to be very popular with the workers in spite of the Bolsheviks' original opposition. Trotsky joined the Soviet under the name "Yanovsky" (after the village he was born in, Yanovka) and was elected vice-Chairman. He did much of the actual work at the Soviet and, after Khrustalev-Nosar's arrest on
November 26, was elected its chairman. On
December 2, the Soviet issued a proclamation which included the following statement about the Tsarist government and its foreign debts:
The autocracy never enjoyed the confidence of the people and was never granted any authority by the people. We have therefore decided not to allow the repayment of such loans as have been made by the Czarist government when openly engaged in a war with the entire people. The following day,
December 3, the Soviet was surrounded by troops loyal to the government and the deputies were arrested.
Trotsky and other Soviet leaders were tried in 1906 on charges of supporting an armed rebellion. At the trial, Trotsky delivered some of the best speeches of his life and solidified his reputation as an effective public speaker, which he confirmed in 1917-1920. He was convicted and sentenced to deportation.
1905 revolution and trial (1905-1906) En route to deportation to Siberia in January 1907, Trotsky escaped and once again made his way to
London, where he attended the 5th Congress of the
RSDLP. In October, he moved to
Vienna where he often took part in the activities of the
Austrian Social Democratic Party and, occasionally, of the
German Social Democratic Party, for seven years.
In Vienna, Trotsky became close to
Adolph Joffe, his friend for the next 20 years, who introduced him to psychoanalysis. i.e. armed robberies of banks and other companies by Bolshevik groups to procure money for the Party, which had been banned by the 5th Congress, but continued by the Bolsheviks.
In January 1912, the majority of the Bolshevik faction led by Lenin and a few Mensheviks held a conference in
Prague and expelled their opponents from the party. In response, Trotsky organized a "unification" conference of social democratic factions in Vienna in August 1912 (a.k.a. "The August Bloc") and tried to re-unite the party. The attempt was generally unsuccessful.
In Vienna, Trotsky continuously published articles in radical Russian and Ukrainian newspapers like
Kievskaya Mysl under a variety of pseudonyms, often "Antid Oto". 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 and became a close friend of
Christian Rakovsky, later a leading Soviet politician and Trotsky's ally in the Soviet Communist Party.
On
August 3 1914, at the outbreak of
World War I which pitted Austria-Hungary against the Russian empire, Trotsky was forced to flee Vienna for neutral
Switzerland to avoid arrest as a Russian
émigré.
Second emigration (1907-1914) The outbreak of WWI caused a sudden realignment within the RSDLP and other European social democratic parties over the issues of war, revolution, pacifism and internationalism. Within the RSDLP, Lenin, Trotsky and Martov advocated various internationalist anti-war positions, while Plekhanov and other social democrats (both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) supported the Russian government to some extent.
In Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked within the
Swiss Socialist Party, prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution, and wrote a book against the war,
The War and the International. The thrust of the book was against the pro-war position taken by the European social democratic parties, primarily the German party.
Trotsky moved to France on
November 19, 1914, as a war correspondent for the
Kievskaya Mysl. In January 1915 he began editing (at first with Martov, who soon resigned as the paper moved to the Left)
Nashe Slovo ("Our Word"), an internationalist socialist newspaper, in Paris. He adopted the slogan of "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered", which didn't go quite as far as Lenin, who advocated Russia's defeat in the war and demanded a complete break with the
Second International.
Trotsky attended the
Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in September 1915 and advocated a middle course between those who, like Martov, would stay within the Second International at any cost and those who, like Lenin, would break with the Second International and form a
Third International. The conference adopted the middle line proposed by Trotsky. At first opposed to it, in the end Lenin 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 did not let him stay and he was deported to the
United States on
December 25, 1916. He arrived in
New York City on
January 13, 1917. In New York, he wrote articles for the local Russian language socialist newspaper
Novy Mir and the Yiddish language daily
Der Forverts (The Forward) in translation and made speeches to Russian émigrés.
Trotsky was living in New York City when the
February Revolution of 1917 overthrew
Tzar Nicholas II. He left New York on
March 27, but his ship was intercepted by
British naval officials in
Halifax,
Nova Scotia and he spent a month detained at
Amherst, Nova Scotia. After initial hesitation by the Russian foreign minister
Pavel Milyukov, he was forced to demand that Trotsky be released and the British government freed Trotsky on
April 29. He finally made his way back to Russia on
May 4.
