Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we are taking
on a figure so central to the 20th century that
the story of his life is not just parallel to
the Soviet Union's existence, but is inseparable
from it, from its fiery birth to its dark, bloody
betrayal, Leon Trotsky. And we really need to
move beyond that simplified historical narrative.
You know, the one where the Russian Revolution
is just a power struggle between Lenin and Stalin.
Right. Because Lev Davidovich Bronstein, who
we all know as Leon Trotsky, was arguably the
third. And for a really critical period, the
undisputed second most prominent figure in the
Soviet state. We're talking about those foundational
years between 1917 and Lenin's death in 1924.
So our mission today is to follow that incredible,
tragic arc. We're going to look at how a man
who was the chief strategist, the architect of
the Red Army, the military genius who won the
Civil War. Exactly. How that man could be reduced
to the world's most famous political exile, the
international symbol of the anti -Stalinist left,
and ultimately the target of one of the 20th
century's most dramatic assassinations. We're
going to unpack his origins, which are really
surprising. Yeah, and his foundational roles.
I mean, from... People's Commissar for Foreign
Affairs to the man who chaired the Petrograd
Soviet. And of course, his intellectual contributions,
Trotskyism and that unyielding, brutal conflict
with Joseph Stalin that just consumed his final
two decades. It's a tale of a spectacular, almost
impossible rise and then this catastrophic, systematic
fall. And we have the source material here to
really get into the granular detail to understand
not just what happened, but why it happened.
So where do we start? We'll start with the man
at his peak, the political wonder at Keene. And
then we'll track that slow suffocating process
that reduced him from a global revolutionary
powerhouse to a stateless figure hunted across
continents by the very apparatus he helped create.
It forces you to ask that essential question,
the one that defines all revolutions. Does bureaucracy
inevitably conquer ideology? Or can, you know,
a series of political miscalculations doom even
the most theoretically sound movement? OK, let's
unpack this revolutionary origin story, because
it starts in a place you might not expect for
a future radical intellectual who preached global
proletarian revolution. It starts with prosperity.
It's a remarkable starting point, isn't it? Leon
Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879,
came from a surprisingly comfortable Jewish farming
family in Yanovka, Ukraine, which was then part
of the Russian Empire. So not exactly from the
downtrodden masses. Not at all. His parents,
David and Anna Bronstein, were wealthy grain
growers. And what's crucial here is that they
were illiterate. They operated completely outside
that urban intellectual world. That's a huge
contrast to the background of most other revolutionaries
who usually came out of the cities or the, you
know, the impoverished intelligentsia. Absolutely.
So he wasn't exactly destined for the barricades,
but the sources all highlight his immense early
intellectual horsepower. Yeah. That's what clearly
separated him from his roots. From the very beginning.
From the moment he was sent away for school at
age nine, he just excelled. He was especially
talented in science and mathematics, got praise
for his exceptional mind, and he was a famously
voracious reader, just absorbing everything he
could get his hands on. His father wanted him
to be an engineer, right? That was the plan.
His father intended for him to become a mechanical
engineer, and he did briefly study engineering
at Odessa University. But engineering clearly
bored him. When did that political fire truly
ignite? It started burning very quickly, around
1896 in Nikolaev. And this is another interesting
nuance. He didn't start as a Marxist. Oh, that's
interesting. He was initially affiliated with
the Narodniks. They were these agrarian socialist
populists who believed Russia's future lay with
the peasant commune. So what changed his mind?
His future first wife, Ebiata Sokolovskaya. She
was a dedicated Marxist, and she was the one
who converted him to the materialist doctrines
of scientific socialism. By early 1897, he dropped
out of his engineering studies completely to
go organize the South Russian Workers' Union
in Nikolaev. And organizing meant attracting
the inevitable attention of the Tsar's secret
police. That led almost immediately to his first
major brush with the state. That's the classic
pattern for a professional revolutionary's life,
isn't it? In January 1898, he was arrested, along
with over 200 other union members. Wow. And he
spent the next two years just waiting for his
trial in a series of prisons, Nikolaev, Kherson,
Odessa, and Moscow. These prisons were effectively
revolutionary universities for him. He's meeting
other political prisoners, reading. Exactly.
He's reading crucial texts like Lenin's The Development
of Capitalism in Russia. After the trial in 1900,
he was sentenced to four years of administrative
exile in eastern Siberia, where you really solidify
his political stance. And the drama of his escape
also marks the birth of that famous name that
stuck. It does. Urged on by Alexandra, who he'd
married in a Moscow prison and who later escaped
Siberia herself with their two young daughters,
Trotsky made his own famous escape in the summer
of 1902. The story is that he was hidden under
a load of hay on a cart. That's the one. He's
hidden in the hay. Upon escape, he needed a new
passport, so he adopted the name Trotsky, reportedly
the name of a stern jailer he'd encountered back
in the Odessa prison. That pseudonym stuck for
the rest of his life. It became his primary identity.
So he escapes Siberia, makes his way to Western
Europe, sails to London, and steps directly into
the inner circle of the fragmented Russian Marxist
movement. He arrives in London in October 1902,
and he walks, quite literally, into the heart
of Russian social democracy. He immediately joins
the editorial board of ISKR, which means The
Spark, working alongside the Titans. Georgi Plekhanov,
Lenin, Julius Martov. And he makes a name for
himself fast. Immediately. He quickly became
one of the paper's most eloquent and persuasive
writers, earning the nickname Perrault, which
means quill or pen. And the initial reception
from Lenin was, well, it was ecstatic. How impressed
was Lenin? We always hear about their later feud,
but the sources indicate Lenin saw him as a real
diamond in the rough. Oh, Lenin was deeply impressed,
which is what makes the later feud so bitter.
