Leon Trotsky[a] (Russian: Лев Дави́дович Тро́цкий; pronounced [ˈlʲef ˈtrot͡skʲɪj] (
); born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein;[b] 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army.
); born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein;[b] 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army.
Trotsky was initially a supporter of the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the 1917 October Revolution, and eventually became a leader within the Party. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army as People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–23). He was also among the first members of the Politburo.
After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power in 1927, expelled from the Communist Party, and finally deported from the Soviet Union in 1929. As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile in Mexico to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism,[1] in the late 1930s, Trotsky opposed Stalin'snon-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler. He was assassinated on Stalin's orders in Mexico, by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born Soviet agent in August 1940.[2] (Most of his family members were also killed in separate attacks.)
Trotsky's ideas were the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who were notrehabilitated by the government under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. In the late 1980s, his books were released for publication in the Soviet Union.
Contents
[show]Before the 1917 Revolution[edit]
Childhood and family (1879–1895)[edit]
Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (Russian: Лев Давидович Бронштейн) on 7 November 1879, in Yanovka (Russian: Яновка) or Yanivka (Ukrainian: Янівка), in the Khersonguberniya of the Russian Empire (today's Bereslavka (Ukrainian: Береславка; 47°53′34″N 32°17′25″E) in the Bobrynets Raion, Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukraine), a small village 15 miles (24 km) from the nearest post office. He was the fifth child of eight of well-to-do Jewish farmers, David Leontyevich Bronshtein (1847–1922) and his wife Anna Bronshtein (1850–1910). The family was Jewish but reportedly not religious. The language spoken at home was a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian (known as Surzhyk).[3] Trotsky's younger sister, Olga, married Lev Kamenev, a leading Bolshevik.
When Trotsky was nine, his father sent him to Odessa to be educated. He was enrolled in a German school, which became Russified during his years in Odessa, consequent to the Imperial government's policy of Russification.[4] As Isaac Deutscher notes in his biography of Trotsky, Odessa was then a bustling cosmopolitan port city, very unlike the typical Russian city of the time. This environment contributed to the development of the young man's international outlook.
Although Trotsky stated in his autobiography My Life that he was never perfectly fluent in any language but Russian and Ukrainian, Raymond Molinier wrote that Trotsky spoke French fluently.[5]
Revolutionary activity and exile (1896–1902)[edit]
Trotsky became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896 after moving to Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv). At first a narodnik (revolutionary populist), he was introduced to Marxism later that year, which he originally opposed. During periods of exile and imprisonment, he gradually became a Marxist. Instead of pursuing a mathematics degree, Trotsky helped organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev in early 1897. Using the name 'Lvov',[6] he wrote and printed leaflets and proclamations, distributed revolutionary pamphlets, and popularized socialist ideas among industrial workers and revolutionary students.
In January 1898, more than 200 members of the union, including Trotsky, were arrested. He spent the next two years in prison awaiting trial. Two months into his imprisonment, on 1 – 3 March 1898, the first Congress of the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) was held.[7] From then on Trotsky identified as a member of the party. While in prison, he married Aleksandra Sokolovskaya (or Sokolovskaia) (1872–1938), a fellow Marxist. While serving his sentence, he studied philosophy. In 1900 he was sentenced to four years in exile in Ust-Kut and Verkholensk (seemap) in the Irkutsk region of Siberia.
His wife was also sent there to join him. Their two daughters, Zinaida (1901 – 5 January 1933) and Nina (1902 – 9 June 1928), were born in Siberia. They were raised by Trotsky's parents after Leon and Alexandra soon separated and divorced. Both daughters married and Zinaida had children, but the daughters died before their parents. Nina Nevelson died from tuberculosis (TB), cared for in her last months by her older sister. Zinaida Volkova died after following her father into exile in Berlin with her son by her second marriage, leaving her daughter in Russia. Suffering also from TB, then a fatal disease, and depression, Volkova committed suicide.
