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Leon Trotsky

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Political People

                   Leon Trotsky
   A portrait of Leon Trotsky.
   Born November 7, 1879
        Yanovka, Kherson, Ukraine, Russian Empire
   Died August 21, 1940
        Mexico City, Mexico

   Leon Davidovich Trotsky  (Russian: Лев Давидович Троцкий) ( Latinized:
   Lev Davidovič Troʦkij; also transliterated Leo, Lev, Trotskii, Trotski,
   Trotskij, Trockij and Trotzky) ( November 7, 1879 [ O.S. October 26] –
   August 21, 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Лев Давидович
   Бронштейн), was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was
   an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first
   as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and
   commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also a
   founding member of the Politburo.

   Following a power struggle with Joseph Stalin in the 1920s, Trotsky was
   expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union.
   He was eventually assassinated in Mexico by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet
   agent, with an ice axe. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism,
   his variation of Communist theory, and Trotskyism remains a major
   school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism
   and Maoism.

Before the 1917 Revolution

   Part of the Politics series on
   Trotskyism

   Leon Trotsky
   Fourth International

   Marxism
   Leninism
   Russian Revolution
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   8 years old Leon Trotsky, 1888
   Enlarge
   8 years old Leon Trotsky, 1888
   Lev Bronstein, 1897
   Enlarge
   Lev Bronstein, 1897

Childhood and family (1879-1896)

   Trotsky was born in Kherson Province, Ukraine on November 7, 1879, in a
   small village 15 miles from the nearest post office. He was the fifth
   child of a wealthy but illiterate Jewish farmer, David Leontyevich
   Bronstein, or Bronshtein (1847–1922), and Anna Bronstein (d. 1910).
   Although the family was Jewish, it was not religious, and the languages
   spoken at home were Russian and Ukrainian instead of Yiddish.
   Bronstein's younger sister, Olga, married Lev Kamenev, a leading
   Bolshevik.

   When Bronstein was nine, his father sent him to Odessa for education.
   He was enrolled in a historically German school, which became
   increasingly Russified during his years in Odessa due to the
   government's policy of Russification. Although he was a good student,
   even in his youth Bronstein was rebellious and he organized a protest
   against an unpopular teacher in 2nd grade. However, he didn't take an
   active part in politics or socialism until 1896, when he moved to
   Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv) for the final year of schooling.

Revolutionary activity and exile (1896-1902)

   Bronstein became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896 after
   moving to Nikolayev. At first a narodnik (revolutionary populist), he
   was introduced to Marxism later that year and gradually became a
   Marxist. Instead of pursuing a mathematics degree, Bronstein helped
   organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev in early 1897.
   Using the name 'Lvov' , he wrote and printed leaflets and
   proclamations, distributed revolutionary pamphlets and popularized
   socialist ideas among industrial workers and revolutionary students.

   In January 1898, over 200 members of the Union, including Bronstein,
   were arrested and he spent the next two years in prison awaiting trial.
   Two months after Bronstein's arrest and imprisonment, the 1st Congress
   of the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) was
   held and from that point on, Bronstein considered himself a member of
   the party. While in prison, he married a fellow Marxist, Aleksandra
   Sokolovskaya, and studied philosophy. In 1900 he was sentenced to four
   years in exile in Ust-Kut and Verkholensk (see map) in the Irkutsk
   region of Siberia, where his first two daughters, Nina Nevelson and
   Zinaida Volkova, were born.

   It was in Siberia that Bronstein became aware of the differences within
   the party, which had been decimated by arrests in the last two years of
   the 19th century. Some social democrats known as "economists" were
   arguing that the party should concentrate on helping industrial workers
   improve their lot in life. Others argued that overthrowing the monarchy
   was more important and that a well organized and disciplined
   revolutionary party was essential. The latter were led by the
   London-based newspaper Iskra, which was founded in 1900. Bronstein
   quickly sided with the Iskra position.

First emigration and second marriage (1902-1903)

   Bronstein escaped from Siberia in the summer of 1902, having stolen a
   passport in the name of Leon Trotsky (a former jailer in Odessa), which
   became his primary revolutionary pseudonym. Once abroad, he moved to
   London to join Georgy Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov and
   other editors of Iskra. Under the penname Pero ("feather" or "pen" in
   Russian) Trotsky soon became one of the paper's leading authors.

   Unbeknown to Trotsky, the six editors of Iskra were evenly split
   between the "old guard" led by Plekhanov and the "new guard" led by
   Lenin and Martov. Not only were Plekhanov's supporters older (in their
   40s and 50s), but they had also spent the previous 20 years in European
   exile together. Members of the new guard were in their early 30s and
   had only recently come from Russia. Lenin, who was trying to establish
   a permanent majority against Plekhanov within Iskra, expected Trotsky,
   then 23, to side with the new guard and wrote in March 1903:

          I suggest to all the members of the editorial board that they
          co-opt 'Pero' as a member of the board on the same basis as
          other members. [...] We very much need a seventh member, both as
          a convenience in voting (six being an even number), and as an
          addition to our forces. 'Pero' has been contributing to every
          issue for several months now; he works in general most
          energetically for the Iskra; he gives lectures (in which he has
          been very successful). In the section of articles and notes on
          the events of the day, he will not only be very useful, but
          absolutely necessary. Unquestionably a man of rare abilities, he
          has conviction and energy, and he will go much farther.

   Due to Plekhanov's opposition, Trotsky did not become a full member of
   the editorial board, but from that point on he participated in its
   meetings in an advisory capacity, which earned him Plekhanov's enmity.

   In late 1902, Trotsky met Natalia Sedova, who soon became his companion
   and, from 1903 until his death, wife. They had two children together,
   Leon Sedov (b. 1906) and Sergei Sedov (b. 1908). As Trotsky later
   explained, after the 1917 revolution:

          In order not to oblige my sons to change their name, I, for
          "citizenship" requirements, took on the name of my wife.

   However, the name change remained a technicality and he never used the
   name "Sedov" either privately or publicly. Natalia Sedova sometimes
   signed her name "Sedova-Trotskaya". Trotsky and his first wife,
   Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, maintained a friendly relationship until
   Sokolovskaya disappeared in 1935 during the Great Purges.

Split with Lenin (1903-1904)

   In the meantime, after a period of secret police repression and
   internal confusion that followed the first party Congress in 1898,
   Iskra succeeded in convening the party's 2nd congress in London in
   August 1903, with Trotsky and other Iskra editors in attendance. At
   first the Congress went as planned, with Iskra supporters handily
   defeating the few "economist" delegates at the Congress. Then the
   Congress discussed the position of the Jewish Bund, which had
   co-founded the RSDLP in 1898 but wanted to remain autonomous within the
   Party. In the heat of the debate, Trotsky made a controversial
   statement to the effect that he and eleven other non-Bund Jewish
   delegates who had signed an anti-Bund statement

          while working in the Russian party, regarded and still do regard
          themselves also as representatives of the Jewish proletariat.

   As Trotsky explained two months later, his statement was just a
   tactical maneuver made on Lenin's request.

   Shortly thereafter, pro-Iskra delegates unexpectedly split in two
   factions. Lenin and his supporters (known as " Bolsheviks") argued for
   a smaller but highly organized party. Martov and his supporters (known
   as " Mensheviks") argued for a larger and less disciplined party. In a
   surprise development, Trotsky and most of the Iskra editors supported
   Martov and the Mensheviks while Plekhanov supported Lenin and the
   Bolsheviks.

   The two factions were in a state of flux in 1903-1904 with many members
   changing sides. Plekhanov soon parted ways with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky
   left the Mensheviks in September 1904 over their insistence on an
   alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation
   with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. From that point until 1917 he remained a
   self-described "non-factional social democrat".

   Trotsky spent much of his time between 1904 and 1917 trying to
   reconcile different groups within the party, which resulted in many
   clashes with Lenin and other prominent party members. Trotsky later
   conceded he had been wrong in opposing Lenin on the issue of the party.
   During these years Trotsky began developing his theory of permanent
   revolution, which led to a close working relationship with Alexander
   Parvus in 1904-1907.

1905 revolution and trial (1905-1906)

   Leon Trotsky
   Enlarge
   Leon Trotsky

   After the events of Bloody Sunday (1905), Trotsky secretly returned to
   Russia in February 1905. At first he wrote leaflets for an underground
   printing press in Kiev, but soon moved to the capital, Saint
   Petersburg. There he worked with both Bolsheviks like Central Committee
   member Leonid Krasin as well as the local Menshevik committee, which he
   pushed in a more radical direction. The latter, however, were betrayed
   by a secret police agent in May. Trotsky had to flee to rural Finland
   where he worked on fleshing out his theory of permanent revolution
   until October, when a nationwide strike made it possible for him to
   return to St. Petersburg.

   After returning to the capital, Trotsky and Parvus took over the
   newspaper Russian Gazette and increased its circulation to 500,000.
   Trotsky also co-founded Nachalo ("The Beginning") with Parvus and the
   Mensheviks, which proved to be very successful.

