Trotsky lev davidovich history. Lev Davidovich Trotsky. After the October events successful for the Bolsheviks, Trotsky became People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, it was he who took part in negotiations with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk

TROTSKY, wow, M. Liar, talker, chatterbox, chatterbox. Whistle like a Trotsky lie. L. D. Trotsky (Bronstein) is a famous politician ... Dictionary of Russian argo

Trotsky- (real name Bronstein) Lev Davydovich (1879 1940), politician. From 1896 in the social democratic movement, from 1904 he advocated the unification of the factions of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In 1905 he put forward the theory of permanent (continuous) revolution ... Russian history

Trotsky- "TROTSKY", Russia Switzerland USA Mexico Turkey Austria, VIRGO FILM, 1993, color, 98 min. Historical and political drama. About the last months of the life of the famous revolutionary, politician, chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Soviet republic. “Our film is ... ... Encyclopedia of Cinema

Trotsky- chatterbox, talker, liar, liar, liar, talker, liar Dictionary of Russian synonyms. Trotsky noun, number of synonyms: 9 chatterbox (132) ... Synonym dictionary

- (Bronstein) L. D. (1879 1940) political and statesman... In the revolutionary movement from the late 90s, during the split of the RSDLP, he joined the Mensheviks, a participant in the 1905 1907 revolution, chairman of the Petersburg Soviet, after the revolution ... ... 1000 biographies

Trotsky- (Bronstein) Lev (Leiba) Davidovich (1879 1940) professional revolutionary, one of the leaders of the October (1917) coup in Russia. Ideologist, theorist, propagandist and practitioner of the Russian and international communist movement. T. many times ... The latest philosophical dictionary

TROTSKY L. D.- Russian politician and statesman; the founder of the left-wing radical trend in the international communist movement, which bears his name Trotskyism. The real name is Bronstein. The pseudonym Trotsky was taken in 1902 for conspiracy purposes. A lion… … Linguistic and Cultural Dictionary

Trotsky, L. D.- was born in 1879, worked in workers 'circles in Nikolaev (the South Russian Workers' Union, which published the newspaper Nashe Delo), was exiled in 1898 to Siberia, from where he fled abroad and took part in Iskra. After the split of the party into Bolsheviks and ... ... Popular political dictionary

Trotsky- Noy Abramovich, Soviet architect. He studied in Petrograd at the Academy of Arts (from 1913) and at the Free Workshops (graduated in 1920), under I.A.Fomin and at the 2nd Polytechnic Institute (1921). He taught in ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Trotsky- (real name Bronstein). Lev (Leiba) Davidovich (1879 1940), Soviet statesman, party and military leader, publicist. His figure attracted the attention of Bulgakov, who repeatedly mentioned T. in his diary and others ... ... Bulgakov's encyclopedia

Books

• L. Trotsky. My Life (set of 2 books), L. Trotsky. Leon Trotsky's book "My Life" is extraordinary literary work summarizing the activities of this truly outstanding person and politics in the country he left in 1929. ... Buy for 880 rubles
• Trotsky, Emelyanov YV .. The figure of Trotsky is still of great interest. His portraits appear at political rallies and demonstrations. Many speak of him as a sinister demon of the revolution. Who was Trotsky? ...

Lev Davidovich Trotsky (real name Leib Davidovich Bronstein; October 26, 1879, Yanovka farm, Kherson province, Russian Empire - August 22, 1940, Villa Coyacana, Mexico) - leader of the international workers' and communist movement, theorist of Marxism, ideologist of one of its currents - Trotskyism. One of the organizers October revolution 1917 and one of the founders of the Red Army. One of the founders and ideologists of the Comintern, a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In the Soviet government - the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs; in 1918-1925 - People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR, then the USSR. Member of the Politburo of the CPSU (b) in 1919-1926.

Encyclopedic reference

From the family of a well-to-do colonist, he was educated at the Nikolaev real school. He joined a circle of revolutionary-minded youth who tried to carry on propaganda among the workers. Together with the Sokolovsky brothers, in 1897 he formed the Social Democratic "South Russian Workers' Union". Arrested in January 1898. He spent about 2 years in prisons, after which he was sentenced to 4 years in prison. Initially, he served his exile in the village of Ust-Kutsk (from August 1900), from February 1901 - in Nizhneilimsk, then in Verkholensk, Irkutsk province. Here L.D. Trotsky actively studied Marxism, was engaged in literary activities. The newspaper "Vostochnoye Obozreniye" published his articles under the pseudonym "Antid Oto".

In February 1902 L.D. Trotsky arrived in, where he delivered a lecture to the local Social Democrats, and in August, with the help of the Siberian Social Democratic Union, fled to Samara. In, before entering the train car, he entered the name Trotsky on a blank passport form.

In the autumn of the same year he went to see V. I. Lenin in London. After January 9, 1905 he returned to Russia, entered the Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies, and then, after the arrest of GS Nosar (Khrustalev), was elected its chairman. In December 1905 he was arrested and in October 1906 exiled to Obdorsk, Tobolsk province, but fled from the road to Finland.

In 1907-1917 he tried to distance himself from both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, taking his own position on the issues of the socialist revolution. On September 25, 1917, at the suggestion of the Bolsheviks, he was re-elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, took an active part in preparing the coup, and was a member of the All-Russian Revolutionary Committee.

After the October Revolution, L.D. Trotsky was the people's commissar for foreign affairs, communications, military and naval affairs, chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council. He was a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b), took part in a number of all-Russian discussions. In November 1927 he was expelled from the party, in 1928 he was expelled from Moscow, and a year later from the country. Abroad L.D. Trotsky continued to fight against Stalin. Organizer of the IV International (1938). He spent the last years of his life in Mexico. On August 19, 1940, he was mortally wounded by an agent of the GPU R. Mercader.

Irkutsk. Historical and Local Lore Dictionary. - Irkutsk, 2011

Trotsky in Siberia

At the very beginning of the 20th century, Trotsky spent almost two years in exile in the Irkutsk province (his daughters were born here). It was on the Irkutsk land that Leib Bronstein, thinking before escaping, what name to write in the transmitted false passport, remembering his prison warden, wrote in the passport: "Trotsky." In Irkutsk, through which he fled (to Samara), his comrades brought him on the train a suitcase with linen, a tie, and, as he put it, " other attributes of civilization". In the book" My Life. The experience of an autobiography "he recalled:

Biography

Childhood and youth

Leiba Bronstein was born the fifth child in the family of David Leontyevich Bronstein (1843-1922) and his wife Anna (Anetta) Lvovna Bronstein (née Zhivotovskaya) - wealthy landowners from among the Jewish colonists of an agricultural farm not far from the village of Yanovka, Elisavetgrad district, Bereznecauberia (nowadays) district of the Kirovograd region, Ukraine). Parents of Leon Trotsky came from the Poltava province. As a child, he spoke Ukrainian and Russian, and not the then widespread Yiddish. Studied at St. Paul's School in Odessa, where he was the first student in all disciplines. During his studies in Odessa (1889-1895), Leon Trotsky lived and was brought up in the family of his cousin (on the maternal side), owner of the printing house and scientific publishing house "Matezis" Moisei Filippovich Spenzer and his wife Fanny Solomonovna, the parents of the poet Vera Inber.

The beginning of revolutionary activity

In 1896 in Nikolaev, Lev Bronstein participated in a circle, together with other members of which he conducted revolutionary propaganda. In 1897 he participated in the founding of the South Russian Workers' Union. On January 28, 1898 he was arrested for the first time. In the Odessa prison, where Trotsky spent 2 years, he becomes a Marxist. “The decisive influence,” he said on this occasion, “had two studies by Antonio Labriola on the materialistic understanding of history. Only after this book did I turn to Beltov and Capital. " The appearance of his pseudonym Trotsky dates back to the same time; it was the name of the local warden-jailer, who impressed the young Lev (he would write it down in his fake passport after his escape). In 1898, in prison, he married Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who was one of the leaders of the Union. Since 1900, he was in exile in the Irkutsk province, where he established contact with the Iskra agents and, on the recommendation of GM Krzhizhanovsky, who gave him the nickname “Pen” for his obvious literary gift, was invited to cooperate with Iskra. In 1902 he escaped from exile abroad; in the fake passport "at random" entered the name Trotsky, after the name of the senior warden of the Odessa prison.

Arriving in London to see Lenin, Trotsky became a regular employee of the newspaper, spoke with essays at meetings of emigrants and quickly gained fame. A.V. Lunacharsky wrote about the young Trotsky:

“... Trotsky impressed the foreign public with his eloquence, education, significant for a young man, and aplomb. ... They did not take him very seriously because of his youth, but everyone resolutely recognized him as an outstanding oratorical talent and, of course, felt that this was not a chicken, but an eaglet. "

First emigration

Insoluble conflicts in the Iskra editorial office between the “old people” (G.V. Plekhanov, P.B. Axelrod, V.I. Zasulich) and the “young” (V.I. Potresov) prompted Lenin to propose Trotsky as the seventh member of the editorial board; however, supported by all the members of the editorial board, Trotsky was blackballed by Plekhanov in an ultimatum.

At the Second Congress of the RSDLP, in the summer of 1903, he supported Lenin so ardently that D. Ryazanov christened him "Lenin's club." However, the new composition of the editorial board proposed by Lenin: Plekhanov, Lenin, Martov - the exclusion of Axelrod and Zasulich prompted Trotsky to go over to the side of the offended minority and be critical of Lenin's organizational plans.

In 1903, in Paris, Trotsky married Natalya Sedova (this marriage was not registered, since Trotsky never divorced A. L. Sokolovskaya).

In 1904, when serious political differences emerged between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, Trotsky moved away from the Mensheviks and became close to A. L. Parvus, who attracted him with the theory of "permanent revolution". At the same time, like Parvus, he advocated the unification of the party, believing that the impending revolution would smooth out many contradictions.
Revolution of 1905-1907.

In 1905, Trotsky returned illegally to Russia with Natalia Sedova. He was one of the founders of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies, became a member of its Executive Committee. Formally, the Council was chaired by GS Khrustalev-Nosar, but in fact the Council was led by Parvus and Trotsky; after the arrest of Khrustalev on November 26, 1905. The executive committee of the Soviet officially elected Trotsky as chairman; but on December 3 he was arrested along with a large group of deputies. In 1906, at the trial of the St. Petersburg Council, which received a wide public response, he was sentenced to eternal settlement in Siberia with the deprivation of all civil rights... On the way to Obdorsk (now Salekhard), he fled from Berezovo.

Second emigration

In 1908-1912 he published the newspaper Pravda in Vienna (in 1912 the Bolsheviks founded their own newspaper Pravda with the same name, which caused numerous controversies). Trotsky recalled in 1923:

« During my several years in Vienna, I came into close contact with Freudians, read their works and even attended their meetings at that time.».

In 1914-1915 in Paris he published the daily newspaper Nashe Slovo.

In September 1915 he took part in the work of the Zimmerwald Conference together with Lenin and Martov.

In 1916 he was exiled from France to Spain, from where he was exiled to the United States by the Spanish authorities, where he continued his journalistic activities.

Return to Russia

Right after February revolution Trotsky set off from America to Russia, but on the way, in the Canadian port of Halifax, together with his family he was removed from the ship by the British authorities and sent to an internment camp for sailors of the German merchant fleet. The reason for the detention was the lack of Russian documents (Trotsky possessed an American passport issued personally by President Woodrow Wilson, with visas for entry into Russia and a British transit visa attached), as well as British fears about Trotsky's possible negative influence on stability in Russia. However, soon, at the written request of the Provisional Government, Trotsky was released as an honored fighter against tsarism and continued on his way to Russia. On May 4, 1917, Trotsky arrived in Petrograd and became the informal leader of the "Mezhraiontsy", who held a critical position in relation to the Provisional Government. After the failure of the July uprising attempt, he was arrested by the Provisional Government and accused, like many others, of espionage; however, he was charged with traveling through Germany.

In July, at the 6th Congress of the RSDLP (Bolsheviks), the "Mezhraiontsy" were united with the Bolsheviks; Trotsky himself, who at that time was in the "Kresty", which did not allow him to speak at the congress with the main report - "On the current situation" - was elected to the Central Committee. After the failure of the Kornilov speech in September, Trotsky was released, like the other Bolsheviks arrested in July.

Expulsion from the USSR

In 1929 he was exiled from the USSR - to Turkey on the island of Buyukada or Prinkipo - the largest of the Princes' Islands in the Sea of ​​Marmara near Istanbul. In 1932 he was deprived of Soviet citizenship. In 1933 he moved to France, in 1935 to Norway. Norway, fearing to worsen relations with the USSR, tried with all its might to get rid of the unwanted immigrant, confiscating all of Trotsky's works and placing him under house arrest, and Trotsky was also threatened to extradite him to the Soviet government. Unable to withstand the oppression, Trotsky emigrated to Mexico in 1936, where he lived in the house of the family of artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

In early August 1936, Trotsky finished work on the book Revolution Betrayed, in which he called what was happening in the Soviet Union "Stalin's Thermidor." Trotsky accused Stalin of Bonapartism.

Trotsky wrote that “ the lead ass of the bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution", While he stated that" with the help of the petty bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy managed to tie the proletarian vanguard hand and foot and crush the Bolshevik opposition"; real indignation aroused in him the strengthening of his family in the USSR, he wrote: “ The revolution made a heroic attempt to destroy the so-called "family hearth", that is, an archaic, musty and inert institution ... The place of the family ... was supposed to be taken by a complete system of public care and services…».