Upon his return, Trotsky was in substantive agreement with the
Bolshevik position, but did not join them right away. Russian social democrats were split in at least 6 groups and the Bolsheviks were waiting for the next party Congress to determine which factions to merge with. Trotsky temporarily joined the
Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in St. Petersburg, and became one of its leaders. At the First
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, Trotsky was arrested on
August 7, 1917 (
New Style), but was released 40 days later in the aftermath of the failed counter-revolutionary
uprising by Lavr Kornilov. After the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the
Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky was elected Chairman on
October 8 (
New Style). 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
Provisional Government headed by
Aleksandr Kerensky.
The following summary of Trotsky's Role in 1917 was written by Stalin in
Pravda, November 6, 1918. (Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book "The October Revolution" issued in 1934, it was expunged in Stalin's Works released in 1949.)
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. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized. After the success of the uprising on November 7-8 (
New Style), Trotsky led the efforts to repel a
counter-attack by
Cossacks under General
Pyotr Krasnov and other troops still loyal to the overthrown Provisional Government at
Gatchina. Allied with Lenin, he successfully defeated attempts by other Bolshevik Central Committee members (Zinoviev, Kamenev,
Alexei Rykov, etc) to share power with other socialist parties.
By the end of 1917, Trotsky was unquestionably the second man in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin, overshadowing the ambitious Zinoviev, who had been Lenin's top lieutenant over the previous decade, but whose star appeared to be fading. This turnaround led to enmity between the two Bolshevik leaders which lasted until 1926 and did much to destroy them both.
World War I (1914-1917) After the Russian Revolution After the Bolsheviks came to power, Trotsky became the
People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and published the secret treaties previously signed by the
Triple Entente that detailed plans for post-war reallocation of colonies and redrawing state borders.
Trotsky led the Soviet delegation during the peace negotiations in
Brest-Litovsk from
December 22, 1917 to
February 10, 1918. At that time the Soviet government was split on the issue.
Left Communists, led by
Nikolai Bukharin, continued to believe that there could be no peace between a Soviet republic and a capitalist country and that only a revolutionary war leading to a pan-European Soviet republic would bring a durable peace. They cited the successes of the newly formed (
January 15, 1918) voluntary
Red Army against Polish forces of Gen.
Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki in
Belarus,
White forces in the
Don region, and newly independent
Ukrainian forces as proof that the Red Army could repel German forces, especially if
propaganda and
asymmetrical warfare were used. They did not mind holding talks with the Germans as a means of exposing German imperial ambitions (territorial gains,
reparations, etc) in hopes of accelerating the hoped−for Soviet revolution in the West, but they were dead set against signing any peace treaty. In case of a German ultimatum, they advocated proclaiming a revolutionary war against Germany in order to inspire Russian and European workers to fight for socialism. This opinion was shared by
Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were then the Bolsheviks' junior partners in a coalition government.
Lenin, who had earlier hoped for a speedy Soviet revolution in Germany and other parts of Europe, quickly decided that the imperial government of Germany was still firmly in control and that, without a strong Russian military, an armed conflict with Germany would lead to a collapse of the Soviet government in Russia. He agreed with the Left Communists that ultimately a pan-European Soviet revolution would solve all problems, but until then the Bolsheviks had to stay in power. Lenin did not mind prolonging the negotiating process for maximum propaganda effect, but, from January 1918 on, advocated signing a separate peace treaty if faced with a German ultimatum.