   Immediately prior to Trotsky's return to the capital, the Mensheviks
   had independently come up with the same idea that Trotsky had -- an
   elected non-party revolutionary organization representing the capital's
   workers, the first Soviet ("Council") of Workers. By the time of
   Trotsky's arrival, the St. Petersburg Soviet was already functioning
   with Khrustalyov-Nosar (Georgy Nosar, alias Pyotr Khrustalyov), a
   compromise figure, at its head and proved to be very popular with the
   workers in spite of the Bolsheviks' original opposition. Trotsky joined
   the Soviet under the name "Yanovsky" (after the village he was born in,
   Yanovka) and was elected vice-Chairman. He did much of the actual work
   at the Soviet and, after Khrustalev-Nosar's arrest on November 26, was
   elected its Chairman. On December 2, the Soviet issued a proclamation
   which included the following statement about the Tsarist government and
   its foreign debts:

          The autocracy never enjoyed the confidence of the people and was
          never granted any authority by the people. We have therefore
          decided not to allow the repayment of such loans as have been
          made by the Czarist government when openly engaged in a war with
          the entire people.

   The following day, December 3, the Soviet was surrounded by troops
   loyal to the government and the deputies were arrested.

   Trotsky and other Soviet leaders were put on trial in 1906 on charges
   of supporting an armed rebellion. At the trial, Trotsky delivered some
   of the best speeches of his life and solidified his reputation as an
   effective public speaker, which he confirmed in 1917-1920. He was
   convicted and sentenced to exile for life.

Second emigration (1907-1914)

   In January 1907, Trotsky escaped en route to exile and once again made
   his way to London, where he attended the 5th Congress of the RSDLP. In
   October 1907, he moved to Vienna where he frequently participated in
   the activities of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and,
   occasionally, of the German Social Democratic Party, for the next seven
   years.

   It was in Vienna that Trotsky became close to Adolph Joffe, his friend
   for the next 20 years, who introduced Trotsky to psychoanalysis. In
   October 1908 he started a bi-weekly Russian language Social Democratic
   paper aimed at Russian workers called Pravda ("The Truth"), which he
   co-edited with Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and Victor Kopp and which was
   smuggled into Russia. The paper avoided factional politics and proved
   popular with Russian industrial workers. When various Bolshevik and
   Menshevik factions (both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks split
   multiple times after the failure of the 1905-1907 revolution) tried to
   re-unite at the January 1910 RSDLP Central Committee meeting in Paris
   over Lenin's objections, Trotsky's Pravda was made a party-financed
   'central organ'. Lev Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, was added to
   the editorial board from the Bolsheviks, but the unification attempts
   failed in August 1910 when Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual
   recriminations. Trotsky continued publishing Pravda for another two
   years until it finally folded in April 1912.

   When the Bolsheviks started a new workers-oriented newspaper in St.
   Petersburg on April 22, 1912, they called it Pravda as well. In what
   appeared to be a minor development at the time, in April 1913 Trotsky
   was so upset by what he saw as a usurpation of 'his' newspaper's name
   that he wrote a letter to Nikolay Chkheidze, a Menshevik leader,
   bitterly denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Trotsky was able to
   suppress the contents of the letter in 1921 to avoid embarrassment, but
   once he started losing power in the early 1920s, the letter was made
   public by his opponents within the Communist Party in 1924 and used to
   paint him as Lenin's enemy.

   This was a period of heightened tension within the RSDLP and led to
   numerous frictions between Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
   The most serious disagreement that Trotsky and the Mensheviks had with
   Lenin at the time was over the issue of "expropriations", i.e. armed
   robberies of banks and other companies by Bolshevik groups to procure
   money for the Party, which had been banned by the 5th Congress, but
   continued by the Bolsheviks.

   In January 1912, the majority of the Bolshevik faction led by Lenin and
   a few Mensheviks held a conference in Prague and expelled their
   opponents from the party. In response, Trotsky organized a
   "unification" conference of social democratic factions in Vienna in
   August 1912 (a.k.a. "The August Bloc") and tried to re-unite the party.
   The attempt was generally unsuccessful.

   While in Vienna, Trotsky continuously published articles in radical
   Russian and Ukrainian newspapers like Kievskaya Mysl under a variety of
   pseudonyms, often "Antid Oto". In September 1912 Kievskaya Mysl sent
   him to the Balkans as its war correspondent, where he covered the two
   Balkan Wars for the next year and became a close friend of Christian
   Rakovsky, later a leading Soviet politician and Trotsky's ally in the
   Soviet Communist Party.

   On August 3 1914, at the outbreak of World War I which pitted
   Austria-Hungary against the Russian empire, Trotsky was forced to flee
   Vienna for neutral Switzerland to avoid arrest as a Russian émigré.

World War I (1914-1917)

   The outbreak of WWI caused a sudden realignment within the RSDLP and
   other European social democratic parties over the issues of war,
   revolution, pacifism and internationalism. Within the RSDLP, Lenin,
   Trotsky and Martov advocated various internationalist anti-war
   positions, while Plekhanov and other social democrats (both Bolsheviks
   and Mensheviks) supported the Russian government to some extent.

   While in Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked within the Swiss Socialist
   Party, prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution, and wrote
   a book against the war, The War and the International. The thrust of
   the book was against the pro-war position taken by the European social
   democratic parties, primarily the German party.
   Leon Trotsky with his daughter Nina in France, 1915
   Enlarge
   Leon Trotsky with his daughter Nina in France, 1915

   Trotsky moved to France on November 19, 1914, as a war correspondent
   for the Kievskaya Mysl. In January 1915 he began editing (at first with
   Martov, who soon resigned as the paper moved to the Left) Nashe Slovo
   ["Our Word"], an internationalist socialist newspaper, in Paris. He
   adopted the slogan of "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace
   without conquerors or conquered", which didn't go quite as far as
   Lenin, who advocated Russia's defeat in the war and demanded a complete
   break with the Second International.

   Trotsky attended the Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in
   September 1915 and advocated a middle course between those who, like
   Martov, would stay within the Second International at any cost and
   those who would, like Lenin, break with the Second International and
   form a Third International. The conference adopted the middle line
   proposed by Trotsky. At first opposed to it, in the end Lenin voted for
   Trotsky's resolution to avoid a split among anti-war socialists.

   In September 1916, Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his
   anti-war activities. Spanish authorities wouldn't let him stay and he
   was deported to the United States on December 25, 1916. He arrived in
   New York City on January 13, 1917. In New York, he wrote articles for
   the local Russian language socialist newspaper Novy Mir and the Yiddish
   language daily Der Forverts (The Forward) in translation and made
   speeches to Russian émigrés.

1917

   Trotsky was living in New York City when the February Revolution of
   1917 overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. He left New York on March 27, but his
   ship was intercepted by British naval officials in Halifax, Nova Scotia
   and he spent a month detained at Amherst, Nova Scotia. After initial
   hesitation by the Russian foreign minister Pavel Milyukov, he was
   forced to demand that Trotsky be released and the British government
   freed Trotsky on April 29. He finally made his way back to Russia on
   May 4 of that year.

   Upon his return, Trotsky was in substantive agreement with the
   Bolshevik position, but he didn't join them right away. At the time,
   Russian social democrats were split in at least 6 groups and the
   Bolsheviks were waiting for the next party Congress to determine which
   factions they would merge with. Trotsky temporarily joined the
   Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in St.
   Petersburg, and became one of its leaders. At the First Congress of
   Soviets in June, he was elected member of the first All-Russian Central
   Executive Committee ("VTsIK") from the Mezhraiontsy faction.

   Trotsky was arrested on August 7, 1917 ( New Style) after an
   unsuccessful pro-Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd, but was released 40
   days later in the aftermath of the failed counter-revolutionary
   uprising by Lavr Kornilov. After the Bolsheviks gained a majority in
   the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky was elected Chairman on October 8 ( New
   Style). He sided with Lenin against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev
   when the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed staging an armed
   uprising and he led the efforts to overthrow the Provisional Government
   headed by Aleksandr Kerensky.

   The following summary of Trotsky's Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in
   Pravda, November 6, 1918. (Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's
   book "The October Revolution" issued in 1934, it was expunged in
   Stalin's Works released in 1949.)

          "All practical work in connection with the organisation of the
          uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade
          Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated
          with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and
          principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the
          garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in
          which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was
          organised."

   After the success of the uprising on November 7-8 ( New Style), Trotsky
   led the efforts to repel a counter-attack by Cossaks under General
   Pyotr Krasnov and other troops still loyal to the overthrown
   Provisional Government at Gatchina. Allied with Lenin, he successfully
   defeated attempts by other Bolshevik Central Committee members
   (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, etc) to share power with other
   socialist parties.

   By the end of 1917, Trotsky was unquestionably the second man in the
   Bolshevik Party after Lenin, overshadowing the ambitious Zinoviev, who
   had been Lenin's top lieutenant over the previous decade, but whose
   star appeared to be fading. This turnaround planted the seeds of the
   two Bolshevik leaders' mutual enmity, which lasted until 1926 and, in
   the end, did much to destroy them both.

