Leon Trotsky Biography and List of Works

Russian Jewish Revolutionary leader and Soviet politician, a close friend of Lenin. Trotsky's theory of 'permanent revolution' became unpopular after Stalin had gained power in the Soviet Union. Trotsky was assassinated by one of Stalin's agents.

"Things are not going well. The Greek soldiers landed on the shores of Crimea, according to the reports of Allied diplomats and newspapermen, were mounted on Crimean donkeys, but the donkeys were not able to arrive in time at the Perekop Isthmus. Things are not going well. Evidently even donkeys have begun to shake off the imperialistic harness."
(From Trotsky's speech on April 1919)

Leon Trotsky was born in Yanovka, Ukraine. He studied at Odessa and in his youth become an ardent disciple of Karl Marx. In 1896 Trotsky joined the Social Democrats and two years later he was arrested as a Marxist and exiled to Siberia. Four years later he escaped and reached England by means of a forged passport in the name of Trotsky.

In London Trotsky met Lenin and other Russian Revolutionary intellectuals and collaborated in the publication of their journal Iskra (Spark). When the party split in 1903, Trotsky gained the position of a leader of the Menshevik wing of the Social Democratic party,(as opposed to the Bolshevik one under Lenin), prophesying that Leninist theory would result in a one-man dictatorship. In the abortive 1905 revolution Trotsky organized the first revolutionary Soviet council in St. Petersburg and was appointed president of the Soviet. About this time he propounded the doctrine of 'permanent revolution,' which implied that revolution in one country must be followed by revolutions in other countries, eventually spreading throughout the world. After the uprising ended he was again exiled to Siberia, where he managed to escape once again.

"Some time before the war the Austro-Hungarian government received a sharp note from St Petersburg, demanding that a stop be put to the activities of the Russian political emigrants in Vienna. The Minister of the Interior received the note and shook with laughter: 'Who do they think is going to start a revolution in Russia - perhaps that Herr Trotsky from the Café Central?'"
(from Wit as a Weapon by Egon Larsen, 1980)

Trotsky found worked as a journalist in Vienna, and became the editor of Pravda (Truth). With the outbreak of World War I he moved to Zurich in 1914 and then to Germany, where he was imprisoned for opposing the war. During World War I Trotsky led the internationalist wing of the Mensheviks. In 1915 Trotsky moved to Paris, editing the socialist weekly Nashe Slovo, but he was expelled from France as a result of his pacifist propaganda. After a short stay in the United States as the editor of Novy Mir, Trotsky returned to Russia in 1917. He joined the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg and established the magazine Vperied (Forward). Trotsky was arrested for a short time by Aleksandr Feodorovich Kerenski's provisional government, but after his release he played a major role in the October Revolution.

At the conference in Brest-Litovsk in 1918 Trotsky was the leader of the Russian delegate. From 1919 to 1927 he was a member of the Politburo. Trotsky was made the Russian Civil War commissar for war (1918-25) and in this post created the Red army. For two and half years, as he explained in My Life, he lived in his heavy armoured train with two engines, travelling from one front to another. The Red army grew from 800,000 to 3,000,000, and fought on sixteen fronts simultaneously. With his speeches Trotsky encouraged villagers and troops, his illiterate audience who was cut off from the vital news. "These spring months become the decisive months in the history of Europe. At the same time this spring will decide definitely the fate of the bourgeois and rich peasant, anti-Soviet Russia."

In 1921-22 the last remnants of non-Communist socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, were abolished. In May 1922 Lenin suffered a stroke that left him partly paralysed, in early 1923 another took away his speech and in January 1924 he died. After Lenin's death, Stalin and Trotsky were the leading figures among the aspiring successors.

"The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence."
(From Terrorism and Communism, 1924)

Although Lenin had rejected Stalin as his successor, Stalin strengthened his position. He inclined towards concentrating on the development of a Communist order in Russia, while Trotsky was dedicated to the belief that Russia should catalyse worldwide a Communist revolution. A schism broke out in the Communist ranks. Trotsky's Left Opposition tried to mobilize the Moscow proletariat, but this failed due to the workers' indifference. The failure proved that he was no longer a charismatic mass leader. Trotsky's influence began to decline and Stalin removed him from the commissariat for war.

From 1925 to 1926 Trotsky held a relatively minor administrative post, before Stalin ousted him from the party. In 1927 Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata, in Kazakhstan, where he devoted himself to writing his memoirs and bitter pamphlets. The 'combined opposition' of Trotsky, Grigory Zinoview, and Lev Kamenev was unsuccessful. In 1929 Trotsky was totally expelled from the Soviet Union. With this stroke Stalin became the sole and undisputed leader of the Communist Party, and therefore of the Soviet Union.

During the following years Trotsky lived in Turkey, France, Norway and finally found asylum in Mexico, where he was invited by the socialist artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957). In Mexico Trotsky continued his attacks on Stalin's leadership and the 'degeneration' of the political system in the Soviet Union. Trotsky regarded the dictatorship he and Lenin had established as justified because it was exercised in the interest of the proletariat, thus it was quite different from Stalin's dictatorship, because the latter acted only in its own interests.

Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (1924), a collection of articles, is his most important contribution to literary criticism. He is sympathetic towards Russian Futurism and praises Mayakovsky for placing his art at the service of the Revolution. According to Trotsky, "art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. But at present even the handling of a hammer is taught with the help of a mirror, a sensitive film which records all the movement... The deeper literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically will it be able to 'picture life..." Trotsky did not believe that it was possible to create genuine proletarian art in his lifetime. He was suspicious about experimental movements but did not reject Freud who was blacklisted in the Soviet Union.

During the Great Purge (1934-38), (a wave of terror by which Stalin aimed at eliminating the opposition), Trotsky was accused of espionage. A supposed family friend, Jacques van den Dreschd, mortally wounded Trotsky with an ice pick on August 21, 1940.

"The vengeance of history is more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary."
(from Stalin, 1946)

Permanent revolution: Trotsky argued from his experience in 1905 that the Russian bourgeois was too weak to carry through the coming revolution. The proletariat could only accomplish the revolution. The proletariat would then be deserted by the peasantry, who would join the mass of small owners opposing the socialist revolution. Since the proletariat in Russia was a minority, it would not be able to maintain itself in power unless it could rely on help from a socialist revolution in the West. The revolution in Russia would touch off a conflagration in the rest of Europe.

See also: Isaac Babel depicts Jews in Odessa and the Russian Civil war in his novel Red Army (1926). Vienna after the turn of the century attracted several intellectuals and writers. Café Central near Palais Frestel was Trotsky's, Peter Altenbeg's, Robert Musil's, Kraftt-Ebbing's, and Alfred Adler's favourite place. - Film: The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), dir. by Joseph Losey, starring Richard Burton, Alain Delon, Romy Schneider. - For further reading: Three Who Made a Revolution by B.D. Wolfe (1948); The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 by Isaac Deutscher (1980); The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-29 by Isaac Deutscher (1980); The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940 by Isaac Deutsher (1980); A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, vol. 7, by René Wellek (1991)

 

Defence of Terrorism, (1920)