Trotsky's position was between these two Bolshevik factions. Like Lenin, he admitted that the old Russian military, inherited from the monarchy and the Provisional Government and in advanced stages of decomposition, was unable to fight:
We began peace negotiations in the hope of arousing the workmen's party of Germany and Austria-Hungary as well as of the Entente countries. For this reason we were obliged to delay the negotiations as long as possible to give the European workman time to understand the main fact of the Soviet revolution itself and particularly its peace policy. But there was the other question: Can the Germans still fight? Are they in a position to begin an attack on the revolution that will explain the cessation of the war? How can we find out the state of mind of the German soldiers, how to fathom it? Throughout January and February of 1918, Lenin's position was supported by 7 members of the Bolshevik Central Committee and Bukharin's by 4. Trotsky had 4 votes (his own,
Felix Dzerzhinsky's,
Nikolai Krestinsky's and
Adolph Joffe's) and, since he held the balance of power, he was able to pursue his policy in Brest-Litovsk. When he could no longer delay the negotiations, he withdrew from the talks on
February 10,
1918, refusing to sign on Germany's harsh terms. After a brief hiatus, the
Central Powers notified the Soviet government that they would no longer observe the truce after
February 17. At this point Lenin again argued that the Soviet government had done all it could to explain its position to Western workers and that it was time to accept the terms. Trotsky refused to support Lenin since he was waiting to see whether German workers would rebel and whether German soldiers would refuse to follow orders.
Germany resumed military operations on
February 18. Within a day, it became clear that the German army was capable of conducting offensive operations and that Red Army detachments, which were relatively small, poorly organized and poorly led, were no match for it. In the evening of
February 18, 1918, Trotsky and his supporters in the committee abstained and Lenin's proposal was accepted 7-4. The Soviet government sent a
telegram to the German side accepting the final Brest-Litovsk peace terms.
Germany did not respond for three days, and continued its offensive encountering little resistance. The response arrived on
February 21, but the proposed terms were so harsh that even Lenin briefly thought that the Soviet government had no choice but to fight. But in the end, the committee again voted 7-4 on
February 23, 1918; the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on
March 3 and ratified on
March 15, 1918. Since he was so closely associated with the policy previously followed by the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky resigned from his position as Commissar for Foreign Affairs in order to remove a potential obstacle to the new policy.
Commissar for Foreign Affairs and Brest-Litovsk (1917-1918) The failure of the recently formed Red Army to resist the German offensive in February 1918 revealed its weaknesses: insufficient numbers, lack of knowledgeable officers, and near absence of coordination and subordination. Celebrated and feared
Baltic Fleet sailors, one of the bastions of the new regime led by
Pavel Dybenko, shamefully fled from the German army at
Narva. The notion that the Soviet state could have an effective voluntary or
militia type military was seriously undermined.
Trotsky was one of the first Bolshevik leaders to recognize the problem and he pushed for the formation of a military council of former Russian generals that would function as an advisory body. Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee agreed on
March 4 to create the
Supreme Military Council, headed by former chief of the imperial General Staff
Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich. But the entire Bolshevik leadership of the Red Army, including People's Commissar (defense minister)
Nikolai Podvoisky and commander-in-chief
Nikolai Krylenko, protested vigorously and eventually resigned. They believed that the Red Army should consist only of dedicated revolutionaries, rely on propaganda and force, and have elected officers. They viewed former imperial officers and generals as potential traitors who should be kept out of the new military, much less put in charge of it. Their views continued to be popular with many Bolsheviks throughout most of the
Russian Civil War and their supporters, including Podvoisky, who became one of Trotsky's deputies, were a constant thorn in Trotsky's side. The discontent with Trotsky's policies of strict discipline, conscription and reliance on carefully supervised non-Communist military experts eventually led to the
Military Opposition, which was active within the Communist Party in late 1918-1919.
On
March 13, 1918 Trotsky's resignation as Commissar for Foreign Affairs was officially accepted and he was appointed People's Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs - in place of Podvoisky - and chairman of the Supreme Military Council. The post of commander-in-chief was abolished, and Trotsky gained full control of the Red Army, responsible only to the Communist Party leadership, whose Left Socialist Revolutionary allies had left the government over Brest-Litovsk. With the help of his faithful deputy
Ephraim Sklyansky, Trotsky spent the rest of the Civil War transforming the Red Army from a ragtag network of small and fiercely independent detachments into a large and disciplined military machine, through forced conscription, party controlled blocking squads, compulsory obedience and officers chosen by the leadership instead of the rank and file. He defended these positions throughout his life.
Head of the Red Army (spring 1918) Main article: Russian Civil War Civil War (1918-1920) Trotsky's managerial and organization-building skills with the Soviet military were soon tested. In May-June 1918, the
Czechoslovak Legions en route from European Russia to
Vladivostok rose against the Soviet government. This left the Bolsheviks with the loss of most of the country's territory, an increasingly well organized resistance by Russian anti-Communist forces (usually referred to as the
White Army after their best known component) and widespread defection by the military experts that Trotsky relied on.