After the Russian Revolution

   Trotsky with troops at the Polish front, 1919
   Enlarge
   Trotsky with troops at the Polish front, 1919

Commissar for Foreign Affairs and Brest-Litovsk (1917-1918)

   After the Bolsheviks came to power, Trotsky became the People's
   Commissar for Foreign Affairs and published the secret treaties
   previously signed by the Triple Entente and the United States that
   detailed plans for post-war reallocation of colonies and redrawing
   state borders.

   Trotsky was the head of the Soviet delegation during the peace
   negotiations in Brest-Litovsk between December 22, 1917 and February
   10, 1918. At that time the Soviet government was split on the issue.
   Left Communists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, continued to believe that
   there could be no peace between a Soviet republic and a capitalist
   country and that only a revolutionary war leading to a pan-European
   Soviet republic would bring a durable peace. They cited the successes
   of the newly formed ( January 15, 1918) voluntary Red Army against
   Polish forces of Gen. Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki in Belarus, White forces in
   the Don region and newly independent Ukrainian forces as proof that the
   Red Army could successfully repel German forces, especially if
   propaganda and asymmetrical warfare were used. Left Communists didn't
   mind holding talks with the Germans as a means of exposing German
   imperial ambitions (territorial gains, reparations, etc) in hopes of
   accelerating the hoped for Soviet revolution in the West, but they were
   dead set against signing any peace treaty. In case of a German
   ultimatum, they advocated proclaiming a revolutionary war against
   Germany in order to inspire Russian and European workers to fight for
   socialism. Their opinion was shared by Left Socialist Revolutionaries,
   who were then the Bolsheviks' junior partners in a coalition
   government.

   Lenin, who had earlier hoped for a speedy Soviet revolution in Germany
   and other parts of Europe, quickly decided that the imperial government
   of Germany was still firmly in control and that, absent a strong
   Russian military, an armed conflict with Germany would lead to a
   collapse of the Soviet government in Russia. He agreed with the Left
   Communists that ultimately a pan-European Soviet revolution would solve
   all problems, but until then the Bolsheviks needed to be able to
   survive and stay in power. Lenin didn't mind prolonging the negotiating
   process for maximum propaganda effect, but, from January 1918 on, he
   advocated signing a separate peace treaty if faced with a German
   ultimatum.

   Trotsky's position during this period was in between these two
   Bolshevik factions. Like Lenin, he admitted that the old Russian
   military, inherited from the monarchy and the Provisional Government
   and in advanced stages of decomposition, was unable to fight:

          That we could no longer fight was perfectly clear to me and that
          the newly formed Red Guard and Red Army detachments were too
          small and poorly trained to resist the Germans.

   On the other hand, he agreed with the Left Communists that signing a
   separate peace treaty with an imperialist power would be a terrible
   moral and material blow to the Soviet government, negating all of its
   military and political successes in late 1917-early 1918, resurrecting
   the notion that the Bolsheviks were secretly allied with the German
   government, and causing an upsurge of internal resistance. In case of a
   German ultimatum, Trotsky argued, the best policy was to refuse to
   accept it, which had a good chance of being the last drop that would
   lead to an uprising within Germany or, at the very least, inspire
   German soldiers to refuse to obey their officers since any German
   offensive would be a naked grab for territories. As Trotsky wrote in
   1925:

          We began peace negotiations in the hope of arousing the
          workmen's party of Germany and Austria-Hungary as well as of the
          Entente countries. For this reason we were obliged to delay the
          negotiations as long as possible to give the European workman
          time to understand the main fact of the Soviet revolution itself
          and particularly its peace policy.

          But there was the other question: Can the Germans still fight?
          Are they in a position to begin an attack on the revolution that
          will explain the cessation of the war? How can we find out the
          state of mind of the German soldiers, how to fathom it?

   1918 Bolshevik propaganda poster depicting Trotsky as St. George
   slaying the reactionary dragon
   Enlarge
   1918 Bolshevik propaganda poster depicting Trotsky as St. George
   slaying the reactionary dragon

   Throughout January and February of 1918, Lenin's position was supported
   by 7 members of the Bolshevik Central Committee and Bukharin's by 4.
   Trotsky had 4 votes (his own, Felix Dzerzhinsky's, Nikolai Krestinsky's
   and Adolph Joffe's) and, since he held the balance of power, he was
   able to pursue his policy in Brest-Litovsk. When he could no longer
   delay the negotiations, he withdrew from the talks on ( February 10,
   1918), refusing to sign on Germany's harsh terms. After a brief hiatus,
   the Central Powers notified the Soviet government that they would no
   longer observe the truce after February 17. At this point Lenin again
   argued that the Soviet government had done all it could to explain its
   position to Western workers and that it was time to accept the terms.
   Trotsky refused to support Lenin since he was waiting to see whether
   German workers would rebel or whether German soldiers would refuse to
   follow orders.

   The German side resumed military operations on February 18. Within a
   day, it became clear that the German army was capable of conducting
   offensive operations and that Red Army detachments, which were
   relatively small, poorly organized and poorly led, were no match for
   it. At this point, in the evening of February 18, 1918, Trotsky and his
   supporters in the Bolshevik Central Committee abstained. Lenin's
   proposal was accepted 7-4 and the Soviet government sent a telegram to
   the German side accepting the final Brest-Litovsk peace terms.

   The German side didn't respond for three days, continuing its offensive
   and encountering little resistance. When the response did arrive on
   February 21, the proposed terms were so harsh that even Lenin briefly
   thought that the Soviet government had no other choice but to fight. In
   the end, however, the Bolshevik Central Committee once again voted 7-4
   on February 23, 1918, which paved the way to the signing of Treaty of
   Brest-Litovsk on March 3 and its ratification on March 15, 1918. Since
   he was so closely associated with the policy previously followed by the
   Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky submitted his resignation
   from his position as Commissar for Foreign Affairs in order to remove a
   potential obstacle to the new policy.

At the head of the Red Army (Spring 1918)

   Trotsky with Lenin and soldiers in Petrograd in 1921
   Enlarge
   Trotsky with Lenin and soldiers in Petrograd in 1921

   The failure of the recently formed Red Army to resist the German
   offensive in February 1918 put its weaknesses on display: insufficient
   numbers, lack of knowledgeable officers, almost complete absence of
   coordination and subordination. Celebrated and feared Baltic Fleet
   sailors, one of the bastions of the new regime led by Pavel Dybenko,
   ignominiously fled from the German army at Narva. The notion that the
   Soviet state could have an effective voluntary or militia type military
   was seriously undermined.

   Trotsky was one of the first Bolshevik leaders to recognize the problem
   and he pushed for the formation of a military council of former Russian
   generals that would function as an advisory body. Lenin and the
   Bolshevik Central Committee agreed to create the Supreme Military
   Council, with former chief of the imperial General Staff Mikhail
   Bonch-Bruevich at its head, on March 4. However, the entire Bolshevik
   leadership of the Red Army, including People's Commissar (defense
   minister) Nikolai Podvoisky and commander-in-chief Nikolai Krylenko,
   protested vigorously and eventually resigned. They believed that the
   Red Army should consist only of dedicated revolutionaries, rely on
   propaganda as well as on force, and have elected officers. They viewed
   former imperial officers and generals as potential traitors who should
   be kept out of the new military, much less put in charge of it. Their
   views continued to be popular with many Bolsheviks throughout most of
   the Russian Civil War and their supporters, including Podvoisky, who
   became one of Trotsky's deputies, were a constant thorn in Trotsky's
   side. The discontent with Trotsky's policies of strict discipline,
   conscription and reliance on carefully supervised non-Communist
   military experts eventually led to the Military Opposition, which was
   active within the Communist Party in late 1918-1919.

   On March 13, 1918 Trotsky's resignation as Commissar for Foreign
   Affairs was officially accepted and he was appointed People's Commissar
   of Army and Navy Affairs (Нарком по военным и морским делам, Нарком
   армии и флота) in place of Podvoisky and chairman of the Supreme
   Military Council. The post of the commander-in-chief was abolished and
   from that point on, Trotsky was in full control of the Red Army,
   responsible only to the Communist Party leadership, their Left
   Socialist Revolutionary allies having left the government over
   Brest-Litovsk. With the help of his faithful deputy Ephraim Sklyansky,
   Trotsky spent the rest of the Civil War transforming the Red Army from
   a ragtag network of small and fiercely independent detachments into a
   large and disciplined military machine.

Civil War (1918-1920)

1918

   Trotsky's managerial skills and his approach to building the Soviet
   military were soon put to a test. When the Czechoslovak Legions, then
   en route from European Russia to Vladivostok, rose against the Soviet
   government in May-June 1918, the Bolsheviks were suddenly faced with
   the loss of most of the country's territory, an increasingly well
   organized resistance by Russian anti-Communist forces (usually referred
   to as the White Army after their best known component) and widespread
   defection by the military experts that Trotsky relied on.

   Trotsky and the Soviet government responded with a full-fledged
   mobilization, which increased the size of the Red Army from less than
   300,000 in May 1918 to one million in October 1918, and an introduction
   of political commissars into the Red Army. The latter were responsible
   for ensuring the loyalty of military experts (who were mostly former
   officers in the imperial army) and co-signing their orders.

