It is the 20th August 1940 in Coyoacan, Mexico,
A man in exile is writing in his study, he is interrupted by a Stalinist agent, who has broken into his home armed with an ice axe,
The pair struggle before the agent drives the adze of the axe into the man’s skull,
bungling his attack, but penetrating his skull and brain,
Too late the man’s bodyguards come to his aid,
And he dies the following day, in a Mexico City hospital. The man’s name………Leon Trotsky! The man known to history as Leon Trotsky was
born on the 7th of November 1879 in the small village of Yanovka in what today is central
Ukraine, but then was part of the Russian Empire, he was not born with the name by which
he is popularly known, but was actually called Lev Davidovich Bronstein. His father was David Leontyevich Bronstein,
a relatively prosperous Jewish-Ukrainian farmer, the family lived in a quite isolated part
of Ukraine which was over twenty kilometres from even the nearest post office. His mother was Anna Lvovna, and although the
family was Jewish, they were not particularly religious, and Russian and Ukrainian was spoken
at home rather than Yiddish, the language typically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. When Leon was eight years old his father sent
him to school in Odessa, the major city of the Crimea on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine,
here he was placed in an environment in which a historically multicultural city was becoming
increasingly Russified, in line with imperial policy, from early on, his rebellious streak
was evident and while at Odessa he organised a strike against an unpopular teacher. The world in which Trotsky was growing up,
was one in upheaval. For centuries Russia had been underdeveloped
politically, culturally and socially by comparison with its neighbours in central and western
Europe, this began to change in the nineteenth century, Russia’s population doubled between
1850 and 1900, coal production increased twelvefold during this period, while iron and steel production
doubled. Great technological advances such as the train,
telephones and telegrams also brought Russia and Russians into much closer engagement with
mainstream European ideas, accordingly a vast movement began from the mid-nineteenth century,
to reform Russian society and end the autocracy and inequality which characterised Russian
rule under the autocratic emperors or Tsars, in 1861 Russia became the last major European
power to abolish serfdom, under which approximately 40% of the Russian population had been effectively,
under the control of the landholders on whose estates they lived. Further reforms were in store, for instance,
censorship of the press was relaxed, allowing for a greater dissemination of political ideas,
new political groupings began to emerge in this more permissive political environment,
for instance, Mikhail Bakunin founded modern collectivist anarchism in Russia in the mid-nineteenth
century, which theorised the complete dismantling of centralised state authority in response
to the autocratic Tsarist regime. Other groups such as the Emancipation of Labour
party and the Narodniks argued for socialism in Russia in the 1870s and 1880s following
the political ideas of the German political theorist, Karl Marx, their ideas began to
find increasing support in Russia from 1891 onwards, following a catastrophic famine that
year, which claimed the lives of approximately half a million Russians, such was the unrest
created by the famine, that Orlando Figes, the leading English speaking historian of
Revolutionary Russia, has argued that the roots of the Russian Revolution of 1917 can
ultimately be traced back to 1891. The events of this time also appear to have
been formative in the life of the young Trotsky, writing towards the end of the 1920s, in an
autobiography he wrote entitled My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, Trotsky stated
of 1891, that it marked ‘the official date of the political breaking point in this country”. Trotsky was not alone in his thinking, and
the struggles engendered by the famine, led to the rising popularity of the Russian socialist
movement in the 1890s, the disparate socialist groups eventually coalesced in 1898 to form
the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, a revolutionary socialist party, formed to
unite Russian socialists in the cause of advancing the lot of Russian industrial workers. The teenage Trotsky was soon involved in these
revolutionary political movements, and by 1896 he had relocated to the Black Sea town
of Nikolayev, where he joined the Narodniks, a year later he helped organise the South
Russian Workers’ Union in the town, early in 1898 he was imprisoned for the first time
owing to political activities, but Lev Bronstein, the future Trotsky, was undeterred, and later
in 1898 he joined the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Following his arrest at Nikolayev in 1898,
Trotsky had been sent to Moscow to face trial for his actions in organising revolutionary
groups in southern Ukraine, after months of inaction in 1900 he was sentenced to four
years hard labour in Siberia, the thinly populated, vast region of eastern Russia which served
as a penal colony for dissenters against the Tsarist regime, his life in the east was tempered
somewhat by his marriage to Aleksandra Sokolovskaya in the summer of 1899, as she accompanied
him to Siberia, and two daughters, Zinaida and Nina were born in the two years that followed. Lev Bronstein never served his full four year
