Prologue
Authors' Note: This prologue is meant for those readers who have not read the three volumes of Comrade Deutscher's work; those who have read it may benefit from a brief review, but may safely begin reading at the first chapter proper.
I. The Personal Life of Leon Trotsky, 1879-1933
One of the salient characteristics of the Revolutionary generation was that the majority of Bolshevik leaders were not of proletarian origins; indeed, Lenin himself was of the Tsar's lower service aristocracy. The one exception to this was the disastrous Stalin, who was the son of a proletarian laborer in Guri, a cobbler named Besarion Djugashvili. Certainly, Lev Davidovich Bronstein was no exception to this rule. He was born to a moderately wealthy Jewish farmer and his wife, David Leontevich and Anna Bronstein, in the German colonies of the rural Ukraine. While the family was nominally Jewish, they were not at all religious; the Bronsteins spoke Russian and Ukrainian at home. It was clear from an early age that Lev Davidovich would not be a farmer like his father, and his family spent a considerable sum employing a private tutor to prepare him for a formal education. At the age of nine, he was sent to a boarding school in the city of Odessa. This experience would prove critical to the future revolutionary.
Odessa at the time was a major port city, more significant as a trading city than any of the northern ports emphasized later under Stalin. At school, Lev Davidovich was exposed to a much more cosmopolitan milieu than the usual provincial Russian gymnasium. His grades for the period were excellent, and he displayed an early aptitude for writing which would follow him through his life. However, he displayed no revolutionary inclinations until 1896, at which point he chose to pursue revolution rather than mathematics.
This pursuit resulted in arrest and internal exile in 1898, at which time he married the first of his wives, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya. Their relationship was close, though more friendly than intimate, as events following his escape from Siberia would show. She followed him to Irkutsk when his four-year exile was imposed in 1900, and they had two daughters, Zinaida and Nina, in 1901 and 1902 respectively. At this time, with Aleksandra's endorsement, he chose to escape from Siberia to the west. He was imperfectly fluent in any of the conventional languages of the exile communities, including French and German, but this was not a great concern given the size of the emigre communities of the time.
At this time, Lev Davidovich became Leon Trotsky, the name of one of his early jailers. This was one of Trotsky's prime personality traits, a sense of self-directed humor utterly lacking in Stalin, whose preferences ran to burlesque humiliation of his subordinates, and only occasionally apparent in Lenin, who preferred barbs driven at anyone around him. Upon arrival in London, Trotsky was exposed to the latter, who was one of the editors of the revolutionary newspaper
Iskra. Trotsky contributed extensively to the paper, and lectured to workers' groups in the West wherever possible. It was one of these lectures which brought him in contact with his second wife, Natalia Ivanova Sedova. As a consequence of this meeting, his marriage to Aleksandra Sokolovskaya unravelled. He remained on good terms with her and his daughters, who were in fact largely raised by David and Anna Bronstein in the Ukraine. For legal reasons, Trotsky went so far to change his name to Sedov upon his second marriage in France, with the result that the children of Natalia Ivanova and Lev Davidovich were named Lev Lvov'ch Sedov (b. 1906) and Sergei Lvov'ch Sedov (b. 1908).
Trotsky became associated with Lenin during this period, even serving as one of the early readers of his pamphlet
What Is To Be Done? along with Julius Martov, another bourgeouis-origin Jewish intellectual who served on the board of
Iskra. Lenin's support actually cost Trotsky considerably, as Lenin was engaged in one of his many feuds at the time with Georgi Plekhanov, founder of the Russian Social-Democrats. Trotsky himself had few quarrels with Plekhanov, considering many of the elder exile's positions to be more reasonable in application than Lenin's, but because of his youth and radicalism, he was considered to be a member of Lenin's party rather than Plekhanov's.
Between his arrival in the west and his return to Russia in 1905, Trotsky witnessed the first of many Party splits at the Second Party Congress in 1903: Lenin and Martov debated whether the Party membership should be drawn from members well-versed in Marxist theory and dedicated to the Cause (Lenin's position, known as the "Bolshevik" position) or a wider membership for wider appeal (Martov's position, the "Menshevik" position). Because of this fracture, the Party was weakened. Trotsky's personal position was with the Mensheviks, reflecting a pragmatism and populism that would be hallmarks of his life. It was one of the earliest statements of the theory of Permanent Revolution, which deserves further scrutiny in itself. "Victory without, then victory within," Trotsky wrote in one of his essays of the period,
Thoughts on the Second Party Congress.