   Facing military defeats in mid-1918, Trotsky introduced increasingly
   severe penalties for desertion, insubordination, and retreat. He
   organized the formation of the infamous "blocking units", special
   squads stationed behind the front-line troops, whose role it was to
   summarily gun down all soldiers suspected of desertion and unauthorized
   retreat. As he later wrote in his autobiography:

          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 reprisals included the death penalty for deserters and
   "traitors", as well as using former officers' families as hostages
   against possible defections:

          [...] commissars are obligated to keep track of [former]
          officers' families and appoint them to positions of
          responsibility when it is possible the seize their families in
          case of treason.

          [...]I ordered you to establish the family status of former
          officers among command personnel and to inform each of them by
          signed receipt that treachery or treason will cause the arrest
          of their families and that, therefore, they are each taking upon
          themselves responsibility for their families. That order is
          still in force. Since then there have been a number of cases of
          treason by former officers, yet not in a single case, as far as
          I know, has the family of the traitor been arrested, as the
          registration of former officers has evidently not been carried
          out at all. Such a negligent approach to so important a matter
          is totally impermissible.

   Trotsky also threatened to execute unit commanders and commissars whose
   units either deserted or retreated without permission. (Trotsky later
   argued that these threats were either taken out of context or were used
   to scare his subordinates into action and were not necessarily meant to
   be carried out.) Since Red Army commissars were often prominent
   Bolsheviks, it sometimes led to clashes between them and Trotsky.

   Though he and Trotsky were later to become mortal enemies, Stalin was
   influenced by Trotsky's use of disciplinary measures, and expanded the
   use of blocking units well into World War II.

   In addition to the use of terror, Trotsky believed that state-sponsored
   propagation of revolutionary ideals could improve an army's
   performance. As he wrote in his memoirs:

          And yet armies are not built on fear. The Czar's army fell to
          pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. [...] The strongest
          cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution,
          and the train supplied the front with this cement.

   The train referred to in the quote above was Trotsky's personal armored
   train that he used during the Civil War to visit the most critical
   sections of the front. While there, he not only planned and supervised
   military operations, but also used his considerable oratorical talents
   to inspire Red Army soldiers and even deserters, often with
   considerable success. Trotsky made at least 36 trips to "hot spots" in
   1918-1920 and his train became one of the symbols of the Red Army.

   Trotsky continued to insist that former officers should be used as
   military experts within the Red Army and, in the summer of 1918, was
   able to convince Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership not only to
   continue the policy in the face of mass defections, but also to give
   these experts more direct operational control of the military. In this
   he differed sharply from Stalin who was, from May through October 1918,
   the top commissar in the South of Russia. Stalin and his future defense
   minister, Kliment Voroshilov, went so far as to refuse to accept former
   general Andrei Snesarev who had been sent to them by Trotsky. Stalin's
   stubborn opposition to Trotsky's military policies led to an acute
   personal conflict, which continued, in various forms, for the next 10
   years, until Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union.

   In September 1918, the Soviet government, facing continuous military
   difficulties, declared what amounted to martial law and reorganized the
   Red Army. The Supreme Military Council was abolished and the position
   of the commander-in-chief was restored, filled by the commander of the
   Red Latvian Rifleman Ioakim Vatsetis (aka Jukums Vācietis), who had
   formerly led the Eastern Front against the Czechoslovak Legions.
   Vatsetis was put in charge of day to day operations of the Red Army
   while Trotsky was appointed Chairman of the newly formed Revolutionary
   Military Council of the Republic and retained overall control of the
   military. Trotsky and Vatsetis had clashed earlier in 1918 while
   Vatsetis and Trotsky's adviser Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich were also on
   unfriendly terms. Nevertheless, Trotsky eventually established a
   working relationship with the often prickly Vatsetis.

   The reorganization caused yet another conflict between Trotsky and
   Stalin in late September - early October 1918 when the latter refused
   to accept former imperial general Pavel Sytin, who had been appointed
   by Trotsky to command the Southern Front. As a result, Stalin was
   recalled from the South Front. Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov tried to get
   Trotsky and Stalin to mend fences, but their meeting was unsuccessful.

1919

   Throughout late 1918 and early 1919, Trotsky had to fend off a number
   of attacks on his leadership of the Red Army, including veiled
   accusations in newspaper articles inspired by Stalin and a direct
   attack by the Military Opposition at the VIIIth Party Congress in March
   1919. On the surface, he weathered all of them successfully and was
   elected one of only five full members of the first Politburo after the
   Congress. However, as he later wrote:

          It is no wonder that my military work created so many enemies
          for me. I did not look to the side, I elbowed away those who
          interfered with military success, or in the haste of the work
          trod on the toes of the unheeding and was too busy even to
          apologize. Some people remember such things. The dissatisfied
          and those whose feelings had been hurt found their way to Stalin
          or Zinoviev, for these two also nourished hurts.

   It was not until the summer of 1919 that the dissatisfied had an
   opportunity to mount a serious challenge to Trotsky's leadership of the
   Red Army.

   By mid-1919, the Red Army had successfully defeated the White Army's
   spring offensive in the East and was about to cross the Urals mountains
   and enter Siberia in pursuit of Admiral Alexander Kolchak's forces.
   However, at the same time the situation in the South, where General
   Anton Denikin's White Russian forces were advancing, was deteriorating
   rapidly. On June 6 commander-in-chief Vatsetis ordered the Eastern
   Front to stop the offensive so that he could use its forces in the
   South. The leadership of the Eastern Front, including its commander
   Sergei Kamenev (a colonel in the imperial army, not to be confused with
   the Politburo member Lev Kamenev), and Eastern Front Revolutionary
   Military Council members Ivar Smilga, Mikhail Lashevich and Sergei
   Gusev vigorously protested and wanted to keep emphasis on the Eastern
   Front. They insisted that it was vital to capture Siberia before the
   onset of winter and that, once Kolchak's forces were broken, it would
   be possible to free up many more divisions for the Southern Front.
   Trotsky, who had had conflicts with the leadership of the Eastern Front
   earlier, including a temporary removal of Kamenev in May 1919,
   supported Vatsetis.

   The conflict came to a head at the July 3-4 Central Committee meeting.
   After a heated exchange the majority supported Kamenev and Smilga
   against Vatsetis and Trotsky. Not only was Trotsky's plan rejected, but
   he was subjected to a barrage of criticism for various alleged
   shortcomings in his leadership style, much of it of a personal nature.
   Stalin used this opportunity to try to pressure Lenin to dismiss
   Trotsky from his post. However, when, on July 5, Trotsky offered his
   resignation, the Politburo and the Orgburo of the Central Committee
   unanimously rejected it.

   Nevertheless, a number of significant changes to the leadership of the
   Red Army were made after July 4. Trotsky was temporarily sent to the
   Southern Front, while the work in Moscow was informally coordinated by
   Smilga. Most members of the bloated Revolutionary Military Council who
   were not involved in its day to day operations, were relieved of their
   duties on July 8 while new members including Smilga were added. The
   same day, while Trotsky was already in the South, Vatsetis was suddenly
   arrested by the Cheka on suspicion of involvement in an anti-Soviet
   plot and replaced by Sergei Kamenev.

   After a few weeks in the South, Trotsky returned to Moscow and resumed
   control of the Red Army. A year later, after Smilga's (and
   Tukhachevsky's) famous defeat during the Miracle at the Vistula,
   Trotsky refused to use this opportunity to pay Smilga back, which
   earned him Smilga's friendship and subsequent support during the
   intra-Party battles of the 1920s.

   In the meantime, by October 1919 the Soviet government found itself in
   the worst crisis of the Civil War, with Denikin's troops approaching
   Tula and Moscow from the South and General Nikolay Yudenich's troops
   approaching Petrograd from the West. Lenin decided that, since it was
   more important to defend Moscow than Petrograd, the latter would have
   to be abandoned. Trotsky argued that Petrograd needed to be defended,
   at least in part to prevent Estonia and Finland from intervening. In a
   rare reversal, Trotsky was supported by Stalin and Zinoviev and
   prevailed against Lenin in the Central Committee. He immediately went
   to Petrograd, whose leadership headed by Zinoviev he found demoralized,
   and organized its defense, sometimes personally stopping fleeing
   soldiers. By October 22 the Red Army was on the offensive and in early
   November Yudenich's troops were driven back to Estonia, where they were
   disarmed and interned. Trotsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner
   for his actions in Petrograd.

1920

   With the defeat of Denikin and Yudenich in late 1919, the Soviet
   government's emphasis shifted to economic work and Trotsky spent the
   winter of 1919-1920 in the Urals region trying to get its economy going
   again. Based on his experiences there, he proposed abandoning the
   policies of War Communism, which included confiscating grain from
   peasants, and partially restoring the grain market. Lenin, however, was
   still committed to the system of War Communism at the time and the
   proposal was rejected. Instead, Trotsky was put in charge of the
   country's railroads (while retaining overall control of the Red Army),
   which he tried to militarize in the spirit of War Communism. It wasn't
   until the spring of 1921 that economic collapse and uprisings would
   force Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership to abandon War
   Communism in favour of the New Economic Policy.