sentence in Siberia, in the summer of 1902, at the urging of his wife, he escaped from
the penal colony by hiding in the back of a hay wagon, as he made his way back to Europe,
Bronstein reputedly utilised a passport he had obtained bearing the name of one of his
jailers from Odessa several years earlier, the surname on the passport was Trotsky, and
Bronstein now adopted it, along with an alternate version of his first name, Leon, as his revolutionary
name, the name the world has known him by ever since. The newly free Leon Trotsky made his way to
London after escaping from Siberia, here he made contact with several leading members
of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, who had gone into exile in England after the
Tsarist regime of Nicholas II had cracked down on its membership, these exiles included
Georgi Plekhanov, a leading editor of the Russian socialist newspaper Iskra, or ‘the
Spark’, and also viewed as the founder of the social-democratic movement in Russia in
the 1870s, Trotsky, who is generally regarded as having been a highly accomplished writer
and brilliant polemicist, was soon putting his own literary abilities to work with the
newspaper. In London Trotsky also came into contact with
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin as he became known, a figure of some controversy within
the party, in 1902 Lenin had published a pamphlet entitled What is to be done? which opened
up a wide-ranging and divisive debate within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
over the future of the party, on the one side were purists such as Lenin who believed that
the party should build its support exclusively around the industrial working class against
the Tsarist regime, the landholders and the bourgeois middle class, while a separate faction
argued that the party should seek the support of the middle class against the Tsarist government
and the upper class of Russia. These divisions within the party came to a
head at the Second Congress of the party held jointly in Brussels and London in August 1903,
at this meeting the party split into two opposing factions, known as the Bolsheviks and the
Mensheviks, Bolsheviks means majority, while Mensheviks means minority, which reflected
the results of a vote held on the issue at the party congress. However this somewhat confusingly did not
reflect the actual support the two factions enjoyed, in reality, the Bolsheviks, headed
by Lenin, had the support of only a minority of the party membership, while in the years
ahead the Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov, were the more popular and powerful of the
two factions which resulted from the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
in 1903. Trotsky’s initial response to this split
in the party was to affiliate himself with the Mensheviks, however, by the autumn of
1904, he had become increasingly disillusioned with the Mensheviks’ excessive courting
of Russian liberals and the Russian middle class, as a result he removed himself from
affiliation with both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks and would spend the next ten plus
years, as a non-aligned, but nevertheless prominent, actor within the Russian socialist
movement. Unbeknownst to Trotsky at the time, his departure
from the Mensheviks occurred just as the cause of political reform in Russia was to undergo
the greatest spurs to action that had been seen since the famine of 1891, on the 22nd
of January 1905 Father Georgy Gapon led a large demonstration of unarmed protestors
through St Petersburg towards the Winter Palace of Nicholas II, to protest against the firing
of several workers from the Putilov ironworks in the city, over their membership of a workers
assembly, the protest was peaceful but the large crowds of thousands of people saw the
deployment of thousands of Russian troops, and then in the late morning, gunfire broke
out in numerous locations, several hours later when the dust settled, as many as 1,000 unarmed
protestors and bystanders had been killed. Bloody Sunday, as the day has become known,
inflamed opinions around the Tsar, Nicholas II, although he had not ordered the attacks,
strikes broke out in most cities and industrial centres throughout the country, this revolution
of 1905 was further driven by Russia’s loss in the Russo-Japanese War, the first major
military defeat for a European war against an eastern state in modern times. In response to the escalating unrest caused
by these events, Nicholas II re-established the Russia Duma or parliament, in an attempt
to conciliate public opinion, but the country had entered into a phase of increasingly radicalised
politics, particularly in the industrialised cities such as St Petersburg, Moscow and Riga. In the tumult following Bloody Sunday, Trotsky
elected to return to Russia from his exile in Western Europe, and travelling through
Kiev in his Ukrainian homeland, he returned to St Petersburg in the spring of 1905, once
there, he again put his literary abilities to work and began writing for various underground
newspapers associated with the Mensheviks, his activities placed him under observation
and danger of arrest by the Tsarist regime, and within weeks of returning to St Petersburg
he had to flee across the nearby border to rural Finland. Trotsky spent the second half of 1905 moving
back and forwards between Finland and St Petersburg, during this time, he took over the running
