Leon Trotsky¶
Core Argument¶
Here, in the starkest possible terms, the chapter presents the assassination of Leon Trotsky not as a mere act of political violence, but as the logical and necessary culmination of a sixteen-year war between two irreconcilable programmes: revolutionary internationalism (Bolshevism) and the counter-revolutionary doctrine of “Socialism in one country” (Stalinism). The murder by Stalin’s GPU is framed as the final, desperate act of a degenerated bureaucracy that had already liquidated the entire generation of October Revolution leaders in the purges of 1936-37. Trotsky’s brain, the chapter argues, contained “all the rich experience and theoretical conceptions of ninety years of Marxism”; his elimination was therefore dictated by the needs of the Stalinist caste and its collaboration with world capitalism. The polemic is explicit: Stalin murdered Trotsky for the same fundamental reasons the German Social Democracy murdered Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg—fear of a living revolutionary alternative.
To counter the mountain of Stalinist falsifications, the chapter deploys a devastating piece of evidence: the 1921 biographical note on Trotsky from Lenin’s Collected Works, edited under Lenin’s own supervision. This single document, published by the Soviet state before the counter-revolution consolidated, demolishes the later slanders. It confirms Trotsky’s central role at every turning point: delegate to the Second Congress, chairman of the 1905 Petersburg Soviet, leader of the October insurrection, Commissar of Foreign Affairs and then War. Crucially, it records his early formulation of the theory of Permanent Revolution—the very theory the Stalinists would later denounce as heresy—and notes his clear internationalist position from the outbreak of the imperialist war. The chapter’s rhetorical thrust is that the Stalinist rewriting of history was so thorough that even the editor of seventeen revised editions, Popov, was himself “liquidated as a ‘Trotskyist’.” The murder of Trotsky is thus presented as the indispensable condition for the open collaboration between the Soviet bureaucracy and foreign imperialism, and the world capitalist class is shown to understand this perfectly, equating Trotskyism with the coming proletarian revolution.