In 1938 he proclaimed the creation of the Fourth International, the heirs of which still exist.

In 1938, Trotsky's eldest son, Lev Sedov, died in a hospital in Paris after an operation.

Trotsky Archive

During his exile from the USSR in 1929, Trotsky was able to take out his personal archive. This archive included copies of a number of documents signed by Trotsky during his time in power in the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, the Central Committee, the Comintern, a number of Lenin's notes addressed personally to Trotsky and not published anywhere else, as well as a number of valuable information for historians about the revolutionary movement before 1917, thousands letters received by Trotsky, and copies of letters sent to him, telephone and address books, etc. Based on his archive, Trotsky in his memoirs easily quotes a number of documents signed by him, including sometimes even secret ones. In total, the archive consisted of 28 boxes.

Stalin was unable to prevent (or he was allowed, which Stalin later called a big mistake in personal conversations, like the expulsion) Trotsky to take out his archive, but in the 30s the GPU agents repeatedly tried (sometimes successfully) to steal some of their fragments, and in March 1931, part of the documents burned during a suspicious fire. In March 1940, Trotsky, badly in need of money and fearing that the archive would still fall into the hands of Stalin, sold most of his papers to Harvard University.

At the same time, a number of other documents related to Trotsky's activities are, according to the historian Yu.G. Felshtinsky, also in other places, in particular, in the archives of the President of the Russian Federation, in the archives International Institute social history in Amsterdam, etc.

Murder

In May 1940, an unsuccessful attempt was made on Trotsky's life. The assassination attempt was led by a secret agent of the NKVD Grigulevich. The group of raiders was led by the Mexican artist and staunch Stalinist Siqueiros. Bursting into the room where Trotsky was, the assailants unintentionally shot all the cartridges and hastily disappeared. Trotsky, who managed to hide behind the bed with his wife and grandson, was not injured. According to Siqueiros, the failure was due to the fact that the members of his group were inexperienced and very worried.

Early in the morning of August 20, 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader, who had previously penetrated into Trotsky's entourage as a convinced of his adherent, came to Trotsky to show his manuscript. Trotsky sat down to read it, and at this time Mercader struck him on the head with an ice pick, which he carried under his cloak. The blow was delivered from behind and from above on the seated Trotsky. The wound reached 7 centimeters in depth, but Trotsky, after receiving the wound, lived for almost another day and died on August 21. After cremation, he was buried in the courtyard of a house in Koyokan.

The Soviet government publicly denied any involvement in the murder. The killer was sentenced by a Mexican court to twenty years in prison; In 1960, Ramon Mercader, who was released from prison and arrived in the USSR, was awarded the title of Hero Soviet Union with the presentation of the Order of Lenin.

Essays

1. Trotsky L. My life. Experience of an autobiography, in 2 volumes. Berlin: Granite, 1930.

Literature

1. Shaposhnikov V.N. Trotsky - an employee of the "Eastern Review" // Izv. Sib. Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences: Ser. history, philology and philosophy. 1989. Issue. 3.
2. Startsev V.I. L. D. Trotsky: Pages of polit, biography. M., 1989;
3. Ivanov A. Leon Trotsky in Siberian exile // Land of Irkutsk. 1998. No. 10.
4. Trotsky L.D. My life. An autobiography experience. M., 1991.

Links

1. Trotsky, Lev Davidovich. // Wikipedia

On November 7 (October 25), 1879, Lev Davidovich Trotsky (Leiba Davidovich Bronstein) was born - one of the key figures in the history of Russia in the XX century ...

In the 1920s and 1930s, the name of Trotsky was known to everyone in the Soviet country. At first he was praised to the skies as the main leader of the October Bolshevik uprising and the winner of the white armies. Then they were anathematized as an enemy of the Party and the Soviet people. After the release of the film "Lenin in October" in 1937, in the minds of the Soviet people, Trotsky was firmly assigned the nickname "political prostitute" (with the reduced "r" characteristic of Ilyich). In fact, Lenin liked to use this word, but he called Kautsky a "prostitute". In relation to his closest "accomplice" Trotsky, the leader of the world proletariat twice allowed himself an affectionate "Judas" (meaning Judas Golovlev from Shchedrin). And this happened only in the pre-revolutionary period, when Trotsky actively collaborated with the "Menshiviks."

However, the name, perhaps the brightest and most charismatic of the leaders of the revolution, became a household name already in 1918. People's Commissar Trotsky was respected and feared not only by the red commanders, but also by their opponents in the civil struggle.

So, in the original version of M. Bulgakov's play "Days of the Turbins," Captain Myshlaevsky recalls Trotsky's name as the only frightening factor for all kinds of bandits and "self-styled", which neither the Germans nor the whites could cope with:

“At Petliura's, you say - how much? Two hundred thousand! These two hundred thousand heels smeared with lard and are blowing at a single word from Trotsky! Have you seen it? Purely!"

After November 1927, "Trotsky", for censorship reasons, was replaced by the word "Bolshevik", but this does not change the meaning of the disappointed White Guard's statement. An adversary like Trotsky could not fail to command respect.

Childhood and youth

Leiba Davidovich Bronstein was the fifth child born into the family of a wealthy Jewish colonist, large landowner David Leontyevich Bronstein. He spent his childhood and adolescence on the estate of his parents (Kherson region) and the city of Odessa, where he received a good classical education at the private school-gymnasium of St. Paul. Lev Davidovich himself describes these years with love and tenderness in his autobiographical book "My Life". The book is an outstanding literary work in the style of an adventure-adventure bestseller and is certainly worth reading and quoting.

According to Trotsky himself, social inequality touched him from childhood. His parents achieved their well-being exclusively by their work, and therefore did not share the revolutionary views of their son, but they never refused him material support. During his youth, his father “ransomed” Leiba from prison several times, hoping that he would come to his senses and “get down to business,” but these hopes were not destined to come true.

Subsequently, when the social revolution, started by the former Jewish boy Leiba Bronstein and his associates, had already won over the entire one-sixth of the land, old David walked to his son in Moscow. In his memoirs, Lev Davidovich wrote:

By that time, old Bronstein, like all landowners, was deprived of his property and seriously suffered from the Civil War in southern Russia. In the head of the unfortunate parent it did not fit that all this disgrace was created by his youngest son Leib under the name of some Trotsky ...

Besides that L.D. Trotsky gained fame as an outstanding politician and military leader, he was also a talented writer (it was not for nothing that one of his party nicknames was the nickname "Pen"). Trotsky had a masterful command of the Russian language, and long "jail time" in prisons and the need to make himself known to a wide reading audience prompted the revolutionary to methodically hone his literary gift.

Trotsky himself more than once recalled that during the time of imprisonment in tsarist prisons, the obligatory walks were the main trouble for him. The prison authorities took care of the health of their "guests", and the political prisoner was outraged that he had to be distracted from literary work and wasting time.

First link

Leib Bronstein went to his first exile in 1900 and not alone. While still in prison, he married the revolutionary Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya. In 1901 and 1902, the couple had two daughters, Zinaida and Nina. The naive tsarist government hoped that a measured life in Siberia and the establishment of a family would discourage the exiled settlers from active revolutionary activity. It was not so! Bronstein very quickly gets in touch with social democratic organizations in Siberia, writes leaflets and proclamations for them. Supervision over the family exiles, according to the revolutionary himself, was practically not carried out, so already in 1903 he decided to flee. Having abandoned his wife with two small children (the youngest Nina was not even four months old), Lev Davidovich travels by cart to the railway station, where he calmly sits in the carriage.

“I held Homer in the Russian hexameters of Gnedich in my hands. In my pocket is a passport in the name of Trotsky, which I wrote down at random, not foreseeing that it would become my name for life. I drove west along the Siberian line. The station gendarmes indifferently let me pass by them, ”the successful fugitive later recalled.

Trotsky quickly got to Samara. Under the pseudonym "Pero", he collaborated in the Leninist newspaper "Iskra", then illegally moved abroad. In London, Paris, Geneva, Trotsky met with Russian émigré revolutionaries, including Lenin. Russian Social Democracy was actively fueled by foreign capital and did not live in poverty. In 1904, Trotsky joined the future "Menshiviks", married N.I. Sedova, and in February 1905 he again went to Russia - to lead the first Russian revolution.

Second link and escape

At one time, the Soviet "Leniniana" actively exaggerated the exploits of the leader of the world proletariat, V.I. Lenin in the fight against the tsarist gendarmerie. It is worth remembering that Ilyich personally sewed leaflets into his felt boots, milk letters and tricks with lower and upper shelves during searches at his apartment ... All this looks like "innocent pranks" in comparison with what L.D. Trotsky.

Without a doubt, the future enemy of the white generals was a much brighter, resourceful and decisive personality than the emigrant theoretician V.I. Lenin. Trotsky more than once displayed an enviable composure, extraordinary energy and ability to survive in the most extreme situations, sometimes incompatible with life. His second escape from exile, after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, is undoubtedly worthy of the pen of Jack London or Fenimore Cooper.

In 1907, Trotsky, deprived of all civil rights, was exiled to an eternal settlement in Berezov, a small town far from any civilization, where, as you know, the disgraced favorite of Peter I, Aleksashka Menshikov, whiled away his days. As soon as he arrived at the place, the exiled revolutionary decided not to waste time exploring the local sights, but immediately took to the run.

A week-long journey on deer (700 km) in a frost of forty degrees, in a completely wild area, could cost the life of any unprepared person. In addition, Trotsky came across a guide from the local northern peoples who knew the road well, but in fact turned out to be a bitter drunkard.

Lev Davidovich had to carry out such an operation to "sober up" the guide more than once. If caught, the fugitive settler was legally threatened with hard labor; in case of loss of the road in the taiga - inevitable death. Imagine V.I. Lenin, pushing the sleds along the icy road and “sobering up” the drunk aborigine, with all their imagination, neither Bonch-Bruevich nor Zoya Voskresenskaya could have been able to ...

Nevertheless, the revolutionary Trotsky contrived to get to the Perm railway and get on the train. Already 11 days later, he met with his wife Sedova near St. Petersburg, and soon moved to Finland.

Emigration and return to Russia

From 1907 to 1917 L.D. Trotsky was in exile. In 1916, for his revolutionary activities, he was exiled from France to Spain, then to the United States. Upon learning of the February Revolution, Trotsky immediately went to Russia, but on the way, in the Canadian port of Halifax, together with his family he was removed from the ship by the British authorities and sent to an internment camp for sailors of the German merchant fleet. He was accused of spying for Germany. Trotsky immediately protested and got the police to carry him out of the ship in their arms. Subsequently, this will become a habit of the revolutionary.

Soon, at the written request of the Provisional Government, the family was released and continued on its way. On May 4, 1917 (a month later than the German "sealed" carriage with Lenin), Trotsky was "exported" to Petrograd.

Revolution of 1917 and Civil War

After the failure of the July Bolshevik uprising attempt, Trotsky was arrested and sent to prison as a German spy. Some of his "accomplices", including Lenin, managed to escape. However, the Provisional Government already at the end of August 1917, having imprisoned the participants of the Kornilov mutiny in the Bykhov prison, for some reason freed enemies and "spies" from the "Kresty". It also gives its yesterday's opponents complete freedom of action.

During the "Bolshevization of the Soviets" in September - October 1917, the Bolsheviks received up to 90% of the seats in the Petrograd Soviet. Young, energetic Trotsky was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies, elected to the Pre-Parliament, and became a delegate to the II Congress of Soviets and the Constituent Assembly.

On October 12, 1917, Trotsky forms the Military Revolutionary Committee (VRK), the main body for preparing an armed uprising. The pretext for the formation of the Military Revolutionary Committee was a possible German offensive against Petrograd, or a repetition of the Kornilov performance. The All-Russian Revolutionary Committee immediately began work on persuading units of the Petrograd garrison to their side. Already on October 16, the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky, ordered the issuance of 5 thousand rifles to the Red Guards.

Lenin from Razliv demanded to start the uprising immediately. Trotsky proposes to postpone it until the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies is convened in order to present the Congress with the fact that the regime of "dual power" has been destroyed. Thus, the Congress was supposed to be the highest and only authority in the country. Trotsky manages to win over the majority of the Central Committee to his side, despite Lenin's concerns about the postponement of the uprising.

Between October 21-23, the Bolsheviks hold a series of rallies among wavering soldiers. On October 22, the Military Revolutionary Committee announced that the orders of the headquarters of the Petrograd Military District were invalid without its approval. At this stage, Trotsky's oratory greatly helped the Bolsheviks to win over the vacillating parts of the garrison to their side. On October 23, Trotsky personally "raided" the garrison of the Peter and Paul Fortress. The talented speaker was again carried in his arms.

The plan for the October coup was worked out by Trotsky and carried out by him completely independently. October 25, 1917 L.D. Trotsky was 38 years old, but he did not even remember about it. The leader of the uprising spent the whole day at the telephone in Smolny.

His memories of this unusual birthday look much more human than anything that was written about the October uprising in subsequent years:

Yes, it was not enough for Trotsky to take the state power lying on the road into his own hands. Before the executors and planners of a daring political act, the question immediately arose: what to do with this power? Their overseas owners, obviously, did not count on such a grandiose success. Torn from the inside by its own revolution, in fact defeated Germany, in 1918 it was not possible to chew such a "fat piece". The invaders had to resolve the dangerous situation themselves: end the war, create anew the state apparatus, build an army, defend the results of a coup d'état. Over the next years, like a spring-loaded spring, Trotsky continues to defend the gains of the Comintern in a single country.