of the Russian Gazette and increased its readership to some 500,000 Russian readers, it was during
this time that Trotsky became highly influential in the formation of Councils or ‘Soviets’
of non-elected workers, established to represent the workers of the capital’s factories,
by the autumn of 1905, a St Petersburg Soviet was in operation and had signalled its opposition
to the Tsarist regime, moreover Trotsky temporarily served as its chairman. It was this role as a writer and lead agitator
which led to Trotsky’s second period of imprisonment. Late in 1905, government troops arrested many
senior members of the St Petersburg Soviet, including Trotsky, he spent much of 1906 in
prison, before finally being convicted of inciting an insurrection in St Petersburg. Thus, in October 1906, Trotsky found himself
yet again, sentenced to hard labour in Siberia, however, yet again, Trotsky would not serve
his sentence, indeed on this occasion, he did not even make it to Siberia, while en
route to the east in the winter of 1906 or 1907, he yet again escaped from official custody,
and made his way back west, eventually returning to London in the course of 1907. However, within a few months, Trotsky had
relocated to Vienna, and it was at the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that he would
conduct his work for much of the next decade, here he became involved from 1908 onwards,
with the Russian Marxist and psychoanalyst Adolph Joffe, in the publication of an underground
Russian language paper Pravda or ‘Truth’ which was smuggled into Russia. 1912 saw efforts to reunite the varying factions
with the Russian socialist movement, in January, Lenin held a conference in Prague where the
Bolsheviks were joined by a number of Mensheviks, then in August, Trotsky held a further unification
meeting in Vienna but with little success. Beyond his involvement in the Russian socialist
movement during his exile in Vienna, Trotsky was working on his theoretical views on Marxism,
in 1908 he published Results and Prospects, a lengthy essay which built on some theoretical
ideas he had conceived and written about in 1905, while in St Petersburg during the aftermath
of Bloody Sunday. These writings outlined Trotsky’s views
on ‘Permanent Revolution’, his singular contribution to Marxist theory, Trotsky here
developed the idea promulgated by Marx, that sections of the middle-class bourgeoisie would
be required to carry out a revolution to implement proper political democracy and a redistribution
of land and wealth, as a step towards achieving a Communist society. Trotsky argued that in Russia the bourgeoisie
could not be relied on to contribute in this way to the revolution, and so the proletariat
or working lower classes, would have to assume the role of carrying out these tasks, a class
struggle which would have to be permanent until Communism was attained, this theory
has gone on to have a substantial impact on Marxist thought, beyond Russia and throughout
the twentieth century. While living in Vienna Trotsky had spent some
time in 1912 covering the conflicts which wracked the Balkans during this period, his
perennial interest in class and ethnic struggles of all kinds, was exhibited during this time,
in his reportage on the Serbian army’s polices of ethnic cleansing against the Albanian people. The Balkans shaped Trotsky’s career in exile
in more ways than one, it was here in the summer of 1914, that the murder of the heir
to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, created the spark which eventually
ignited into the First World War, by the end of August 1914, Europe was arrayed into two
opposing alliances, Britain, France and Russia on one side and Germany, Austria-Hungary and
the Ottoman Empire on the other, as a Russian émigré, Trotsky was now forced to flee Austria-Hungary,
and resettled in neutral Switzerland, where Lenin also moved to, after a period of imprisonment
in Austria. In Switzerland Trotsky began working with
the Swiss Socialist Party and wrote a book, The War and the International, in which he
opposed the war, in contrast to a number of other socialist parties throughout Europe,
who had favoured the conflict for varying reasons based on domestic circumstances. It was this anti-war stance which saw the
perennially nomadic Trotsky relocating again in 1916, and while in France early in the
year, he was arrested, on account of his anti-war stance and deported to neutral Spain, from
where he was yet again deported to the United States, he was there by early 1917, and lived
briefly in the Bronx in New York City. It was while he was in New York, that the
defining moment for the Russian socialist movement occurred, as with the Russian defeat
in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Russia’s performance in the World War which had swept
Europe since 1914, had seriously destabilised the political situation at home in Russia,
the Tsar, Nicholas II, had taken personal command of the Russian armies in 1915, and
was viewed as personally responsible for a series of major military reverses on the Eastern
Front. More critically, heavy borrowing and printing
of money to pay for the war effort, had seen rapid inflation in Russia, and by 1917 the
cost of basic foodstuffs had increased fourfold on what they had been in 1914, pushing the
poor to the point of destitution, this combined with increasing food shortages, saw more radical
political movements within the country gaining support, from his exile in Western Europe,