Trotsky and the government responded with a full-fledged
mobilization, which increased the size of the Red Army from less than 300,000 in May 1918 to one million in October, and an introduction of
political commissars into the army. The latter were responsible for ensuring the loyalty of military experts (who were mostly former officers in the imperial army) and co-signing their orders.
Facing military defeats in mid-1918, Trotsky introduced increasingly severe penalties for desertion, insubordination, and retreat. As he later wrote in his autobiography:
Trotsky continued to insist that former officers should be used as military experts within the Red Army and, in the summer of 1918, was able to convince Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership not only to continue the policy in the face of mass defections, but also give these experts more direct operational control of the military. In this he differed sharply from Stalin who was, from May through October 1918, the top commissar in the South of Russia. Stalin and his future defense minister,
Kliment Voroshilov, went so far as to refuse to accept former general
Andrei Snesarev who had been sent to them by Trotsky. Stalin's stubborn opposition to Trotsky's military policies foreshadowed a continuing acute conflict between the two Bolsheviks over the policies and direction of the Soviet Union, culminating 10 years later in Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union and then his assassination.
In September 1918, the government, facing continuous military difficulties, declared what amounted to martial law and reorganized the Red Army. The Supreme Military Council was abolished and the position of commander-in-chief was restored, filled by the commander of the
Red Latvian Rifleman Ioakim Vatsetis (aka Jukums Vācietis), who had formerly led the Eastern Front against the Czechoslovak Legions. Vatsetis was put in charge of day-to-day operations of the army while Trotsky became chairman of the newly formed
Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and retained overall control of the military. Trotsky and Vatsetis had clashed earlier in 1918 while Vatsetis and Trotsky's adviser Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich were also on unfriendly terms. Nevertheless, Trotsky eventually established a working relationship with the often prickly Vatsetis.
The reorganization caused yet another conflict between Trotsky and Stalin in late September. Trotsky appointed former imperial general
Pavel Sytin to command the Southern Front, but in early October 1918 Stalin refused to accept him and so was recalled from the front. Lenin and
Yakov Sverdlov tried to make Trotsky and Stalin reconcile, but their meeting was unsuccessful.
1918 Throughout late 1918 and early 1919, there were a number of attacks on Trotsky's leadership of the Red Army, including veiled accusations in newspaper articles inspired by Stalin and a direct attack by the Military Opposition at the VIIIth Party Congress in March 1919. On the surface, he weathered them successfully and was elected one of only five full members of the first
Politburo after the Congress. But he later wrote: that Petrograd needed to be defended, at least in part to prevent
Estonia and
Finland from intervening. In a rare reversal, Trotsky was supported by Stalin and Zinoviev and prevailed against Lenin in the Central Committee. He immediately went to Petrograd, whose leadership headed by Zinoviev he found demoralized, and organized its defense, sometimes personally stopping fleeing soldiers. By October 22 the Red Army was on the offensive and in early November Yudenich's troops were driven back to Estonia, where they were disarmed and interned. Trotsky was awarded the
Order of the Red Banner for his actions in Petrograd.
1919 With the defeat of Denikin and Yudenich in late 1919, the Soviet government's emphasis shifted to economic work and Trotsky spent the winter of 1919-1920 in the Urals region trying to re-start its economy. Based on his experiences there, he proposed abandoning the policies of
War Communism,
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. But the Red Army offensive was turned back during the
Battle of Warsaw in August 1920, in part because of Stalin's failure to obey Trotsky's orders in the run-up to the decisive engagements. Back in Moscow, Trotsky again argued for a peace treaty and this time prevailed.
1920 In late 1920, after the Bolsheviks won the Civil War and before the Eighth and Ninth Congress of Soviets, the Communist Party had a heated and increasingly acrimonious debate over the role of
trade unions in the Soviet state. The discussion split the party into many "platforms" (factions), including Lenin's, Trotsky's and Bukharin's; Bukharin eventually merged his with Trotsky's. Smaller, more radical factions like the
Workers' Opposition (headed by
Alexander Shlyapnikov) and the
Group of Democratic Centralism were particularly active.
