Trotsky: A Brief Biography
Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on November 7, 1879 (Gregorian calendar) in Yanovka in the Ukraine. Assassinated August 20, 1940 near Mexico City.
His parents David and Anna Bronstein were farmers. He was one of five children--two of whom died in infancy. At the age of eight he was sent to school in Odessa. He briefly attended the University of Odessa, and in 1896 he found socialism and Marxism.
In early 1898 he was arrested and sentenced to prison and Siberian exile. While in exile he married his fellow socialist Aleksandra Sokolovskaya: they had two daughters. In 1902 he escaped Siberia (without his family) with a forged passport in the name of "Trotsky"--the name of one of his jailers in Odessa--which he used ever after. He settled in London, where he joined Lenin and the other Russian socialists working on the revolutionary newspaper Spark--Iskra. In Paris he met and married his second wife, Natalya Sedova: they had two sons, Lev and Sergei.
Trotsky refused to follow Lenin when Lenin split the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party at its second congress in 1903. Lenin and his "majority" (bolshevik) faction insisted on the necessity of violent revolution. Trotsky joined the "minority" (menshevik) faction which advocated a democratic approach to socialism.
When the Russian Revolution of 1905 broke out, Trotsky swiftly went to St. Petersburg, where he became a leader of the St. Petersburg Council (soviet) of Workers' Deputies. After the Czar regained control he was jailed and exiled. In 1907 he once again escaped from exile, and settled in Vienna. When World War I began, Trotsky moved first to Switzerland and then to Paris. He denounced the war as a capitalists' war--and thus got expelled from both France and Spain. In January 1917 he and his family reached New York City. When he learned of the February deposition of Czar Nicholas II, he sailed for Russia, reaching St. Petersburg--the name of which had been changed to Petrograd--in May 1917.
After a failed uprising in July, Trotsky was arrested by Aleksandr Kerensky's liberal provision government. In August Lenin admitted Trotsky to his Bolshevik Party, and named him to the Boshevik Central Committee. Trotsky took the lead in the November 6-7 1917 coup that gave the Bolshevik Party control of Petrograd. He organized the forces that defeated Kerensky's attempt to retake the capital at Pulkovo on November 13. When the Bolshevik Party formed a government, Trotsky was foreign minister--commissar for foreign affairs.
Trotsky's first mission was to implement the Bolshevik promise of immediate peace by calling for armistice negotiations with Germany and Austria. In mid-December peace talks between the new Russian government and the central powers began in the Polish-Russian city of Brest-Litovsk. The peace talks broke down, and the German army resumed its advance into Russia in February 1918. Lenin argued for acceptance of the harsh German terms; Trotsky and his followers abstained from the vote authorizing Lenin to conclude the peace.
After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky's portfolio was shuffled to commissar for war: he was assigned the task of building a Red Army to defend the Bolshevik regime against the imminent threat of civil war. Trotsky focused on building a small, disciplined, professional army. He was successful: the newly-formed red Army turned back attacks by "White" forces in 1918 and 1919. During the civil war Trotsky emerged as the number-two man in the regime. He wrote the initial manifesto of the Comintern--the organization that was to coordinate Communist uprisings and agitation outside of Russia. But he lacked the bureaucratic and coalition-building skills necessary to win broad support in the party.
In March 1921 Lenin's regime faced its final test. Rank-and-file members of the party agitated for more internal democracy. The naval garrison at Kronstadt outside of Petrograd rebelled.
Edmund Wilson on Leon Trotsky (from To the Finland Station (New York: Doubleday, 1940), pp. 435-437:
[T]here has been... no other first-rate Marxist for whom the Marxist conception of History, derived from the Hegelian Idea, plays so frankly teleological a role as it does in the work of Trotsky. Here are some references.... "If the prince was not succeeding in peacefully regenerating the country, he was accomplishing with emarkable effectiveness the task of a more general order for which history had placed him at the head of the government: the destruction of the political illusions and the prejudices of the middle class." "History used the fantastic plan of Gapon for the purpose of arriving at its ends."...
History, then, with its dialectical Trinity, had chosen Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky to disillusion the middle class, had propounded revolutionary conclusions which it had compelled Father Gapon to bless.... These statements make no sense whatever unless one substitutes for the words history and dialectic of history the words Providence and God....
What it may mean in moments of action to feel History towering at one's elbow with her avenging sword in her hand is shown in the remarkable scene at the first congress of the Soviet dictatorship after the success of the October insurrection of 1917, when Trotsky, with the contempt and indignation of a prophet, read Martov and his followers out of a meeting. "You are pitiful isolated individuals," he cried at the height of the Bolshevik triumph. "You are bankrupt; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on--into the garbage-pile of history!"
These words are worth pondering for the light they throw on the course of Marxist politics and thought. Observe that the merging of yourself with the onrush of the current of history is to save you from the ignoble fate of being a "pitiful, isolated individual"; and that the failure so to merge yourelf will relegate you to the garbage-pile of history, where you can presumably be of no more use.
Today, though we may agree with the Bolsheviks that Martov was no man of action, his croakings over the course they had adopted seem to us full of far-sighted intelligence. He pointed out that procliaming a socialist regime in conditions different from those contemplated by Marx would not realize the results that Marx expected; that Marx and Engels had usually described the dictatorship of the proletariat as having the form, for the new dominant class, of a democratic republic, with universal suffrage and the popular recall of officials; that the slogan "All power to the Soviets" had never really meant what it said and had soon been exchanged by Lenin for "All power to the Bolshevik Party."
There sometimes can turn out to be valuable objects cast away in the garbage-pile of history--things that have to be retrieved later on. From the point of view of the Stalinist Soviet Union, that is where Trotsky himself is today; and he might well discard his earlier assumption that an isolated individual must needs be "pitiful" for the conviction of Dr. Stockman in Ibsen's Enemy of the People that "the strongest man is he who stands most alone."
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