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who was leon trotsky?
The essay below was written by Kwame M.A. Somburu of Socialist Action.
The following quotes are from one of history’s greatest revolutionaries - Leon Trotsky. The first,
he made as a twenty year old revolutionary. The second, at sixty-one, shortly before his
brutal assassination in August 1940, on the orders of Joseph Stalin (dictator of the former
Soviet Union):
“As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant
future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of
his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and
happiness!” At the spectacle of blood and oppression which the 20th century had opened
he exclaimed: “You - you are only the present.”
“But whatever may be the circumstances of my death, I shall die with unshaken faith in
the Communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such
power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion . . . I can see the bright green strip
of grass beneath the all and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere.
Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and
violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
These are quotes from Trotsky’s writings on South Africa in 1935.
“We must accept decisively and without any reservation the complete and unconditional
right of the blacks to independence . . . The proletarian revolutionaries must never forget
the right of the oppressed nationalities to self-determination, including full separation,
and the duty of the proletariat of the oppressing nation to defend this right with arms if
necessary. . . “
Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac Deutscher, said this about him:
“Trotsky’s attempt to arouse the working class of Germany to the danger that threatened
it was his greatest political deed in exile. Like no one else, and much earlier than
anyone, he grasped the destructive delirium with which National Socialism (Fascism)
was to burst upon the world. His commentaries on the German situation, written
between 1930 and 1933, the years before Hitler’s assumption of power, stand out as a
cool, clinical analysis and forecast of this stupendous phenomenon of social
psychopathology and of its consequences to the international labor movement, to the
Soviet Union, and to the world.”
Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born into a Jewish farmer’s family at Yanovka, in the
province of Kherson in the Ukraine on November 7, 1879. He lived on the family farm
until the age of nine, then he attended high schools from 1888 to 1898 in Odessa and
Nikolayev. Before graduating from the Nikolayev school he joined a clandestine
revolutionary circle of Narodniks (Populists), but soon became a Marxist, a Social
Democrat and one of the founders and chief inspirer of the South Russian Workers
Union.
Early in 1898, Bronstein and other members of the Union were arrested after having led a
number of workers’ demonstrations and strikes at Nikolayev and for publishing
clandestine literature. For nearly two years he was held in prison and then, without trial,
deported for four years to Siberia. One of his jailers was named Trotsky. In prison he
married Alexandria Sokolovskaya; and two daughters, Nina and Zina, were born to them
in Siberia.
In exile Bronstein joined the Social Democratic Siberian Union, and under the pen name
Antid-Oto, became known as a political commentator, social analyst and literary critic.
He fled from deportation in the summer of 1902, with encouragement of his wife, and on
Lenin’s initiative, came to London, where he joined the team of Marxist propagandists
grouped around the periodical Iskra (other members of the team were Plekhanov,
Axelrod, Zasulich, Martov and Potresov). Bronstein had took the name Trotsky during
his escape to evade the police.
Trotsky participated in the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers
Party in Brussels and London (1903), at which the historic split between Bolsheviks
(majority) and Mensheviks (minority) occurred. For a time he was one of the chief
spokespersons for the Mensheviks, but soon developed political differences and resigned.
For years he was independent of the two factions.
In 1904 he met Natalya Sedova in Paris. She eventually became his second wife. In
February, 1905, after the outbreak of the first Russian Revolution, he was back in Russia
and became one of the chief leaders and orators of socialism, and the president of the St.
Petersburg Councils of Workers Delegates, the first soviet (workers’ council) in history.
He was arrested in December, along with the rest of the soviet’s executive committee,
tried in 1906, and exiled for life to a Siberian penal colony. He escaped enroute in
February, 1907, and went to Vienna.
While in prison, he fully formulated his theory of “Permanent Revolution.” From 1907
till 1914, with Natalya Sedova and their two sons, Leon and Sergei, he lived in Vienna
editing Pravda and devoting himself to journalistic and political activity. When World
War I started, Trotsky went to Switzerland and then to France, where he was a
correspondent of the great liberal Russian daily, Kievskaya Mysl, in addition to editing
Nashe Slovo.
At the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference (called to rally anti-war socialists) Trotsky was one
of the chief inspirers of revolutionary socialist opposition to the war. Common
opposition to war and support for a Third International (as opposed to the social
democratic Second International whose sections supported their countries in the war),
brought him closer to Lenin after years of factional struggle. Deported from France, he
found asylum in the United States early in 1917; but after the outbreak of the February
Revolution, he returned to Russia.
In the summer of 1917, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks, and in unity with Lenin,
distinguished himself as a staunch left opponent of Kerensky’s new post-czar provisional
government. He was imprisoned by Kerensky on August 5, 1917. After his release, due
to mass support, he was elected Petrodgrad (St. Petersburg) Soviet. He played a major
role in organizing and leading the October insurrection, which brought the Bolsheviks to
power. As First Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, he conducted the peace
negotiations of Brest Litovsk - and made harsh concessions to buy time for the revolution
to spread - but refused to accept Germany’s demand for unconditional surrender. he
proclaimed a “neither-war-nor-peace” policy and resigned from the Commissariat of
Foreign Affairs.
Trotsky founded the first truly revolutionary army in world history (the Red Army) in
1918; he was its leader as Commissar of War, from then until 1925. In 1919, he
co-founded the Third International (the Communist International) with Lenin, and held
important government posts in the early 1920s. He wrote “From the February Revolution
to Brest Litovsk,” and “Terrorism and Communism” and was the author of all the
Manifestos of the first five Congresses of the Communist International and some of its
most important policy statements and resolutions. Trotsky’s military writings, speeches
and “Orders of the Day” were published in Russian in three volumes under the title “How
the Revolution Armed Itself.”