He referred to the 23 -year -old Trotsky as unquestionably
a man of rare abilities, saying he had conviction
and energy. He famously predicted Trotsky would
go much farther. That's high praise. It's more
than that. Lennon even proposed co -opting the
young man to the editorial board as a full fifth
member, a sign of immense political trust and
respect, especially given Trotsky's age. But
the seeds of his later tragic downfall were sown
almost immediately with that famous 1903 schism
at the second Congress of the RSDLP. This is
the critical moment. This is where personality
and ideology just collided. The Congress in London
sees the party split into the Bolsheviks and
the Mensheviks. And the conventional wisdom focuses
on the organizational difference, right? Lenin
wanting a small, disciplined party, Martov wanting
a bigger, more inclusive one. Right. Lenin wanted
the Bolsheviks to be a small, tightly disciplined
party of professional revolutionaries, while
Martov wanted the Mensheviks to be a larger,
more inclusive party that welcomed mere sympathizers.
But the source material suggests the philosophical
difference underpinning it was actually deeper.
It was about the role of the working class itself.
Exactly. The split was rooted in divergent views
on revolutionary consciousness. Lenin believed
consciousness had to be brought to the working
class by the professional party elite. Marta
favored a more spontaneous, organic development
of class consciousness within a broader, more
open party structure. And Trotsky initially sided
fiercely with the Mensheviks. He did. He viewed
Lenin's consciousness of a centralized elite
party as substitutionism, the idea that the party
was substituting itself for the working class.
He actually declared himself non -factional by
1904 and spent the next decade trying, unsuccessfully,
to reconcile the two warring groups. And this
is where that infamous personal feud with Lenin
begins, one that provides endless toxic ammunition
for Stalin later on. It became highly personalized
and astonishingly aggressive. During this period,
when Trotsky was attacking Lenin's organizational
principles, Lenin leveled some truly shocking
personal attacks against him in print and private
letters. What kind of attacks? He called Trotsky
Judas, a scoundrel, and even a swine. The intensity
of that dispute just colored their entire relationship
until they finally reunited in 1917. Trotsky
himself later admitted he was wrong to oppose
Lenin on the issue of strong, centralized party
organization. Moving on, the next major pivot
point is the 1905 revolution. This was his first
taste of real executive power, of revolutionary
governance. The massacre on Bloody Sunday in
January 1905, where the Tsarist Guard fired on
peaceful petitioners in St. Petersburg, it just
galvanized revolutionary fervor across the country.
Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in February
1905, working with underground groups. And this
was a period of intense ideological development
for him. Absolutely. While he was briefly hiding
in rural Finland, he fully articulated his theory
of permanent revolution, which was based on the
recognition that the Russian bourgeoisie was
just too weak to carry out its own revolution.
So when he returned to the capital in October,
right in the middle of these massive widespread
strikes, he encountered the Soviet. Explain to
us why the St. Petersburg Soviet of workers'
deputies was so groundbreaking and immediately
so powerful. It was a spontaneous, radical organizational
innovation. The Soviet was an elected, non -party,
mass body that represented the striking workers
of the capital. It was initially conceived by
the Mensheviks, but Trotsky just rapidly ascended
the ranks. He became the leader. He joined as
deputy, was elected vice chairman, and then after
the chairman was arrested, Trotsky took over.
This gave him direct executive and symbolic leadership
over the revolutionary working class of the Russian
capital right at the height of the 1905 uprising.
And his leadership was immediately provocative.
He issued a proclamation that directly attacked
the economic stability of the Tsarist regime.
The most famous act of the Soviet under his chairmanship
was the proclamation about Tsarist government
debts. On December 2nd, the Soviet essentially
declared the Tsarist government bankrupt. What
did it say? It said they would not allow the
repayment of such loans as had been made by the
Tsarist government when openly engaged in a war
with the entire people. This wasn't just rhetoric.
It was a profound economic challenge. It directly
jeopardized the regime's standing with international
financiers in Paris and London, and it triggered
the final violent crackdown. Which was swift.
The very next day. December 3, 1905, government
troops arrested the Soviet deputies en masse.
Trotsky was convicted of sedition and sentenced
to indefinite Siberian exile, which led to his
dramatic second escape in January 1907. So, exiled
again, he spends the next decade hopping across
Europe trying to keep the fractured Marxist movement
alive, right up until the outbreak of World War
I. He first moved to Vienna in Austria -Hungary
in 1907. There, he launched his own biweekly
Russian -language social democratic paper called
Pravda, which means truth. It was popular, non
-factional, and successfully smuggled into Russia.
And this detail is crucial because in 1912, the
Bolsheviks, under Lenin, deliberately usurped
the name. They did. They launched their own paper,
also called Pravda, instantly creating another
deep point of friction and resentment with Trotsky
that Stalin could and would later weaponize.
The sources also mention his failed attempt to
reconcile the factions in 1912. Yes, the August
block of 1912 was his big comprehensive effort
to unify the warring Bolshevik and Menshevik
factions. But it was ultimately unsuccessful.
He just... deeply underestimated Lenin's absolute
commitment to organizational separation and the
bloc collapsed quickly. And then the war breaks
out. When World War I broke out in 1914, he was
forced to flee Vienna for neutral Switzerland.
The war also split the RSDLP between defeatists
like Lenin and Trotsky, who opposed the imperialist
war, and defensists like Plekhanov, who supported
their nation's war efforts. His outspoken internationalist
anti -war stance made him a dangerous figure
for every European government. It ultimately
led him all the way to the U .S. Right. He worked
as a war correspondent in France, publishing
a paper called Nachoslovo, our word, in Paris.
