Leon Trotsky

Lore & Background

Trotsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898, being arrested and exiled to Siberia for his activities. In 1902 he escaped to London, where he met Lenin. Trotsky initially sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks in the party's 1903 schism, but declared himself non-factional in 1904. During the 1905 Revolution, Trotsky was elected chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. He was again exiled to Siberia, but escaped in 1907 and lived abroad. After the February Revolution of 1917, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. He helped to lead the October Revolution, and as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I. He served as People's Commissar for Military Affairs from 1918 to 1925, during which he built the Red Army and led it to victory in the civil war.

Reader's Guide

Trotsky's significance lies in his central role in the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet state, alongside Lenin, and in his later opposition to Stalin. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky emerged as a prominent critic of Joseph Stalin, who soon politically outmanoeuvred him. Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and from the party in 1927, exiled to Alma Ata in 1928 and deported in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937. In exile, Trotsky wrote polemics against Stalinism, advocating proletarian internationalism against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution held that the revolution could survive only if it spread to more advanced capitalist countries. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), he argued that the Soviet Union had become a 'degenerated workers' state', and in 1938 founded the Fourth International as an alternative to the Comintern. After being sentenced to death in absentia at the Moscow show trials in 1936, Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Stalinist agent. Written out of official history under Stalin, Trotsky was one of the few of his rivals who were never politically rehabilitated by later Soviet 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 are controversial, such as his ideological defence of the Red Terror and violent suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, scholarship 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.

Did You Know?

• Trotsky's childhood name is disputed; some claim it was the Yiddish Leiba, but others argue it was Lyova, a standard Russian diminutive of Lev.
• He was born into a wealthy but illiterate Jewish farming family in Yanovka, then in the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine.
• Trotsky married Aleksandra Sokolovskaya in a ceremony performed by a Jewish chaplain while imprisoned in Moscow in 1900.
• He was assassinated in Mexico City in 1940 by Ramón Mercader, a Stalinist agent.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service." — Leon Trotsky "Capital was really safer in Russia than anywhere else. ... No true Marxist would allow sentiment to interfere with business." — Leon Trotsky "Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies." — Leon Trotsky "Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it." — Leon Trotsky