On March 13, 1918, he resigned from the post of Commissar (after the failure of his formula in Brest, which read "no peace, no war"). Already on March 14, he actually heads the Red Army as People's Commissar for Military Affairs (People's Commissar for Military Affairs, Pre-Revolutionary Military Council) and retains this post throughout the Civil War.

According to many post-Soviet historians and publicists, as a "military leader" of Bolshevism, Trotsky displayed organizational skills and undoubted oratorical talent. However, it was in the military sphere that he remained, as the historian Dmitry Volkogonov emphasizes, an "amateur". During the Civil War, Trotsky did not show any special military leadership talents, and also made several strategic mistakes.

In our opinion, the claims of historians to Trotsky the military leader are completely unjustified.

It should not be forgotten that the newly-minted "commander-in-chief", having not received a military education, as well as experience military service, managed to "beat" in Civil war much more educated and experienced opponents. The generals of the White armies who opposed him, for the most part, had the experience of the First World War and service in the Russian General Staff. All of them, according to the biographical reference N. Rutycha, graduated from military schools and academies, where they, of course, were trained in planning and conducting strategic operations. Despite this, the famous generals from infantry and cavalry lost their Russia, finding themselves powerless outcasts, taxi drivers and Parisian "clochards". Trotsky, who had never served in the army, did not even have the rank of private. Nevertheless, he entered the Kremlin victorious and remained in power until 1926-27.

Struggle for power in 1921-1927

In 1921, Lenin's deteriorating health and the actual end of the Civil War brought the issue of power to the fore. In the secret opinion of doctors, sent to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee, the extremely serious nature of the illness of the head of state was emphasized. Immediately after Lenin's stroke (May 1922), a "troika" of Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin was formed to jointly fight Trotsky as one of the likely successors.

At the suggestion of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) was established, to which Stalin was appointed. Initially, this position was understood as a technical one and therefore did not interest Trotsky in any way. The head of state was considered the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. Meanwhile, Stalin manages to head the "technical" state apparatus just at a time of especially sharp growth of his influence.

Trotsky, in his own opinion, considered himself the sole successor of Lenin and did not see Stalin and the company as serious competitors. Kamenev (Rosenfeld) was his relative: he was married to Trotsky's sister. Lev Davydovich never took him seriously, nor did Zinoviev, for whom the image of a party jester had long been entrenched.

Since 1922, in parallel with the strengthening of Stalin's influence as the head of the "technical" apparatus, his influence as the secretary of the retiring Lenin has grown. Trotsky himself in his autobiographical work "My Life" admits on this occasion:

Indeed, Trotsky, who was "resting on his laurels," was never interested in details or parts of the party's power. He was used to receiving everything and did not pay attention to the little things. Stalin often visited Lenin in Gorki during his illness. Trotsky, as it turned out, had no idea where this settlement was.

Stalin, starting in 1922, methodically assigns his supporters to all key posts in the party. Special attention he pays to the secretaries of provincial and district party committees, as they form delegations to party congresses. During 1923, the troika replaces the commanders of the military districts with their own. Trotsky, as if not noticing what was happening around him, did nothing. At meetings of the Central Committee, he demonstratively appears with a French novel (as if to a toilet), makes loud scandals, slams doors, and often leaves on a hunt.

In the fall of 1923, while on a hunt, Trotsky caught a bad cold and fell ill with pneumonia. He never showed up at Lenin's funeral. Subsequently, Trotsky blamed Stalin for this, who, according to him, deliberately reported the erroneous date of the funeral.

Once the second person in the state is losing real power, it remains only to appeal to his authority as a leader of the revolution and the Civil War, using his oratorical and journalistic abilities.

In October 1924, seeing that the "troika" Stalin-Kamenev-Zinoviev was close to collapse, Trotsky finally decided to go on the offensive. He publishes the scandalous article "Lessons of October", in which he recalls his role as the organizer of the October Revolution, and in the form of "compromising evidence" informs the readers that Zinoviev and Kamenev were generally against the speech, and Stalin did not play any role in it. The article provoked the so-called "literary discussion", in which the "troika", once again united, attacked Trotsky with "compromising evidence", recalling his non-Bolshevik past and mutual abuse with Lenin before the revolution.

The "war of compromising materials" launched by Trotsky damaged his authority much more than all previous scandals. At the plenum of the Central Committee in January 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded that Trotsky be expelled from the party. Stalin, continuing to maneuver, suggests that Trotsky not only not exclude, but even leave him in the Central Committee and the Politburo, taking away from him only the key posts of the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs and the Pre-Revolutionary Council. Frunze becomes the new People's Commissar for Military Affairs, and Voroshilov becomes his deputy.

According to Trotsky himself, he even accepted his "overthrow" with relief, since this to some extent deflected accusations of preparing a "Bonapartist" military coup. The plenary session of the Central Committee appoints Trotsky to a number of secondary posts: chairman of the Main Committee for Concessions (Glavkontsesskiy), chairman of a special meeting at the Supreme Council for National Economy on product quality, chairman of the Electrotechnical Committee.

After such a blow to Trotsky, the "troika" Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin finally disintegrated. Supporters of Zinoviev and Kamenev form the so-called "new opposition". The main pretext for the split is the doctrine of "building socialism in a single country" developed by Stalin. Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev continued to pursue a course towards "world revolution."

Summing up the internal party discussions in the mid-20s, it is worth noting that at present, among the Stalinist historians and jingoistic patriots who have embarked on a new "great-power" platform, there is an opinion that Stalin, who did not participate in any what collusion with the Western powers, at that moment he was most concerned about the welfare of the country. The former Caucasian criminal always felt like a stranger in the society of intellectuals-re-emigrants, "sent Cossacks", and therefore preferred to eliminate Trotsky and the company, not only politically, but also physically.

However, the guardian of national interests decided to keep Trotsky himself alive for some time. A living enemy is better than a dead one because the struggle against foreign "opposition" can justify any outrages and lynching in the party elite.

The united opposition Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev lost its war in 1926-27 without even starting it. Stalin very quickly "squeezed" them out of the state of party legality, forcing them to actually go underground. As you know, the anti-government demonstrations and opposition rallies on November 7, 1927 led only to riots and riots on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad.

At the joint October plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, Trotsky demanded that the "Testament of Lenin" be read out, and, in accordance with it, that Stalin be removed from the post of General Secretary. Stalin was forced to read out the text of the "Testament", but it did not, contrary to the expectations of the opposition, "exploded with a bomb." After the XV Congress of the CPSU (b), Stalin asked the plenum of the Central Committee to accept his resignation from the post of General Secretary. It was just a well-rehearsed performance. The Central Committee, controlled by Stalin himself, naturally did not accept the "resignation". On the contrary, the majority of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) spoke in favor of the expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky from the party. In fact, the opposition was defeated.

In January 1927, Trotsky and his family were sent into exile in Alma-Ata. The OGPU officers had to carry the oppositionist out of the apartment in their arms. Trotsky again announced all kinds of protests and actively resisted their actions, trying to raise as much noise as possible. But that didn't help him.

Emigration and death

The forced expulsion of Trotsky from the USSR was connected with even greater difficulties: none of the European powers that accepted white émigrés wanted to give shelter to such an odious figure. In 1929, Trotsky was exiled to Turkey. Then, after the deprivation of Soviet citizenship, he moved to France, in 1935 - to Norway, where there were practically no Russian emigrants. But Norway, fearing to worsen relations with the USSR, tried with all its might to get rid of the unwanted guest, confiscating all of Trotsky's works and placing him under house arrest. Trotsky was repeatedly threatened to betray him to the Soviet government if he did not stop "kindling the fire of the world revolution" and looking for new "ghosts of communism" in post-war Europe. Unable to withstand the oppression, Trotsky emigrated to distant Mexico in 1936, where he lived until his death. In Mexico, Trotsky finished work on the book Revolution Betrayed, in which he called what was happening in the Soviet Union "Stalin's Thermidor." He accused Stalin of Bonapartism and the usurpation of power.

In 1938, Trotsky proclaimed the creation of the Fourth International, the heirs of which still exist. In response to this in Paris, in a hospital after an operation of appendicitis, Trotsky's eldest son, Lev Sedov, died (or was deliberately eliminated by agents of the NKVD). The fate of Trotsky's daughters from their first marriage was just as tragic: the youngest Nina died in 1928 of tuberculosis, and the eldest Zinaida followed her father into exile, but in 1933, in a state of deep depression, committed suicide.

Trotsky managed to take out his personal archive into exile. This archive included copies of a number of documents signed by Trotsky during his time in power in the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, the Central Committee, the Comintern, a number of Lenin's notes addressed personally to Trotsky and never published elsewhere. Based on his archive, Trotsky in his memoirs easily quotes a number of documents he signed, including sometimes even secret ones. In the 1930s, OGPU agents repeatedly tried (sometimes successfully) to steal some of their fragments, and in March 1931, part of the documents burned down during a suspicious fire. In March 1940, Trotsky, badly in need of money and fearing that the archive would still fall into the hands of Stalin, sold most of his papers to Harvard University.

On August 20, 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader, who had previously penetrated into Trotsky's entourage as a convinced of his adherent, mortally wounded him in the head with an ice pick. Trotsky died of his injury the next day. The Soviet government publicly denied any involvement in the murder. The killer was sentenced by a Mexican court to twenty years in prison, but in 1961 Ramon Mercader, who arrived in the USSR, was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union with the Order of Lenin.

Who is Leon Trotsky?

Leon Trotsky (/ trɒtski /; pronounced; nee Leiba Davidovich Bronstein; November 7 (old style October 26) 1879 - August 21, 1940, was a Marxist revolutionary and theoretician, a Soviet politician who planned the transfer of all political power into the hands of the Soviets during during the October Revolution of 1917, and is also the founding leader of the Red Army.

Initially, Trotsky supported the Menshevik Internationalist faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. He joined the Bolsheviks shortly before the October Revolution of 1917 and eventually became the leader of the Communist Party. He was, along with Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov, one of seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 to lead the Bolshevik revolution. In the early days of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union, he first served as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and then as the founder and commander of the Red Army with the rank of People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. He played a major role in the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Civil War in Russia (1918-1923).

After the failed struggle of the left opposition against the politics and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and against the growing role of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was stripped of power (October 1927), expelled from the Communist Party (November 1927), exiled to Alma-Ata ( January 1928) and expelled from the Soviet Union (February 1929). As head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union from exile. On Stalin's orders, he was killed in Mexico in August 1940 by Spanish-born Ramon Mercader, a Soviet agent.

Trotsky's ideas formed the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist teaching that opposes the theories of Stalinism. Dropped out of history books under Stalin, he was one of the few Soviet political figures not rehabilitated by the government under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. It was only in the late 1980s that his books were published in the Soviet Union, which soon disintegrated.

Biography of Leon Trotsky

Lev Trotsky, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, born November 7, 1879, was the fifth child in a Russian-Jewish family of wealthy (but illiterate) farmers in Yanovka or Yanivka, in the Kherson province Russian Empire(now Bereslavka, in Ukraine), a small village 24 kilometers from the nearest post office. His parents were David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847-1922) and his wife Anna Lvovna (née Zhivotovskaya) (1850-1910). The family was of Jewish origin. The language they spoke at home was surzhik, a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian. Trotsky's younger sister, Olga, who also became a Bolshevik and Soviet politician, married the prominent Bolshevik Lev Kamenev.

Many anti-communists, anti-Semites and anti-Trotskyists noted the real name of Trotsky, emphasizing the political and historical significance of the name Bronstein. Some authors, notably Robert Service, have also argued that Trotsky had the Yiddish name "Leiba" as a child. American Trotskyist David North said this was an obvious attempt to emphasize Trotsky's Jewish origins, but contrary to Service's claims, there is no documentary evidence of this. He believes that it is highly unlikely that the family was Jewish since they did not speak Yiddish, the main language of Eastern European Jews. Both North and Walter Lucker wrote in their books that Trotsky was called Leva as a child, a standard Russian diminutive of the name "Lev".

When Trotsky was nine years old, his father sent him to Odessa to study at a Jewish school. He was enrolled in a German language school, which became Russian-speaking during his life in Odessa as a result of the imperial government's policy of Russification. As Isaac Deutscher notes in his biography of Trotsky, Odessa was then a bustling cosmopolitan port city, unlike the typical Russian city of the time. This environment contributed to the development of the young man's international outlook. Although Trotsky pointed out in his autobiography My Life that he never knew how to speak fluently any language other than Russian and Ukrainian, Raymond Molyneux wrote that Trotsky spoke French fluently.

Trotsky's revolutionary activities

Trotsky became a participant in revolutionary events in 1896, after moving to the port city of Nikolaev on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast. At first as a populist (revolutionary populist), he initially opposed Marxism, but in the same year became a Marxist thanks to his future first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya. Instead of doing mathematics, Trotsky helped organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolaev in early 1897. Using the name "Lvov," he wrote and printed leaflets and proclamations, distributed revolutionary brochures, and promoted socialist ideas among industrial workers and revolutionary students.

In January 1898, more than 200 union members were arrested, including Trotsky. Over the next two years, he was held in prison awaiting trial, first in Nikolaev, then in Kherson, then in Odessa and finally in Moscow. In a Moscow prison, he contacted other revolutionaries. There he first heard about Lenin and read Lenin's book The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Two months after the beginning of his imprisonment, on March 1-3, 1898, the first Congress of the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) took place. From that moment on, Trotsky was a party member.