But he was deported in September 1916 for his
anti -war activities, first to Spain and then
unwillingly to the United States. He was in the
Bronx. He lived briefly in the Bronx, working
for the socialist newspaper Novumir. He was there
when the February Revolution of 1917 deposed
the Tsar, and he left immediately to go back.
And his journey back to Russia provided that
famous anecdote, the Canadian Detour. The sources
describe his month -long detention at the Amherst
internment camp in Nova Scotia. It's an incredible
story that just speaks to his relentless, almost
manic charismatic energy. His ship, the SS Christiani
of Shored, was intercepted by the Royal Navy.
The British detained him as a German -aligned
troublemaker. And what does he do in the camp?
He immediately starts agitating. He's organizing
among the workers and sailors who were part of
the 800 German inmates. He famously described
his month there as one continual mass meeting.
The audacity is remarkable. He's organizing the
enemy aliens against their captors? He was. And
the sources say his political speeches were so
effective that they sometimes angered the German
inmates themselves, many of whom were conservative
merchants and officers who hated socialism. They
complained to the camp commander about the Russian
agitator. How did he get out? He was only released
after intense diplomatic pressure from the newly
formed Petrograd Soviet, which demanded the freedom
of a fellow Russian citizen. It was a perfect
demonstration of his powerful oratory skills
in action. He finally arrived back in Petrograd
in May 1917. The crucial step now was his long
-awaited alignment with the Bolsheviks. Yes.
Upon arrival, he joined the Mezryansi, an organization
of non -factional socialists, which formally
merged with the Bolsheviks in August 1917. His
political influence just exploded. He's arrested,
released. Right. After the failed July Days uprising,
he was briefly arrested, but his release coincided
with the failed Kornilov counter -revolutionary
uprising. And by October 1917, he was once again
elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, which
perfectly positioned him to direct the armed
uprising that was about to launch the Bolsheviks
into power. And this is where we find the ultimate
historical endorsement. confirming his centrality
to the revolution's success, an endorsement that
naturally was later completely erased by the
author himself. The source material provides
a deeply revealing quote from Joseph Stalin of
all people. It was published in Pravda on November
6th, 1918, a year after the seizure of power.
What did Stalin say? He said all practical work
in connection with the organization 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 organized. That is the ultimate
acknowledgement. It confirms that he was, at
that critical moment, unquestionably the second
most powerful and most strategically vital man
after Lenin. The fact that passage was quickly
expunged from later editions of Stalin's works
just underscores the systematic historical rewriting
that was about to come. So the success of the
October Revolution launches Trotsky into executive
power. And his first role was pure revolutionary
provocation on the world stage. As the People's
Commissar for Foreign Affairs, his first cabinet
post, he literally blew up the established diplomatic
world order. His first critical act was publishing
the Triple Entente secret treaties, including
the Sykes -Picot Agreement on November 23rd,
1917. These documents revealed the imperialist
plans of Britain and France to carve up territories
after the war. Secret agreements that totally
contradicted the democratic rhetoric of the Allied
powers. Exactly. This revelation caused immense
embarrassment. It destabilized Allied governments
and it achieved a massive, instantaneous propaganda
victory for the Bolsheviks. Trotsky famously
declared that upon taking the post, he would
issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the
peoples of the world and then shut up shop. But
his diplomatic career quickly led straight into
the biggest immediate crisis facing the newborn
Soviet state, the Treaty of Brest -Litovsk, negotiating
peace with the Central Powers, Germany and Austria
-Hungary. The military situation was desperate.
The old Russian army had just dissolved and the
German military was advancing almost unopposed.
This created a massive internal policy conflict
within the Bolshevik Central Committee. It was
a struggle between three distinct positions.
Okay, let's lay out those three positions clearly
because it really defines the early ideological
fault lines. Okay. First, you had Lenin. He prioritized
survival and immediate peace at almost any cost,
recognizing the military impotence of the new
state. Pragmatism above all. Second, you had
the left communists led by Nikolai Bukharin.
They were furious at the thought of peace. They
advocated for a revolutionary war, believing
the revolution had to be exported immediately
and that no peace was possible with capitalist
empires. They were willing to sacrifice the Soviet
state for the purity of the global revolution.
And then Trotsky carved out his own famous impossible
to maintain middle path, the strategy of no war,
no peace. It was strategically brilliant. if
ultimately doomed. Trotsky understood that the
old army couldn't fight, but he also agreed with
the left communists that signing this devastatingly
humiliating peace treaty would demoralize the
masses. And revive suspicions of Bolshevik German
collusion. Right. So his proposal was to announce
the termination of the war and demobilization
of the army without actually signing the treaty.
The idea was to put the fate of occupied territories
like Poland and the Baltic provinces on the conscience
of the German and Austrian working people. He
was gambling that Germany was too internally
unstable to resume fighting. It was a gamble
he lost, decisively proving Lenin right about
the need for immediate painful peace. Unfortunately,
yes. Germany resumed military operations on February
18, 1918. Their detachments easily routed the
disorganized Red Guard forces. And though Trotsky
personally abstained from the final Central Committee
vote, his policy had failed in spectacular fashion.
So Lenin's position prevailed. It did. Lenin's
position to accept the harsher German terms prevailed
by a vote of seven to four. Because Trotsky was
so closely associated with no war, no peace,
he resigned as commissar for foreign affairs
in March 1918, just before the treaty was signed.