Lenin called for the war effort to be turned into a civil war of the proletariat against
the Tsarist regime. Within the government this disaffection was
not aided by the Tsar’s family, Nicholas II’s wife Alexandra, the Tsarina, was originally
German and her nationality became a focus for criticism and suspicion, as Russia found
itself losing the war to Germany, moreover, the royal family had begun to place an increasing
amount of faith in the abilities of Grigori Rasputin, a mystic who had befriended the
Tsar’s family, and who popular opinion increasingly saw, as being the power behind the throne
in St Petersburg, and although he was assassinated on the 30th of December 1916, his rise had
severely tarnished the reputation of the imperial family in the mid-1910s. These social, political and economic factors
coalesced early in 1917 into severe unrest in St Petersburg, or Petrograd as it was called
after 1914, a city whose population had grown from approximately one million people in 1890,
to over two million in 1917, many of whom were poor, over worked and severely disaffected
industrial workers. In early February 1917 workers in Petrograd
began strikes and demonstrations throughout the city, in particular strikes began at the
Putilov Mill, by far the largest employer in the city with upwards of 20,000 workers,
the strike here was sparked by the company reneging on a pay increase, which had been
promised to allay the workers difficulties over the food price increase in the capital,
when a lock out from the factory began after the strike, further demonstrations occurred
throughout Petrograd, and by early March well over 100,000 workers were protesting throughout
the capital, the Russian Revolution had begun. Things moved quickly, the Tsar was absent
from the capital at the Eastern Front, but commanded the army to intervene to suppress
the rioting and demonstrations in the capital, this move backfired, however, as many of the
rank and file soldiers, either refused to comply or simply deserted, the Russian parliament,
the Duma, now moved to establish a committee to establish law and order, while measures
were underway to also establish a Soviet or city council of the industrial workers of
Petrograd. Meanwhile Nicholas II, on his way back to
the capital from the Eastern Front, was facing increasing pressure to abdicate as the situation
in Petrograd spiralled out of control, confronted by senior members of the Russian military
and urged to do, so he abdicated on the 15th of March 1917, in favour of his brother, Michael,
however, realising that he lacked the support to restore order, Michael Romanov refused
the title of Tsar the following day, accordingly on the 16th of March the Russian Empire of
the Tsars effectively came to an end. A provisional government now came to power,
headed by a liberal aristocrat, Prince Georgy Lvov, and while power within Petrograd itself
largely lay with the Petrograd Soviet, over the next eight months a power struggle would
play out, between these two contenders for power, the aristocratic conciliar government
and the populist socialist Soviet. When news of the events in Russia reached
Trotsky in New York, he immediately began preparing to return to his homeland, he departed
the United States on the 27th of March 1917, while crossing the Atlantic, he was detained
for a month at Nova Scotia, Trotsky’s commitment to the workers’ struggle was evident here,
while detained at a British internment camp, he helped organise mass meetings and workers
agitation, eventually the British government released him at the end of April, and he reached
Russia in mid-May. Finally, back in Petrograd he became a major
player in the struggle which was materialising, Lenin had returned to the capital from Western
Europe in mid-April, and had quickly established the Bolsheviks as one of the foremost groups
in the divided politics of Russia in the weeks after the February Revolution. Despite his non-alignment with either the
Bolsheviks or Mensheviks in years gone by, Trotsky now drifted towards Lenin’s position,
which increasingly sought to overthrow the provisional aristocratic regime and establish
a socialist government. Government crackdowns on some of the more
militant groupings in Petrograd, had seen Lenin flee over the border to Finland, however,
a failed attempt by the military to seize power in Russia and place General Lavr Kornilov
in charge of the government in September 1917, saw Lenin return to the capital in October,
upon his return, the Bolshevik Central Committee voted to launch a revolt and seize power,
in response not only to the failed military coup d’état, but also major military reverses
on the Eastern Front, which had seen the German army advancing into Russia itself after seizing
Russia’s possession in Poland and Lithuania. Trotsky’s role in inciting the revolution
which followed Lenin’s return to the capital cannot be overstated, he authored the resolution
which was passed by the Petrograd Soviet on the night of the 22nd of October, which specifically
called for the creation of a “military revolutionary centre” to “facilitate the revolutionary
defence of Petrograd and the safety of the people from the attacks being openly prepared
by military and civil Kornilovites”. The resulting revolt occurred on the night
of the 7th of November 1917, but has become known as the October Revolution, having occurred
on the 25th of October according to the Julian Calendar, which was in use in Russia at the