Trotsky's first marriage and Siberian exile

While in prison in Moscow in the summer of 1899, Trotsky married Alexandra Sokolovskaya (1872-1938), a Marxist. The wedding ceremony was performed by a Jewish chaplain.

In 1900 he was sentenced to four years of exile in Siberia. Because of the marriage, Trotsky and his wife were allowed to stay together in Siberia. They were sent to Ust-Kut and Verkholensk in the region of Lake Baikal in Siberia. They had two daughters, Zinaida (1901 - January 5, 1933) and Nina (1902 - June 9, 1928), both born in Siberia.

In Siberia, Trotsky studied philosophy. He learned about the various directions within the party, which were destroyed by the arrests in 1898 and 1899. Some Social Democrats, known as the "Economists," argued that the party should focus on helping industrial workers improve their lives and not worry about them changing government. They believed that social reforms would grow out of workers' struggles for higher wages and better working conditions. Others argued that the overthrow of the monarchy was more important and that a well-organized and disciplined revolutionary party was of great importance. The last position was expressed by the London newspaper "Iskra" or on English language"The Spark", which was founded in 1900. Trotsky quickly sided with Iskra's position and began writing for the newspaper.

In the summer of 1902, at the insistence of his wife, Trotsky fled Siberia, hidden in a carriage in a load of hay. Alexandra later fled Siberia with her daughters.

Leo and Alexandra were separated and soon divorced, but maintained friendly relations. Their children were later raised by Trotsky's parents in Ukraine. Both daughters got married. Zinaida gave birth to children, but her daughters died before their parents. Nina Nevelson died of tuberculosis (TB) and was cared for by her older sister in the last months of her life. Zinaida Volkova died after her father went into exile in Berlin. She took her son from her second marriage with her and left her daughter in Russia. Suffering from tuberculosis, and then from a fatal illness and depression, Volkova committed suicide. Their mother, Alexandra Trotskaya, disappeared in 1935 during the Great Terror in the Soviet Union under Stalin and was killed by Stalinist forces three years later.

Trotsky's first emigration

Up to this point in his life, Trotsky used his birth name - Leo or Leon Bronstein. He changed his last name to Trotsky, the name he will carry for the rest of his life. They say he took the name of the jailer of the Odessa prison in which he was previously held. It became his main revolutionary pseudonym. After escaping from Siberia, Trotsky moved to London, joining Georgy Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Yuli Martov and other editors of Iskra. Under the pseudonym Pen ("pen" or "pen" in Russian), Trotsky soon became one of the newspaper's leading writers.

Unknown to Trotsky, the six editors of Iskra were evenly distributed between the "old guard" led by Plekhanov and the "new guard" led by Lenin and Martov. Plekhanov's supporters were older (in their 40s and 50s) and had spent the past 20 years together in exile in Europe. The members of the new guard were much younger and had only recently emigrated from Russia. Lenin, who tried to create a permanent majority against Plekhanov in Iskra, expected Trotsky, then 23, to side with the new guard.

In March 1903, Lenin wrote:

I invite all members of the editorial board to accept "Pen" on the board on the same basis as other members. We desperately need a seventh member, both for the convenience of voting (six is ​​an even number) and as an addition to our forces. The Pen has been contributing to the solution of each problem for several months; he works most energetically for Iskra; he lectures (which he is very good at). In the section of articles and notes on the events of the day, it is not only useful but absolutely necessary. He is undoubtedly a man of rare ability, he has conviction and energy, and he will go much further.

Due to Plekhanov's disagreement, Trotsky did not become a full member of the board. But, since then, he took part in its meetings as a consultant, which brought him Plekhanov's dislike.

At the end of 1902, Trotsky met with Natalya Ivanovna Sedova, who soon became his lover. They married in 1903, and she was with him until her death. They had two children, Lev Sedov (1906 - February 16, 1938) and Sergei Sedov (March 21, 1908 - October 29, 1937), both of whom died before their parents. As for the names of his sons, Trotsky later explained everything after the 1917 revolution:

In order not to force my sons to change their names, I, upon the demand of "citizenship", took my wife's surname.

Trotsky never used the surname "Sedov" either privately or publicly. Natalya Sedova sometimes signed "Sedova-Trotskaya".

In the meantime, after a period of secret police repression and internal confusion following the first Party Congress in 1898, Iskra managed to convene the Second Party Congress in London in August 1903. Trotsky and other Iskra editors were present. The First Congress took place as planned, with Iskra's supporters defeating several of the Economists' delegates. The Congress then discussed the position of the Jewish Bund, which established the RSDLP in 1898, but wanted to remain autonomous within the party.

Shortly thereafter, the pro-Iskra delegates split into two factions. Lenin and his Bolshevik supporters favored a smaller but highly organized party, while Martov and his Menshevik supporters favored a larger and less disciplined party. Unexpectedly, Trotsky and most of the Iskra editors supported Martov and the Mensheviks, while Plekhanov supported Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In 1903 and 1904, many members changed sides in factions. Plekhanov soon parted with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky left the Mensheviks in September 1904 because they insisted on an alliance with the Russian liberals and their resistance to reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

From 1904 to 1917, Trotsky called himself a "non-factional Social Democrat." He worked between 1904 and 1917 trying to reconcile different groups within the party, which led to numerous clashes with Lenin and other prominent party members. Trotsky later claimed that he was wrong in confronting Lenin on party issues. During these years, Trotsky began to develop his theory of permanent revolution and in 1904-1907 established a close working relationship with Alexander Parvus.

During the split, Lenin referred to Trotsky as "Judas", "scoundrel" and "pig."

Bloody sunday

Unrest and agitation against the Russian government began in St. Petersburg on January 3, 1905 (Julian calendar), when a strike began at the Putilov factory in the city. This single blow became a general strike, and by January 7, 1905, there were 140,000 strikers in St. Petersburg. On Sunday January 9, 1905, Father Georgy Gapon led a peaceful procession of citizens through the streets to the Winter Palace to pray to the tsar for food and help from the brutal government. The Palace Guard opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, killing 1,000 people. Sunday January 9, 1905 became known as Bloody Sunday.

After the events of Bloody Sunday, Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in February 1905 via Kiev. At first he wrote leaflets for an underground printing house in Kiev, but soon moved to the capital, St. Petersburg. There he worked with 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 to concretize his theory of permanent revolution.

On September 19, 1905, typesetters at the Sytinsky printing plant in Moscow went on strike for a shorter working day and higher wages. By the evening of September 24, workers from 50 other printing houses in Moscow also went on strike. On October 2, 1905, typesetters in printing houses in St. Petersburg decided to support the Moscow strikers. On October 7, 1905, the railway workers of the Moscow-Kazan railway went on strike. As a result of the confusion that arose, Trotsky returned from Finland to St. Petersburg on October 15, 1905. On that day, Trotsky addressed the Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies, which was held in Institute of Technology... About 200,000 people gathered in the street to listen to the speech.

After their return, Trotsky and Parvus took over the newspaper Russkaya Gazeta, increasing its circulation to 500,000 newspapers. Trotsky was also a co-founder, along with Parvus and Yuli Martov and other Mensheviks, of the newspaper "Beginning", which also proved to be very successful in the revolutionary atmosphere of St. Petersburg in 1905.

Shortly before Trotsky's return, the Mensheviks independently came up with the same idea as Trotsky: an elected non-party revolutionary organization representing the capital's workers, the first "Soviet" of workers. By the time Trotsky arrived, the St. Petersburg Council was already functioning, headed by Khrustalev-Nosar (Georgy Nosar, pseudonym Pyotr Khrustalev). Khrustalev-Nosar was a compromise figure when he was elected head of the St. Petersburg Soviet. Khrustalev-Nosar was a lawyer who stood above the political factions contained in the Council. However, from the moment of his election, he proved to be very popular among the workers, despite the initial resistance of the Bolsheviks. Khrustalev-Nosar became famous in his capacity as a representative of the St. Petersburg Council. Indeed, for the outside world, Khrustalev-Nosar was the embodiment of the St. Petersburg Council. Trotsky joined the Council under the name "Yanovsky" (in honor of the village in which he was born, Yanovki) and was elected deputy chairman. He did a great job in the Council and after the arrest of Khrustalev-Nosar on November 26, 1905, he was elected Chairman of the Council. On December 2, the Council issued a proclamation containing the following statement about the tsarist government and its foreign debts:

The autocracy never enjoyed the confidence of the people and never received any authority from the people. Therefore, we decided not to allow the repayment of such loans, as was done by the tsarist government, openly participating in the war with the entire people.

The next day, the Council was surrounded by troops loyal to the government and the deputies were arrested. Trotsky and other leaders of the Soviet were tried in 1906 on charges of supporting an armed rebellion. At the trial on October 4, 1906, Trotsky delivered one of the best speeches of his life. It was this speech that solidified his reputation as a successful public speaker. He was convicted and sentenced to internal exile in Siberia.

Trotsky's second emigration

On his way to exile in Obdorsk in Siberia in January 1907, Trotsky fled the village of Berezovo and headed back to London. He attended the 5th Congress of the RSDLP. In October he moved to Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Over the next seven years, he was often involved in the activities of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and sometimes in the German Social Democratic Party.

In Vienna, Trotsky approached Adolf Joffe, who was his friend for the next 20 years, and introduced him to psychoanalysis. In October 1908, he was invited to join the editorial board of Pravda, a bi-weekly Russian-language Social Democratic newspaper for Russian workers, which he co-edited with Ioffe, Matvey Skobelev, and Viktor Kopp. The newspaper was smuggled into Russia. Pravda was published very irregularly; only five issues were published in the first year. By avoiding factional politics, the newspaper proved popular with Russian industrial workers. Both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split several times after the failure of the 1905-1907 revolution. There was not enough money to publish Pravda. Trotsky applied to the Central Committee of the Russian Federation for financial support for the newspaper during 1909.

The Central Committee in 1910 was controlled by the majority of the Bolsheviks. Lenin agreed to finance Pravda, but demanded that the Bolshevik be appointed co-editor of the newspaper. When various factions of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks tried to reunite at a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in January 1910 in Paris over Lenin's objections, Trotsky's Pravda became a party-funded "central organ". Leon Kamenev, Trotsky's son-in-law, joined the editorial board as a Bolshevik, but attempts at unification failed in August 1910. Kamenev left the editorial office amid mutual accusations. Trotsky continued to publish Pravda for two more years, until finally the newspaper closed in April 1912.

On April 22, 1912, the Bolsheviks began publishing a new workers-oriented newspaper in St. Petersburg, and also called it Pravda. Trotsky was so upset that he considered the name of his newspaper a usurpation that in April 1913 he wrote a letter to Nikolai Chkheidze, the Menshevik leader, harshly condemning Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Although he quickly put an end to the controversy, the letter was intercepted by the Russian police and a copy was placed in their archives. Shortly after Lenin's death in 1924, the letter was discovered and published by opponents of Trotsky in the Communist Party to portray him as an enemy of Lenin.

The 1910s were a period of increased tension in the RSDLP, which led to numerous frictions between Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The most serious disagreements that Trotsky and the Mensheviks had with Lenin at that time was the issue of "expropriation", that is, the armed robberies of banks and other companies by Bolshevik groups to collect money for the party. These actions were prohibited by the 5th Congress, but continued to be committed by the Bolsheviks.

In January 1912, most of the Bolshevik faction, led by Lenin and several Mensheviks, held a conference in Prague and expelled their opponents from the party. In response, Trotsky organized in August 1912 in Vienna a "union" of social democratic factions (also known as the "August bloc") and tried to reunite the party. The attempt was largely unsuccessful.

In Vienna, Trotsky regularly published articles in radical Russian and Ukrainian newspapers, such as Kievskaya Mysl, under various pseudonyms, often using Antide Oto. In September 1912, Kievskaya Mysl sent him to the Balkans as its war correspondent, where he covered the two Balkan Wars over the next year and became a close friend of Christian Rakovsky. The latter later became a leading Soviet politician and Trotsky's ally in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On August 3, 1914, during World War I, in which Austria-Hungary fought against the Russian Empire, Trotsky was forced to leave Vienna for neutral Switzerland to avoid being arrested as a Russian emigrant.

Trotsky and the First World War

The outbreak of the First World War caused a sudden regrouping in the RSDLP and other European Social Democratic parties on the issues of war, revolution, pacifism and internationalism. In the RSDLP, Lenin, Trotsky and Martov defended various internationalist anti-war points of view, while Plekhanov and other Social Democrats (both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) supported the Russian government to some extent. In Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked for the Swiss Socialist Party, urging it to pass an international resolution. He wrote a book against the war, "War and the International", and also against the military position of the European Social Democratic parties, especially the German party. As a war correspondent for Kievskaya Mysl, Trotsky moved to France on November 19, 1914. In January 1915, in Paris, he began editing (first with Martov, who soon left the editorial office when the newspaper became more leftist) Nashe Slovo, an international socialist newspaper. He developed the slogan "a world without annexations and indemnities, a world without conquerors and conquered." Lenin advocated recognition of Russia's defeat in the war and demanded a complete break with the Second International.

Trotsky participated in the Zimmerwald Conference of Anti-War Socialists in September 1915 and advocated a middle course between those who, like Martov, decided to remain in the Second International at any cost, and those who, like Lenin, would sever relations with the Second International and form the Third International. The conference adopted middle line proposed by Trotsky. First opposing, Lenin eventually voted in favor of Trotsky's decision to avoid a split among the anti-war socialists.

