Leon Trotsky was born with the name Lev Davidovich Bronstein on November 7, 1879 to Russified Jewish parents. When he was seventeen, Trotsky joined a circle of Mykolayiv Populists, but he soon converted to Marxism which influenced him later to become a Social-Democrat. After spending some time in Odessa University, Trotsky returned home and in 1897 he organized the Southern Russian Workers Union. For this he was arrested, jailed, and exiled. After escaping from Siberian exile in 1902, he fled to Europe and adopted the name, Trotsky. While in Europe he met V.I. Lenin, L. Martov, Georgy Plekhanov, and other Russian Social-Democrats, who where at that time, publishing Iskra (The Spark). Trotsky was a great writer and speaker, and quickly gained power within the party.
At the Second Congress in 1903, Trotsky opposed Lenin and the Bolsheviks and sided with the Mensheviks (the party to rule Russia before the Bolsheviks). Then in 1905, Trotsky returned to Russia to participate in the revolution, where he chaired the Saint Petersburg Soviet of Workers Deputies. He was again jailed in 1905 and later exiled to Siberia, this time he used his time to reconsider the paradoxes of revolution, and to write his thoughts in two books, 1905 and Results and Prospects.
In 1907 he escaped from Siberia and then spent ten years defending his ideas and made a trip to New York City, where he wrote for a Russian newspaper. The March Revolution of 1917 caught him by surprise, where upon he left the United States and traveled back to Russia by May. He assumed leadership of the independent left Social-Democratic Interdistrict Group, and joined the Petrograd Soviet (St. Petersburg was re-named). Within weeks, Trotsky gained enormous popularity as an agitator for the Soviet left. In July, he was convinced by Lenin to join the Bolshevik party and he was then elected to its Central Committee.
As a Bolshevik, Trotsky was elected chairman of the Soviet. With this new chairmanship he rallied support for the needed uprising against the Mensheviks. Lenin at this point was forced into hiding and Trotsky became the general in charge. As general, Trotsky successfully led the workers and soldiers in the November revolution, which led the revolution to the dawning of a new government.
After the revolution, Trotsky became Commissar of Foreign Affairs and negotiated a peace treaty with Germany. Leon Trotsky is also responsible for creating, inspiring, and directing the Red Army that won the civil war and saved the Revolution. Trotsky was second only to Lenin in the Politburo. He supported some of Lenin's ideals, but he had his own plans for industrializing Russia. When Lenin suffered a stroke in May 1922, Trotsky was in no position to take over and he was outmaneuvered by the troika of Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, and Stalin.
In 1925 the troika removed Trotsky from the Commissariat of War, in 1926 they expelled him from the Politburo; and in 1928 Stalin exiled him to Central Asia, and in 1929 expelled him from the USSR. Trotsky then went from place to place in order to find a safe place to criticize Stalinist Russia. In Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico he published numerous works, including: My Life (1930), an unmatched History of The Russian Revolution (3 vol., 1931-33), and The Revolution Betrayed (1937). Trotsky was assassinated with an ice pick by a Stalinist agent in 1940.
Leon Trotsky was not just part of the Russian Revolution, he was a major strategist and the brains behind the Red Army. The Russian Revolution was not possible without the Red Army and Trotsky was the creator. But it wasn't just the Red Army, he led the Revolution because Lenin was in hiding. Trotsky was a revolutionary figure, but not a successful one. While he wanted the workers and the educated to take charge in the new government, Lenin and Stalin wanted to rule with an elite while they enforced law with the military. In the end, Trotsky was killed by the leader of a new government, that he helped create.
Back To Collage