time, the Revolutionary Military Committee had appointed Trotsky as its chairman, and
he was instrumental in the seizure of power in Petrograd through the October Revolution,
by bringing the garrison in the capital over to the Bolsheviks cause. As a consequence, within 24 hours of the inception
of the revolt, many government buildings in the capital had been occupied, and on the
9th of November the Winter Palace, the seat of government itself, fell under the control
of Lenin, his party and the Petrograd Soviet. Thus, began the long and chequered history
of the Soviet state. Within days, the new Soviet state began to
tighten its control over Russia, with Moscow declaring in favour of the new regime on the
15th of November, major policy changes were quickly made to begin creating a Communist
state, all private property was nationalised, as were the Russian banks, foreign debt was
defaulted on, the vast properties of the Russian Orthodox Church were taken into state possession,
while factories were placed under the control of workers Soviets, the members of which were
given pay increases and had their working day reduced to eight hours. Trotsky’s star was in the ascendant in the
first weeks of the new Soviet state, following his role in the October Revolution and the
regard he was held in, by members of the Petrograd Soviet, in these early days of the Revolution,
nobody other than Lenin was more powerful within the new regime, and his role in the
months that followed, reflected this status as the second most powerful figure in the
government of Soviet Russia. Trotsky was appointed as People’s Commissar
for Foreign Affairs in November 1917, the Soviet equivalent of Minister for Foreign
Affairs, his first task was the war effort, which Russia was losing badly in 1917, his
first act was to publish the terms of the Triple Entente, the alliance between Britain,
France and Tsarist Russia, which stated the alliance’s agreements to redraw Europe’s
boundaries and redistribute the Central Powers lands amongst them, in the conflict’s aftermath,
as new colonies in Africa and the Middle East, this betrayal of British and French intentions
effectively ended the Triple Entente and put Russia in a war on its own against Germany. At the same time, Trotsky began peace negotiations
with the German government in Berlin to bring Russia’s involvement in the First World
War to an end, these began in December 1917, from the very beginning the Germans laid out
highly punitive terms which involved their annexation of huge tranches of the Russian
Empire around modern-day Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic Sea region. The government in Petrograd was highly opposed
to such terms, but from early 1918 it was facing increasing opposition from within central
Russia to the establishment of the Soviet state, with a major civil war brewing at home,
and the Russian army in no state to undertake a resumption of the war on the Eastern Front,
the regime reluctantly agreed to most of Germany’s terms in the spring of 1918. Trotsky, who was loathe to agree to territorial
concessions to a capitalist regime, refrained from casting a vote in the decision to accept
the German terms which he had overseen the negotiation of, he had hoped that while the
negotiations were underway, the German proletariat would overthrow the Kaiser’s government
in Berlin, but his optimism in the revolutionary cause proved unfounded on this occasion. Under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,
signed on the 3rd of March 1918, and named for the Belarussian town where it was agreed,
the infant Soviet state ceded all of Russia’s territories in Poland and the Baltic states
of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to Germany, as well as some territories in the Caucasus
and Caspian Sea region to the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. Russia also recognised the independence of
Finland, Ukraine and Georgia, thus creating new buffer states on its borders, the total
losses amounted to over one million square miles of Russian territory and 55 million
people, as well as a huge proportion of Russia’s coal, iron and steel factories, Lenin was
clear that this was an utter ‘humiliation’, but the Treaty provided the Soviet state with
time to secure itself at home against its domestic enemies. These enemies were multiplying in the spring
of 1918 as the Russian Civil War spread throughout the country as far as the Pacific Ocean, and
by the time peace was established with the Germans, the Bolsheviks’ enemies, a broad
coalition of aristocrats, former supporters of the Tsarist regime, Cossacks, army officers,
the Orthodox Church, centrists and even leftists who were opposed to the Bolsheviks, had begun
organising themselves into an opposing ‘White Army’ in opposition to the Soviet ‘Red
Army’. They acquired significant foreign backing
in the shape of aid from Britain, France, the United States and Japan, less significantly
other groupings such as the ‘Black Army’ and ‘Green Army’ arose in regions such
as the Ukraine, to fight for local rights in these areas against the Soviet regime in
Petrograd. Having led the peace negotiations with Germany,
Trotsky now took centre-stage in the Civil War effort, and in mid-March, just days after
the finalisation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he resigned as People’s Commissar for Foreign
Affairs and was then appointed as People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs,
