Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) changed his name from Lev Davidovich Bronstein after escaping from exile in Siberia in 1902. He, along with Lenin, was one of the great leaders of the Russian revolutionary forces both before and after the 1917 Revolution. Also like Lenin, he was a revolutionary before he was a Marxist. Trotsky was arrested and exiled when only 19, for trying to foment revolution among industrial workers, though his own family was relatively prosperous. On his escape he fled to London where he met and worked with Lenin and rapidly became a leading member, especially as a propagandist, of the then more or less united All-Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), most of which was similarly in exile. During the period from the turn of the century to 1917 the RSDLP was badly split between factions with very different interpretations of how socialism could be achieved in Russia. One wing, later to be known as Mensheviks, took a version of Marxism which required Russia to go through a full industrial revolution of a capitalist nature, and thus felt that, even if a revolution set up a democracy, a lengthy period of co-operation with liberal bourgeois parties would be necessary. The other wing, Lenin’s Bolsheviks, argued instead that an alliance between what there was of an industrial proletariat and the peasantry could force the pace of industrial transformation, making it unnecessary to endure the transition phase of liberal capitalism. Trotsky, however, could never quite make up his mind about this split, floated back and forth in the endless congresses of the exiles, and thus created ill will and suspicion on both sides.
He returned to Russia briefly in 1905 to help the abortive revolution of that year, and he was back in Russia much earlier in 1917 than Lenin, playing a vital role in organizing the extreme communist opposition to the original moderate government.
His own analysis was, in fact, even more revolutionary than Lenin’s, when he worked it out, because he denied that the support of the peasantry was needed, and argued for what he called ‘permanent revolution’. This was a strategy in which the first revolution, to overthrow the autocratic Tsarist regime, should be immediately followed by a purely proletarian revolution, and one which should be ‘exported’ to all Western countries, as he believed that underdeveloped Russia could not long sustain a socialist society. Though he co-operated ultimately with Lenin, he was always unhappy with the latter’s stress of the leadership of the party. He held a variety of vital posts in the Bolshevik government set up in October 1917, the most important of which was the creation and running of the Red Army with which he successfully, though brutally, won the civil war against the traditionalist ‘White’ Russian army. He lost power, after Lenin’s death, to Stalin and his faction, who advocated ‘socialism in one country’, and because he opposed the central authority and the ignoring of the Russian masses which Stalin took to even greater lengths than had Lenin. Expelled from the party, he was exiled yet again, this time permanently, in 1929, and ultimately murdered, supposedly on Stalin’s orders, in 1940. He spent the last few years of his life in propaganda against what he saw as the corruption of the revolution, even attempting, with no real success, to create a rival international communist movement (the so-called Fourth International). Trotsky perhaps remains theoretically the most interesting character of the whole Russian revolutionary movement, but the one whose ideas were least acceptable to orthodox communists on either side of the iron curtain.
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