Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
Lev Davidovich Trotsky stands as one of the two greatest Marxists of the twentieth century, alongside Lenin, a revolutionary whose entire existence was consecrated to the working class and international socialism. This chapter traces his trajectory from the Petersburg Soviet of 1905, through the Zimmerwald Manifesto during the imperialist slaughter of 1914–1918, to his central role organising the October insurrection of 1917, his tenure as first Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and his creation of the Red Army during the Civil War. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky led the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state, defending Bolshevism and the October tradition in works such as The Revolution Betrayed.
The chapter situates Trotsky’s formation against the collapse of Narodnaya Volya’s terrorist adventurism and the rise of Marxism. Beginning his revolutionary career in Nikolayev in 1897, he was arrested at nineteen, exiled to Siberia, and escaped to London in 1902 to join Lenin on Iskra. At the Second Congress of the RSDLP, the historic split occurred over Lenin’s demand for a disciplined mass party against the old guard’s circle mentality. Trotsky initially sided with the minority but broke decisively with the Mensheviks in 1904 over collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie, remaining independent until 1917. The 1905 Revolution saw him emerge as the best-prepared Social-Democratic leader, chairing the Petersburg Soviet and developing the theory of Permanent Revolution—the proposition that the proletariat, in alliance with the peasantry, could take power in backward Russia before the West, rejecting the Mensheviks’ stagist, class-collaborationist line.
The chapter does not flinch from Trotsky’s fundamental error: conciliationism, the belief in unity between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Lenin opposed this, denouncing ‘Trotskyism’ as conciliation. By 1912, Lenin broke decisively with the Mensheviks, a move justified as the Bolsheviks won majority working-class support. Trotsky later acknowledged this mistake, writing in 1924 that his differences with Lenin were never as great as the distance between Stalin-Bukharin and Marxism-Leninism. The First World War caused the collapse of the Second International; Trotsky adopted a clear revolutionary stance, drafting the Zimmerwald Manifesto. By 1917, his articles from New York and Lenin’s Letters from Afar were practically identical. Lenin never referred to their old polemics after 1917 and warned against holding Trotsky’s non-Bolshevik past against him.
The October Revolution demonstrated the decisive role of leadership: without Lenin and Trotsky, it would not have succeeded. Stalin himself wrote in 1918 that the party was indebted primarily to Trotsky for organising the uprising. After Lenin’s death, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev falsified history, deleting Trotsky’s name and inventing ‘Trotskyism’ to belittle his role. Trotsky created the Red Army from nothing against twenty-one imperialist armies. In September 1918, dispatched to the catastrophic eastern front, he achieved the first decisive military victory in one week. German officers Bauer and Hoffmann praised his organisational achievement as Napoleonic.
After the Civil War, a bureaucratic caste emerged, latching onto Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’. Trotsky and the Left Opposition defended the ideas of October. Lenin, from his sickbed in late 1922, dictated notes denouncing bureaucratic and chauvinist arrogance, seeking to remove Stalin as General Secretary. He died before acting; his ‘Letter to the Congress’ was suppressed for decades. Trotsky predicted in The Revolution Betrayed that unless the working class removed the bureaucracy, it would end in capitalist counter-revolution—borne out fifty years later when the children of Stalinist officials became private owners of production. Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico on 20 August 1940. His writings remain a treasure-house of Marxist ideas; the relevance of Trotskyism retains full force in Russia, where the post-Soviet bourgeoisie has caused collapse of productive forces.