thus, at the height of the Civil War Trotsky was effectively placed in charge of the Soviet
war effort. The initial problems facing him were the small
size of the Red army and the lack of professionalism within it, consequently his first act was
an enormous recruitment drive, and within six months of his taking charge of the Red
Army, its numbers had swelled from 300,000 men to one million troops, eventually this
would increase to three million men as new fronts opened, particularly in Poland from
early 1919 onwards, as Polish separatists undertook the Polish-Soviet War, backed in
particular by Britain and France to establish what eventually became the Second Polish Republic. Trotsky’s methods as Commissar for Military
and Naval Affairs could be brutal, in order to instil greater discipline in the rank and
file, he devised the notorious ‘blocking units’, special units which were placed
behind the front line of the Red Army troops, charged specifically with gunning down any
of their own soldiers suspected of trying to desert or retreat, many years later in
his autobiography he laid out his thoughts on this: “An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless
the army command has the death penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that
are so proud of their technical achievements-the animals that we call men-will build armies
and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the
possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear.” These ‘blocking units’ remained a common
feature of the Red Army for many years and were used extensively again during the Second
World War, but beyond this brutal tactic for enforcing discipline on the rank and file
in the Red Army, as Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, Trotsky was also a firm
proponent of the Red Terror, the ruthless suppression of political dissent within the
military establishment and the use of labour camps to provide arms and other supplies for
the war effort. As a zealous revolutionary and Communist,
he believed that such measures were justifiable in so far as they would lead to the destruction
of the propertied classes and the initiation of a new global socialist world order, in
this respect the example that he set during the Russian Revolution, spoke of an individual
who could display a savage streak which was often out of step with his concern for the
rights of the downtrodden proletariat, and many of his methods shaped the autocracy and
violence of the Soviet state in the years and decades ahead. Trotsky’s command of the Red Army had also
brought him into conflict for the first time with Joseph Stalin, a rising star of the Soviet
regime from Georgia, who had established himself as one of Lenin’s closest confidantes in
1917 and had been given command over elements of the army in 1918, particularly on the Southern
Front in the Caucasus near his native Georgia, in the autumn of 1918 Trotsky sought to appoint
General Pavel Sytin as commander of the Red Army in the south, but Stalin successfully
blocked his appointment, the first in a series of increasingly antagonistic clashes between
the two figures which would have serious implications for the Soviet state in the years ahead. Late 1919 saw the tide turn in the Civil War,
at that time various White Army factions, Polish forces and the military contingents
of newly independent states such as Finland and Estonia, all backed with foreign support
from Britain, the United States and France threatened Petrograd and Moscow, however,
after the breaking of a brief siege of Petrograd in the late autumn, the Red Army finally went
on the offensive in the winter of 1919/20, with the end of the Polish-Soviet War in 1920
and the British retreat of their forces from Central Asia, following which, rapid advances
were made in 1920 and 1921. Eventually the Civil War was brought to an
end in October 1922 when Vladivostok, the last White Army held city on the Pacific coast
of Russia, fell to the Red Army, when the fighting stopped the Soviet state had lost
some of the territory formerly held by the Tsarist Russian Empire, notably in Poland
and the Baltic region, where the new states of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had
fully established their independence, however Russia had retained most of its territories,
including Belarussia and Ukraine. With the establishment of peace after five
years of revolution, civil war and unrest, the focus of the Soviet state turned to rebuilding
and restructuring the economy in line with socialist principles, and in 1921 Lenin’s
government began introducing the New Economic Policy, a market-orientated economic policy,
which allowed individuals to own small amounts of private property and included various other
elements of a capitalist system. The NEP, as it has become known, was conceived
as a temporary retreat from more radical socialist policies, while the Civil War emergency persisted,
it was fiercely opposed by Trotsky, who had placed himself by the early 1920s, at the
far left of the Soviet hierarchy, a government which was headed by Lenin, but which was not
a dictatorship like that which emerged in the 1930s under Stalin. Trotsky effectively believed, in line with
Marxist and socialist principles, that the state should have complete control over the
allocation of all output, and that Russia should develop an exemplary command economy,
nevertheless, the NEP was adopted despite the objections of Trotsky and the other members