Trotsky's position formed while he led a special commission on the Soviet transportation system, Tsektran. He was appointed there to rebuild the rail system ruined by the Civil War. Being the Commissar of War and a revolutionary military leader, he saw a need to create a militarized "production atmosphere" by incorporating trade unions directly into the State apparatus. His unyielding stance was that in a worker's state the workers should have nothing to fear from the state, and the State should fully control the unions. In the Ninth Party Congress he argued for "such a regime under which each worker feels himself to be a soldier of labor who cannot freely dispose of himself; if he is ordered transferred, he must execute that order; if he does not do so, he will be a deserter who should be punished. Who will execute this? The trade union. It will create a new regime. That is the militarization of the working class." Trotsky frequently argued for revolutionary defensism, which states that revolutionists have a right to protect a revolution from counterrevolutionary violence.
[2] The claim that the Kronstadt rebels were counterrevolutionary is debatable
because of their program.
Trade union debate (1920-1921) Fall from power (1922-1928) In late 1921 Lenin's health deteriorated, he was absent from Moscow for ever longer periods, and eventually had three strokes between
May 26,
1922 and
March 10,
1923, which caused paralysis, loss of speech and finally death on
January 21,
1924. With Lenin increasingly sidelined throughout 1922, Stalin (elevated to the newly created position of the Central Committee
General Secretary published in
Pravda on
March 14, 1923, which seemed to anoint Trotsky as Lenin's successor.
The resolutions adopted by the XIIth Congress called, in general terms, for greater democracy within the Party, but were vague and remained unimplemented. In an important test of strength in mid-1923, the
troika was able to neutralize Trotsky's friend and supporter
Christian Rakovsky by removing him from his post as head of the Ukrainian government (
Sovnarkom) and sending him to London as Soviet ambassador. When regional Party secretaries in Ukraine protested against Rakovsky's reassignment, they too were reassigned to various posts all over the Soviet Union.
Lenin's illness (1922-1923) Starting in mid-summer 1923, the Soviet economy ran into significant difficulties, which led to numerous strikes countrywide. Two secret groups within the Communist Party,
Workers' Truth and
Workers' Group, were uncovered and suppressed by the Soviet secret police. Then, in September-October, the much anticipated
Communist revolution in Germany ended in defeat.
On
October 8, 1923 Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee and the
Central Control Commission, attributing these difficulties to lack of intra-Party democracy. Trotsky wrote:
In the fiercest moment of War Communism, the system of appointment within the party did not have one tenth of the extent that it has now. Appointment of the secretaries of provincial committees is now the rule. That creates for the secretary a position essentially independent of the local organization. [...] The bureaucratization of the party apparatus has developed to unheard-of proportions by means of the method of secretarial selection. There has been created a very broad stratum of party workers, entering into the apparatus of the government of the party, who completely renounce their own party opinion, at least the open expression of it, as though assuming that the secretarial hierarchy is the apparatus which creates party opinion and party decisions. Beneath this stratum, abstaining from their own opinions, there lays the broad mass of the party, before whom every decision stands in the form of a summons or a command. Other senior communists who had similar concerns sent
The Declaration of 46 to the Central Committee on
October 15, in which they wrote:
[...] we observe an ever progressing, barely disguised division of the party into a secretarial hierarchy and into "laymen", into professional party functionaries, chosen from above, and the other party masses, who take no part in social life. [...] free discussion within the party has virtually disappeared, party public opinion has been stifled. [...] it is the secretarial hierarchy, the party hierarchy which to an ever greater degree chooses the delegates to the conferences and congresses, which to an ever greater degree are becoming the executive conferences of this hierarchy. Although the text of these letters remained secret at the time, they had a significant effect on the Party leadership and prompted a partial retreat by the
troika and its supporters on the issue of intra-Party democracy, notably in Zinoviev's
Pravda article published on
November 7. Throughout November, the
troika tried to come up with a compromise to placate, or at least temporarily neutralize, Trotsky and his supporters. (Their task was made easier by the fact that Trotsky was sick in November and December.) The first draft of the resolution was rejected by Trotsky, which led to the formation of a special group consisting of Stalin, Trotsky and Kamenev, which was charged with drafting a mutually acceptable compromise. On
December 5, the Politburo and the Central Control Commission unanimously adopted the group's final draft as its resolution.