On March 31, 1916, Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his anti-war activities. The Spanish authorities did not want him to come and deport him to the United States on December 25, 1916. He arrived in New York on January 13, 1917. He lived for nearly three months at 1522 Wise Avenue in the Bronx. In New York, he wrote articles for the local Russian-language socialist newspaper “ New world”And the daily newspaper“ True Day ”in Yiddish. He also gave speeches to Russian émigrés. He was officially making about $ 15 a week.

Trotsky lived in New York when Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown by the February Revolution of 1917. He left New York on March 27, 1917, but his ship, the SS Kristianiafjord, was intercepted by the British naval forces in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was detained for a month at the Amherst POW camp in Nova Scotia. While imprisoned in the camp, Trotsky befriended the workers and sailors among his cellmates, describing his month in the camp as "one permanent mass meeting." Trotsky's speeches and agitation aroused the ire of German prison officers, who complained to the commander of the British camp, Colonel Morris, about Trotsky's "anti-patriotic" attitude. Morris then banned Trotsky from making public speeches, with the result that 530 prisoners protested and signed a petition against Morris's order. At this time in Russia, after initial doubts and pressure from workers 'and peasants' councils, Russian Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov was forced to demand the release of Trotsky as a citizen of Russia and the British government released him on April 29, 1917.

He reached Russia on May 17, 1917. After his return, Trotsky actually agreed with the position of the Bolsheviks, but did not immediately join them. The Russian Social Democrats were divided 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 Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in St. 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 Mezhdistrict faction.

After the failed pro-Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd, Trotsky was arrested on August 7, 1917. 40 days later he was released after the failed counter-revolutionary uprising of Lavr Kornilov. After the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky was elected chairman on October 8. He sided with Lenin against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, when the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed the issue of an armed uprising, he led the attempts to overthrow the Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky.

The following summary of Trotsky's role in 1917 was written by Stalin in Pravda on November 10, 1918. Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book The October Revolution (1934), it was excluded from Stalin's works (1949).

All practical work related to the organization of the uprising was carried out under the direct leadership of the President of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. It can be argued with confidence that the party owes first and foremost to Comrade Trotsky for the quick transfer of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and for the effective organization of the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee.

Following the success of the November 7-8, 1917 uprising, Trotsky made efforts to repel a Cossack counterattack led by General Pyotr Krasnov and other troops still loyal to the ousted Provisional Government in Gatchina. In alliance with Lenin, he suppressed attempts by other members of the Bolshevik Central Committee (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, etc.) to share power with others socialist parties... By the end of 1917, Trotsky was undoubtedly the second person in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin. He eclipsed the ambitious Zinoviev, who had been Lenin's top lieutenant for the previous decade, but whose star seemed to be fading away. This change in position contributed to the ongoing rivalry and enmity between the two men, which lasted until 1926 and contributed to their mutual destruction.

Trotsky during the Russian Revolution

After the Bolsheviks came to power, Trotsky became the people's commissar for foreign affairs and published secret treaties previously signed by the Entente, which detailed plans for the post-war redistribution of colonies and redistribution of state borders.

Trotsky led the Soviet delegation during the peace talks in Brest-Litovsk from December 22, 1917 to February 10, 1918. The left-wing communists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, continued to believe that there could be no peace between the Soviet republic and a capitalist country and that only a revolutionary war leading to a pan-European Soviet republic, will bring lasting peace. They referred to the successes of the newly formed (January 15, 1918) voluntary Red Army against the Polish troops of General Jozef Dovbor-Munitsky in Belarus, the White movement in the Don region and the new independent Ukrainian troops as evidence that the Red Army could withstand the forces of Germany, especially if used propaganda and asymmetric fighting... They did not mind negotiating with the Germans to expose Germany's imperial claims (territorial gains, reparations, etc.) in the hope of speeding up the coveted Soviet revolution in the West, but they were categorically against signing any peace treaty. In the event of an ultimatum to Germany, they advocated declaring a revolutionary war against Germany in order to inspire Russian and European workers to fight for socialism. This opinion was shared by the left-wing social revolutionaries, who were then the junior partners of the Bolsheviks in the coalition government.

Lenin, who had previously hoped for an early Soviet revolution in Germany and other parts of Europe, quickly decided that the imperial government of Germany was still firmly in control of the state and that, without strong Russian troops, an armed conflict with Germany would lead to the collapse of the Soviet government in Russia. He agreed with the left-wing communists that the pan-European Soviet revolution would ultimately solve all problems, but until then the Bolsheviks had to stay in power. Lenin did not object to the continuation of negotiations for maximum propaganda effect, but from January 1918 he advocated the signing of a separate peace treaty if he had to face a German ultimatum. Trotsky's position was between these two Bolshevik factions. Like Lenin, he admitted that the old Russian army, inherited from the monarchy and the Provisional Government and becoming obsolete, could not fight:

It was quite clear to me that we could no longer fight, and that the newly formed units of the Red Guard and Red Army were too small and poorly trained to resist the Germans.

But he agreed with the left communists that a separate peace treaty with the imperialist government would be a terrible moral and material blow to the Soviet government, nullify all its military and political successes of 1917 and 1918, and revive the notion that the Bolsheviks were secretly connected with the German government. , and will cause a surge of internal resistance. He argued that any German ultimatum should be denied, which could well lead to an uprising in Germany, or at least inspire German soldiers to disobey their officers, since any German offensive would be a clear seizure of territory. He wrote in 1925:

We began peace talks in the hope of raising the workers' parties of Germany and Austria-Hungary, as well as the parties of the Entente countries. For this reason, we were obliged to delay the negotiations as long as possible in order to give the European workers time to understand the main fact of the Soviet revolution itself and, in particular, its peaceful policy. But there was another question: can the Germans still fight? Do they have the ability to launch an attack on the revolution that will explain the end of the war? How can we know the direction of the thoughts of the German soldiers, how can we understand it?

During January and February 1918, Lenin's position was supported by 7 members of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks and 4 supporters of Bukharin. Trotsky had 4 votes (his own, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Nikolai Krestinsky and Adolf Ioffe), and since his vote was decisive, he was able to continue his policy in Brest-Litovsk. When he could no longer postpone negotiations, he withdrew from the negotiations on February 10, 1918, refusing to sign Germany's tough terms. After a short break, the Central Powers notified the Soviet government that after February 17 they would cease to observe the ceasefire. At this stage, Lenin again argued that the Soviet government had done everything possible to explain its position to Western workers and that it was time to accept the terms. Trotsky refused to support Lenin as he waited to see if the Germans would revolt and if German soldiers would refuse to follow orders.

Germany resumed military operations on 18 February. During the day, it became clear that the German army was capable of offensive operations and that the Red Army units, which were relatively small, poorly organized and poorly controlled, were not up to par. On the evening of February 18, 1918, Trotsky and his supporters in the committee abstained and Lenin's proposal was accepted by 7-4 votes. The Soviet government sent a radiogram to the German side, accepting the final terms of the Brest-Litovsk Peace.

Germany did not respond for three days and continued the offensive, experiencing little resistance. The reply came on February 21, but the conditions were so harsh that even Lenin briefly pondered that the Soviet government had no choice but to fight. But in the end, the committee again voted 7-4 on February 23, 1918; The Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed on March 3 and ratified on March 15, 1918. Because Trotsky was so closely associated with the policies pursued by the earlier Soviet delegation in Brest-Litovsk, he resigned from his post as Foreign Commissar to remove a potential obstacle to the new policy.

The inability of the newly formed Red Army to withstand the German advance in February 1918 exposed its weaknesses: inadequacy, lack of trained officers, and an almost complete lack of coordination and subordination. The renowned and terrifying sailors of the Baltic Fleet, one of the strongholds of the new regime led by Pavel Dybenko, fled from the German army in Narva. The notion that the Soviet state could have an effective volunteer or military army was seriously undermined.

Trotsky was one of the first Bolshevik leaders to acknowledge the problem, and he pushed for the creation of a military council of former Russian generals that would function as an advisory body. Lenin and the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks agreed on March 4 to create a Supreme Military Council headed by the former chief of the imperial general staff, Mikhail Bonch-Bruyevich.

The entire Bolshevik leadership of the Red Army, including the People's Commissar (Minister of Defense) Nikolai Podvoisky and Commander-in-Chief Nikolai Krylenko, strongly protested and eventually resigned. They believed that the Red Army should consist only of devoted revolutionaries, rely on propaganda and force, as well as elected officers. They viewed former Imperial officers and generals as potential traitors to be avoided in the new troops, much less put them at the head of those troops. Their views continued to be popular with many Bolsheviks throughout most of the Russian Civil War, and their supporters, including Podvoisky, who became one of Trotsky's deputies, continually thwarted Trotsky's ideas. Dissatisfaction with Trotsky's policies of strict discipline, appeal and trust in carefully monitored non-communist military experts eventually led to military opposition, which was active within the Communist Party in late 1918-1919.

On March 13, 1918, Trotsky's resignation as commissar for foreign affairs was officially accepted and he was appointed People's Commissar for Army and Navy Affairs, instead of Podvoisky, and chairman of the Supreme Military Council. The post of commander-in-chief was abolished and Trotsky gained full control over the Red Army, responsible only for the leadership of the Communist Party, whose left-wing Social Revolutionary allies left the government over Brest-Litovsk. With the help of his deputy, Ephraim Sklyansky, Trotsky spent the remainder of the civil war, transforming the Red Army from a motley group of small and desperately independent detachments into a large and disciplined war machine, through compulsory conscription, party-controlled detachments, compulsory obedience, and officers chosen by the leadership rather than privates. He defended this point of view throughout his life.

The military situation soon tested Trotsky's managerial and organizational skills. In May-June 1918, the Czechoslovak legions on the way from European Russia to Vladivostok rebelled against the Soviet government. This led to the Bolsheviks losing most of the country's territory, increasingly organized resistance from Russian anti-communist forces (commonly referred to as the White Army after their best-known component), and widespread desertion of the military experts on whom Trotsky relied.

Trotsky and the government responded with full-fledged mobilization, which increased the size of the Red Army from less than 300,000 troops in May 1918 to 1,000,000 in October, and the introduction of political commissars into the army. The latter had the task of securing the loyalty of military experts (mainly former officers of the Imperial army) and jointly signing their orders. Trotsky considered the organization of the Red Army to be built on the ideas of the October Revolution. As he later wrote in his autobiography:

An army cannot be built without repression. Masses of people cannot be led to death as long as the army command does not have the death penalty in its arsenal. As long as, proud of their technology, the evil tailless monkeys called humans build armies and fight, the command will put the soldiers between possible death in front and inevitable death behind. Yet armies are not built on fear. The tsarist army collapsed not because of the lack of repression. In an attempt to save the army by restoring the death penalty, Kerensky only destroyed it. From the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. These facts do not require explanation to anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of the language of history. The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October Revolution, and the train supplied this cement to the front.

In response to the failed assassination attempt on Lenin by Fanny Kaplan on August 30, 1918, and the successful murder of the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky, on August 17, 1918, the Bolsheviks instructed Felix Dzerzhinsky to start the "Red Terror" announced in the September 1, 1918 issue " Red newspaper ". As for the Red Terror, Trotsky wrote:

The bourgeoisie today is a descending class ... We are forced to tear it off in order to cut it off. The Red Terror is a weapon used against a doomed class that does not want to die. If the White Terror can only slow down the historical rise of the proletariat, the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie.

When working with deserters, Trotsky often interested them politically, awakening the ideas of revolution in them.

In Kaluga, Voronezh and Ryazan provinces, tens of thousands of young peasants did not attend the first Soviet conscriptions. The military commissariat of Ryazan managed to collect about fifteen thousand such deserters. Driving through Ryazan, I decided to look at them. They tried to dissuade me: "No matter what happens." But everything turned out as well as possible. From the barracks they called out: "Comrades deserters, go to the meeting, Comrade Trotsky has come to you." They ran out excited, noisy, curious, like schoolchildren. I imagined them worse. They imagined me more terrifying. In a few minutes I was surrounded by a huge unbelted, undisciplined, but not at all hostile lads. The "comrade deserters" looked at me in such a way that, it seemed, many eyes would pop out. Climbing on the table right there in the yard, I talked with them for an hour and a half. It was the most grateful audience. I tried to raise them in their own eyes and in the end I urged them to raise their hands as a sign of loyalty to the revolution. Before my very eyes, they were infected with new ideas. They were possessed by true enthusiasm. They walked me to the car, looked with all their eyes, but not frightened, but enthusiastically, shouted at the top of their lungs and did not want to detach from me for anything. I learned later, not without pride, that an important educational tool in relation to them was the reminder: "What did you promise Trotsky?" The regiments of Ryazan "deserters" fought well at the fronts afterwards.

Given the shortage of manpower and 16 opposing foreign armies, Trotsky also pushed for the use of former Tsarist officers as military specialists in the Red Army, in conjunction with Bolshevik political commissars to ensure the revolutionary character of the Red Army. Lenin commented on this:

When Comrade Trotsky recently informed me that the number of officers of the old army in our military department is several tens of thousands, then I got a concrete idea of ​​the secret of using our enemy: how to make those who are his opponents build communism, build communism out of bricks that the capitalists have picked up against us! We have no other bricks! So, we must force the bourgeois experts, under the leadership of the proletariat, to build our building out of these bricks. It's complicated; but this is the key to victory.