In Siberia, Trotsky became aware of the differences within the party, which had been decimated by arrests in 1898 and 1899. Some social democrats known as "economists" argued that the party should focus on helping industrial workers improve their lot in life and were not so worried about changing the government[8] or thought that these societal reforms would grow out of the worker's struggle for higher pay and better working conditions. Others argued that overthrowing the monarchy was more important and that a well-organized and disciplined revolutionary party was essential. The latter was led by the London-based newspaper Iskra, or in English, The Spark, which was founded in 1900. Trotsky quickly sided with the Iskra position and began writing for Iskra.[9][citation needed]
First emigration and second marriage (1902–1903)[edit]
In early, 1898, Trotsky was arrested for subversive activities while working to unionize workers in the harbor town of Nikolayev on the Ukrainian coast with the Black Sea.[10] Imprisoned in Nikolayev, then Kherson, and then Odessa, Trotsky was transferred to a Moscow prison. In the prison in Moscow, Trotsky came into contact with other revolutionaries. Here he first heard about Lenin and read Lenin's book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia.[11]
While in the prison in Moscow in the summer of 1900, Trotsky met and married Alexandra Sokolovskaya.[12] The wedding ceremony was performed by a Jewish chaplain.[13] Because of the marriage, Trotsky and his new wife were allowed to be exiled to the same location in Siberia. Accordingly, the couple was exiled to Ust-Kut and the Verkholensk in the Baikal Lake region of Siberia. Here Trotsky remained until the summer of 1902, when he escaped from Siberia hidden in a load of hay on a wagon.[14] He escaped from Siberia at the urging of his wife. There were two children as result of this marriage who later escaped from Siberia with their mother.
Until this point in his life Trotsky had used his real name—Lev or Leon Bronstein.[15] It was at this time that he changed his name to "Trotsky"—the name he would use for the rest of his life. It is said he adopted the name of a jailer of the Odessa prison in which he had earlier been held,[16] which became his primary revolutionary pseudonym. Once abroad, he moved to London to join Georgi Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov and other editors of Iskra. Under the pen name Pero ("feather" or "pen" in Russian), Trotsky soon became one of the paper's leading authors.
Unknown to Trotsky, the six editors of Iskra were evenly split between the "old guard" led by Plekhanov and the "new guard" led by Lenin and Martov. Not only were Plekhanov's supporters older (in their 40s and 50s), but they had spent the previous 20 years together in exile in Europe. Members of the new guard were in their early 30s and had only recently come from Russia. Lenin, who was trying to establish a permanent majority against Plekhanov within Iskra, expected Trotsky, then 23, to side with the new guard and wrote in March 1903:[17]
I suggest to all the members of the editorial board that they co-opt 'Pero' as a member of the board on the same basis as other members. [...] We very much need a seventh member, both as a convenience in voting (six being an even number), and as an addition to our forces. 'Pero' has been contributing to every issue for several months now; he works in general most energetically for the Iskra; he gives lectures (in which he has been very successful). In the section of articles and notes on the events of the day, he will not only be very useful, but absolutely necessary. Unquestionably a man of rare abilities, he has conviction and energy, and he will go much farther.
Because of Plekhanov's opposition, Trotsky did not become a full member of the board. But, from then on he participated in its meetings in an advisory capacity, which earned him Plekhanov's enmity.
In late 1902, Trotsky met Natalia Ivanovna Sedova, who soon became his companion and, from 1903 until his death, his wife. They had two children together, Lev Sedov (1906 – 16 February 1938) and Sergei Sedov (21 March 1908 – 29 October 1937), both of whom would predecease their parents. Regarding his sons' surnames, Trotsky later explained that[18] after the 1917 revolution:
In order not to oblige my sons to change their name, I, for "citizenship" requirements, took on the name of my wife.
Trotsky never used the name "Sedov" either privately or publicly. Natalia Sedova sometimes signed her name "Sedova-Trotskaya". Trotsky and his first wife Aleksandra maintained a friendly relationship after their divorce. She disappeared in 1935 during the Great Purges and was murdered by Stalinist forces three years later.