On
December 8, Trotsky published an open letter, in which he expounded on the recently adopted resolution's ideas. The
troika used his letter as an excuse to launch a campaign against Trotsky, accusing him of factionalism, setting "the youth against the fundamental generation of old revolutionary Bolsheviks" as a "petty bourgeois deviation". After the Conference, a number of Trotsky's supporters, especially in the Red Army's Political Directorate, were removed from leading positions or reassigned. Nonetheless, Trotsky kept all of his posts and the
troika was careful to emphasize that the debate was limited to Trotsky's "mistakes" and that removing Trotsky from the leadership was out of the question. In reality, Trotsky had already been cut off from the decision making process.
Immediately after the Conference, Trotsky left for a
Caucasusian resort to recover from his prolonged illness. On his way, he learned about Lenin's death on January 21, 1924. He was about to return when a follow up telegram from Stalin arrived, giving an incorrect date of the scheduled funeral, which would have made it impossible for Trotsky to return in time. Many commentators speculated after the fact that Trotsky's absence from Moscow in the days following Lenin's death contributed to his eventual loss to Stalin, although Trotsky generally discounted the significance of his absence.
Left opposition (1923-1924) There was little overt political disagreement within the Soviet leadership throughout most of 1924. On the surface, Trotsky remained the most prominent and popular Bolshevik leader, although his "mistakes" were often alluded to by
troika partisans. Behind the scenes, he was completely cut off from the decision making process. Politburo meetings were pure formalities since all key decisions were made ahead of time by the
troika and its supporters. Trotsky's control over the military was undermined by reassigning his deputy, Ephraim Sklyansky, and appointing
Mikhail Frunze, who was being groomed to take Trotsky's place.
At the XIIIth Party Congress in May, Trotsky delivered a conciliatory speech:
None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly, the Party is always right.... We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right. The English have a saying, "My country, right or wrong," whether it is in the right or in the wrong, it is my country. We have much better historical justification in saying whether it is right or wrong in certain individual concrete cases, it is my party.... And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end. The attempt at reconciliation, however, did not stop
troika supporters from taking potshots at him.
In the meantime, the Left Opposition, which had coagulated somewhat unexpectedly in late 1923 and lacked a definite platform aside from general dissatisfaction with the intra-Party "regime", began to crystallize. It lost some less dedicated members to the harassment by the
troika, but it also began formulating a program. Economically, the Left Opposition and its theoretician Yevgeny Preobrazhensky came out against further development of capitalist elements in the Soviet economy and in favor of faster industrialization. That put them at odds with Bukharin and Rykov, the "Right" group within the Party, who supported
troika at the time. On the question of world revolution, Trotsky and Karl Radek saw a period of stability in Europe while Stalin and Zinoviev confidently predicted an "acceleration" of revolution in Western Europe in 1924. On the theoretical plane, Trotsky remained committed to the Bolshevik idea that the Soviet Union could not create a true socialist society in the absence of the world revolution, while Stalin gradually came up with a policy of building '
Socialism in One Country'. These ideological divisions provided much of the intellectual basis for the political divide between Trotsky and the Left Opposition on the one hand and Stalin and his allies on the other.
At the XIIIth Congress Kamenev and Zinoviev helped Stalin defuse Lenin's Testament, which belatedly came to the surface. But just after the congress, the
troika, always an alliance of convenience, showed signs of weakness. Stalin began making poorly veiled accusations about Zinoviev and Kamenev. Yet in October 1924, Trotsky published
The Lessons of October, an extensive summary of the events of the 1917 revolution. In it, he described Zinoviev's and Kamenev's opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, something that the two would have preferred left unmentioned. This started a new round of intra-party struggle, which became known as the
Literary Discussion, with Zinoviev and Kamenev again allied with Stalin against Trotsky. Their criticism of Trotsky was concentrated in three areas:
Trotsky was again sick and unable to respond while his opponents mobilized all of their resources to denounce him. They succeeded in damaging his military reputation so much that he was forced to resign as People's Commissar of Army and Fleet Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council on
January 6, 1925. Zinoviev demanded Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist Party, but Stalin refused to go along and skillfully played the role of a moderate. Trotsky kept his Politburo seat, but was effectively put on probation.