In September 1918, the Bolshevik government, faced with constant military difficulties, declared what amounted to martial law and the reorganization of the Red Army. The Supreme Military Council was abolished, and the post of commander-in-chief was restored, occupied by the commander of the Latvian riflemen Joachim Vatsetis (aka Jukums Vacietis), who had previously led the Eastern Front against the Czechoslovak legions. Vatsetis directed the daily operations of the army, and Trotsky became chairman of the newly formed Revolutionary Military Council of the republic and retained overall control over the military. Trotsky and Vatsetis had clashed earlier in 1918, while Vatsetis and Trotsky's adviser Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich were also unfriendly towards each other. Nonetheless, Trotsky eventually developed a working relationship with the often hot-tempered Vatsetis.

The reorganization sparked another conflict between Trotsky and Stalin at the end of September. Trotsky appointed the former Imperial General Pavel Pavlovich Sytin to command the Southern Front, but in early October 1918 Stalin refused to accept him, and therefore he was recalled from the front. Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov tried to reconcile Trotsky and Stalin, but their meeting was unsuccessful.

Trotsky in power in the early 1919s

In late 1918 and early 1919, there were several attacks on Trotsky's management of the Red Army, including accusations of newspaper articles inspired by Stalin and a direct attack by the military opposition at the 8th Party Congress in March 1919. On the surface, he successfully passed them and was elected one of the five full members of the first Politburo after the convention. But he later wrote:

No wonder my military work has created so many enemies for me. I didn’t look to the side, I pushed aside those who were hindering military success, or in a rush to work, stepping on the toes of the careless, and I was too busy to even apologize. Some people remember things like that. The dissatisfied and those whose feelings were hurt found their way to Stalin or Zinoviev, because these two were also in pain.

In mid-1919, the disaffected had the opportunity to create a serious problem for Trotsky's leadership: the Red Army grew from 800,000 to 3,000,000 and fought on sixteen fronts at the same time. The Red Army defeated the White Army's spring offensive in the east and was about to cross Ural mountains and enter Siberia in pursuit of the forces of Admiral Alexander Kolchak. But the white Russian troops of General Anton Denikin were advancing to the south and the situation quickly deteriorated. On June 6, Commander-in-Chief Vatsetis ordered the Eastern Front to halt the advance so that he could use these forces in the south. But the leadership of the Eastern Front, including its commander Sergei Kamenev ( former colonel Imperial Army) and members of the Eastern Front of the Revolutionary Military Council Ivar Smilga, Mikhail Lashevich and Sergei Gusev protested zealously and wanted to focus on the Eastern Front. They insisted that it was very important to capture Siberia before winter and that as soon as Kolchak's forces were crushed, even more divisions would be freed for the Southern Front. Trotsky, who had previously been in conflict with the leadership of the Eastern Front, including the temporary removal of Kamenev in May 1919, supported Vatsetis.

At a meeting of the Central Committee on July 3-4, after a heated exchange, the majority supported Kamenev and Smilga against Vatsetis and Trotsky. Trotsky's plan was rejected and he was heavily criticized for various alleged flaws in his leadership style, mainly his character. Stalin used this opportunity to put pressure on Lenin to dismiss Trotsky from his post. But when Trotsky resigned on July 5, the Politburo and the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee unanimously refused to resign.

However, some significant changes were made to the leadership of the Red Army. Trotsky was temporarily sent to the Southern Front, and work in Moscow was informally coordinated by Smilga. Most of the members of the Revolutionary Military Council who did not participate in its daily activities were relieved of their duties on July 8 and new members were added, including Smilga. On the same day when Trotsky was in the south, Vatsetis was suddenly arrested by the Cheka on suspicion of involvement in an anti-Soviet conspiracy and replaced by Sergei Kamenev. A few weeks later in the south, Trotsky returned to Moscow and resumed control of the Red Army. A year later, Smilga and Tukhachevsky were defeated during the Battle of Warsaw, but Trotsky turned down the opportunity to repay Smilga, which earned him Smilga's friendship and later support during the internal party battles of the 1920s.

By October 1919, the government was in the worst crisis of the civil war: Denikin's troops approached Tula and Moscow from the south, and the troops of General Nikolai Yudenich approached Petrograd from the west. Lenin decided that, since it was more important to defend Moscow, it was necessary to abandon Petrograd. Trotsky argued that it was necessary to defend Petrograd, at least in part, in order to prevent the intervention of Estonia and Finland. In a rare reshuffle, Trotsky was supported by Stalin and Zinoviev, and he defeated Lenin in the Central Committee. He immediately went to Petrograd, whose leadership was headed by Zinoviev, who was demoralized, and organized his defense, sometimes personally stopping the fleeing soldiers. By October 22, the Red Army was on the offensive, and at the beginning of November, Yudenich's troops were expelled to Estonia, where they were disarmed and detained. Trotsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his actions in Petrograd.

Trotsky in power in the early 1920s

With the defeat of Denikin and Yudenich at the end of 1919, the emphasis of the Soviet government shifted to the economy. Trotsky spent the winter of 1919-1920 in the Urals region trying to revive its economy. Based on his experience, he proposed abandoning the policy of War Communism, which included confiscating grain from peasants, and partially restoring the grain market. Still committed to War Communism, Lenin turned down his offer. He made Trotsky responsible for the country's railways (while maintaining overall control over the Red Army), which he believed should be militarized in the spirit of War Communism. Only in early 1921, due to economic collapse and social uprisings, did Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership abandon War Communism in favor of a New Economic Policy.

In early 1920, Soviet-Polish tensions eventually led to the Polish-Soviet War. On the eve of and during the war, Trotsky argued that the Red Army had exhausted its strength and the Soviet government should sign a peace treaty with Poland as soon as possible. He did not believe that the Red Army would find much support in Poland. Lenin later wrote that he and other Bolshevik leaders believed that the successes of the Red Army in the civil war in Russia and against the Poles meant that: “The defensive period of the war with world imperialism is over, and we could and should have used the military situation to start an offensive war ".

The Red Army was defeated by Poland and the offensive was canceled during the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920, in part because Stalin did not obey Trotsky's orders ahead of decisive battles. Back in Moscow, Trotsky again advocated a peace treaty and this time won.

Trade union discussion

In late 1920, when the Bolsheviks won the civil war and prior to the 8th and 9th Congress of Soviets, the Communist Party had a heated and increasingly fierce debate about the role of trade unions in the Soviet state. The discussion divided the party into many "platforms" (factions), including the factions of Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin; Bukharin eventually united his faction with Trotsky. Smaller, more radical factions such as the Workers' Opposition (led by Alexander Shlyapnikov) and the Democratic Centralism Group were particularly active.

Trotsky's position was formed when he headed the special commission on the Soviet transport system "Tsektran". He was appointed to this position to rebuild the railway system destroyed by the civil war. As a military commissar and revolutionary military leader, he saw the need to create a militarized "industrial atmosphere" by incorporating trade unions directly into the state apparatus. His adamant position was that workers in a workers' state should not be afraid of the state, and that the state should completely control the trade unions. At the Ninth Party Congress, he defended “a regime in which every worker feels like a soldier of labor who cannot dispose of himself freely; Who is watching this? Trade union. This is the militarization of the working class. " Lenin sharply criticized Trotsky and accused him of "bureaucratically nagging the trade unions" and organizing "factional attacks." He focused less on state control than on the need for a new relationship between the state and ordinary workers. He said: "The introduction of true labor discipline makes sense only if the entire set of participants in production takes a conscious part in the implementation of these tasks, which is not possible to achieve by bureaucratic methods and orders from above." This was a discussion that, according to Lenin, the party could not afford. His disappointment with Trotsky was exploited by Stalin and Zinoviev, with their support for Lenin's position, to improve his position in the leadership of the Bolsheviks at the expense of Trotsky.

Disagreements threatened to spiral out of control and many Bolsheviks, including Lenin, feared a split in the party. The Central Committee split almost equally into supporters of Lenin and Trotsky, while all three secretaries of the Central Committee (Krestinsky, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky and Leonid Serebryakov) supported Trotsky.

At a meeting of its faction at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921, Lenin's faction won a decisive victory, and a number of Trotsky's supporters (including all three secretaries of the Central Committee) lost their leadership positions. Instead of Krestinsky, Zinoviev became a member of the Politburo, who supported Lenin. Vyacheslav Molotov took the place of Krestinsky in the secretariat. The congress also passed a secret resolution on the Unity party, which banned factions within the party, except for the duration of discussions before the congresses. Later, the resolution was published and used by Stalin against Trotsky and other opponents. At the end of the tenth congress, after the peace negotiations had failed, Trotsky ordered the suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny, the last major uprising against Bolshevik rule.

Years later, anarchist Emma Goldman and others criticized Trotsky's actions as military commissar for his role in suppressing the insurgency and claimed that he ordered arbitrary arrests and executions of political opponents such as anarchists, although Trotsky did not participate in the actual suppression. Some Trotskyists, most notably Abby Bakan, argued that the claim that the Kronstadt rebels were "counter-revolutionaries" was supported by evidence of support for the White Army and the French government during the March mutiny of the Kronstadt sailors. Other historians, most notably Paul Evrich, argued that the evidence did not point to this conclusion and believed that the Kronstadt Uprising was spontaneous.

Trotsky's contribution to the Russian Revolution

Vladimir Chernyaev, a leading Russian historian, summarized Trotsky's main contribution to the revolution in Russia:

Trotsky bears great responsibility both for the victory of the Red Army in the civil war and for the creation of a one-party authoritarian state with its apparatus for the merciless suppression of dissent ... He was the ideologist and practitioner of the Red Terror. He despised "bourgeois democracy"; he believed that spinelessness and carelessness would destroy the revolution and that the suppression of the possessing classes and political opponents would clear the historical arena for socialism. He spearheaded concentration camps, forced "labor camps" and the militarization of labor, as well as the state takeover of trade unions. Trotsky was involved in many of the practices that became standard during the Stalinist era, including summary executions.

Historian Jeffrey Swain states that:

The Bolsheviks won the civil war because of Trotsky's ability to work with military specialists, because of his style of work, in which large-scale consultations were accompanied by swift and decisive action.

In 1921, Lenin said that Trotsky "He is in love with the apparatus, but not in politics". Swain explains this paradox by the fact that Trotsky did not know how to work in a team; he was a loner who mostly worked as a journalist and not as a professional revolutionary like the others.

Whom did Lenin prepare for his successors

At the end of 1921, Lenin's health deteriorated and he was absent from Moscow for longer periods of time. He had three strokes between May 26, 1922 and March 10, 1923, which caused paralysis, loss of speech, and finally death on January 21, 1924. With Lenin increasingly out of the game during 1922, Stalin was appointed to the newly created post of General Secretary of the Central Committee. Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev became part of the troika (triumvirate) formed by Stalin to ensure that Trotsky, popularly considered the second number in the country and the possible heir of Lenin, did not come to replace Lenin.

The rest of the recently expanded Politburo (Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky, Bukharin) was initially not recognized, but eventually joined the troika. Stalin's patronage power as general secretary clearly played a role, but subsequently Trotsky and his supporters concluded that the more fundamental reason was the slow bureaucratization of the Soviet regime after the extreme conditions of the civil war ended. Most of the Bolshevik elite wanted “normalcy,” while Trotsky personally and politically personified a turbulent revolutionary period that they would rather have left behind.

While the exact sequence of events is unclear, evidence suggests that Trotsky initially appointed Trotsky to head second-tier government departments (such as Gokhran, the State Securities Depository). When Trotsky predictably refused, they tried to use that as an excuse for his expulsion. At this time, there were speculations about Trotsky's health and whether he had epilepsy.

When, in mid-July 1922, Kamenev wrote a letter to the recovering Lenin stating that “(the Central Committee) is throwing or is ready to throw a healthy cannon overboard,” Lenin was shocked and replied:

Throwing Trotsky overboard - you are probably hinting at this, it is impossible to interpret it otherwise - this is the height of stupidity. If you don’t think I’m already hopelessly stupid, how can you think about it?

From then until the last stroke, Lenin spent most of his time trying to devise a way to prevent a split within the leadership of the Communist Party, which was reflected in the Lenin's Testament. As part of these efforts, on September 11, 1922, Lenin proposed that Trotsky become his deputy in the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom). The Politburo approved this proposal, but Trotsky "categorically refused."

In late 1922, Trotsky formed an alliance with Lenin against Stalin and the emerging Soviet bureaucracy. More recently, Stalin has orchestrated the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), further centralizing state control. The alliance proved to be effective in the matter of foreign trade, but it was hampered by the progressive illness of Lenin.

In January 1923, Lenin amended his Testament to propose the removal of Stalin from his post as general secretary of the party, while mildly criticizing Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders. By this time, relations between Stalin and Lenin had completely deteriorated, which was demonstrated during the event when Stalin grossly insulted Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. In March 1923, a few days before the third stroke, Lenin asked Trotsky to condemn Stalin and his so-called "Great Russian Nationalist Campaign" at the 12th Party Congress.