Split with Lenin (1903–1904)[edit]
In the meantime, after a period of secret police repression and internal confusion that followed the first party Congress in 1898, Iskra succeeded in convening the party's 2nd congress in London in August 1903. Trotsky and other Iskraeditors attended. The first congress went as planned, with Iskra supporters handily defeating the few "economist" delegates. Then the congress discussed the position of the Jewish Bund, which had co-founded the RSDLP in 1898 but wanted to remain autonomous within the party.[citation needed]
Shortly thereafter, the pro-Iskra delegates split into two factions.[19] Lenin and his supporters, the Bolsheviks, argued for a smaller but highly organized party while Martov and his supporters, the Mensheviks, argued for a larger and less disciplined party.[19] In a surprise development, Trotsky and most of the Iskra editors supported Martov and the Mensheviks, while Plekhanov supported Lenin and the Bolsheviks. During 1903 and 1904, many members changed sides in the factions. Plekhanov soon parted ways with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky left the Mensheviks in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
From 1904 until 1917, he described himself as a "non-factional social democrat". Trotsky spent much of his time between 1904 and 1917 trying to reconcile different groups within the party, which resulted in many clashes with Lenin and other prominent party members. Trotsky later maintained that he had been wrong in opposing Lenin on the issue of the party. During these years Trotsky began developing his theory of permanent revolution, which led to a close working relationship with Alexander Parvus in 1904–1907.[citation needed]
1905 revolution and trial (1905–1906)[edit]
The unrest and agitation against the Russian government came to a head in Saint Petersburg on 3 January 1905 (Julian Calendar), when a strike broke at the Putilov Works in Saint Petersburg.[23] This single strike grew into a general and by 7 January 1905 there were 140,000 strikers in Saint Petersburg.[24] On Sunday, 9 January 1905, Father Georgi Gapon led a peaceful procession of citizens through the streets to the Winter Palace to beseech the tsar for food and relief from the oppressive government. The peaceful demonstration was fired upon by the Palace Guard resulting in the death of 1,000 demonstrators. Thus, Sunday 9 January 1905 became known as Bloody Sunday.
Following the events of Bloody Sunday, Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in February 1905, by way of Kiev.[25] At first he wrote leaflets for an underground printing press in Kiev, but soon moved to the capital, Saint Petersburg, where he worked with both Bolsheviks, such as Central Committee member Leonid Krasin, and the local Menshevik committee, which he pushed in a more radical direction. The latter, however, were betrayed by a secret police agent in May, and Trotsky had to flee to rural Finland. There he worked on fleshing out his theory of permanent revolution.[26]
On 19 September 1905, the typesetters at the Sytin Print Works in Moscow went out onstrike for shorter hours and higher pay.[27] By the evening of 24 September, the workers at 50 other printing shops in Moscow were also on strike.[28] On 2 October 1905, the typesetters in printing shops in Saint Petersburg, decided to strike in support of the Moscow strikers.[29] On 7 October 1905, the railway workers of the Moscow–Kazan Railway went out on strike.[30]The confusion engendered by these strikes made it possible for Trotsky to return from Finland to Saint Petersburg on 15 October 1905.[31] On the same day that he returned to Saint Petersburg, Trotsky appeared before the Saint Petersburg Soviet Council of Workers Deputies which was meeting at the Technological Institute in Saint Petersburg.[32] Not only were the elected Deputies present at this meeting, but also attending were some 200,000 people—about 50% of all workers in Saint Petersburg.[31] After returning to the capital, Trotsky and Parvus took over the newspaper Russian Gazette and increased its circulation to 500,000.[33] Trotsky also co-founded, together with Parvus and Julius Martov and other Mensheviks, Nachalo ("The Beginning"), which also proved to be a very successful newspaper in the revolutionary atomosphere of Saint Petersburg in 1905.[34]
Just before Trotsky's return, the Mensheviks had independently come up with the same idea that Trotsky had: an elected non-party revolutionary organization representing the capital's workers, the first Soviet ("Council") of Workers. By the time of Trotsky's arrival, the Saint Petersburg Soviet was already functioning headed by Khrustalyev-Nosar (Georgy Nosar, alias Pyotr Khrustalyov). Khrustalyev-Nosar had been a compromise figure when elected as the head of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. Khrustalev-Nosar was a lawyer that stood above the political factions contained in the Soviet.[35] However, since his election, he proved to be very popular with the workers in spite of the Bolsheviks' original opposition to him. Khrustalev-Nosar became famous in his position as spokesman for the Saint Petersburg Soviet.[36] Indeed to the outside world, Khrustalev-Nosar was the embodiment of the Saint Petersburg Soviet.[37] Trotsky joined the Soviet under the name "Yanovsky" (after the village he was born in, Yanovka) and was elected vice-Chairman. He did much of the actual work at the Soviet and, after Khrustalev-Nosar's arrest on 26 November 1905, was elected its chairman. On 2 December, the Soviet issued a proclamation which included the following statement about the Tsarist government and its foreign debts:[38]
The autocracy never enjoyed the confidence of the people and was never granted any authority by the people. We have therefore decided not to allow the repayment of such loans as have been made by the Tsarist government when openly engaged in a war with the entire people.