   In the meantime, in early 1920 Soviet-Polish tensions escalated to the
   point where they eventually led to the Polish-Soviet War. In the run-up
   to the war and during the hostilities, Trotsky argued that the Red Army
   was exhausted and that the Soviet government should sign a peace treaty
   with Poland as soon as possible. He also didn't believe that the Red
   Army would find much support in Poland proper. Lenin and other
   Bolshevik leaders, however, thought that the Red Army's successes in
   the Russian Civil War and against the Poles meant that, as Lenin said
   later:

          The defensive period of the war with worldwide imperialism was
          over, and we could, and had the obligation to, exploit the
          military situation to launch an offensive war.

   However, the Red Army offensive was stopped and turned back during the
   Battle of Warsaw in August 1920, in part because of Stalin's failure to
   obey Trotsky's orders in the run-up to the decisive engagements. Back
   in Moscow, Trotsky again argued in favour of signing a peace treaty and
   this time was able to prevail.

Trade union debate (1920-1921)

   In late 1920, after the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War and in the
   period leading up to the Eighth and Ninth Congress of Soviets, the
   Communist Party found itself engaged in a heated and increasingly
   acrimonious discussion over the role of trade unions in the Soviet
   state. The discussion split the Party into numerous factions, with
   Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin each having their "platforms" (factions),
   Bukharin eventually merging his faction with Trotsky's. Smaller, more
   radical factions like the Workers' Opposition (headed by Alexander
   Shlyapnikov) and the Group of Democratic Centralism were particularly
   active.

   Trotsky's position in this crucial debate was formed while he was
   heading a special commission on the Soviet transportation system,
   Tsektran. His appointment as head of this committee was made in order
   to rebuild a railroad system that lay in ruins after the Civil War.
   Being the Commisar of War and a revolutionary military leader, he felt
   there was a need to create a militarized "production atmosphere" by
   incorporating the trade unions directly into the State apparatus. His
   unyielding stance that in a worker's state the workers should have
   nothing to fear from the state, and that the State should have full
   control over the trade unions lead him to argue in the Ninth Party
   Congress for, "such a regime under which each worker feels himself to
   be a soldier of labor who cannot freely dispose of himself; if he is
   ordered transferred, he must execute that order; if he does not do so,
   he will be a deserter who should be punished. Who will execute this?
   The trade union. It will create a new regime. That is the
   militarization of the working class."

   Lenin sharply critiqued Trotsky and accused him of "bureaucratically
   nagging the trade unions" and of staging "factional attacks." His view
   did not focus on State control as much as the concern that a new
   relationship was needed between the State and the rank-and-file
   workers. He said, "Introduction of genuine labor discipline is
   conceived only if the whole mass of participants in productions take a
   conscious part in the fulfillment of these tasks. This cannot be
   achieved by bureaucratic methods and orders from above." This was a
   debate that Lenin thought the Party could ill afford. His frustration
   with Trotsky was capitalized on by Stalin and Zinoviev, who used their
   support for Lenin's position to improve their standing within the
   Bolshevik leadership at Trotsky's expense.

   Disagreements were threatening to get out of hand and many Bolsheviks,
   including Lenin, feared that the Party would splinter. The Central
   Committee was split almost evenly between Lenin's and Trotsky's
   supporters, with all three Secretaries of the Central Committee
   (Krestinky, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky and Leonid Serebryakov) supporting
   Trotsky.

   At a meeting of his faction at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921,
   Lenin said:

          I have been accused: "You are a son of a bitch for letting the
          discussion get out of hand". Well, try to stop Trotsky. How many
          divisions does one have to send against him? [...]

          We will come to terms with Trotsky. [...]

          Trotsky wants to resign. Over the past three years I have had
          lots of resignations in my pockets. And I have let some of them
          just lie there in store. But Trotsky is a temperamental man with
          military experience. He is in love with the organization, but as
          for politics, he hasn't got a clue.

   At the Congress, Lenin's faction won a decisive victory and a number of
   Trotsky's supporters (including all three secretaries of the Central
   Committee) lost their leadership positions. Zinoviev, who had supported
   Lenin, became a full member of the Politburo while Krestinsky lost his
   Politburo seat. Krestinsky's place in the secretariat was taken by
   Vyacheslav Molotov. The Congress also adopted a secret resolution on
   "Party unity", which banned factions within the Party except during
   pre-Congress discussions. The resolution was later published and used
   by Stalin against Trotsky and other opponents.

   At the end of the Tenth Party Congress, Trotsky had to rush to
   Petrograd to organize and direct the suppression of the Kronstadt
   Rebellion, the last major revolt against Bolshevik rule. Libertarian
   socialist Emma Goldman has criticized Trotsky for his actions as
   Commissar for War and his role in the suppression of the Kronstadt
   Rebellion, and also arguing that he ordered unjustified incarcerations
   and executions of political opponents such as anarchists, which, in
   Goldman's view, makes Trotsky's allegiance to socialism and communism
   highly questionable. Trotsky, however, frequently argued for
   revolutionary defensism, which states that revolutionists have a right
   to protect a revolution from counterrevolutionary violence.

Fall from power (1922-1928)

Lenin's illness (1922-1923)

   In late 1921 Lenin's health deteriorated and his periods of absence
   from Moscow became longer and longer, eventually leading to three
   strokes between May 26, 1922 and March 10, 1923, which resulted in
   paralysis, loss of speech and finally death on January 21, 1924. With
   Lenin increasingly sidelined throughout 1922, Stalin (elevated to the
   newly created position of the Central Committee General Secretary
   earlier in the year), Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev formed a troika
   (triumvirate) to ensure that Trotsky, publicly the number two man in
   the country at the time and Lenin's heir presumptive, would not succeed
   Lenin.

   The rest of the recently expanded Politburo (Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky,
   Bukharin) was at first uncommitted, but eventually joined the troika.
   Stalin's power of patronage in his capacity as General Secretary
   clearly played a role, but Trotsky and his supporters later concluded
   that a deeper, more fundamental reason was the process of slow
   bureaucratization of the Soviet regime once the extreme trials and
   tribulations of the Civil War were over: much of the Bolshevik elite
   wanted 'normalcy' while Trotsky was, personally and politically, a
   personification of a more turbulent revolutionary period that they
   would much rather leave behind.

   Although the exact sequence of events is unclear, evidence suggests
   that at first the troika nominated Trotsky to head second rate
   government departments (e.g. Gokhran, the State Depository for
   Valuables) and then, when Trotsky predictably refused, they tried to
   use it as an excuse to oust him.

   When, in mid-July 1922, Kamenev wrote a letter to the recovering Lenin
   to the effect that "(the Central Committee) is throwing or is ready to
   throw a good cannon overboard", Lenin was shocked and responded:

          Throwing Trotsky overboard - surely you are hinting at that, it
          is impossible to interpret it otherwise - is the height of
          stupidity. If you do not consider me already hopelessly foolish,
          how can you think of that????

   From that moment until his final stroke, Lenin spent much of his time
   trying to devise a way to prevent a split within the Communist Party
   leadership, which was reflected in Lenin's Testament. As part of this
   effort, on September 11, 1922 Lenin proposed that Trotsky become his
   deputy at the Sovnarkom. The Politburo approved the proposal, but
   Trotsky "categorically refused".

   In the fall of 1922, Lenin's relationship with Stalin deteriorated over
   Stalin's heavy-handed and chauvinistic handling of the issue of merging
   Soviet republics into one federal state, the USSR. At that point,
   according to Trotsky's autobiography, Lenin offered Trotsky an alliance
   against Soviet bureaucracy in general and Stalin in particular. The
   alliance proved effective on the issue of foreign trade , but it was
   complicated by Lenin's progressing illness. In January 1923 the
   strained relationship between Lenin and Stalin completely broke down
   when Stalin rudely insulted Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. At that
   point Lenin amended his Testament suggesting that Stalin should be
   replaced as the party's General Secretary, although the thrust of his
   argument was somewhat weakened by the fact that he also mildly
   criticized other Bolshevik leaders, including Trotsky. In March 1923,
   days before the third stroke that put an end to his political career,
   Lenin prepared a frontal assault on Stalin's "Great-Russian
   nationalistic campaign" against the Georgian Communist Party and asked
   Trotsky to deliver the blow at the XIIth Party Congress. With Lenin no
   longer active, Trotsky did not raise the issue at the Congress.

   At the XIIth Party Congress in April 1923, immediately after Lenin's
   final stroke, the key Central Committee reports on organizational and
   nationalities questions were delivered by Stalin and not by Trotsky,
   while Zinoviev delivered the political report of the Central Committee,
   traditionally Lenin's prerogative. Stalin's power of appointment had
   allowed him to gradually replace local Party secretaries with loyal
   functionaries and thus control most regional delegations at the
   Congress, which enabled him to pack the Central Committee with his
   supporters, mostly at the expense of Zinoviev and Kamenev's backers.

   At the Congress, Trotsky made a speech about intra-party democracy,
   among other things, but avoided a direct confrontation with the troika.
   The delegates, most of whom were unaware of the divisions within the
   Politburo, gave Trotsky a standing ovation, which couldn't help but
   upset the troika. The troika was further infuriated by Karl Radek's
   article Leon Trotsky — Organizer of Victory published in Pravda on
   March 14, 1923, which seemed to anoint Trotsky as Lenin's successor.