However, Trotsky would not remain in Western exile to attend all of the details of the Party civil war. After Bloody Sunday in 1905, he returned secretly to St. Petersburg (modern Leningrad) to participate in the 1905 Revolution as a liaison between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. The 1905 Revolution brought forth another of Trotsky's contributions to the Party, the soviet, a non-party elected council. The St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies met for the first time on October 13, 1905, during the General Strike, at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute. It should be noted that the Soviet's intentions during this period were more moderate and concerned with improving workers' conditions rather than active revolution, but the Tsarist authorities saw it as a seditious organization and arrested Trotsky once more in 1906.
Like the later trial of the German ideologue Hitler in 1924, Trotsky's trial in 1906 was an opportunity for him to display both the Party's position and his own oratorical gifts. Allowing public access to this trial rates alongside the publication of Marx and Engels in Russian as one of the most self-destructive acts of the Tsarist regime. The Tsarist police organs believed they had restrained Trotsky after this, sentencing him to exile once more.
They were mistaken. Trotsky once more escaped to the West en route to exile, this time settling in Vienna. At this time, he was introduced to the Western practice of psychoanalysis, giving once more a comparison with his main rival Stalin. Where Trotsky could be introspective, and as unforgiving of flaws he found as himself as he was of flaws in others, Stalin was convinced
ab initio of his correctness, without any examination or correction from outside. During this period, he founded the future Party paper
Pravda in Vienna.
Pravda was accepted as a central Party publication in 1910 following the temporary reconciliation between Lenin and Martov, and Trotsky's brother-in-law Lev Kamenev was brought on board as a board member. The reconciliation, and relations between Trotsky and Kamenev, failed shortly thereafter, largely on Lenin's uncompromising positions.
Trotsky found employment during this period for a number of Russian and Ukrainian Leftist papers, including the Ukrainian
Kievskaya Misl for which he covered the Balkan Wars as a war correspondent. While in the Balkans, he received notification that Lenin had co-opted
Pravda and, after the paper's western publication ceased, had re-started publication in St. Petersburg. He was of course furious, and wrote an intemperate letter condemning Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which was later used by Stalin in the 1920s. He was on good terms once more with Lenin by the outbreak of war in 1914.
Of the two younger thinkers of the Party, Lenin and Trotsky, Trotsky's position was, as might be expected, far more internationalist and moderate:
Peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered. This was, needless to say, unpopular with Lenin, who wished to see Russia broken and laid open to revolution, and to nationalist socialists like Plekhanov, but it was in keeping with Marx and the general internationalist trend of socialism. He was bitterly disappointed by the national Social Democrat parties' decision to support their respective nations, marking his effective final break with the Social Democrats. Trotsky was one of the delegates at the anti-war socialists' gathering at Zimmerwald in 1915, and shortly thereafter was deported from France to neutral Spain for sedition and pacifism.
From Spain, he traveled to the United States, where he wrote and lectured for several months. His autobiography is conflicted in this period, as he says in various places that he spent little time with the proletarians among the crew, yet in others says that his one friend was a Swiss maid with strong anti-war positions, and yet again that a group of Spaniard boilermen confidently predicted that the internal rot of Spain would soon lead to a workers' revolution there. The most likely explanation is that this often brilliant writer was writing at two decades' remove with the distortions implied therein. Trotsky spent little time in the United States, however, as he was once more called home to Russia by revolution.
In February 1917, the Tsar was forced into abdication, and the struggle for the soul of Russia between Kerensky and the Communists began. A thorough treatment of this struggle can be found in Trotsky's own brilliant
History of the Russian Revolution. A bald outline will suffice here. In 1917, the central government changed hands repeatedly, from the Tsar, to Kerensky and the Kadets, to the Bolsheviks, who took power thanks to superior organization and the involvement of local soviets, beginning with the Sailors' Soviet aboard the cruiser
Avrora. One of the first tasks of the new government was stabilization in the west, where the war with Germany went on. Trotsky was Lenin's choice for these negotiations, and did his best to preserve as favorable a peace as possible. The Germans eventually lost patience with these negotiations and launched an offensive resulting in the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. This initial humiliation had two consequences for Trotsky - one immediate, the founding of the Red Army, and the other a distant one, a desire to recall the lands lost in 1917 and erase his personal humiliation.
At the same time of this stabilization of the German situation, conservative counter-revolutionary forces gathered throughout Russia, beginning the Civil War period. In response, Trotsky and his nemesis Stalin both imposed draconian measures to take maximum advantage of the Party's superior organization in the face of White factionalism and over the course of 1917-1920 defeated the Whites piecemeal. Trotsky was a hero due to his role in the foundation of the Red Army, and served not only as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, but also Defense Commissar. However, he was absent from the center of events in Moscow for most of this period with the result of extensive political weakness. Only his affiliation and friendship with Lenin preserved him from Stalin's initial predatory maneuvers during this period.
