Trotsky, Leon

Leon Trotsky. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940, age 61) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist. He was a central figure in the 1905 Revolution, October Revolution, Russian Civil War, and establishment of the Soviet Union. Trotsky, with Vladimir Lenin, was widely considered one of the two most prominent Soviet figures and was de facto second-in-command during the early years of the Russian Soviet Republic. Ideologically a Marxist and a Leninist, his thought and writings inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Trotsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898. He was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia, but in 1902 escaped to London, where he met Lenin and wrote for the party’s newspaper Iskra. Trotsky initially sided with Julius Martov’s Mensheviks against Lenin‘s Bolsheviks after the party’s 1903 schism but declared himself non-factional in 1904.

During the failed 1905 Revolution, Trotsky returned to Russia and was elected chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. He was again exiled to Siberia, but escaped in 1907 and spent time in London, Vienna, Switzerland, Paris, and New York.

After the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew the tsar, Trotsky returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played an important role in the October Revolution that overthrew the Provisional Government.

In Lenin’s first government, Trotsky was appointed as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and led negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I.

From 1918 to 1925, he served as the People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs; in this post, he founded the Red Army and led it to victory in the Russian Civil War. He was also an honorary president of the Third International.

In 1922, Trotsky and Lenin formed an alliance against the growing Soviet bureaucracy; Lenin proposed that Trotsky become his Deputy Chairman and preside over economic management at the Council of People’s Commissars, but he declined. Trotsky led the party’s Left Opposition, which opposed the moderation of the New Economic Policy.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky was the most prominent critic of Joseph Stalin, but was outmaneuvered by him and lost his positions: he was expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and the party in 1927, internally exiled to Alma Ata in 1928, and deported in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937.

Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution”

In exile, Trotsky wrote extensively and polemically against Stalinism, supporting proletarian internationalism against Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country.” Trotsky’s own theory of “permanent revolution” posited that the socialist revolution could only survive if spread to advanced capitalist countries.

In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union had become a “degenerated workers’ state” due to its isolation and called for an end to Stalin’s dictatorship. He founded the Fourth International in 1938 as an alternative to the Comintern.

In 1936, Trotsky was sentenced to death in absentia at the first of the Moscow show trials, and in 1940, was assassinated at his home in Mexico City by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader.

Written out of Soviet history under Stalin, Trotsky was one of the few of his rivals who was never politically rehabilitated by later leaders. In the Western world, Trotsky emerged as a hero of the anti-Stalinist left for his defence of a more democratic, internationalist form of socialism against Stalinist totalitarianism, and for his intellectual contributions to Marxism.

While some of his wartime actions have proved controversial, such as his ideological defence of the Red Terror and suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, scholarship generally ranks Trotsky’s leadership of the Red Army highly among historical figures, and he is credited for his major involvement with the military, economic, cultural and political development of the Soviet Union.