That probably saved his political career, even
if it wounded his pride. And this diplomatic
failure led directly to his greatest historical
contribution. building and commanding the Red
Aki. He became People's Commissar of Army and
Navy Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary
Military Council. This was Trotsky's monumental,
career -defining role. The key challenge was
that the Civil War, which was about to explode
on 16 fronts against organized white armies,
Cossacks, and foreign interventionists, it couldn't
be won with just revolutionary enthusiasm and
elected officers. The opposition he faced from
within his own party was fierce. Oh, absolutely.
The existing Bolshevik military leadership, including
the former Defense Commissar Nikolai Podvoisky,
vehemently protested his appointment and resigned.
They believe the Red Army should only consist
of dedicated revolutionaries, rely on propaganda,
and have elected officers. But Trotsky realized
those ideals were a recipe for military annihilation.
He just shredded them in favor of ruthless efficiency
and military necessity. Precisely. He was facing
professional armies. He understood that in that
moment, ideology was secondary to organization.
The Red Army swelled from under 300 ,000 in May
1918 to 3 million by mid -1919. And this expansion
relied on controversial draconian methods. Mass
conscription, fierce discipline backed by summary
execution for desertion, and mandatory reliance
on military specialists, some 50 ,000 former
czarist officers. Using czarist officers was
pragmatic, but it must have been revolutionary
heresy to the hardliners. How did the political
commissar system, which sounds like an awkward
compromise, actually work to integrate this expertise?
Was it just fear, or did it effectively integrate
their skills? It was a fascinating blend of pragmatism
and political control. The Tsarist officers were
supervised 247 by political commissars who had
to co -sign all of their orders. This gave the
specialists the necessary technical freedom to
command while the commissars ensured their loyalty
to the Soviet cause. And Trotsky defended this.
He did. He later argued he had no other bricks
to build the army, as Lenin later agreed. This
system was constantly challenged by Bolshevik
hardliners who formed the military opposition
in 1918 -1919. They viewed it as a total betrayal
of revolutionary principle. He also deployed
extremely controversial measures like hostage
taking to prevent defections measures that mirror
the methods of his future executioner. The sources
confirm this. He authorized holding relatives
of ex -Saurus officials in the Red Army hostage
to deter betrayal, particularly on the Eastern
Front. While this dark practice was deployed
by both red and white armies, Trotsky later defended
it. What was his justification? He argued that
no families of betraying ex -officials were actually
executed and that such draconian deterrence,
if adopted earlier, would have reduced overall
Civil War casualties by shortening the conflict.
He was operating on a purely utilitarian calculation
of maximum efficiency in a total war scenario.
The Civil War period is also inextricably linked
with the Red Terror. How did Trotsky, the intellectual,
offer a justification for that period of mass
repression? The Red Terror was officially enacted
after the assassination of the Petrograd Cheka
leader, Moisei Yuritsky, the party editor, V.
Volodarsky, and the assassination attempt on
Lenin in August 1918. But the Bolsheviks also
cited early white army massacres as context.
Trotsky viewed the terror as a necessary historical
counterterror deployed to defend the revolution's
very existence. And he offered a purely utilitarian,
cold -blooded justification for it in his 1920
work Terrorism and Communism. He did. He argued
that the Red Terror was a necessary weapon deployed
against a doomed class that was fighting desperately
to survive and does not wish to perish. This
wasn't just pragmatic, it was an ideological
defense of state violence. He claimed that while
the white terror could only temporarily retard
the rise of the proletariat, the red terror would
hasten the destruction of the bourgeoisie as
a class. It really represents the hardening of
his political thought under the extreme pressure
of the Civil War. Yet, even as he was winning
the war, his internal conflicts, especially with
Stalin, were accelerating, foreshadowing the
coming succession struggle. The two clashed fiercely
in late 1918 over command appointments on the
Southern Front. This was a conflict where Stalin
showed his ruthless disregard for military specialists,
some of whom he allegedly imprisoned on a barge
and then sunk. And Trotsky won that fight. Crucially.
Yes, Trotsky succeeded in reversing Stalin's
unauthorized command decisions. A year later,
in October 1919, when General Yudinich approached
Petrograd, Lenin was prepared to abandon the
city to concentrate forces for the defense of
Moscow. Trotsky argued passionately and successfully
for defending Petrograd, prevailed in the Central
Committee, and saved the city, earning the Order
of the Red Banner for it. But his aggressive
organizing tendencies led to further clashes
in the post -war period regarding the structure
of the economy and labor. With the Civil War
winding down in late 1919, attention shifted
to the devastated economy. And what's fascinating
here is that Trotsky showed surprising economic
foresight. In early 1920, he proposed abandoning
the harsh war communism policies, specifically
grain confiscation and partially restoring the
grain market. A proposal Lenin rejected. Lenin
rejected it, only to adopt those same principles
later under the new economic policy. or NEP.
So on economic reform, Trotsky was actually ahead
of the curve. The Polish Soviet war in 1920 was
another moment of internal friction where his
caution was overruled. Yes. Lenin and others
believed the Red Army's successes meant they
could export the revolution into Europe. They
overruled Trotsky's call for a quick peace, believing
they had a revolutionary obligation to launch
an offensive to carry the revolution to Poland
and beyond. Which ended in disaster. The subsequent
devastating defeat at the Battle of Warsaw was
a massive blow, forcing them to sign a painful
peace treaty again, confirming Trotsky's earlier
strategic caution. The last great debate before
Lenin's final illness was the trade union debate,
and this highlights his most controversial authoritarian
tendencies regarding labor organization. It does.
Trotsky advocated the militarization of labor.
He argued that trade unions should be integrated
directly into the state apparatus, treating workers
essentially as soldiers of labor under strict
discipline to rebuild the economy. A deeply unpopular
policy. Very. And Lenin sharply disagreed. He
argued unions should retain some independence
as schools of communism, teaching workers state
administration and self -governance. Lenin's
view won at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921.