Stalin did, indeed, become increasingly predatory in the period immediately following the Civil War, adopting a militaristic tone and a pseudo-uniform as his daily wear. Stalin had spent the pre-Revolutionary years in a mixture of banditry and conventional Party activism, and apparently welcomed every opportunity for violence. In comparison, Trotsky had spent the pre-war years as a relatively principled pacifist, preferring to avoid such measures as the 'expropriations' where capitalist institutions were raided for money as nothing more than banditry. One of the few points of commonality between Stalin and Trotsky was the harshness with which they prosecuted the civil war - in Stalin's case from predilection, and in Trotsky's case from a hard-hearted resolution that, once violence had been deemed requisite, it must be executed fully and thoroughly in order to avoid further violence from the inevitable failure of half-measures.
Trotsky weakened his position with Lenin somewhat in 1919-1920 by arguing first that the draconian wartime measures be abandoned and then that the war with Poland that erupted early in that year was a poor idea on the grounds that the Red Army was exhausted and the Soviet Union needed to be re-knit while the Western powers, too, were exhausted; however, he led the Red Army as best he could in Poland. The offensive failed in the Battle of Warsaw, largely due to Stalin's inability to follow orders, especially those issued by his rival Trotsky, and Stalin's slovenly attitude toward logistics and pre-battle preparation. This highlights another difference between the two. Where Trotsky was willing to accept Tsarist officers, engineers, and other experts who had accepted the Revolution, Stalin's provincial outlook demanded a total overthrow of the old regime. Trotsky was personally romantic and professionally pragmatic; Stalin was the inverse.
Nevertheless, the failure of the Red Army at Warsaw was blamed on its commander, and Trotsky again found his support eroding even while Lenin supported him. Lenin and Trotsky split over the position of the trade unions; Lenin saw them as superfluous in a workers' state, while Trotsky saw the trade unions as one more form of soviet which should be integrated fully into the state, a position which he would articulate much more fully later in life. Stalin had control of the Party by this time, and was even sufficiently insolent to insult Lenin's wife publicly, a snub which drove Trotsky and Lenin ever closer together. It was not enough, however. In 1923, Lenin died without fully resolving who should lead the Soviet Union in his wake. Shortly thereafter, Trotsky was stripped of his command of the Red Army and sent into the political wilderness with a series of minor committee chairs and technical posts.
He did not emerge from this state until 1925, when he was drawn into Bukharin's United Opposition movement. One of the key positions of this movement was that of the Chinese question, where Stalin argued, and succeeded in persuading the Politburo, that the only force capable of fighting Japanese imperialism in China was the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-Shek. As a result, the Chinese Communists were forced to follow Chiang's line. The eventual outcome of this struggle was that Chiang turned on the Chinese Communists and massacred them at Shanghai in 1927. To draw attention away from this, Stalin orchestrated a purge of the Party against Trotsky and Zinoviev in November of 1927 on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, followed by most of their supporters, including Lev Kamenev, in early 1928.
Trotsky was subsequently forced into internal exile, traveling to Kazakhstan in early 1928 before Stalin reversed this decision and drove him abroad the very next year. It was felt that Trotsky's proximity to the Chinese White exile community would have allowed him potential access to a method of overthrowing Stalin, and thus he was sent into exile in Turkey with his wife and their elder son. At this time he was depoted to the Princes' Isles, off Istanbul, where he was kept under close watch by the White community in Istanbul, Turkish authorities, and Stalin's secret police apparatus, the OGPU.
He continued his writing here, formulating the alternative to Stalin's Right deviation that would internationally become known as Trotskyism. It was also here that the decisive events of 1933 found him.
Censor's notes: Insufficient respect toward Comrades Lenin and Trotsky, suggesting that Lenin's route prior to revolution was factional and not unifying. Insufficient discussion of inequities of Stalinite regime in 1928-1933. Insufficient discussion of Stalinite aberrations including planning failures and collectivization policies. No reference to Ukrainian famine of 1928 and Stalin's 'Great Break' movement of 1929 or First Five-Year Plan. No great discussion of writings of Comrade Trotsky. Occasionally dry, but an adequate precis of Comrade Trotsky's life.
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Apologies for the lengthy, rather dry post. There will be at least one more coming up. I promise there's meat to this thing.