Leon Trotsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Leon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 by Ramon Mercader, a Stalinist agent. He had been sentenced to death in absentia four years earlier at the Moscow show trials. Of all the men Stalin defeated, Trotsky was one of the few never politically rehabilitated by later Soviet leaders. His name was written out of official history.

  Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born on the 7th of November 1879 into a wealthy but illiterate Jewish farming family in Yanovka, a village in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire. From that farm came a man who would build the Red Army, negotiate Russia out of a world war, and stand beside Vladimir Lenin as one of the two most prominent figures in the Soviet state.

  How did a boy disciplined for reading the wrong books in class become the organiser of an armed uprising? Why did Lenin once call him a man of rare abilities and later call him Judas? And how did the second-most-powerful man in the Bolshevik Party end his life hunted across three continents? The answers run through schisms, prisons, peace talks, and a long exile.

• 2. Becoming Trotsky

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  He adopted the surname Trotsky after escaping from Siberia, reportedly taking the name of a jailer in the Odessa prison where he had been held. It became his primary revolutionary pseudonym, the name he used for the rest of his life. Before that point he had used his birth name, Lev Bronstein.

  David Bronstein sent his son to Odessa for education when the boy was eight years old. There Trotsky enrolled at a Lutheran German-language school that admitted students of various faiths. Odessa was a bustling cosmopolitan port city, unlike typical Russian cities, and it shaped his international outlook. He excelled in science and mathematics, read voraciously, and was often disciplined for reading non-curriculum books during class.

  Trotsky became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896 after moving to the port town of Nikolayev. He began as a narodnik, an agrarian socialist populist who opposed Marxism, but was converted to Marxism by his future first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya. His father had intended him to become a mechanical engineer, and he briefly studied engineering and mathematics at Odessa University before dropping out in early 1897.

  Using the name Lvov, Trotsky helped organise the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev, writing and printing leaflets for industrial workers. In January 1898 over 200 union members, including Trotsky, were arrested. He spent two years in prison awaiting trial. In Moscow he encountered other revolutionaries, learnt of Lenin, and read Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

• 3. Iskra And The Schism

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  In the summer of 1902 Trotsky escaped from Siberia hidden in a load of hay, urged on by his wife Aleksandra. He had been sentenced in 1900 to four years of exile in the Baikal region, where the couple had two daughters, Zinaida and Nina. After his escape he moved to London and joined Georgi Plekhanov, Lenin, Julius Martov, and the other editors of the newspaper Iskra, The Spark.

  Writing under the pen name Pero, meaning quill or pen, Trotsky soon became one of the paper's leading writers. In March 1903 Lenin proposed his co-option to the editorial board, writing that Pero was unquestionably a man of rare abilities, with conviction and energy, who would go much farther. Plekhanov's opposition blocked the appointment, and Trotsky participated only in an advisory capacity, earning Plekhanov's animosity.

  The August 1903 Second Congress in London split the pro-Iskra delegates. Lenin's supporters, the Bolsheviks, wanted a smaller, highly organised party of committed members. Martov's supporters, the Mensheviks, favoured a larger, less disciplined party that included sympathisers. Trotsky supported Martov, while Plekhanov backed Lenin. He left the Mensheviks in September 1904 and from then until 1917 described himself as a non-factional social democrat.

  During the split Lenin referred to Trotsky as Judas, a scoundrel, and a swine. In late 1902 Trotsky had met Natalia Sedova, who became his companion. They married in 1903 and remained together until his death, raising two sons, Lev Sedov and Sergei Sedov.

• 4. The Petersburg Soviet

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  On the 9th of January 1905, Father Georgi Gapon led a procession to the Winter Palace to petition Tsar Nicholas II. The Palace Guard fired on the demonstration, killing and injuring many. This event, known as Bloody Sunday, intensified revolutionary fervour across the empire.

  Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in February 1905 via Kiev, then moved to Saint Petersburg. After a police raid forced him to flee to rural Finland, he further developed his theory of permanent revolution, the idea that the revolution could survive only if it spread to more advanced capitalist countries. He returned to Saint Petersburg on the 15th of October 1905 and addressed the Soviet of Workers' Deputies at the Technological Institute. An estimated 200,000 people gathered outside, about half the city's workers.

  Trotsky and his former colleague Alexander Parvus took over the newspaper Russian Gazette, increasing its circulation to 500,000. He joined the Saint Petersburg Soviet under the name Yanovsky, after his birthplace, and was elected vice-chairman. After the arrest of its public face, Khrustalyev-Nosar, on the 26th of November 1905, Trotsky became its chairman.

  On the 2nd of December the Soviet issued a proclamation refusing repayment of loans made by the Tsarist government while it was openly at war with the people. The following day government troops surrounded the Soviet and arrested its deputies. Trotsky and other leaders were tried in 1906 for supporting armed rebellion, convicted, and sentenced to internal exile in Siberia. En route in January 1907, he escaped again and made his way to London.

• 5. Year Zero

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  Trotsky was in New York City when the February Revolution of 1917 led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. He had arrived in the city on the 13th of January 1917, staying for over two months at 1522 Vyse Avenue in the Bronx, writing for a local Russian-language socialist newspaper. He left aboard the SS Kristianiafjord on the 27th of March 1917.

  The Royal Navy intercepted his ship at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Trotsky was detained for a month at the Amherst Internment Camp. He described his month there as one continual mass meeting. His agitation angered German inmates, and when the camp commander forbade him from speaking, 530 prisoners protested and signed a petition. The British government freed him on the 29th of April 1917, and he reached Russia on the 17th of May.

  Upon his return, Trotsky temporarily joined the Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organisation in Petrograd. He was arrested in August during the aftermath of the July Days and released 40 days later following the failed counter-revolutionary uprising by Lavr Kornilov. After the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, he was elected its chairman and led efforts to overthrow the Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky.

  Writing in Pravda on the 6th of November 1918, Stalin credited Trotsky as the man under whose immediate direction all practical work of the uprising was done. Stalin wrote that the Party was indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet. That passage, quoted in Stalin's 1934 book, was expunged from his collected Works in 1949.

• 6. No War, No Peace

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  Trotsky became People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs after the Bolsheviks seized power. He published the secret treaties signed by the Triple Entente, including the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which detailed plans to reallocate colonies and redraw borders. The revelation on the 23rd of November 1917 caused considerable embarrassment to Britain and France.

  He led the Soviet delegation at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks with the Central Powers from the 22nd of December 1917 to the 10th of February 1918. The Soviet government was divided. Left Communists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, believed no peace was possible and wanted a revolutionary war. Lenin, judging the German government still strong, argued for signing a separate treaty if faced with an ultimatum.

  Trotsky's position sat between the two. He acknowledged that the newly formed Red Army was too small and poorly trained to resist the Germans. Yet he believed a treaty would be a severe blow that revived suspicions of Bolshevik-German collusion. His policy was no war, no peace: announce the war's end and demobilise without signing anything, placing the fate of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland on the German working people.

  Germany resumed military operations on the 18th of February 1918, and the Red Army proved no match. After Trotsky and his supporters abstained, the Central Committee approved Lenin's proposal to accept German terms by 7 votes to 4. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on the 3rd of March and ratified on the 15th of March 1918. Closely associated with the failed policy, Trotsky resigned as Commissar for Foreign Affairs.

• 7. Organiser Of Victory

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  An army cannot be built without reprisals, Trotsky wrote, yet armies are not built on fear. On the 13th of March 1918 he became People's Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs, with full control of the Red Army. The entire existing Bolshevik military leadership protested his appointment and eventually resigned, objecting to his strict discipline, conscription, and reliance on former imperial officers.