In 1923 he headed the first opposition to Stalin, voicing protest against the suppression of
Soviet democracy, the “bureaucratization” of the party and in advocating a rapid
industrialization of the USSR. In 1924, Trotsky formed the “Left Opposition” to fight the
degeneration of the revolution. In 1925 he resigned as Commissar of War after being
defeated by a coalition of Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and others. During an
interval in the inner party struggle, he wrote many of his most incisive political thoughts.
Some of Trotsky’s voluminous writings from this period include: “Literature and
Revolution,” “On Lenin,” “Where Is Britain Going?” “Europe and America,” and
“Problems of Everyday Life.”
In 1926, he united with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Stalin and his bureaucratic
supporters, forming the Joint Opposition. After an intense struggle over every major
issue of Communist policy, he was expelled from the party at the end of 1927, and exiled
to Alma-Ata on the Russo-Chinese frontier. From there, he continued to direct the
Opposition, to criticised Stalin’s “Socialism in One Country” theory, and Stalin’s
conducting of communist affairs, especially his disastrous policies during the
unsuccessful Chinese Revolution of 1925-7. Read Trotsky’s “Problems of the Chinese
Revolution” and “Trotsky on China” for a devastating critique of the criminal politics of
Stalinism. In Alma-Ata he also wrote “Criticism of the Comintern Program” and
“Permanent Revolution.”
Trotsky was deported from Russia to an island off Turkey in 1929. From here he
continued to organize an international opposition to the degeneration of the Russian
Revolution. While there he published the “Bulletin of the Left Opposition,” wrote “The
History of the Russian Revolution,” “My Life” and other books. From 1929 to 1933, he
also conducted a special campaign designed to arouse the communist movement to the
dangers of rising Fascism, but his warnings were to go unheeded. His writings against
Fascism included “Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It,” and “The Struggle Against
Fascism in Germany.”
In 1932 he was stripped of Soviet citizenship, and his co-thinkers and relatives back in
Russia increasingly became the victims of brutal persecution at the hands of Stalin’s
dictatorship. One of his daughters, Nina, died in 1928; the other, Zina, while ill, was
deprived of her citizenship and cut off from her family in Russia. She committed suicide
in 1933 in Berlin. He had to leave Turkey in 1933, and was denied asylum by practically
every European country, until France let him in for a brief stay. While there, he called
for the formation of a new world revolutionary movement - the Fourth International,
since the Third, the Communist International, had become politically corrupt and
counter-revolutionary under Stalin.
In 1935, he was expelled from France and went to Norway for a short stay, where he
wrote “The Revolution Betrayed.” After the trial and execution back in Russia of
Zinoviev, Kamenev and other prominent long time Bolsheviks in August, 1936, the
Norwegian government, yielding to Stalin’s pressure, interned him to prevent him from
exposing the fraud of the Great Purges. By this time Stalin’s furious campaign against
Trotsky had reached its climax; in the Moscow trials Trotsky was the chief defendant in
absentia. He was accused of staging innumerable conspiracies to assassinate Stalin,
Voroshilov, Kaganovich and other Soviet leaders. The bureaucracy also accused him of
acting in secret collusion with Hitler and the Emperor of Japan in order to bring about the
downfall of the Soviet regime and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.
In 1937, the liberal Cardenas government of Mexico consented to admit Trotsky if he
promised to stay out of Mexico’s political affairs. He accepted, and was housed by
famous Mexican painter Diego Rivera. While there appeared in a “Counter-trial”
presided over by the American philosopher John Dewey, in which he successfully refuted
Stalin’s lies and accusations against him. The following year, with international support,
he proclaimed the Fourth International and wrote its manifesto, “The Transitional
Program.”
Trotsky wrote many essays and articles that predicted the outbreak of the Second World
War, and its probably outcome. A great wave of terror in the USSR led to the deaths of
his youngest son Sergei and many of Trotsky’s sympathizers and their families. His elder
son, Leon, died in Paris in February, 1938. The circumstances of his death suggested that
he was assassinated by the Soviet secret police, the G.P.U. (the predecessor of the KGB).
In the 1930s Trotsky participated in discussions with international revolutionaries on the
history, status and liberation of Black Americans. They included James P. Cannon
(USA, author of “History of American Trotskyism” and “America’s Road to Socialism,”
as well as being a key leader of the once revolutionary Socialist Workers Party) and
C.L.R. James (Trinidad, author of the “Black Jacobins” and “World Revolution and the
Negro,” known as J.R. Johnson while a member of the SWP in the U.S. for security
reasons). Their discussions have been published in the pamphlet “Black Nationalism and
Self-Determination in the USA.”
At this time more and more of his co-thinkers and sympathizers were being abducted and
assassinated by the G.P.U. in Spain, France and Switzerland. In May, 1940, an
unsuccessful attempt was made on Trotsky’s life by an armed Stalinist gang led by the
famous Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. On August 20, 1940, a G.P.U. agent,
Ramon Mercader assassinated Trotsky by putting an ice pick through his head while he
was reading a manuscript Mercader had given him. During that period of his life Trotsky
was writing his last book, an accusatory biography of Stalin. President Roosevelt refused
to allow his body to brought into the United States for a memorial meeting.
