Leon Trotsky, b. Lev Davidovich Bronstein, Nov. 7 (N.S.), 1879, d. Aug. 21, 1940, was second only to Vladimir Ilich LENIN as polemicist and organizer of the Bolshevik phase of the RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS OF 1917. A charismatic orator and superb tactician, he was also a brilliant theorist whose writings greatly influenced socialist movements worldwide. His practical skills enabled him to plan the Petrograd uprising in November 1917 and to create the Red Army that saved the Bolshevik regime in the ensuing Civil War (1918-20). But his fierce independence and aloofness prevented him from gaining broad party support after Lenin's death, in his unsuccessful struggle for power with Joseph STALIN.
Early Life and Revolutionary Activity
Trotsky, the son of a relatively prosperous Jewish farmer in Yanovka, in the Ukraine, was sent at the age of 9 to school in Odessa. Rebellious and outspoken, he became at the age of 18 a professional revolutionary. He was arrested in 1898 and was later exiled to Siberia, where he joined the Social Democratic party. In 1902 he escaped abroad, met Lenin, and began his troubled relationship with the Bolshevik party (see BOLSHEVIKS AND MENSHEVIKS).
Trotsky admired Lenin's pragmatism, but after the Social Democratic split in 1903 he sided with the Mensheviks because he feared that Lenin's "elitist" organizational methods would lead to dictatorship. An independent-minded left-winger, Trotsky wrote extensively in the radical press, and during the Russian Revolution of 1905 he returned to take a leading role in the Saint Petersburg (later Petrograd) Workers' Soviet. Arrested, tried, and again exiled to Siberia, he escaped abroad again in 1907 and wrote extensively until he returned to Russia in 1917.
Trotsky's major writings centered on the question of revolutionary development. Recognizing the weakness of Russia's bourgeoisie, he argued that the first, "bourgeois" stage of revolution could be carried out only with the help of Russia's organized workers, and that this stage would lead to a condition of "permanent revolution." The proletariat, who would have brought the bourgeoisie to power, would then gradually assume political control. As the revolution passed into worker hands in backward Russia, workers' revolts would spread to the more advanced capitalist societies of Europe and would establish socialist regimes to aid and protect the weak Russian revolutionary government.
Revolutionary Leader and Soviet Official
This outlook, soon to affect much Third World revolutionary thinking, structured Trotsky's activism in 1917. Returning to Russia independently of Lenin after the March 1917 revolution, he called on the workers to overthrow the liberal provisional government. In August he joined the Bolshevik party, whose long-time loyalists (including Stalin) regarded him as an interloper. However, Trotsky rapidly won a leading role with his spellbinding speeches and organizational energy. In September he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, and from that post he organized the Bolshevik forces that overthrew the regime of Aleksandr Kerensky.
Appointed commissar of foreign affairs (1917-18), Trotsky unsuccessfully opposed the annexationist Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany, but he retained Lenin's confidence and became commissar of war (1918-25). From the demoralized remnants of tsarist forces he managed to organize an efficient Red Army, a truly remarkable feat; but his brusque style, his impatience with criticism and incompetence, and his decision to rely on "military specialists" won him few friends. Rank-and-file party comrades saw him as aloof and remote.
Known as a "left Bolshevik" and an advocate of both rapid, planned industrialization and party democracy, Trotsky watched impatiently after 1921 as the party course seemed to support neither. In a series of essays labeled "The New Course" (1923), he bitterly criticized the growing bureaucratization of the party and argued for greater centralized planning. Much of his hostility was directed against Stalin, whom he loathed. In response, Stalin stated his own position, both by his activities within the party organization and in his advocacy of "socialism in one country" (the antithesis of Trotsky's advocacy of world revolution). With Lenin's death in January 1924, Trotsky proved either too self-confident or too impatient to work carefully at practical politics. Within weeks he was censured for "factionalism," and within three years he was stripped of all posts and expelled from the party.
Exile
Condemned to internal exile in 1928, he was banished from the USSR the following year. Trotsky then lived in Turkey (1929-33), France (1933-35), Norway (1935-36), and Mexico (1936-40). He continued to write on a wide range of issues: culture, literature, politics, international affairs, revolutionary theory, and women. He completed his massive History of the Russian Revolution (3 vols., 1931-33; Eng. trans., 1932-33), also working energetically to expose Stalin--most notably in The Revolution Betrayed (1937). At the treason trials held (1936-38) in Moscow, Trotsky was denounced in absentia as the archconspirator against the Soviet regime. He was finally axed to death by a Stalinist agent at his home in a suburb of Mexico City. The facts about the assassination were officially kept quiet in the Soviet Union until January 1989, when--apparently as part of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of "glasnost," or openness--the Literaturnaya Gazeta revealed that the Soviet secret police carried out the murder.
Many of Trotsky's writings have appeared in English translation, including Literature and Revolution (1925), Terrorism and Communism (1921; rev. ed., 1935), and Diary in Exile, 1935 (1958). Trotsky was rehabilitated by Soviet authorities in the Gorbachev era, shortly before the demise of the USSR.