of the left wing of the Soviet leadership, indeed it lasted well beyond the cessation
of the war and was the central basis of the Soviet economy until 1928. Meanwhile, as the Civil War was being brought
to an end, Lenin’s health had begun to deteriorate, opening up serious questions about who would
succeed him as head of the Soviet state, he suffered three strokes between May 1922 and
March 1923, finally culminating in partial paralysis and loss of his motor functions,
including the ability to speak, when he eventually died on the 21st of January 1924 the Soviet
hierarchy, or the Politburo as the leadership had become known, had been preparing for his
passing for over two years. As Lenin’s health had deteriorated from
1921 onwards, it had become apparent that there were two major figures who might succeed
him as the ostensible head of the Soviet state, Trotsky or Stalin, from the October Revolution
of 1917 onwards, Trotsky had effectively been number two in the administration only to Lenin,
and his leadership of the Red Army had cemented the wider public perception of Trotsky as
the successor designate to Lenin, however, within the Politburo things had begun to shift,
a zealous, often aloof, and introverted intellectual, Trotsky was not the most naturally gifted
or ruthless of politicians. His opponent was however, and as Lenin’s
health deteriorated, Stalin had obtained the position of Central Committee General Secretary,
through which he exercised enormous powers of patronage within the government, between
his appointment as General Secretary in 1922 and Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin
focused on building a coalition within the Politburo to support him and undermine Trotsky’s
position, he was also responsible for overseeing the creation of the Union of Socialist Soviet
Republics in December 1922, or the USSR as it has become known. Stalin’s assent was particularly assisted
by the formation of a triumvirate of himself and two of the other most senior members of
the Politburo, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, this troika would allegedly share much of
the power in a post-Lenin world by opposing Trotsky’s succession to Lenin. Lenin had his suspicions about Stalin, they
were significant enough that in 1923, shortly before his third stroke effectively incapacitated
him, he changed his last will and testament to warn the party about Stalin and anoint
Trotsky as his successor as head of the Soviet state, nevertheless, by mid-1923, Stalin’s
monopolisation of power was too far advanced, by now he had used his position as General
Secretary to place his followers in many mid-ranking offices and his alliances within the higher
brass of the Politburo held firm in their support for him against Trotsky. At first, Lenin’s death in January 1924
seemed to usher in little explicit change in the workings of the Soviet government,
the revolutionary government’s first leader had been effectively incapacitated for months
prior to his death anyway, and following his passing, the Politburo seemed to go on governing
by collective assent, much as it had done in 1922 and 1923, however, the reality was
quite different to the initiated, the troika of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev now effectively
pre-determined the decisions that were made by the Politburo. Moreover, Trotsky’s diminished position
was signified and made public a year after Lenin’s death when, on the 6th of January
1925, he was removed from his position as Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs and
even his Chairmanship of the Revolutionary Military Council, the position he had occupied
in 1917, as arguably the single most decisive character in the inception of the October
Revolution. He was allowed to retain his position as a
member of the Politburo, but Trotsky increasingly found himself ostracised from any real power
within the Soviet regime. 1925 saw Trotsky becoming an increasingly
isolated and remote figure, estranged from effective power and outside the decision-making
circles he had once been so prominent within, when the troika of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev
broke up later in the year and Stalin turned against his erstwhile allies, Trotsky is notable
only for playing no role, in the machinations that followed their downfall. Stalin’s split with Kamenev and Zinoviev
ushered in the final episodes in the scramble for power in the post-Lenin years and ultimately
the last acts of Trotsky’s career as a revolutionary in his homeland, at the 14th Congress of the
Bolshevik Party in Moscow in December 1925, he allied with Kamenev and Zinoviev against
Stalin and his faction, to form what has been termed the ‘New Opposition’, the speeches
laid bare that this was now a fight for control of the party, but it was ultimately one in
which Stalin was victorious in the months ahead. The death knell of opposition to Stalin’s
monopolisation of power within the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state, did not finally
come until 1927, in October Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee,
when they then attempted to organise counter-events to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the
Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the police intervened to break these up, and
in early November, the pair were expelled from the Communist Party. Eventually Kamenev and Zinoviev capitulated
to Stalin at the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, however Trotsky refused, as a consequence
