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Leon Trotsky
(1879-1940)
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Russian revolutionist and co-founder of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Trotsky was born Lev Davydovich Bronstein on November 7, 1879, in a farming community near Bobrinetz, Ukraine. His father, David, was from a "lower class" family of Jews who had been forced to leave the Jewish town of Poltava. Lev's mother, Anna, was from a middle-class family from Odessa. Anna had fallen in love with David against her family's wishes. The couple purchased a plot of land inside a former noble estate called Yanovka. Trotsky recalled that his parents were indulgent of their children but emotionally distant — usually working on the farm.
After discovering he was unhappy at a school for religious Jews in Gromokla, Bronstein's (Trotsky's) parents sent him to live with his cousin, Moissei Spentzer, in the more-urban city of Odessa. After waiting a year for an opening, Bronstein managed to enter a fairly liberalized school in Odessa — where he excelled in math and literature. At seventeen, he moved to Nikolayev to complete secondary school.
It was in Nikolayev in that Bronstein first met young socialists. He joined a loose group of town radicals which met at one of the members' orchard. It was hear that Bronstein first met his future wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya. The two would get into heated debates — Sokolovskaya was a Marxist and (at that point) Bronstein was a Narodnik (populist). Young Bronstein felt that Marxism was a dry set of theories and (known for his youthful enthusiasm and arrogance) would sometimes mock Alexandra. But eventually Alexandra won the debate and won Bronstein whole-heartedly over to Marxism.
He turned his back on a mathematics degree from the University of Odessa to pursue the revolution and organized a Marxist group, the South Russian Workers' Union. He was subsequently exiled at the age of nineteen to Siberia. Following the advice of friends and his wife, Bronstein escaped from Siberia in 1902 by using a passport with a fake name on it — "Trotsky." He traveled to London and arrived at the apartment of fellow Russian Marxist Vladimir Lenin. He was an active worker and became a co-editor of Lenin's Iskra ("The Spark"). Most of his co-editors thought him to be a wonderful edition to the journal's staff; the only one who did not was Georgi Plekhanov (who would go on to lead the Mensheviks).
In 1903, Russia's chief Marxist group, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, broke into the Bolshevik and Menshevik groupings. Trotsky felt that party unity was extremely important, and for this reason, tended to switch his allegiances from Menshevik to Bolshevik. Trotsky would later look back at this period and realize that the divisions in the party were irreconciable.
During the Russian revolution of 1905, Trotsky was active, leading the workers as the chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet (workers council). It was during this period that Trotsky developed the idea of Permanent Revolution. He believed that, in Russia, the workers (and not the bourgeois classes) would lead the oppressed masses through the democratic/capitalist revolution which would overthrow the monarchy. This stage would immediately be followed by the socialist revolutionary stage.
Because of his leadership in the 1905 Revolution, he was again exiled to Siberia by the Tsar. And again he escaped — this time to Vienna. He began publishing his own Marxist journal, Pravda ("The Truth"). He debated Lenin over the character of what the Russian revolution would be. Lenin felt that the revolution would be led by a joint effort of the workers and peasants; Trotsky agreed, but asserted that the workers (much more organized and powerful) had to lead the other oppressed classes.
When World War I began, Trotsky arrived in Paris, publishing the journal Nashe Slovo ("Our World"), and later traveled to Spain and New York. In New York, he edited Novy Mir (“New World”). When Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown in a democratic revolution in early 1917, Trotsky came to Russia. Seeing two of the “socialist” parties (the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries) sided with the main conservative capitalist party (the Constitutional Democrats, or Cadets) in maintaining “law and order” instead of continuing the revolution, he fully denounced them and sided with Lenin's Bolsheviks. Also, Lenin began adopting Trotsky's theories of Permanent Revolution.
He became the chairman of the Petrograd workers soviet and was Lenin's second-in-command during the crisis of 1917. When General Kornilov sought to overthrow the provisional government and create a military dictatorship, the Bolsheviks and workers resisted the coup. In October/November 1917, the workers (led by Lenin and Trotsky) overthrew the provisional government and formed the Soviet government, dramatically altering the then-backward Russian nation.
Trotsky became people's commissar of foreign affairs of the new Soviet Union and traveled to Germany, where he pulled Russia's battered military out of World War I in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. During the Russian civil war between the Bolsheviks and the Tsarist White Army(funded by the international capitalists), Trotsky organized the Red Army from elements in the working class and the remnants of the old military. By 1920, the Reds one and their Bolshevik (now Communist) party was in control of the nation.
During this period following the war, there was great debate over what to do next. Trotsky felt that the revolution could only be completed if capitalism was defeated throughout the world, but Joseph Stalin (a long-time Bolshevik functionary) felt that attention should be devoted to industrializing Russia (“socialism in one country”). Lenin died of a stroke in 1924, but before he did, he stated in his "Last Testament" that Stalin should be removed from his position as Secretary General of the Communist Party and Trotsky should be Lenin's replacement. Trotsky, perhaps not realizing the danger Stalin embodied, allowed the Last Testament to be kept secret and did not use the popularity he had gained after building the Red Army to fight back.
Many of the Communist leaders — perhaps annoyed with Trotsky's arrogance and feeling they could manipulate the simple-minded Stalin — sided with Stalin. (Many of these leaders were eventually executed by the grateful Stalin.) Between 1925-27, Trotsky was thrown out of the Communist Party. His forces throughout the world formed the International Left Opposition. These forces fought against Stalin's dictatorial and cut-throat style as leader of the Soviet Union. This led to the death of many of them in Stalin's "Great Purges."
Trotsky was exiled from Russia to Turkey in 1933. Seeing the rising tide of fascism and Nazism in Western Europe, Trotsky proposed combining the efforts of all working-class parties (the social democrats, Trotskyists, and Stalinists) in fighting the fascists in a United Front. However, Stalin replied by calling Trotsky a Nazi and the anti-Communist social democrats were unwilling to cooperate, as well.
In 1938, Trotsky consolidated his forces into the Fourth International. Also that year, he moved to Mexico City and began work on a critical analysis of his chief opponent — Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence. He felt that Stalin's selfish bureaucracy was destroying the victories of the Russian Revolution and would eventually revert Russia to a capitalist state (which came true in 1991). Apparently concerned that he had been too kind by merely exiling Trotsky, Stalin's GPU sent a Mexican agent, Mercarder del Rio, to take care of this. Using an ice pick, del Rio assassinated Trotsky in 1940. For this terrible act, the assassin was given a prison sentence of twenty years. When he was released in 1960, del Rio fled to Stalinist-controlled Czechoslovakia.
Trotsky was a life-long advocate for socialist revolution, though (he even admitted) made mistakes along the way. However, he was a brilliant man who could write in four languages and whose ideas on socialism were quite prophetic. If Stalin had not succeeded in taking power, history would have surely gone very differently.
For more information of Leon Trotsky, it would be suggested to read the Isaac Deutscher's three-part biography of Trotsky: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast. It is generally agreed that these books are the most in-depth (and most readable) biographies of this great revolutionary.