The following day, the Soviet was surrounded by troops loyal to the government and the deputies were arrested.[39] Trotsky and other Soviet leaders were tried in 1906 on charges of supporting an armed rebellion. At the trial on 4 October 1906, Trotsky delivered one of the best speeches of his life.[40][clarification needed] It was this speech that solidified his reputation as an effective public speaker.[citation needed] He was convicted and sentenced to internal exile to Siberia.
Second emigration (1907–1914)[edit]
While en route to exile in Obdorsk, Siberia, in January 1907, Trotsky escaped at Berezov[41] and once again made his way to London, where he attended the 5th Congress of the RSDLP. In October, he moved to Vienna where he often took part in the activities of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and, occasionally, of the German Social Democratic Party, for seven years.
In Vienna, Trotsky became close to Adolph Joffe, his friend for the next 20 years, who introduced him to psychoanalysis.[42] In October 1908 he started Pravda ("Truth"), a bi-weekly, Russian-language social democratic paper for Russian workers, which he co-edited with Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and Victor Kopp. It was smuggled into Russia.[43] The paper appeared very irregularly, only five issues appeared in the first year of publication.[43] However, the paper avoided factional politics and proved popular with Russian industrial workers. Both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks split multiple times after the failure of the 1905–1907 revolution. Money was very scarce for publication of Pravda. Trotsky approached the Russian Central Committee to seek financial backing for the newspaper throughout 1909.[44] The Central Committee was controlled by a majority of Bolsheviks at this time in 1910. Thus, Lenin agreed to the financing of Pravda, but required a Bolshevik be appointed as co-editor of the paper.[45] When various Bolshevik and Menshevik factions tried to re-unite at the January 1910 RSDLP Central Committee meeting in Paris over Lenin's objections,[46] Trotsky's Pravda was made a party-financed 'central organ'. Lev Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, was added to the editorial board from the Bolsheviks, but the unification attempts failed in August 1910 when Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual recriminations. Trotsky continued publishing Pravda for another two years until it finally folded in April 1912.
The Bolsheviks started a new workers-oriented newspaper in Saint Petersburg on 22 April 1912, and also called it Pravda. Trotsky was so upset by what he saw as a usurpation of his newspaper's name that in April 1913 he wrote a letter to Nikolay Chkheidze, a Menshevik leader, bitterly denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Though he quickly got over the disagreement, the letter was intercepted by the police, and a copy was put into their archives. Shortly after Lenin's death in 1924, the letter was pulled out of the archives and made public by Trotsky's opponents within the Communist Party to portray him as Lenin's enemy.
This was a period of heightened tension within the RSDLP, leading to numerous frictions between Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The most serious disagreement that Trotsky and the Mensheviks had with Lenin at the time was over the issue of "expropriations",[47] i.e., armed robberies of banks and other companies by Bolshevik groups to procure money for the Party. These actions had been banned by the 5th Congress, but were continued by the Bolsheviks.
In January 1912, the majority of the Bolshevik faction, led by Lenin and a few Mensheviks, held a conference in Prague and expelled their opponents from the party. In response, Trotsky organized a "unification" conference of social democratic factions in Vienna in August 1912 (a.k.a. "The August Bloc") and tried to re-unite the party. The attempt was generally unsuccessful.