   The resolutions adopted by the XIIth Congress called, in general terms,
   for greater democracy within the Party, but they were vague and
   remained unimplemented. In an important test of strength in mid-1923,
   the troika was able to neutralize Trotsky's friend and supporter
   Christian Rakovsky by removing him from his post as head of the
   Ukrainian government (Sovnarkom) and sending him to London as Soviet
   ambassador. When regional Party secretaries in Ukraine protested
   against Rakovsky's reassignment, they too were reassigned to various
   posts all over the Soviet Union.

Left opposition (1923-1924)

   Starting in mid-summer 1923, the Soviet economy ran into significant
   difficulties, which led to numerous strikes countrywide. Two secret
   groups within the Communist Party, Workers' Truth and Workers' Group,
   were uncovered and suppressed by the Soviet secret police. Then, in
   September-October 1923, the much anticipated Communist revolution in
   Germany ended in defeat.

   On October 8, 1923 Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee and
   the Central Control Commission which attributed these difficulties to
   lack of intra-Party democracy. Trotsky wrote:

          In the fiercest moment of War Communism, the system of
          appointment within the party did not have one tenth of the
          extent that it has now. Appointment of the secretaries of
          provincial committees is now the rule. That creates for the
          secretary a position essentially independent of the local
          organization. [...] The bureaucratization of the party apparatus
          has developed to unheard-of proportions by means of the method
          of secretarial selection. There has been created a very broad
          stratum of party workers, entering into the apparatus of the
          government of the party, who completely renounce their own party
          opinion, at least the open expression of it, as though assuming
          that the secretarial hierarchy is the apparatus which creates
          party opinion and party decisions. Beneath this stratum,
          abstaining from their own opinions, there lays the broad mass of
          the party, before whom every decision stands in the form of a
          summons or a command.

   Other senior Communists who had similar concerns sent The Declaration
   of 46 to the Central Committee on October 15, in which they wrote:

          [...] we observe an ever progressing, barely disguised division
          of the party into a secretarial hierarchy and into "laymen",
          into professional party functionaries, chosen from above, and
          the other party masses, who take no part in social life. [...]
          free discussion within the party has virtually disappeared,
          party public opinion has been stifled. [...] it is the
          secretarial hierarchy, the party hierarchy which to an ever
          greater degree chooses the delegates to the conferences and
          congresses, which to an ever greater degree are becoming the
          executive conferences of this hierarchy.

   Although the text of these letters remained secret at the time, the two
   documents had a significant effect on the Party leadership and prompted
   a partial retreat by the troika and its supporters on the issue of
   intra-Party democracy, notably in Zinoviev's Pravda article published
   on November 7.

   Throughout November, the troika tried to come up with a compromise
   formula that would placate, or at least temporarily neutralize, Trotsky
   and those who supported him. (Their task was made easier by the fact
   that Trotsky was sick in November and December 1923.) The first draft
   of the resolution was rejected by Trotsky, which led to the formation
   of a special group consisting of Stalin, Trotsky and Kamenev, which was
   charged with drafting a mutually acceptable compromise. On December 5,
   1923, the Politburo and the Central Control Commission unanimously
   adopted the group's final draft as its resolution.

   On December 8, Trotsky published an open letter, in which he expounded
   on the recently adopted resolution's ideas. The troika used his letter
   as an excuse to launch a campaign against Trotsky, accusing him of
   factionalism, setting "the youth against the fundamental generation of
   old revolutionary Bolsheviks" and other sins. Trotsky defended his
   position in a series of seven letters which were collected as The New
   Course in January 1924. The illusion of a "monolithic Bolshevik
   leadership" was thus shattered and a lively intra-Party discussion
   ensued, both in local Party organizations and in the pages of Pravda.
   The discussion lasted most of December and January until the XIIIth
   Party Conference which was held between January 16 and 18, 1924. Those
   who were opposed to the line of the Central Committee during the debate
   were thereafter referred to as members of the Left Opposition.

   Since the troika controlled the Party apparatus through Stalin's
   Secretariat as well as Pravda through its editor Bukharin, it was able
   to direct the course of the discussion and the process of delegate
   selection. Although Trotsky's position prevailed within the Red Army
   and Moscow universities and received about half the votes in the Moscow
   Party organization, it was defeated elsewhere and the Conference was
   packed with pro-troika delegates. In the end, only three delegates
   voted for Trotsky's position and the Conference denounced "Trotskyism"
   as a "petty bourgeois deviation". After the Conference, a number of
   Trotsky's supporters, especially in the Red Army's Political
   Directorate, were removed from leading positions or reassigned.
   Nonetheless, Trotsky kept all of his posts and the troika was careful
   to emphasize that the debate was limited to Trotsky's "mistakes" and
   that removing Trotsky from the leadership was out of the question. In
   reality, of course, Trotsky had already been cut off from the decision
   making process.

   Immediately after the end of the Conference, Trotsky left for a
   Caucasusian resort to recover from his prolonged illness. He was still
   en route there when he received the news of Lenin's death on January
   21, 1924. He was about to come back when a follow up telegram from
   Stalin arrived, giving an incorrect date of the scheduled funeral,
   which would have made it impossible for Trotsky to return in time. Many
   commentators speculated after the fact that Trotsky's absence from
   Moscow in the days following Lenin's death contributed to his eventual
   loss to Stalin, although Trotsky generally discounted the significance
   of his absence.

After Lenin's death (1924)

   There was little overt political disagreement within the Soviet
   leadership throughout most of 1924. On the surface, Trotsky remained
   the most prominent and popular Bolshevik leader, although his
   "mistakes" were often alluded to by troika partisans. Behind the
   scenes, he was completely cut off from the decision making process.
   Politburo meetings were pure formalities since all key decisions were
   made ahead of time by the troika and its supporters. Trotsky's control
   over the military was undermined by reassigning his deputy, Ephraim
   Sklyansky, and appointing Mikhail Frunze, who was being obviously
   groomed to take Trotsky's place, in his stead.

   At the XIIIth Party Congress in May, Trotsky delivered a conciliatory
   speech:

          None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party.
          Clearly, the Party is always right.... We can only be right with
          and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being
          in the right. The English have a saying, "My country, right or
          wrong," whether it is in the right or in the wrong, it is my
          country. We have much better historical justification in saying
          whether it is right or wrong in certain individual concrete
          cases, it is my party.... And if the Party adopts a decision
          which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or
          unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of
          the decision to the end.

   The attempt at reconciliation, however, didn't stop troika supporters
   from taking potshots at him.

   In the meantime, the Left Opposition, which had coagulated somewhat
   unexpectedly in late 1923 and lacked a definite platform aside from
   general dissatisfaction with the intra-Party "regime", began to
   crystallize. It lost some less dedicated members to the harassment by
   the troika, but it also began formulating a program. Economically, the
   Left Opposition and its theoretician Yevgeny Preobrazhensky came out
   against further development of capitalist elements in the Soviet
   economy and in favour of faster industrialization of the economy. That
   put them on a collision course with Bukharin and Rykov, the "Right"
   group within the Party, who supported troika at the time. On the
   question of world revolution, Trotsky and Karl Radek saw a period of
   stability in Europe while Stalin and Zinoviev confidently predicted an
   "acceleration" of revolution in Western Europe in 1924. On the
   theoretical plane, Trotsky remained committed to the Bolshevik idea
   that the Soviet Union could not create a true socialist society in the
   absence of the world revolution, while Stalin gradually came up with a
   policy of building ' Socialism in One Country'. These ideological
   divisions provided much of the intellectual basis for the political
   divide between Trotsky and the Left Opposition on the one hand and
   Stalin and his allies on the other.

   Immediately after the XIIIth Congress (where Kamenev and Zinoviev
   helped Stalin defuse Lenin's Testament, which belatedly came to the
   surface), the troika, always an alliance of convenience, started
   showing signs of cracking up. Stalin began making poorly veiled
   accusations in Zinoviev's and Kamenev's address. However, in October
   1924, Trotsky published The Lessons of October, an extensive summary of
   the events of the 1917 revolution. In the article, he described
   Zinoviev's and Kamenev's opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power
   in 1917, something that the two would have preferred left unmentioned.
   This started a new round of intra-party struggle, which became known as
   the Literary Discussion, with Zinoviev and Kamenev once again allied
   with Stalin against Trotsky. Their criticism of Trotsky was
   concentrated in three areas:
     * Trotsky's disagreements and conflicts with Lenin and the Bolsheviks
       prior to 1917
     * Trotsky's alleged distortion of the events of 1917 in order to
       emphasize his role and diminish the roles played by other
       Bolsheviks
     * Trotsky's harsh treatment of his subordinates and other alleged
       mistakes during the Russian Civil War

   Trotsky was again sick and unable to respond while his opponents
   mobilized all of their resources to denounce him. They succeeded in
   damaging his military reputation so much that he was forced to resign
   as People's Commissar of Army and Fleet Affairs and Chairman of the
   Revolutionary Military Council on January 6, 1925. Zinoviev demanded
   Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist Party, but Stalin refused to go
   along and skillfully played the role of a moderate. Trotsky kept his
   Politburo seat, but was effectively put on probation.