Trotsky's disagreements and conflicts with Lenin and the Bolsheviks prior to 1917
Trotsky's alleged distortion of the events of 1917 in order to emphasize his role and diminish the roles played by other Bolsheviks
Trotsky's harsh treatment of his subordinates and other alleged mistakes during the Russian Civil War
After Lenin's death (1924) 1925 was a difficult year for Trotsky. After the bruising
Literary Discussion and losing his Red Army posts, he was effectively unemployed throughout the winter and spring. In May 1925, he was given 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 In the meantime, 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 meeting of the Central Committee and came to a head at the XIVth Party Congress in December 1925. With only the Leningrad Party organization behind them, Zinoviev and Kamenev, dubbed
The New Opposition, were thoroughly defeated while Trotsky refused to get involved in the fight and didn't speak at the Congress.
A year in the wilderness (1925) During a lull in the intra-party fighting in the spring of 1926, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters in the
New Opposition gravitated closer to Trotsky's supporters and the two groups soon formed an alliance, which also incorporated some smaller opposition groups within the Communist Party. The alliance became known as the United Opposition.
The United Opposition was repeatedly threatened with sanctions by the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party and Trotsky had to agree to tactical retreats, mostly to preserve his alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev. The opposition remained united against Stalin throughout 1926 and 1927, especially on the issue of the
Chinese Revolution. The methods used by the Stalinists against the Opposition became more and more extreme. At the XVth Party Conference in October 1926 Trotsky could barely speak due to interruptions and catcalls and at the end of the Conference he lost his Politburo seat. In 1927 Stalin started using the
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.
United opposition (1926-1927) In October 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee. When the United Opposition tried to organize independent demonstrations commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1927, the demonstrators were dispersed by force and Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party on
November 12. Their leading supporters, from Kamenev down, were expelled in December 1927 by the XVth Party Congress, which paved the way for mass expulsions of rank and file oppositionists as well as internal exile of opposition leaders in early 1928.
When the XVth Party Congress made Opposition views incompatible with membership in the Communist Party, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters capitulated and renounced their alliance with the Left Opposition. Trotsky and most of his followers, on the other hand, refused to surrender and stayed the course.
Trotsky was exiled to
Alma Ata (now in
Kazakhstan) on
January 31,
1928. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929, accompanied by his wife
Natalia Sedova and his son
Leon Sedov.
After Trotsky's expulsion from the country, exiled Trotskyists began to waver and, between 1929 and 1934, most of the leading members of the Opposition surrendered to Stalin, "admitted their mistakes" and were reinstated in the Communist Party. Christian Rakovsky, who served as an inspiration for Trotsky between 1929 and 1934 while he was in Siberian exile, was the last prominent Trotskyist to capitulate. Almost all of them perished in the
Great Purges just a few years later.
Defeat and exile (1927-1928) Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union in February 1929. His first station in exile was at
Büyükada off the coast of
Istanbul, where he stayed four years. There were many former White Army officers in Istanbul, which put Trotsky's life in danger, but a number of Trotsky's European supporters volunteered to serve as bodyguards and assured his safety.
In 1933 Trotsky was offered asylum in
France by
Daladier. He stayed first at
Royan, then at
Barbizon. He was not allowed to visit
Paris. In 1935 it was implied to him that he was no longer welcome in France. After weighing alternatives, he moved to
Norway, where he got permission from then Justice minister
Trygve Lie to enter the country, Trotsky was a guest of
Konrad Knudsen near
Oslo. After two years, allegedly under influence from the Soviet Union, he was put under house arrest. After consultations with Norwegian officials, his transfer to
Mexico on a freighter was arranged. Mexican President
Lázaro Cárdenas welcomed him warmly, even arranging a special train to bring him to
Mexico City from the port of
Tampico.
In Mexico, he lived at one point at the home of the painter
Diego Rivera, and at another at that of Rivera's wife & fellow painter,
Frida Kahlo. He remained a prolific writer in exile, penning several key works, including his
History of the Russian Revolution (1930) and
The Revolution Betrayed (1936), a critique of the Soviet Union under
Stalinism. Trotsky argued that the Soviet state had become a
degenerated workers' state controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy, which would eventually either be overthrown via a
political revolution establishing workers' democracy, or degenerate into a capitalist class.