At the 12th Party Congress in April 1923, immediately after Lenin's last stroke, Trotsky did not raise this issue at the Congress. Instead, he delivered a speech on internal party democracy, avoiding direct confrontation with the troika. Stalin prepared for the congress by replacing many local party delegates with subordinates to him, mainly at the expense of Zinoviev and Kamenev. The delegates, most of whom were unaware of the units in the Politburo, gave Trotsky a standing ovation. This upset the troika, already furious with Karl Radek's article "Leon Trotsky - the organizer of victory", published in Pravda on March 14, 1923. Stalin delivered keynote speeches on organizational structure and nationality issues; and Zinoviev provided a political report to the Central Committee, which was the traditional prerogative of Lenin. Among the resolutions of the XII Congress were calls for more democracy within the party, but they were vague and remained unfulfilled.

In mid-1923, the troika had a friend and supporter of Trotsky, Christian Rakovsky, removed from the post of head of the Ukrainian government (USSR by Radnark) and sent to London as ambassador. When regional leaders in Ukraine protested against Rakovsky's redistribution, they too were transferred to various positions throughout the Soviet Union.

Beginning in mid-1923, the Soviet economy faced significant difficulties, leading to numerous strikes throughout the country. The Soviet secret police exposed and suppressed two secret groups within the Communist Party: Rabochaya Pravda and Rabochaya Pravda. On October 8, 1923, Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, explaining these difficulties by the lack of internal party democracy. Trotsky wrote:

In the bitter days of War Communism, the appointment system within the party was not one-tenth the degree it currently has. The appointment of regional committee secretaries is now the rule. This creates a position for the secretary that is virtually independent of the local organization. The bureaucratization of the party apparatus has grown to unheard-of proportions due to the methods of selecting secretaries. There was created a very wide layer of party workers who are part of the party government apparatus, which completely abandoned the opinion of their party, at least openly expressing it, as if assuming that the secretarial hierarchy is the apparatus that creates the opinion of the party and party decisions. Under this layer, refraining from their own opinions, lie the broad masses of the party, for whom every decision looks like a challenge or a command.

Other higher-ranking communists who had similar problems sent Declaration 46 to the Central Committee on October 15, in which they wrote:

We are observing a constantly progressing, barely disguised division of the party into the secretarial hierarchy and the "laity", into professional party functionaries, selected from above, and other party masses that do not participate in public life... Free discussion within the party practically disappeared, and party public opinion was suppressed. This is the secretariat hierarchy, the party hierarchy, which to a greater extent elects delegates to conferences and congresses, which to a greater extent become the executive congresses of this hierarchy.

Although the text of these letters remained secret at the time, they had a huge impact on the party leadership and caused a partial retreat of the troika and its supporters on the issue of internal party democracy, in particular in Zinoviev's article in Pravda, published on November 7. Throughout November, the troika tried to come up with a compromise to calm or at least temporarily neutralize Trotsky and his supporters. (Their task was facilitated by the fact that Trotsky was ill in November and December.) The first draft resolution was rejected by Trotsky, which led to the creation of a special group of Stalin, Trotsky and Kamenev tasked with drafting a mutually acceptable compromise. On December 5, the Politburo and the Central Control Commission unanimously adopted the group's final draft as a resolution. On December 8, Trotsky published an open letter in which he outlined the ideas of the recently adopted resolution. The troika used his letter as a pretext to launch a campaign against Trotsky, accusing him of factionalism, staging "youth against the fundamental generation of old revolutionary Bolsheviks" and other sins. Trotsky defended his opinion in a series of seven letters, which were collected in " New Deal"in January 1924. The illusion of an" indivisible Bolshevik leadership "was destroyed and a lively internal party discussion ensued, both in local party organizations and on the pages of Pravda. The discussion lasted most of December and January until the XIII party conference on January 16-18, 1924 Those who opposed the position of the Central Committee in the debates were later called members of the left opposition.

Since the troika controlled the party apparatus through Stalin's secretariat and Pravda through its editor Bukharin, it could lead the discussion and the selection process for delegates. Although Trotsky's position prevailed in the Red Army and Moscow universities and received about half the votes in the Moscow party organization, it was defeated elsewhere, and the conference was filled with troika delegates. In the end, only three delegates voted in favor of Trotsky's position, and the Conference condemned "Trotskyism" as a "petty-bourgeois deviation." After the congress, a number of Trotsky's supporters, especially in the Political Directorate of the Red Army, were removed from leadership positions or reappointed. Nevertheless, Trotsky retained all his posts, and the troika cautiously emphasized that the debate was limited to Trotsky's "mistakes" and that Trotsky's expulsion from the leadership was out of the question. In fact, Trotsky was already cut off from the decision-making process.

Immediately after the congress, Trotsky went to a Caucasian resort to recover from a long illness. On the way, he learned about Lenin's death on January 21, 1924. He was about to return when a telegram arrived from Stalin stating the wrong date for the planned funeral, making it impossible for Trotsky to return on time. Many commentators have speculated that Trotsky's absence from Moscow in the days following Lenin's death contributed to his final defeat to Stalin, although Trotsky generally underestimated the significance of his absence.

Troika against Trotsky

For most of 1924, there was little overt political division in the Soviet leadership. At first glance, Trotsky remained the most prominent and popular leader of the Bolsheviks, although his "mistakes" were often cited by the supporters of the troika. Behind the scenes, he was completely cut off from the decision-making process. The Politburo meetings were purely formalities, since all key decisions were made in advance by the troika and its supporters. Trotsky's control over the military was undermined by the reappointment of his deputy, Ephraim Sklyansky, and the appointment of Mikhail Frunze, who was to take Trotsky's place.

At the thirteenth party congress in May, Trotsky delivered a conciliatory speech:

None of us is willing or able to challenge the will of the party. It is clear that the party is always right .... We can only be right with the party and through the party, for history has provided no other way to be right. The British have a saying, "Right or wrong, but this is my country", whether right or wrong, this is my country. With much more historical right, we can say: right or wrong in certain private specific issues, in certain moments , but this is my party .... And if a party makes a decision that one or another of us considers unfair, he will say: fair or unfair, but this is my party, and I bear the consequences of its decision to the end.

However, the attempt at reconciliation did not stop the troika's supporters from criticizing Trotsky.

At the same time, the left opposition, which somewhat unexpectedly curtailed at the end of 1923 and did not have a definite platform other than general dissatisfaction with the inner-party "regime", began to take a definite form. She lost some of her less devoted members to the persecution of the troika, but she also began to formulate a program. Economically, the Left Opposition and its theorist Yevgeny Preobrazhensky opposed the further development of capitalist elements in the Soviet economy and in favor of faster industrialization. This quarreled them with Bukharin and Rykov, the "right-wing" group within the party that supported the troika at the time. As for the world revolution, Trotsky and Karl Radek saw a period of stability in Europe, while Stalin and Zinoviev confidently predicted the "acceleration" of the revolution in Western Europe in 1924. In theory, Trotsky remained an adherent of the Bolshevik idea that the Soviet Union could not create a true socialist society in the absence of a world revolution, while Stalin gradually developed a policy of building "Socialism in one country." These ideological divisions provided much of the intellectual basis for the political rift between Trotsky and the left opposition on the one hand, and Stalin and his allies on the other.

At the Thirteenth Congress, Kamenev and Zinoviev helped Stalin to smooth over Lenin's Testament, which came to the surface belatedly. But immediately after the congress, the troika, always being an alliance of convenience, showed signs of weakness. Stalin began to carry out ill-concealed accusations against Zinoviev and Kamenev. However, in October 1924, Trotsky published The Lessons of October, a detailed account of the events of the 1917 revolution. In it, he described the opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, which they would prefer to ignore. This was the beginning of a new round of internal party struggle, which became known as the Literary Discussion, and Zinoviev and Kamenev again became Stalin's allies against Trotsky. Their criticism of Trotsky focused on three areas:

Disagreements and conflicts with Lenin and Trotsky's Bolsheviks before 1917.

Trotsky's alleged distortion of the events of 1917 to emphasize his role and diminish the roles of other Bolsheviks.

Trotsky's ill-treatment of his subordinates and other alleged mistakes during the Russian civil war.

Trotsky was again sick and unable to answer, while his opponents mobilized all their resources to condemn him. They managed to damage his military reputation so much that he was forced to resign as People's Commissar of the Army and Navy and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council on January 6, 1925. Zinoviev demanded that Trotsky be expelled from the Communist Party, but Stalin refused to go further and played the role of a man of moderate views. Trotsky retained his position in the Politburo, but was actually put on probation.

1925 was a difficult year for Trotsky. After a painful literary discussion and the loss of posts in the Red Army, he was virtually unemployed throughout the winter and spring. In May 1925, he was given three positions: Chairman of the Concession Committee, Head of the Electrotechnical Council, and Chairman of the Scientific and Technical Council of Industry. Trotsky wrote in Moya Zhizn that he “took a break from politics” and “naturally plunged into a new line of work head over heels,” but some modern documents paint a picture of a distant and abstract person. Later that year, Trotsky resigned from his two technical positions (supporting Stalin-instigated conflict and sabotage) and focused on his work on the Concessions Committee.

One of the few political events that affected Trotsky in 1925 was the controversy surrounding the Lenin Testament, described by the American Marxist Max Eastman in his book Since Lenin Died (1925). The Soviet leadership denounced Eastman's assessment of events and used party discipline to force Trotsky to write an article denying Eastman's account of events.

In the meantime, the trio finally split up. Bukharin and Rykov sided with Stalin, while Krupskaya and Soviet finance commissioner Grigory Sokolnikov joined Zinoviev and Kamenev. The struggle began at a meeting of the Central Committee in September 1925 and reached a critical stage at the 14th Party Congress in December 1925. With only the Leningrad party organization behind them, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who received the name "New Opposition", were completely defeated, and Trotsky refused to participate in the battle and did not speak at the congress.

United opposition

In early 1926, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their New Opposition supporters approached Trotsky's supporters, and the two groups soon formed an alliance that also included several smaller opposition groups within the Communist Party. The alliance became known as the United Opposition.

The united opposition was repeatedly threatened with sanctions by the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party, and Trotsky had to agree to tactical retreats, mainly to preserve his alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev. The opposition remained united against Stalin throughout 1926 and 1927, especially on the issue of the Chinese revolution. The methods used by the Stalinists against the opposition became more and more extreme. At the 15th Party Congress in October 1926, Trotsky could barely speak due to interruptions and booing, and at the end of the Congress he lost his seat in the Politburo. In 1927, Stalin began using the GPU (Soviet secret police) to infiltrate and discredit the opposition. Ordinary oppositionists were increasingly harassed, sometimes expelled from the party and even arrested.

Soviet policy towards the Chinese revolution became the ideological boundary between Stalin and the United Opposition. The Chinese Revolution began on October 10, 1911, with the result that the Chinese emperor abdicated the throne on February 12, 1912. Sun Yat-sen founded the Republic of China. However, in reality, the republic had very little control over the country. Much of China was divided among various regional warlords. The republican government created a new "Nationalist People's Army and National People's Party - the Kuomintang." In 1920, the Kuomintang began relations with Soviet Russia. With the help of the Soviet Union, the Republic of China built a nationalist people's army. It was planned that with the help of the nationalist army Northern expedition will defeat the forces of the military leaders of the northern part of the country. This Northern Expedition became the subject of a controversy over the foreign policy of Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin tried to convince the small Chinese Communist Party to unite with the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalists to provoke a bourgeois revolution, before trying to provoke a Soviet-style working class revolution. Stalin believed that the KMT bourgeoisie, together with all the patriotic national liberation forces in the country, would defeat the Western imperialists in China.

Trotsky wanted the Communist Party to complete the orthodox proletarian revolution and oppose the Kuomintang. Stalin financed the Kuomintang during the expedition. Stalin opposed Trotskyist criticism with a secret speech in which he said that Jiang's right-wing Kuomintangs were the only ones who could defeat the imperialists, that Chiang Kai-shek was financed by wealthy merchants, and that his forces were to be used until they were squeezed out like a lemon. before discarding. However, Chiang quickly redefined his position in the wake of the Shanghai Massacre in 1927, cracking down on the Communist Party in Shanghai halfway through the Northern Expedition.

Trotsky's defeat and expulsion

In October 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee. When the United Opposition attempted to organize independent demonstrations to mark the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of power in November 1927, the demonstrators were dispersed by force and Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party on November 12. Their leading supporters, from Kamenev, were expelled in December 1927 by the 15th Party Congress, which paved the way for mass expulsions of rank-and-file oppositionists, as well as the expulsion of opposition leaders in early 1928.

When the Fifteenth Party Congress made the views of the United Opposition incompatible with membership in the Communist Party, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters capitulated and abandoned their alliance with the Left Opposition. Trotsky and most of his followers, on the other hand, refused to surrender and did not deviate from their course. Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan on January 31, 1928. In February 1929, he was expelled from the Soviet Union to Turkey, accompanied by his wife Natalya Sedova and his eldest son Lev Sedov.

The fate of the left opposition after Trotsky's expulsion

After Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists in the Soviet Union began to hesitate. Between 1929 and 1932, most of the leading members of the Left Opposition surrendered to Stalin, “admitted their mistakes,” and were reinstated in the Communist Party. One of the earliest exceptions was Christian Rakovsky, who inspired Trotsky between 1929 and 1934 by refusing to surrender, as the state's suppression of any remaining opposition by Stalin increased over the year. At the end of 1932, Rakovsky failed in an attempt to escape from the Soviet Union and was exiled to Yakutia in March 1933. In response to Trotsky's request, the French mathematician and Trotskyist Jean Van Heyenort, along with fellow activist Pierre Frank, unsuccessfully called on the influential Soviet author Maksim Gorky to stand up for Christian Rakovsky and boarded the ship he was sailing near Istanbul. Hayenorth said they only managed to meet with Gorky's son Maxim Peshkov, who reportedly told them that his father was unwell but promised to convey their request. Rakovsky was the last prominent Trotskyist to capitulate to Stalin in April 1934, when Rakovsky officially "admitted his mistakes" (his letter to Pravda, entitled "There Should Be No Mercy", portrayed Trotsky and his supporters as "agents of the German Gestapo") ... Rakovsky was appointed to a post in the commissariat of health and was allowed to return to Moscow, he also served as the Soviet ambassador to Japan in 1935. However, Rakovsky was mentioned in charges involving the murder of Sergei Kirov, and was arrested and imprisoned in late 1937 during the Great Terror.