A year in the wilderness (1925)

   1925 was a difficult year for Trotsky. After the bruising Literary
   Discussion and losing his Red Army posts, he was effectively unemployed
   throughout the winter and spring. In May 1925, he was given three
   posts: chairman of the Concessions Committee, head of the
   electro-technical board, and chairman of the scientific-technical board
   of industry. Trotsky wrote in My Life that he "was taking a rest from
   politics" and "naturally plunged into his new line of work up to my
   ears", but some contemporary accounts paint a picture of a remote and
   distracted man. Later in the year, Trotsky resigned his two technical
   positions (claiming Stalin-instigated interference and sabotage) and
   concentrated on his work in the Concessions Committee.

   In one of the few political developments that affected Trotsky in 1925,
   the circumstances surrounding the controversy around Lenin's Testament
   were described by American Marxist Max Eastman in his book Since Lenin
   Died (1925). The Soviet leadership denounced Eastman's account and used
   party discipline to force Trotsky to write an article denying Eastman's
   version of the events.

   In the meantime, the troika finally broke up. Bukharin and Rykov sided
   with Stalin while Krupskaya and Soviet Commissar of Finance Grigory
   Sokolnikov aligned with Zinoviev and Kamenev. The struggle became open
   at the September 1925 meeting of the Central Committee and came to a
   head at the XIVth Party Congress in December 1925. With only the
   Leningrad Party organization behind them, Zinoviev and Kamenev, dubbed
   The New Opposition, were thoroughly defeated while Trotsky refused to
   get involved in the fight and didn't speak at the Congress.

United opposition (1926-1927)

   During a lull in the intra-party fighting in the spring of 1926,
   Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters in the New Opposition gravitated
   closer to Trotsky's supporters and the two groups soon formed an
   alliance, which also incorporated some smaller opposition groups within
   the Communist Party. The alliance became known as the United
   Opposition.

   The United Opposition was repeatedly threatened with sanctions by the
   Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party and Trotsky had to agree to
   tactical retreats, mostly to preserve his alliance with Zinoviev and
   Kamenev. The opposition remained united against Stalin throughout 1926
   and 1927, especially on the issue of the Chinese Revolution. The
   methods used by the Stalinists against the Opposition were becoming
   more and more extreme. At the XVth Party Conference in October 1926
   Trotsky could barely speak due to interruptions and catcalls and at the
   end of the Conference he lost his Politburo seat. In 1927 Stalin
   started using the GPU (Soviet secret police) to infiltrate and
   discredit the opposition. Rank and file oppositionists were
   increasingly harassed, sometimes expelled from the Party and even
   arrested.

Defeat and exile (1927-1928)

   In October 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central
   Committee. When the United Opposition tried to organize independent
   demonstrations commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik
   seizure of power in November 1927, the demonstrators were dispersed by
   force and Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party
   on November 12. Their leading supporters, from Kamenev down, were
   expelled in December 1927 by the XVth Party Congress, which paved the
   way for mass expulsions of rank and file oppositionists as well as
   internal exile of opposition leaders in early 1928.

   When the XVth Party Congress made Opposition views incompatible with
   membership in the Communist Party, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their
   supporters capitulated and renounced their alliance with the Left
   Opposition. Trotsky and most of his followers, on the other hand,
   refused to surrender and stayed the course.

   Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata (now in Kazakhstan) on January 31, 1928.
   He was expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929, accompanied by
   his wife Natalia Sedova and his son Leon Sedov.

   After Trotsky's expulsion from the country, exiled Trotskyists began to
   waver and, between 1929 and 1934, most of the leading members of the
   Opposition surrendered to Stalin, "admitted their mistakes" and were
   reinstated in the Communist Party. Christian Rakovsky, who served as an
   inspiration for Trotsky between 1929 and 1934 while he was in Siberian
   exile, was the last prominent Trotskyist to capitulate. Almost all of
   them perished in the Great Purges just a few years later.

Last exile (1929-1940)

   Trotsky reading The Militant.
   Enlarge
   Trotsky reading The Militant.

   Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union in February 1929. His first
   station in exile was the Turkish island of Prinkipo (now Büyükada) off
   the Istanbul coast, where he stayed four years. There were many former
   White Army officers in Istanbul, which put Trotsky's life in danger,
   but a number of Trotsky's European supporters volunteered to serve as
   bodyguards and assured his safety.

   In 1933 Trotsky was offered asylum in France by Daladier. He stayed
   first at Royan, then at Barbizon. He was not allowed to visit Paris. In
   1935 it was implied to him that he was no longer welcome in France.
   After weighing alternatives, he moved to Norway, where he got
   permission from then Justice minister Trygve Lie to enter the country,
   Trotsky was a guest of Konrad Knudsen near Oslo. After two years,
   allegedly under influence from the Soviet Union, he was put under house
   arrest. After consultations with Norwegian officials, his transfer to
   Mexico on a freighter was arranged. Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas
   welcomed him warmly, even arranging a special train to bring him to
   Mexico City from the port of Tampico.

   In Mexico, he lived at one point at the home of the painter Diego
   Rivera, and at another at that of Rivera's wife & fellow painter, Frida
   Kahlo. He remained a prolific writer in exile, penning several key
   works, including his History of the Russian Revolution (1930) and The
   Revolution Betrayed (1936), a critique of the Soviet Union under
   Stalinism. Trotsky argued that the Soviet state had become a
   degenerated workers' state controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy,
   which would eventually either be overthrown via a political revolution
   establishing workers' democracy or degenerate to the point where the
   bureaucracy converts itself into a capitalist class.
   Trotsky with American comrades in Mexico, shortly before his
   assassination, 1940.
   Enlarge
   Trotsky with American comrades in Mexico, shortly before his
   assassination, 1940.

   While in Mexico, Trotsky also worked closely with James P. Cannon,
   Joseph Hansen, and Farrell Dobbs of the Socialist Workers Party of the
   United States, as well as other supporters. Cannon, a long-time leading
   member of the American communist movement, had supported Trotsky in the
   struggle against Stalinism since he first read Trotsky's criticisms of
   the Soviet Union in 1928. Trotsky's critique of the Stalinist regime,
   though banned, was distributed to leaders of the Comintern. Among his
   other supporters was Chen Duxiu, founder of the Chinese Communist
   party.

Moscow show trials

   In August 1936, the first Moscow show trial of the so-called
   "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre" was staged in front of an
   international audience. During the trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14
   other accused, most of them prominent Old Bolsheviks, confessed to
   having plotted with Trotsky to kill Stalin and other members of the
   Soviet leadership. The court found everybody guilty and sentenced the
   defendants to death, Trotsky in absentia. The second show trial of Karl
   Radek, Grigory Sokolnikov, Yuri Pyatakov and 14 others took place in
   January 1937, with even more alleged conspiracies and crimes linked to
   Trotsky. In April 1937, an independent "Commission of Inquiry" into the
   charges made against Trotsky and others at the "Moscow Trials" was held
   in Coyoacan, with John Dewey as chairman . The findings were published
   in the book Not Guilty.

Fourth International

   James Cannon and Felix Morrow, with a bust of Trotsky.
   Enlarge
   James Cannon and Felix Morrow, with a bust of Trotsky.

   At first Trotsky was opposed to the idea of establishing parallel
   Communist Parties or a parallel international Communist organization
   that would compete with the Third International for fear of splitting
   the Communist movement. However, Trotsky changed his mind in mid-1933
   after the Nazi takeover in Germany and the Comintern's response to it,
   when he proclaimed that:

          An organization which was not roused by the thunder of fascism
          and which submits docilely to such outrageous acts of the
          bureaucracy demonstrates thereby that it is dead and that
          nothing can ever revive it. ... In all our subsequent work it is
          necessary to take as our point of departure the historical
          collapse of the official Communist International.

   In 1938, Trotsky and his supporters founded the Fourth International,
   which was intended to be a revolutionary and internationalist
   alternative to the Stalinist Comintern.

Dies Committee

   Towards the end of 1939 Trotsky agreed to go to the United States to
   appear as a witness before the Dies Committee of the House of
   Representatives, a forerunner of the House Un-American Activities
   Committee. Representative Dies, chairman of the committee, demanded the
   suppression of the American Communist Party. Trotsky intended to use
   the forum to expose the NKVD's activities against him and his
   followers. He made it clear that he also intended to argue against the
   suppression of the American Communist Party, and to use the committee
   as a platform for a call to transform the world war into a world
   revolution. Many of his supporters argued against his appearance, but
   it came to nothing anyway, as, when made aware of the deposition
   Trotsky intended to make, the committee refused to hear him, and he was
   denied a visa to enter the USA. On hearing about it, the Stalinists
   immediately accused Trotsky of being in the pay of the oil magnates and
   the FBI.

Assassination

   Study where the attack on Leon Trotsky took place.
   Enlarge
   Study where the attack on Leon Trotsky took place.