While in Mexico, Trotsky also worked closely with
James P. Cannon,
Joseph Hansen, and
Farrell Dobbs of the
Socialist Workers Party of the United States, and other supporters.
Cannon, a long-time leading member of the American communist movement, had supported Trotsky in the struggle against
Stalinism since he first read Trotsky's criticisms of the Soviet Union in 1928. Trotsky's critique of the Stalinist regime, though banned, was distributed to leaders of the Comintern. Among his other supporters was
Chen Duxiu, founder of the Chinese Communist party.
Last exile (1929-1940) In August 1936, the first
Moscow show trial of the so-called "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center" was staged in front of an international audience. During the trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 other accused, most of them prominent Old Bolsheviks, confessed to having plotted with Trotsky to kill Stalin and other members of the Soviet leadership. The court found everybody guilty and sentenced the defendants to death, Trotsky
in absentia. The second show trial of
Karl Radek,
Grigory Sokolnikov,
Yuri Pyatakov and 14 others took place in January 1937, with even more alleged conspiracies and crimes linked to Trotsky. In April 1937, an independent "Commission of Inquiry" into the charges made against Trotsky and others at the "Moscow Trials" was held in
Coyoacan, with
John Dewey as chairman
[3]. The findings were published in the book
Not Guilty.
Moscow show trials Main article: Fourth International Fourth International Towards the end of 1939 Trotsky agreed to go to the United States to appear as a witness before the
Dies Committee of the House of Representatives, a forerunner of the
House Un-American Activities Committee. Representative Dies, chairman of the committee, demanded the suppression of the
American Communist Party. Trotsky intended to use the forum to expose the
NKVD's activities against him and his followers. He made it clear that he also intended to argue against the suppression of the American Communist Party, and to use the committee as a platform for a call to transform the world war into a world revolution. Many of his supporters argued against his appearance, but anyway, when the committee learned the deposition Trotsky intended to make, it refused to hear him, and he was denied a visa to enter the USA. On hearing about it, the Stalinists immediately accused Trotsky of being in the pay of the oil magnates and the
FBI.
Dies Committee After quarreling with Diego Rivera, in 1939 Trotsky moved into his own residence in
Coyoacán, a neighborhood in
Mexico City. He was very ill, suffering from
high blood pressure, and feared that he would suffer a
cerebral hemorrhage. He even prepared himself for the possibility of ending his life through suicide.
Final months On
August 20,
1940, Trotsky was successfully attacked in his home by a
NKVD agent,
Ramón Mercader, who drove the pick of an
ice axe into Trotsky's skull.
Assassination Trotsky's house in Coyoacán was preserved in much the same condition as it was on the day of the assassination and is now a museum run by a board which includes his grandson
Esteban Volkov. The current director of the museum is Dr.
Carlos Ramirez Sandoval under whose supervision the museum has improved considerably after years of neglect. Trotsky's grave is located on its grounds.
Trotsky was never formally rehabilitated by the Soviet government, despite the
Glasnost-era rehabilitation of most other
Old Bolsheviks killed during the Great Purges. But in 1987, under
President Gorbachev, Trotsky was called "a hero and martyr", and was featured on a
commemorative postage stamp.
[4] His son,
Sergei Sedov, killed in 1937, was rehabilitated in 1988, as was
Nikolai Bukharin. Above all, beginning in 1989, Trotsky's books, forbidden until 1987, were finally published in the Soviet Union.
Trotsky's great-granddaughter,
Nora Volkow (daughter of Esteban Volkov), is currently head of the US
National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Epilogue Main article: Trotskyism Contributions to theory Main article: Permanent Revolution Permanent Revolution Our relations with Kamenev, which were very good in the first period after the insurrection, began to become more distant from that day.
I am sure Trotsky will uphold my views as well as I.
The need of the hour was for a man who would incarnate the call to struggle, a man who, subordinating himself completely to the requirements of the struggle, would become the ringing summons to arms, the will which exacts from all unconditional submission to a great, sacrificial necessity. Only a man with Trotsky's capacity for work, only a man so unsparing of himself as Trotsky, only a man who knew how to speak to the soldiers as Trotsky did—only such a man could have become the standard bearer of the armed toilers. He was all things rolled into one.
Reforms
Biography
Pre-1900
1900-1949
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