And finally, his instrumental role in suppressing
the Kronstadt Rebellion, an act that defined
his role as both savior and destroyer of democratic
ideals. The Kronstadt Rebellion in March 1921
saw sailors and soldiers at the naval base revolt.
They demanded democratic reforms, free elections
to the Soviets, and an end to one -party rule.
As commissar of war, Trotsky was instrumental
in ordering the successful violent suppression
of the rebellion by the Red Army. Resulting in
thousands of deaths and executions. Yes. This
was a direct, brutal confrontation between the
party and those who upheld the revolution's early
ideals. Anarchists like Emma Goldman accused
him of betraying the revolution's democratic
promise. This incredible duality really defines
his time in power, making him such a complex
historical figure. The historian Vladimir Cherniev
summarizes this dark contradiction in a very
sobering critique. Cherniev states that Trotsky
bears a great deal of responsibility both for
the victory of the Red Army and the Civil War
and for the establishment of a one -party authoritarian
state with its apparatus for ruthlessly suppressing
dissent. This includes being an ideologist and
practitioner of the Red Terror, the initiator
of forced labor camps, and promoting summary
executions. Practices that later became the standard
monstrous operating procedure under Stalin. He
created the very machinery that would later hunt
and destroy him. Exactly. Yet the sources also
stress that without Trotsky's unique ability
to blend revolutionary zeal with the pragmatic
use of military specialists and his capacity
for swift, determined action, the Bolsheviks
would almost certainly have lost this. Civil
War within a year. It's impossible to discuss
his contributions without acknowledging that
fatal contradiction. By late 1921, Trotsky stood
at the peak of his career. He was number two
in the government, a founding Politburo member,
and the hero who saved the revolution. But the
political ground was already shifting, primarily
because of Lenin's failing health, which began
this dangerous vacuum of power. Lenin suffered
his first stroke in May 1922, and his health
just slowly declined until his death in January
1924. This deterioration created a political
vacuum that was filled not by revolutionary merit,
but by administrative maneuvering and conspiracy.
That's the critical dynamic. Joseph Stalin, who
had just been elevated to the brand new administrative
position of Central Committee General Secretary
in April 1922, a position nobody yet understood
to be the fulcrum of power, immediately formed
a triumvirate. The Troika. The Troika. Yeah.
With Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. And their
explicit, singular mission was to prevent Trotsky,
who was widely considered Lenin's heir presumptive,
from succeeding him. Why was the Troika so fixated
on stopping Trotsky? Was it purely ideological
or was there deep -seated resentment? It was
a mixture of both. Trotsky was immensely popular
with the younger generation and the Red Army,
but he was disliked by many old Bolsheviks for
his abrasive personality, his perceived arrogance,
and his constant non -factional maneuvering before
1917. And the Troika exploited that resentment.
They did. They used the secretariat to cut Trotsky
off from decision -making, deliberately withholding
information and scheduling Politburo meetings
when he was ill or away. But Lenin tried to intervene.
He foresaw the catastrophic danger posed by this
rising bureaucracy centered around Stalin's secretariat.
That is the pivotal missed opportunity in Soviet
history. In late 1922, Lenin began to ally strategically
with Trotsky against Stalin over crucial issues,
like preserving the foreign trade monopoly and
opposing Stalin's brutal handling of the Georgian
affair. Lenin actually wrote to Stalin about
it. He did. He wrote to Stalin stating he had
come to an arrangement with Trotsky to stand
up for my views on the trade monopoly, confirming
that he trusted Trotsky over the rest of the
leadership on key policy matters. And Lenin also
explicitly offered Trotsky the position that
might have secured his future, but Trotsky refused
it. This gets right to the core of his political
flaw. Yes. On September 11, 1922, Lenin proposed
that Trotsky should become his deputy at the
Council of People's Commissars, the Sovnorkom.
Many historians interpret this as Lenin subtly
designating Trotsky his successor as head of
government. But Trotsky categorically refused.
If Lenin had laid the political path for him,
why did Trotsky, the great strategist, fail to
execute these basic political steps? Was he too
much the theorist? to be a successful politician?
The sources offer multiple possible reasons,
all of which point to a lack of political acumen
in the context of bureaucratic infighting. One
interpretation, based on the notes of Politburo
Secretary Boris Bozinov, suggests Trotsky declined
because he feared his Jewish origins would be
exploited to fuel anti -Semitic attitudes towards
the Soviet Union. Damaging the state during a
sensitive transition. Right. Others argue it
was intellectual arrogance. He simply disdained
the mundane administrative work of running the
state, preferring to focus on intellectual debates
and military strategy. Whatever the specific
motivation, the historian Mark McCauley noted
it was lamentable lack of political judgment
at the crucial moment. Then came the famous testament,
which the Troika successfully suppressed after
Lenin's death in January 1924. In January 1923,
days before his final stroke, Lenin dictated
an amendment to his testament. It recommended
Stalin's removal as general secretary due to
his rudeness and excessive power, while also
mildly criticizing Trotsky for excessive self
-assurance. And Lenin asked Trotsky to act. He
asked Trotsky to denounce Stalin's great Russian
nationalistic campaign at the upcoming 12th Party
Congress. So why did Trotsky, armed with Lenin's
direct support and the potentially explosive
testament, remain silent at the 12th Party Congress?
This is perhaps his greatest tactical failure.
At the Congress in April 1923, Trotsky did not
raise the issue of the testament or directly
confront the Troika. He later claimed he refused
to deliver a report because it seemed to me equivalent
to announcing my candidacy for the role of Lenin's
successor at a time when Lenin was fighting a
grave illness, which he viewed as inappropriate.