  The revolt of the Czechoslovak Legions in 1918 cost Russia most of its territory and tested Trotsky's organisational skills. He responded with full mobilisation, increasing the Red Army from under 300,000 in May 1918 to one million by October, and introduced political commissars to ensure the loyalty of military experts. Lenin praised the strategy of compelling the bourgeois experts to build communism with the bricks the capitalists had hurled against the revolution.

  The historian Geoffrey Swain argues the Bolsheviks triumphed in the Civil War because of Trotsky's ability to work with military specialists, and his style of widescale consultation followed by swift action. Yet Lenin said in 1921 that Trotsky was in love with organisation but in working politics had not got a clue. Swain explains this by noting Trotsky was a loner who had mostly worked as a journalist.

  Trotsky's methods drew lasting criticism. The Red Army first used punitive barrier troops in 1918, stationing blocking detachments behind unreliable regiments with orders to shoot deserters. In March 1921, as Commissar of War, he ordered the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. After failed negotiations, the Red Army stormed the island on the 18th of March, killing thousands of sailors. The anarchist Emma Goldman accused him of betraying the revolution's democratic ideals.

• 8. Outmanoeuvred

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  Lenin suffered three strokes between the 25th of May 1922 and the 9th of March 1923, leading to his death on the 21st of January 1924. With Lenin sidelined, Stalin was elevated to the new post of Central Committee General Secretary in April 1922. Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev formed a triumvirate with Stalin to prevent Trotsky, publicly number two and Lenin's heir presumptive, from succeeding him.

  Lenin twice tried to elevate Trotsky and twice was rebuffed. When Kamenev hinted the Central Committee was ready to throw Trotsky overboard, Lenin called the idea the height of stupidity. On the 11th of September 1922 Lenin proposed Trotsky become his deputy at the Council of People's Commissars, but Trotsky categorically refused. In January 1923 Lenin amended his Testament to suggest Stalin's removal as General Secretary.

  From 1923 Trotsky led the Left Opposition, which supported greater industrialisation and party democratisation. On the 8th of October 1923 he wrote to the Central Committee attributing the party's problems to the bureaucratisation of the apparatus by means of secretarial selection. A separate Declaration of 46 echoed his concerns. At the XIIIth Party Conference in January 1924, only three delegates voted for his position, and the conference denounced Trotskyism as a petty bourgeois deviation.

  The ideological divide hardened around two theories. Trotsky held that the Soviet Union could not build true socialism without world revolution. Stalin developed the policy of socialism in one country. After the Literary Discussion damaged his military reputation, Trotsky resigned his Red Army posts on the 6th of January 1925. Zinoviev demanded his expulsion, but Stalin, playing the moderate, refused.

  Trotsky led a street demonstration in Moscow against Stalin's government on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1927. Soviet authorities dispersed it, and he was expelled from the Communist Party shortly afterward. His eulogy at the funeral of his friend Adolph Joffe that month was his last public speech in the Soviet Union.

  He was exiled to Alma Ata, now Almaty, on the 31st of January 1928, then deported from the Soviet Union to Turkey in February 1929, accompanied by Natalia Sedova and their eldest son Lev. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937. In exile he wrote polemics against Stalinism, advocating proletarian internationalism against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country.

  In The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936, Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union had become a degenerated workers' state. In 1938 he founded the Fourth International as an alternative to the Comintern. The cost to those around him was severe. His daughter Zinaida followed him into exile but took her own life in Berlin in 1933. His first wife Aleksandra disappeared in 1935 during the Great Purge and was murdered by Soviet forces in 1938.

  Almost all the Trotskyists remaining in the Soviet Union were executed in the Great Purges of 1936 to 1938. Christian Rakovsky, the last prominent Trotskyist to capitulate, survived until the Medvedev Forest massacre of September 1941, where he was shot with 156 other prisoners on Stalin's orders. Among the victims of that same massacre was Trotsky's sister Olga Kameneva.