Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky: The Revolution's Best Writer and Worst Politician

Joseph Stalin once put it in print: "All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky." Twenty-two years later Stalin had the same man killed in a Mexico City study with an ice axe. Between those two sentences lies the career of a Ukrainian farmer's son who built the Red Army out of nothing, lost a bureaucratic knife-fight to a man he considered second-rate, and spent his last decade writing the most eloquent indictment of the state he had helped create.

The Farmer's Son from Yanovka

Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born on 7 November 1879 at Yanovka in Kherson Governorate, into a prosperous Jewish farming family. From the age of eight he attended St Paul's Realschule, a Lutheran school in Odessa, where he excelled at mathematics and science. In 1896 he moved to Nikolayev and into revolutionary politics as an agrarian populist; he was argued into Marxism by Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, whom he married in prison in 1900.

Prison came early. Arrested in January 1898 for organising the South Russian Workers' Union, he served two years before being sentenced in 1900 to four years of Siberian exile. In the summer of 1902 he escaped hidden in a load of hay, and took for a false passport the name of a jailer from his Odessa prison: Trotsky. It stuck for life. In London he met Lenin and became a leading contributor to *Iskra* under the pen-name Pero, "the pen." When the party split in 1903 he sided with the Mensheviks, then declared himself non-factional in 1904 — more than a decade of belonging to no one, which his enemies never let him forget.

1905 and Permanent Revolution

The 1905 revolution made him. At twenty-six he was elected chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet, and when it was crushed he was arrested and exiled again, escaping in 1907. Out of that year came the theory that carries his name: permanent revolution, the argument that a backward country like Russia need not wait for a bourgeois-democratic stage to mature, because its weak middle class would leave the working class to seize power directly — and that such a revolution could only survive if it spread internationally. It was a heresy against orthodox Marxism in 1906 and the operating assumption of the Bolshevik leadership by late 1917. In between, he worked as a war correspondent covering the Balkan Wars of 1912–13.

October

Deported from France, he sailed for New York in January 1917. On his way back after the February revolution the British detained him at Halifax; Russian diplomatic pressure sprang him, and he reached Petrograd on 17 May. He joined the Bolsheviks, whom he had spent a decade fighting, and in October was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. From that position he ran the military preparation of the insurrection through the Military Revolutionary Committee. Stalin's later testimonial to his role was accurate, and Stalin spent the rest of his life trying to erase it.

The Armoured Train

As Commissar for Foreign Affairs he negotiated at Brest-Litovsk, pursuing a "no war, no peace" line before Lenin overruled him and accepted German terms in March 1918. Then came the job that mattered. As Commissar for War from 1918 to 1925 he expanded the Red Army from roughly 300,000 to five million, and did it by a heresy of his own: recruiting former Tsarist officers for their professional competence and attaching Bolshevik political commissars to guarantee their loyalty. He spent the civil war living in an armoured train that moved between fronts, arriving where things were collapsing.

The methods were brutal and he defended them in print. He instituted the Red Terror in the army, used barrier troops, took the families of former officials hostage, and imposed a discipline that has often been exaggerated — of some 837,000 deserters, 612 were executed, and many of the rest were returned to the ranks. In March 1921 he ordered the suppression of the Kronstadt naval rising, which killed thousands and which anarchists have cited ever since as the moment the revolution turned on its own.

Losing

By 1922 Lenin, alarmed at Stalin's grip on the party machine, was allying with Trotsky against the bureaucracy and offering him a deputy premiership, which he declined; Lenin's Testament warned explicitly about Stalin. Then Lenin died in January 1924 and Trotsky discovered that brilliance in public and command of an army counted for very little against control of appointments. Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed a troika to block him and held the party apparatus and the press. Trotsky led the Left Opposition from 1923, attacking "socialism in one country" and demanding faster industrialisation and international revolution. He was removed from the Politburo in 1926, expelled from the party in 1927, banished to Alma-Ata in 1928 and deported from the Soviet Union in 1929.

The Prophet Outcast

He lived in Turkey, France and Norway before Mexico admitted him in 1937, and he wrote continuously: *My Life*, the *History of the Russian Revolution*, and in 1936 *The Revolution Betrayed*, which diagnosed the USSR as a "degenerated workers' state" captured by a privileged bureaucracy. He founded the Fourth International in 1938. Stalin sentenced him to death in absentia in 1936 and worked through his family, arresting and executing relatives during the purges. In August 1940 Ramón Mercader, a Stalinist agent, struck him in the skull with an ice axe; he died on 21 August. He is buried at the Mexico City house that is now his museum.

Why Leon Is Called a Genius

The unusual thing about Trotsky is the combination. Revolutions produce orators, and they produce organisers, and occasionally they produce writers; almost never the same person. He was elected chairman of a soviet at twenty-six, ran the military organisation of the October seizure of power, and then built a five-million-man army from a collapsed state in three years — while producing a body of prose that is read as literature. The *History of the Russian Revolution* is treated as a major work of narrative history by people with no sympathy for its politics, and the theory of permanent revolution, formulated in 1906, described in advance the shape the 1917 revolution actually took.

The counter-case is severe and not confined to his enemies. Robert Service argues that Trotsky's authoritarian impulses closely resembled Lenin's and Stalin's, and that he would have been no more likely than Stalin to build a humanitarian socialism. The record supports the worry: the Red Terror, barrier troops, hostages and Kronstadt were his. In exile he denounced Stalin for suppressing inner-party debate, having earlier joined Lenin in banning factions, and his later proposals often had little connection to reality — calls for uprisings by Fourth International sections that did not exist. Then there is the defeat itself: a man celebrated for insight failed to see what a general secretary with the personnel files could do. Much of his posthumous reputation was built by sympathisers like Isaac Deutscher and Max Eastman on the strength of his anti-Stalinist writing — the eloquence of the loser rather than the judgment of the politician.

Legacy

Trotsky remains the great counterfactual of the twentieth century: the alternative Soviet Union that never happened, and which his admirers can therefore keep uncorrupted. He is the only major Old Bolshevik never rehabilitated in Russia. What survives beyond the political sects that carry his name is the writing — a first-hand account of a revolution by the man who organised it, and an analysis of how it curdled, written by someone who had every reason not to look.

Achievements

• People's Commissar (1917–1918)
• Member of the Russian Constituent Assembly (1917–1918)
• Member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee (1917–1917)
• Member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee (1917–1919)
• Order of the Red Banner