This extreme political caution, or perhaps his
characteristic intellectual disdain for petty
factional fighting, allowed the Troika to win.
It did. They controlled the Congress delegates,
adopted vague resolutions on democracy that were
never implemented, and effectively sealed their
control over the party apparatus. After Lenin's
death in January 1924 and the Troika's successful
suppression of the Testament, Trotsky finally
launched his formal offensive, creating the left
opposition. His offensive began in mid -1923,
starked by widespread economic strikes. In October
1923, Trotsky wrote a sharp letter to the Central
Committee, followed by the broader Declaration
of 46. These documents condemned the rise of
the secretarial hierarchy and the total loss
of internal party democracy. A critique that
was politically prophetic. Absolutely. But the
apparatus, controlled by Stalin's secretariat,
immediately fought back, not on policy, but by
inventing the label Trotskyism. They manufactured
Trotskyism. weaponizing it to mean petty bourgeois
deviation. And in October 1924, Trotsky gave
them fresh ammunition by publishing Lessons of
October, an article summarizing the 1917 revolution.
Crucially, this piece publicly attacked Zinoviev
and Kamenev for their 1917 hesitation to seize
power. This ignited the literary discussion.
It did. The Troika countered by resurrecting
all of Trotsky's pre -1917 disagreements with
Lenin. painting him as a perpetual outsider and
a disloyal Bolshevik. The political damage was
immediate and devastating, resulting in his total
political castration. The Troika used the debate
to marginalize him completely. Although Stalin
played the moderate by preventing his expulsion,
Trotsky was forced to resign his crucial military
posts as People's Commissar of Army and Fleet
Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military
Council in January 1925. His control over the
military, his strongest institutional base, was
gone and the political landscape shifted again
as that alliance of convenience fractured the
troika only lasted as long as trotsky was the
common enemy Once he was defanged, Stalin turned
on Zinoviev and Kamenev, defeating them. They
were dubbed the new opposition. Right. And realizing
their fatal error, they soon gravitated back
toward Trotsky's followers, forming the United
Opposition in early 1926. So the fight was no
longer just about bureaucracy. It was now centered
on the absolute ideological conflict that would
define the global left for decades. Permanent
revolution versus socialism in one country. This
was the defining... irreconcilable clash. Trotsky's
theory of permanent revolution held that for
the revolution to survive in a backward country
like Russia, it must spread internationally to
advanced capitalist countries for support. And
Stalin's theory rejected that. Completely. Stalin's
emerging theory of socialism in one country argued
that the USSR could achieve true socialism independently,
focusing inward on consolidation. This was enormously
appealing to the Soviet bureaucracy, who just
wanted stability and national power. The true
tragic test of these opposing strategies played
out in China. The Chinese revolution became the
ideological demarcation line, and the sources
show how clear the warnings were. Trotsky argued
that the small Chinese Communist Party must maintain
class independence from the Kuomintang, the KMT.
But Stalin insisted they merge. He insisted they
merge and submit to the KMT leadership, believing
the KMT leader Chiang Kai -shek was the only
one capable of defeating the imperialists. Stalin
infamously insisted they should use Chiang's
right -wing KMT until they were squeezed for
all usefulness like a lemon before being discarded.
But the lemon squeezed back first, proving Trotsky
completely and tragically right. In April 1927,
Chiang Kai -shek reversed the tables in the Shanghai
Massacre, brutally massacring the communists,
killing thousands. This ideological disaster
deeply discredited Stalin's foreign policy. But
by then, Stalin was so entrenched controlling
the entire party apparatus that he could just
crush the internal opposition anyway, ignoring
the validation of Trotsky's warnings. The final
nail in the political coffin was the opposition's
ill -fated attempt to take their arguments out
of the party committee rooms and onto the streets.
On the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution
in November 1927, the opposition held a street
demonstration in Moscow against Stalin's government.
This public challenge was instantly dispersed
and condemned as factionalism. And he was expelled
from the party. Shortly after. He gave his last
public speech in the Soviet Union at his friend
Adolf Joff's funeral later that month, after
Joff committed suicide in protest. His exile
started internally before moving abroad. He was
exiled to Alma -Ada, Kazakhstan, in January 1928
with his wife and eldest son Lev. From this internal
exile, he continued to write and organize. A
year later, the decision was made to deport him
entirely from the Soviet Union to Turkey in February
1929. We have to pause here to acknowledge the
horrifying long -term cost of the struggle, particularly
the fate of his family and the purges that followed.
Stalin's cruelty wasn't limited to politics.
It extended to biological annihilation. The tragedy
is profound, and the sources emphasize this systematic
targeted cruelty. Almost all of the 18 close
relatives Trotsky left behind in the Soviet Union
faced repression. His children and other relatives
were subjected to torture and execution in the
purges. Can you tell us more about the fate of
his sons Lev and Sergo? His eldest son, Lev Sadov,
was a committed revolutionary and a key political
activist. He died under mysterious circumstances
in Paris in 1938, almost certainly assassinated
by NKVD agents. His younger son, Sergei Sadov,
was a scientist, an engineer, and he explicitly
rejected political life. But even his non -political
status offered no protection. Not at all. Sergei
was arrested in 1937 and executed, as was Trotsky's
sister, Olga Kameneva. This wasn't random violence.
It was a targeted, systematic campaign to erase
not just his ideas, but his entire biological
existence and any vestige of a shared personal
past within the Soviet state. It just underscores
the utter ruthlessness of Stalin's betrayal.
So Trotsky is deported to Turkey in 1929, now
a stateless global pariah, spending the last
decade of his life physically escaping Stalin
while intellectually dismantling him from exile.