in January 1928 he was removed to Kazakhstan east of the Caspian Sea, before being deported
to Turkey a year later, consequently the lifelong revolutionary yet again found himself exiled
from Russia, he would never return. Perhaps Trotsky’s fate was better than those
who remained, Russia in the years of Trotsky’s last exile in the 1930s descended into paranoia,
terror and bloodshed, as Stalin tightened his grip on power, other dissenters in the
years ahead, who favoured Trotsky’s approach to Communism, often faced hard penal labour
in Siberia, many more were disappeared or killed by Stalin’s regime. The culmination of this reign of terror was
the Moscow Show Trials. When Sergei Kirov, a senior Bolshevik politician,
was assassinated on the 1st of December 1934, his murder was used as a pretext for the removal
of Stalin’s former allies, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, who had formed the troika
with Stalin in the mid-1920s, and who had helped him to reduce Trotsky’s influence
within the party, were both arrested, found guilty of involvement in Kirov’s murder,
and both were executed by firing squad on the 25th of August 1936. The Great Purge or Great Terror of 1937 and
1938 followed, during which, Stalin and his secret police wiped out all opposition to
the regime in Russia, by branding individuals as opponents of the state and ‘Trotskyists’,
when all was said and done, as many as 1.2 million people died in these years, either
through judicial executions or more commonly in the horrendous conditions of Stalin’s
forced labour camps, known to history as ‘the Gulag’. Consequently Trotsky outlived nearly all those
who had remained behind in Russia and opposed Stalin in any fashion, and after his departure
from Russia, he spent four years in Turkey, before then living in France for two years,
between 1933 and 1935, he was then moved on by the French authorities and he departed
for Norway but following official pressure from Russia he was deported to Mexico and
arrived there early in 1937. It was his last place of exile, and he would
eventually die there in 1940. His last years in exile were not spent idly,
he remained a prolific writer, writing several books including his History of the Russian
Revolution and his autobiography, he also worked with the Socialist Workers Party of
the United States while in Mexico, and gained supporters amongst members of the Chinese
Communist Party, which was undertaking its long and bitter struggle to gain control of
China, moreover, in 1938, he and his supporters founded the Fourth International, a Communist
revolutionary and internationalist alternative to the Stalinist Comintern. It was almost certainly this continued activity
and Trotsky’s never-ending revolutionary zeal which led to his death, fuelled by the
paranoia under which all of Russia was suffering in the 1930s, Stalin had determined, in the
latter part of the decade, to dispense with Trotsky permanently, even in faraway Mexico
City, on the 24th of May 1940, Trotsky survived a raid on his home by Stalinist assassins. Three months later however another Stalinist
agent was successful, on the 20th of August 1940, Ramon Mercader, a Stalinist agent, broke
into Trotsky’s home in Mexico City and drove an ice axe into Trotsky’s skull. The blow was poorly delivered and it was not
until the following day that Trotsky finally died in a Mexico City hospital. Thus died the man who was born as Lev Bronstein,
but who is known to the world as Leon Trotsky, he was one of the most fascinating figures
of Russian history, a deeply committed socialist and believer in the cause of Communism, he
spent his entire adult life fighting for that ideal, twice fleeing exile to the penal colonies
of Siberia and spending fifteen years as a revolutionary nomad between Russia, London,
Vienna, Switzerland and the United State, before finally returning triumphantly to Russia
in 1917 and playing a leading role in the October Revolution. Following the creation of the Soviet state
he was instrumental in the civil wars that followed, essentially becoming the key figure
in the early professionalization and development of the Red Army as a formidable revolutionary
army. But Trotsky’s abilities and intellectual
significance extended beyond his practical impact on the government of early Soviet Russia,
to his role in shaping the very nature of Communism itself in the twentieth century,
particularly with the theory of ‘Permanent Revolution’, which influenced Communist
thinkers in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America for decades to come. Yet there was also a paradoxical quality to
Trotsky, at times a seemingly humane man, committed to workers’ rights and the good
of the proletariat, he could also be brutal in defence of the cause of revolution, as
his development of the concept of ‘blocking units’ within the Red Army testifies. Overall, though, his ruthlessness was no match
for that of Joseph Stalin, in the power struggle which followed Lenin’s death in the mid-1920s,
Trotsky ultimately ended up the loser, and his later years were something of an anti-climax,
spent yet again in exile from Russia as his rival for power plunged the new Soviet state
into years of autocracy, repression and bloodshed. What do you think of Leon Trotsky? Was he a humane revolutionary under whose
influence the history of Soviet Russia could have been spared the worst excesses of Stalin’s
regime? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