   Trotsky eventually quarreled with Rivera and in 1939 moved into his own
   residence in Coyoacán, a neighbourhood in Mexico City. On May 24, 1940,
   he survived a raid on his home by Stalinist assassins under the
   leadership of GPU agent Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich, Mexican
   Stalinist painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Vittorio Vidale. Later,
   on August 20, 1940, Trotsky was successfully attacked in his home by a
   Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader, who drove the pick of an ice axe into
   Trotsky's skull.

   The blow was poorly delivered, however, and failed to kill Trotsky
   instantly, as Mercader had intended. Witnesses stated that Trotsky spat
   on Mercader and began struggling fiercely with him. Hearing the
   commotion, Trotsky's bodyguards burst into the room and nearly killed
   Mercader, but Trotsky stopped them, shouting, "Do not kill him! This
   man has a story to tell." Trotsky died the next day at a local
   hospital.

   Mercader later testified at his trial:

          I laid my raincoat on the table in such a way as to be able to
          remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I decided not to
          miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment
          Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took
          out the ice axe from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and,
          with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head.

   According to James P. Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers
   Party (USA), Trotsky's last words were "I will not survive this attack.
   Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully
   before."

   Trotsky's house in Coyoacán was preserved in much the same condition as
   it was on the day of the assassination and is now a museum run by a
   board of intellectuals, including his grandson Esteban Volkov.
   (Trotsky's great-grandaughter, psychiatrist Nora Volkow, studied brain
   imaging in addiction, and is now director of the National Institute on
   Drug Abuse.) The current director of the museum is Dr. Carlos Ramirez
   Sandoval under whose supervision the museum has improved considerably
   after years of neglect. Trotsky's grave is located on its grounds.

   Trotsky was never formally rehabilitated by the Soviet government,
   despite the Glasnost-era rehabilitation of most other Old Bolsheviks
   killed during the Great Purges. Nonetheless, Trotsky was featured on a
   commemorative postage stamp in 1987.

   In 1951, David Bronstein challenged Mikhail Botvinnik for the world
   chess championship in Moscow. David Bronstein was Jewish, and the
   second cousin of Trotsky. He was winning the match, 11.5 to 10.5, when
   in game 23, he alarmingly resigned in a drawn position and as a result,
   failed to gain the world championship. He later claimed that he was
   forced to lose the match by Soviet officials who acted under orders
   from Stalin.

Contributions to theory

   Trotsky considered himself a "Bolshevik-Leninist", arguing for the
   establishment of a vanguard party. He considered himself an advocate of
   orthodox Marxism. His politics differed in many respects from those of
   Stalin or Mao, most importantly in his rejection of the theory of
   Socialism in One Country and his declaring the need for an
   international " permanent revolution". Numerous Fourth Internationalist
   groups around the world continue to describe themselves as Trotskyist
   and see themselves as standing in this tradition, although they have
   different interpretations of the conclusions to be drawn from this.
   Supporters of the Fourth International echo Trotsky's opposition to
   Stalinist totalitarianism, advocating political revolution, arguing
   that socialism cannot sustain itself without democracy.

Permanent Revolution

   Permanent Revolution is the theory that the bourgeois democratic tasks
   in countries with delayed bourgeois democratic development cannot be
   accomplished except through the establishment of a workers' state, and
   further, that the creation of a workers' state would inevitably involve
   inroads against capitalist property. Thus, the accomplishment of
   bourgeois democratic tasks passes over into proletarian tasks.

   Although most closely associated with Leon Trotsky, the call for
   Permanent Revolution is first found in the writings of Karl Marx and
   Friedrich Engels in March 1850, in the aftermath of the 1848
   Revolution, in their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist
   League:

          It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent
          until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven
          from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered
          state power and until the association of the proletarians has
          progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all
          the leading countries of the world - that competition between
          the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the
          decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of
          the workers. ... Their battle-cry must be: "The Permanent
          Revolution."

   Trotsky's conception of Permanent Revolution is based on his
   understanding, drawing on the work of the founder of Russian Marxism
   Georgy Plekhanov, that in 'backward' countries the tasks of the
   Bourgeois Democratic Revolution could not be achieved by the
   bourgeoisie itself. This conception was first developed by Trotsky in
   collaboration with Alexander Parvus in late 1904 - 1905. The relevant
   articles were later collected in Trotsky's books 1905 and in Permanent
   Revolution, which also contains his essay "Results and Prospects".

Trotsky influences in modern culture

     * Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement was deeply
       influenced by Trotsky's theories and work and wrote extensively
       about the association between his work and her new movement. Some
       of her own writings about Trotsky may be found here:

Trotsky in the arts

     * Trotsky is allegorically referred to in the novel Animal Farm by
       George Orwell, represented by the pig Snowball.
     * Will Revenge Trotsky is the name of a Uruguayan punk group.
     * Trotsky in Finland is the title and subject of a poem by Tom
       Paulin, published in the collection The Strange Museum.
     * David Ives wrote a satirical one-act play entitled Variations on
       the Death of Trotsky in which Trotsky's death is played out several
       times, each time more ridiculously. The play is a part of the
       collection All in the Timing.
     * The band Trotsky Icepick released several albums on SST Records.
     * The character Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, who later appears with his
       name changed to Strelnikov, in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was
       loosely, although not biographically, based on Trotsky. Parallels
       include the armoured train used by Strelnikhov, his political zeal,
       and the political ostracism which eventually falls on him as Stalin
       tightens his grip.
     * Richard Burton starred as Trotsky in the 1972 film The
       Assassination of Trotsky, directed by Joseph Losey, screenplay by
       Nicholas Moseley.
     * Joe Frank produced an 1979 episode of NPR Playhouse called The
       Death of Trotsky.
     * A character who believes he is Trotsky appears in an episode of
       Monty Python's Flying Circus.
     * Geoffrey Rush starred as Trotsky in the movie Frida.
     * Ska-punk band Catch 22 released a concept album, Permanent
       Revolution, based on the life of Trotsky.
     * Trotsky's First Confessions is the title of a short story by the
       Canadian writer Matt Cohen.
     * Leonard Michaels wrote "Trotsky's Garden", a short story on the
       last moments of Trotsky. This short story appeared in I Would Have
       Saved Them if I Could ( ISBN 0-374-51713-4).
     * The song 'No More Heroes' by British punk/new wave band The
       Stranglers mentions the death of Trotsky in its opening lines. The
       artwork for the album of the same name features bassist
       Jean-Jacques Burnel lying on a tomb with Trotsky written on the
       side.

Rumors of appearances in American films

   There is an urban legend that Trotsky was once an extra in one or more
   American movies. This legend is based on two separate episodes.

   First, there is a minor 1930s documentary about Hollywood history which
   is shown by the cable television channel Turner Classic Movies from
   time to time. It includes an 8-10 second excerpt from a silent movie
   (Thought to be "My Official Wife" made 1916-1917, when Trotsky briefly
   lived in New York City) with a Trotsky look-alike making a brief
   appearance as an extra. The announcer claims, perhaps in jest since the
   whole episode is played for laughs, that it is indeed Trotsky
   supplementing his income while in New York in early 1917. Kevin
   Brownlow argued that it couldn't possibly be Trotsky.

   The second episode is described here:

                Recorded on the Fox lot in Hollywood on January 27, 1928,
                the Dedication of "Park Row" footage constitutes one of
                the earliest synchronous-sound newsreels. [...] However,
                the real star here is this "Leon Trotsky of the Soviet
                Republic!" Exactly what Trotsky is doing in Hollywood
                seems to bewilder even those standing behind him in this
                film. More bewildering still to most viewers in 1928 is
                the fact that his Russian goes untranslated. Is this
                confirmation that it is really he? It looks like Trotsky,
                albeit a little younger and leaner than he was at the
                time. While we, like they, might have wondered, for the
                Russian-speaker the joke is given away immediately. The
                actor's words (delivered haltingly, with a Slavic accent)
                can be translated as:

                      Comrades, by the irony of fate I play the role of
                      Trotsky in the new Raoul Walsh production by the Fox
                      studio. In this production, he will show the very
                      best anyone has ever seen. Raoul Walsh is famous for
                      this staging of What Price Glory?, and in this
                      production he'll show something truly special.
                      [Translation by Alexander Ogden and Judith Kalb]

Selected works

   Leon Trotsky's grave in Coyoacán.
   Enlarge
   Leon Trotsky's grave in Coyoacán.
     * Works by Leon Trotsky at Project Gutenberg
     * Autobiography, 1879-1917.
     * 1905
     * War and the International
     * Trotsky's Military Writings, Volume 3
     * Terrorism and Communism
     * Trotsky's Military Writings, Volume 4
     * Between Red and White
     * Trotsky's Military Writings, Volume 5
     * The New Course
     * Literature and Revolution
     * The Lessons of October
     * The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 1
     * The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 2
     * Problems of the Chinese Revolution
     * Platform of the Joint Opposition
     * The Third International After Lenin
     * History of the Russian Revolution
     * My Life
     * Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects
     * In Defence of October
     * The Revolution Betrayed
     * The Case of Leon Trotsky
     * The Stalin School of Falsification
     * Their Morals and Ours
     * The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution
     * In Defence of Marxism

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