In Vienna, Trotsky continuously published articles in radical Russian and Ukrainian newspapers, such as Kievskaya Mysl, under a variety of pseudonyms, often using "Antid Oto". In September 1912, Kievskaya Mysl sent him to the Balkans as its war correspondent, where he covered the two Balkan Wars for the next year and became a close friend of Christian Rakovsky. The latter was later a leading Soviet politician and Trotsky's ally in the Soviet Communist Party. On 3 August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, in which Austria-Hungary fought against the Russian empire, Trotsky was forced to flee Vienna for neutral Switzerland to avoid arrest as a Russian émigré.[citation needed]
World War I (1914–1917)[edit]
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The outbreak of World War I caused a sudden realignment within the RSDLP and other European social democratic parties over the issues of war, revolution, pacifism and internationalism. Within the RSDLP, Lenin, Trotsky and Martov advocated various internationalist anti-war positions, while Plekhanov and other social democrats (both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) supported the Russian government to some extent. In Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked within theSwiss Socialist Party, prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution. He wrote a book opposing the war, The War and the International,[48] and the pro-war position taken by the European social democratic parties, primarily the German party.
As a war correspondent for the Kievskaya Mysl, Trotsky moved to France on 19 November 1914. In January 1915 in Paris, he began editing (at first with Martov, who soon resigned as the paper moved to the left) Nashe Slovo ("Our Word"), an internationalist socialist newspaper. He adopted the slogan of "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered." Lenin advocated Russia's defeat in the war and demanded a complete break with the Second International.
Trotsky attended the Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in September 1915 and advocated a middle course between those who, like Martov, would stay within the Second International at any cost and those who, like Lenin, would break with the Second International and form a Third International. The conference adopted the middle line proposed by Trotsky. At first opposed, in the end Lenin voted for Trotsky's resolution to avoid a split among anti-war socialists.[49]
On 31 March Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his anti-war activities. Spanish authorities did not want him and deported him to the United States on 25 December 1916. He arrived in New York City on 13 January 1917. He stayed for nearly three months at 1522 Vyse Avenue in The Bronx. In New York he wrote articles for the local Russian language socialist newspaper,Novy Mir, and the Yiddish-language daily, Der Forverts (The Forward), in translation. He also made speeches to Russian émigrés. He was officially earning some $15 a week.[citation needed]
Trotsky was living in New York City when the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. He left New York on 27 March, but his ship, the SS Kristianiafjord, was intercepted byBritish naval officials in Canada at Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was detained for a month at Amherst Internment Camp in Nova Scotia. After initial hesitation, the Russian foreign minister Pavel Milyukov demanded the release of Trotsky as a Russian citizen, and the British government freed him on 29 April.
He reached Russia on 4 May. After his return, Trotsky substantively agreed with the Bolshevik position, but did not join them right away. Russian social democrats were split into at least six groups, and the Bolsheviks were waiting for the next party Congress to determine which factions to merge with. Trotsky temporarily joined the Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in Saint Petersburg, and became one of its leaders. At the First Congress of Soviets in June, he was elected a member of the first All-Russian Central Executive Committee("VTsIK") from the Mezhraiontsy faction.[citation needed]
After an unsuccessful pro-Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd, Trotsky was arrested on 7 August 1917. He was released 40 days later in the aftermath of the failed counter-revolutionary uprising by Lavr Kornilov. After the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky was elected chairman on 8 October. He sided with Lenin against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev when the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed staging an armed uprising, and he led the efforts to overthrow the Provisional Government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky.
The following summary of Trotsky's role in 1917 was written by Stalin in Pravda, 10 November 1918.[citation needed] (Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book The October Revolution(1934), it was expunged from Stalin's Works (1949).[citation needed]
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.
After the success of the uprising on 7–8 November, Trotsky led the efforts to repel a counter-attack by Cossacks under General Pyotr Krasnov and other troops still loyal to the overthrown Provisional Government at Gatchina. Allied with Lenin, he defeated attempts by other Bolshevik Central Committee members (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alexey Rykov, etc.) to share power with other socialist parties. By the end of 1917, Trotsky was unquestionably the second man in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin. He overshadowed the ambitious Zinoviev, who had been Lenin's top lieutenant over the previous decade, but whose star appeared to be fading. This reversal of position contributed to continuing competition and enmity between the two men, which lasted until 1926 and did much to destroy them both.[citation needed]
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