His first refuge was Buyukata, or Prinkipo, an
island near Istanbul. He lived in the Yonaros
mansion, heavily guarded and under surveillance,
but safe from immediate execution. This was an
incredibly productive period for him. This is
where he wrote his major works. It was. He wrote
prolifically, including his monumental history
of the Russian Revolution and his autobiography.
Critically, in 1932, he and his family officially
lost their Soviet citizenship. He was completely
stateless, entirely dependent on the political
goodwill of foreign powers. And that statelessness
led to four years of precarious European asylum
with every government eager to get rid of him
due to relentless political pressure from both
local fascists and the Soviet regime. Every asylum
granted was conditional and brief. In 1933, he
found temporary asylum in France, but was restricted
from living in Paris and placed under constant
police surveillance. His situation became absolutely
untenable after the Franco Soviet Treaty of Mutual
Assistance in 1935. He was officially told he
was no longer welcome. as the French sought to
appease Stalin. And the next stop, Norway, proved
to be one of the most cynically frustrating experiences
of his entire life. In 1935, he was granted asylum
in Norway, becoming a guest of Conrad Knudsen
near Honefoss. But when the infamous Moscow show
trials began in the summer of 1936, accusing
him of these massive, complex conspiracies, the
Norwegian labor government grew terrified of
Soviet pressure. They cracked down on him. Following
a fascist burglary on his house, police forced
Trotsky to sign new conditions. No writing on
current politics. No interviews. All correspondence
inspected. It's incredible to think the man who
directed the civil war was effectively imprisoned
by a supposedly socialist government just because
Moscow snapped its fingers. What did the sources
say about the psychological impact of that forced
silence? He was under effective house arrest,
confined indoors 22 hours a day. desperately
prevented from protesting the trials where his
former comrades, Zinoviev and Kamenev, were confessing
to plotting with him to kill Stalin. He later
called this period of enforced silence and political
persecution by the Norwegian socialist government
the worst persecution he had ever experienced.
Worse than his Siberian exiles. Worse than Siberia.
By late 1936, the Norwegian government deported
him again, and he arrived in Mexico in January
1937. Welcome by President Lazaro Cardenas. Mexico
gave him a crucial period of intellectual safety
and a famously colorful social life with the
revolutionary art community. He and Natalia first
lived at La Casa Azul, the home of painters Frida
Kahlo and Diego Rivera, where Trotsky also had
a brief, notorious affair with Kahlo. He later
broke with Rivera over political disagreements
and moved to his final fortified residence on
Avenida Viena in Coyoacan. And he collaborated
with other artists there. He famously collaborated
with Andre Breton and Rivera on the Manifesto
for an Independent Revolutionary Art in 1938,
advocating fiercely for artistic freedom outside
of both capitalist and Stalinist constraints.
But the Moscow show trials were raging, inventing
these elaborate conspiracies against him. How
did he fight back from exile against the enormous
propaganda machine of the Soviet state? The trials
saw old Bolsheviks confess to plotting to kill
Stalin with Trotsky. He was sentenced to death
in absentia. To combat this fabrication, he cooperated
with an independent commission of inquiry chaired
by the famous American philosopher John Dewey.
The Dewey Commission? Yes. The Dewey Commission
rigorously investigated the charges, traveled
to Mexico, and published its findings in the
book Not Guilty, completely exonerating Trotsky
and exposing the trials as fabrications extracted
by torture. That international independent validation
must have been critical for the anti -Stalinist
movement. I appreciate the sources highlighting
his defiant opening statement to the commission.
He delivered a defiant address titled, I stake
my life, reaffirming his lifelong commitment
to true socialism. Whoever seeks physical comfort
and spiritual calm, let him step aside. But all
those for whom the word socialism is not a hollow
sound, forward. That conviction, in the face
of immense danger, is key to his legacy. And
this conviction led directly to his final great
organizational effort, the founding of the Fourth
International. By mid -1933, after the Nazis
seized power in Germany, Trotsky judged the Communist
International, the Comintern, to be dead. It
had failed utterly to rally the German working
class against Hitler, and had just become a tool
of Stalin's foreign policy. So in 1938, he decided
to found the Fourth International as a revolutionary
internationalist alternative. This move cemented
his ideological legacy. It did, but it also underscored
his relentless, uncompromising commitment to
factional organization, even utter isolation.
Just months before his death, under the shadow
of persistent threats, he left us his final,
incredibly moving political and personal statement.
His testament, written in February 1940 because
he feared a cerebral hemorrhage due to high blood
pressure, is profoundly human. It reaffirmed
his unshaken faith in a communist future, forcefully
denied Stalin's accusations of betrayal and thanked
his wife, Natalia Sadova, describing her as an
inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity and
tenderness. And his final words were about life
itself. His final poignant words stated, life
is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse
it of all evil, oppression and violence and enjoy
it to the full. The attempts on his life started
almost immediately after that. culminating in
one of the most infamous murders in history.
There was a brazen failed attempt in May 1940,
led by NKVD agents, including the muralist David
Alfaro Siqueiros. They sprayed his house with
machine gun fire. Trotsky survived, though his
14 -year -old grandson was shot in the foot.
He recognized the gravity and wrote, And the
successful attack in August 1940 is famous, but
the weapon is frequently misidentified. On August
20, 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader, having infiltrated
Trotsky's household under the guise of being
a friendly Belgian journalist, attacked him in
his study. The sources are precise. Mercator
used a mountaineering ice axe, a specialized
tool used for cutting steps and holds on ice,
not the commonly cited ice pick. So it was an
ice axe, not an ice pick. Correct. The flat,
wide adds of the axe struck his head, fracturing
his parietal bone and penetrating seven centimeters
into his brain. It's chilling that even after
such a catastrophic injury, he fought back and
insisted on his killer being kept alive. Witnesses
reported Trotsky spat on Mercator, struggled
fiercely, and even broke Mercator's hand during
the attack. Even in agony, he insisted his bodyguards
not kill the assassin, but keep him alive so
he could answer questions and expose the plot.
He died the next day. He died the next day at
age 60 from blood loss and shock. Mercator spent
20 years in a Mexican prison. And the absolute
confirmation of Stalin's direct responsibility
came decades later. Yes. Mercator was initially
denied any public award by the USSR. But upon
his release and arrival in the Soviet Union in
1961, Leonid Brezhnev personally signed a decree
awarding Mercator the title Hero of the Soviet
Union for the Special Deed, confirming that the
Kremlin orchestrated the assassination and celebrated
it as a state victory. Here's where it gets really
interesting. Let's shift to the intellectual
legacy he left behind, which continues to influence
the left today. What are the key takeaways for
you, the learner, from this deep dive into his
theoretical contributions? First and foremost
is the concept of permanent revolution. We discussed
it conceptually, but the takeaway is clear. In
countries with underdeveloped capitalism, the
working class must seize power, rapidly implement
socialist measures, and critically link their
struggle to the international revolution. The
revolution cannot be completed or sustained nationally.
It must spread or it will succumb to internal
and external pressures. This was the fundamental
rebuttal to Stalin's nationalized insular concept
of social. Exactly. Second is his definitive
and increasingly prescient critique of the Soviet
system articulated in his most important book.
The Revolution Betrayed. Right. In that book.
From 1936, he offered a devastating assessment
of the USSR. He argued that the Soviet Union
had become a degenerated worker state dominated
by an undemocratic, parasitical bureaucracy that
betrayed the revolution's promise of workers'
democracy. And he predicted its collapse. He
predicted that this bureaucratic state would
either be overthrown by a political revolution
establishing workers' democracy or, absent that,
degenerate into a capitalist class state. A view
many scholars found astonishingly prescient of
the U .S .A.'s eventual collapse after 1989.
His economic thinking, despite his loss of power,
was also highly influential, even on Stalin's
policy decisions. Trotsky was an early and consistent
advocate for strong economic planning and accelerated
industrialization as early as 1923. He proposed
joint reports to the Central Committee to strengthen
Gauss' plan and introduce a national plan to
catch up to the West. But... his approach was
different from Stalin's. Very different. His
later proposals countered Stalin's brutal forced
collectivization by emphasizing that successful
planning required Soviet democracy, right of
criticism, free elections, internal party democracy,
which he insisted would yield higher economic
successes than the bureaucratic terror -driven
approach. It is now scholarly consensus that
Stalin basically appropriated the left opposition's
position on accelerated industrialization, even
if he implemented it with characteristic brutality.
And finally, his strategic view on countering
fascism proved heartbreakingly correct in the
1930s. His strategy was the united front. Revolutionaries
and reformists must temporarily unite in a common
struggle to mobilize workers against fascism.
He strongly criticized the Comintern's shifting
policy under Stalin, which forced German communists
to treat the Social Democrats as social fascists.
Which divided the German working class. It did.
And the failure of the Comintern to forge a united
front in Germany is widely judged to have tragically
facilitated Hitler's rise to power, a devastating
historical validation of Trotsky's warnings.
Looking back, Trotsky is a study in historical
duality. He was the revolutionary hero. the unparalleled
orator and writer, the general who forged the
Red Army and won the Civil War. And yet simultaneously,
he was the intellectual who articulated the most
comprehensive critique of Stalinism and the anti
-Stalinist last entire program. He was literally
written out of history by Stalin's machine, becoming
a non -person whose name could not be spoken.
He was completely erased under Stalin. His works
were banned in the USSR until 1987 under Gorbachev's
glasnost. It wasn't until 2001 that the General
Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation
officially rehabilitated him. That historical
erasure was a deliberate campaign. Oh, it was
a deliberate attempt by Stalin to remove his
legacy, which required the virtually unlimited
resources of the Soviet regime and the ruthless
extermination of every single person associated
with his name. But the physical traces of his
life endures globally, a testament to his intellectual
struggle. His archive, which he sold just before
his assassination, is now housed at Harvard University.
It occupies 65 feet of shelf space. a gold mine
for historians. And his preserved final home
in Coyoacan, Mexico City, where he died, remains
the Leon Trotsky House Museum, a stark moving
monument to his final defiant years. So what
does this all mean for us? We've seen a man with
undeniable brilliance, a military genius and
an intellectual powerhouse who failed spectacularly
at the simple political maneuvering required
to succeed Lenin. The sources repeatedly hint
at a critical flaw. The historical reputation
is split. There's immense praise for his organizational
skills and intellectual foresight, mixed with
strong criticism for his early authoritarian
practices that paved the way for Stalin's terror.
But the fundamental tragedy lies in the political
arena. He was a brilliant theorist who seemed
blind to the machinery of political power once
the revolution became institutionalized. So here
is a final provocative thought for you to explore.
based on the material we've covered today if
trotsky's personal refusal to accept the deputy
premier role in 1922 and his subsequent hesitation
to directly challenge stalin armed with lenin's
testament at the 12th congress in 1923 ultimately
enabled stalin's ascent To what extent can an
individual's personality flaws, such as intellectual
arrogance or a fatal misreading of the changing
political climate doom, even the most theoretically
sound political movement? Is the greatest visionary
often the worst politician? Think about that
as you reflect on this deep dive into the life
and fate of Leon Trotsky. We hope you feel a
little better informed.