Almost all of the Trotskyists who were still within the borders of the Soviet Union were executed during the Great Terror of 1936-1938, although Rakovsky lived to see the Shooting at Orel in September 1941, where he was shot, along with 156 other prisoners on Stalin's orders, less than three months before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Also among the victims of the Shooting at Orel was Trotsky's sister and Kamenev's first wife Olga Kameneva.

Link of Leon Trotsky

In February 1929, Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union to a new exile in Turkey. During the first two months of his stay in Turkey, Trotsky lived with his wife and eldest son at the Consulate of the Soviet Union in Istanbul. In April 1929, Trotsky, his wife and son were transferred to the island of Buyukada (aka Prinkipo) by the Turkish authorities. On Prinkipo, they were moved to a house called the Yanaros mansion, where Trotsky and his wife lived until July 1933. During his exile in Turkey. Trotsky was under the supervision of the Turkish police forces of Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Trotsky was also at risk of attack from many of the former White Army officers who lived on Prinkipo, officers who opposed the October Revolution and were defeated by Trotsky and the Red Army in the Russian Civil War. However, European supporters volunteered to protect Trotsky and ensure his safety.

In July 1933, Trotsky was offered asylum in France by Prime Minister Edouard Daladier. Trotsky accepted this offer, but was forbidden to live in Paris and soon found himself under the supervision of the French police. From July 1933 to February 1934, Trotsky and his wife lived in Royan. Philosopher and activist Simone Weil also agreed that Trotsky and his bodyguards would stay for several days at her parents' house. After the crisis on February 6, 1934 in France, French Interior Minister Albert Sarrow signed a decree deporting Trotsky from France. However, no foreign government was ready to accept Trotsky. As a result, the French authorities instructed Trotsky to move to a residence in the tiny village of Barbizon under the strict supervision of the French police, where Trotsky found that his contact with the outside world was even worse than it had been during his exile in Turkey.

In May 1935, shortly after the French government agreed to the Franco-Soviet treaty of mutual assistance with the government of the Soviet Union, Trotsky was officially informed that he was no longer welcome in France. After weighing the options, Trotsky applied to move to Norway. After receiving permission from then Minister of Justice Trygve Lee to enter the country, Trotsky and his wife became guests of Konrad Knudsen at Norderchow, near Honefoss, and spent a year living at Knudsen's house from June 18, 1935 to September 2, 1936, although Trotsky was hospitalized. for several weeks at a nearby hospital in Oslo from 19 September 1935.

Following complaints from the French media about Trotsky's role in encouraging mass strikes in France in May and June 1936 in his articles, Johan Nygaardsvold, the head of the Norwegian government, began to show concern about Trotsky's actions. In the summer of 1936, Trotsky's asylum increasingly became a political issue due to the fascist National Unity led by Vidkun Quisling, along with a large increase in pressure from the Soviet government led by Joseph Stalin on the Norwegian authorities. On August 5, 1936, Knudsen's house was robbed by the Nazis from the National Unity, while Trotsky and his wife were on a sea voyage with Knudsen and his wife. Fascist robbers targeted Trotsky's works and archives to perpetrate vandalism. The raid was largely thwarted by Knudsen's daughter, Hjordis, although the robbers took a few papers from a nearby desk before leaving. Although the fascist perpetrators were caught and put on trial, the "evidence" obtained from the hack was used by the government to file claims against Trotsky.

On August 14, 1936, the Soviet press agency TASS announced the opening of a "Trotskyite-Zinovievist" conspiracy and that the trial of the sixteen accused would soon begin. Trotsky demanded a full and open investigation of Moscow's accusations. The defendants were sentenced to death, including Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who were executed on August 25, 1936. On August 26, 1936, eight police officers arrived at Knudsen's house, demanding that Trotsky sign new conditions for living in Norway. These conditions included agreeing not to write any more about current political issues and not to give interviews, but to agree to have all his correspondence (incoming and outgoing) checked by the police. Trotsky categorically refused the conditions, and Trotsky was told that he and his wife would soon move to another place of residence. The next day, Trotsky was interrogated by the police about his political activities and the police officially refer to Trotsky as a "witness" to the fascist raid of August 5, 1936.

On September 2, 1936, four weeks after the Nazi invasion of Knudsen's house, Trygve Lee ordered that Trotsky and his wife be transferred to a farm in Hurum, where they were under house arrest. The detention of Trotsky and his wife in Hurum was harsh, as they were forced to remain in the premises for 22 hours a day under the constant protection of thirteen police officers, and the walk through the farm lasted only one hour twice a day. Trotsky was not allowed to publish any letters and not allow objections to his critics in Norway and abroad. Only visits by Trotsky's lawyers and the parliamentary leader of the Norwegian Workers' Party, Olav Sheflo, were allowed. From October 1936, Trotsky and his wife were banned from outdoor walks. In the end, Trotsky managed to secretly send one letter on December 18, 1936, entitled "Confession", to Moscow. On December 19, 1936, Trotsky and his wife were deported from Norway after being put on the Norwegian oil tanker Ruth under the guard of Jonas Lee. Later, while living in Mexico, Trotsky was extremely upset about being held for 108 days in Hurum, and accused the Norwegian government of trying to prevent him from publicly voicing his strong opposition to the Sixteen and other show trials, saying:

When I look back at this period of internment, I must say that never, nowhere, during my whole life - and I have experienced many things - have I not been persecuted with the same pathetic cynicism with which I was persecuted by the Norwegian "Socialist" government. ... For four months, these ministers, dripping with democratic hypocrisy, held me with an iron grip so that I could not protest against the greatest crime that history will ever know.

The oil tanker Ruth, on which Trotsky and his wife were put, arrived in Mexico on January 9, 1937. Upon Trotsky's arrival, Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas welcomed him to Mexico and prepared his special Hidalgo train to take Trotsky to Mexico City from the port of Tampico.

From January 1937 to April 1939, Trotsky and his wife lived in the Coyoacan area of ​​Mexico City in La Casa Azul ("Blue House"), in the home of the artist Diego Rivera and his wife and colleague Frida Kahlo, with whom Trotsky had an affair. His final move was made a few blocks from his residence on Avenida Vienne in April 1939 after a break with Rivera.

He wrote extensively in exile, writing several key works, including his History of the Russian Revolution (1930) and Revolution Betrayed (1936), a criticism of the Soviet Union under Stalinism. Trotsky argued that the Soviet state had become a "degenerate workers 'state" controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy that would eventually either be overthrown through a political revolution, creating a workers' democracy, or degenerated into a capitalist class.

While in Mexico, Trotsky also worked closely with James P. Cannon, Joseph Hansen, and Farrell Dobbs of the United States Socialist Workers' Party and other supporters.

Cannon, a longtime leading member of the American communist movement, has supported Trotsky in the fight against Stalinism since he first read Trotsky's criticism of the Soviet Union in 1928. Criticism of Trotsky's Stalinist regime, although banned, was circulated among the leaders of the Comintern. Among his other supporters was Chen Duxiu, the founder of the Chinese Communist Party.

The trial of the Bolshevik deputies

In August 1936, the first Moscow demonstration trial of the so-called "Trotskyite-Zinovievist terrorist center" was organized in front of an international audience. During the trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 other defendants, most of whom were prominent old Bolsheviks, confessed that they conspired with Trotsky to kill Stalin and other members of the Soviet leadership. The court found all guilty and sentenced the defendants to death, Trotsky in absentia. The second demonstration trial of Karl Radek, Grigory Sokolnikov, Yuri Pyatakov and 14 other participants took place in January 1937, during which more suspicious conspiracies and crimes were associated with Trotsky. In April 1937, an independent "Commission of Inquiry" was held in Coyoacan on the charges against Trotsky and others in the "Moscow Trials", with John Dewey as chairman. The findings were published in the book Not Guilty.

"The Moscow trials are immortalized under the banner of socialism. We will not yield this banner to the masters of lies! If our generation is too weak to establish socialism on earth, we will pass on the spotless banner to our children. The struggle that is in power far exceeds the importance of individual people, factions and parties. This is a struggle for the future of all mankind. It will be difficult, it will be long. Allow those who seek physical comfort and spiritual peace. During the opposition, it is more convenient to rely on bureaucracy than on the truth, but all those for whom the word "Socialism" is not an empty phrase, but the content of their moral life - go ahead! Neither threats, nor persecution, nor violence can stop us! Even over our bones, the future will triumph! We will pave the way for it. It will triumph! With all the strong blows of fate, I will be happy, as in the best days of my youth; because, my friends, the highest human happiness is not the exploitation of the present, but preparing the future ”.

Reunited Fourth International

For fear of a split in the communist movement, Trotsky initially opposed the idea of ​​creating parallel communist parties or a parallel international communist organization that would compete with the Third International. In mid-1933, he changed his mind after the Nazi takeover in Germany and the Comintern's response to him. He said that:

An organization that was not awakened by the thunder of fascism and which submissively submits to such outrageous acts of bureaucracy, thereby demonstrates that it is dead and that nothing can revive it ... In all our subsequent work, it is necessary to take as our starting point the historical collapse of the official Communist International.

In 1938, Trotsky and his supporters founded the Fourth International, which was to become a revolutionary and international alternative to the Stalinist Comintern.

Towards the end of 1939, Trotsky agreed to travel to the United States to appear as a witness before the Dees Committee of the House of Representatives, the forerunner of the House Committee on Non-American Activities. Martin Dees' spokesman, chairman of the committee, demanded the closure of the American Communist Party. Trotsky intended to use the forum to expose the actions of the NKVD against him and his followers.

He made it clear that he also intends to oppose the suppression of the American Communist Party and use the committee as a platform to call for turning World War II into a world revolution. Many of his supporters opposed his appearance. When the committee learned of the nature of the testimony that Trotsky intended to present, they refused to listen to him and he was denied a visa to enter the United States. Upon learning of this, the CPSU immediately accused Trotsky of being paid by the oil magnates and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"Trotsky's Testament"

After an altercation with Diego Rivera, Trotsky moved to his last residence on Avenida Vienne in April 1939.

On February 27, 1940, Trotsky wrote a document known as Trotsky's Testament, in which he expressed his final thoughts and feelings for posterity. He suffered from high blood pressure and was afraid that he would suffer a cerebral hemorrhage. After firmly denying Stalin's accusations that he had betrayed the working class, he thanked his friends and, above all, his wife and dear interlocutor Natalya Sedova for their loyal support:

In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate has given me the happiness of being her husband. For almost forty years of marriage, she remained an inexhaustible source of love, generosity and tenderness. She underwent great suffering, especially in last period our life. But I find comfort in the fact that she also knew the days of happiness.

During the forty-three years of my adult life, I remained a revolutionary; for forty-two of them I fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to start all over again, I would, of course, try to avoid this or that mistake, but the basic course of my life would remain unchanged. I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and therefore an implacable atheist. My belief in the communist future of humanity is no less fierce, and today it is more resilient than it was in my youth.

Natasha has just approached the window from the yard and opened it wider so that air can freely enter my room. I can see a bright green band of grass under the wall and a clear blue sky above the wall and sunlight everywhere. Life is Beautiful. May future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence and enjoy it to the fullest.

L. Trotsky

Coyoacan.

The assassination of Leon Trotsky

After an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Trotsky in March 1939, Stalin assigned the entire organization of this assignment to an NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov, who, in turn, attracted Nachum Eiting. According to Sudoplatov's "Special Operations", the NKVD began to create three NKVD agent networks for the murder, one of which relied on Ramon Mercader. All three networks were designed to operate autonomously from the pre-existing NKVD spy networks in the United States and Mexico, Sudoplatov said.

On May 24, 1940, Trotsky survived an attack by armed assassins in his villa led by NKVD agent Joseph Grigulevich and Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Trotsky's 14-year-old grandson, Vsevolod Platonovich "Esteban" Volkov (born March 7, 1926) was wounded in the leg, and Trotsky's young assistant and bodyguard, Robert Sheldon Hart, was kidnapped and then killed. After an unsuccessful assassination attempt, Trotsky wrote an article entitled "Stalin Seeks My Death" on June 8, 1940, where Trotsky claims that another assassination attempt is undeniable.

On August 20, 1940, in his research, Trotsky was attacked by Ramon Mercader, who used an ice ax as a weapon. The blow to the head was inept and failed to kill Trotsky instantly, as Mercader had assumed. Witnesses stated that Trotsky let out a terrible cry and began to fight Mercader fiercely. Hearing the excitement, Trotsky's bodyguards rushed into the room and nearly killed Mercader, but Trotsky stopped them, declaring with difficulty that the killer needed to be asked questions. Trotsky was taken to the hospital, operated on, and after living another day, he died at the age of 60 on August 21, 1940 as a result of blood loss and shock. Mercader later testified at trial:

I put the raincoat on the table in such a way as to take the ice ax that was in my pocket. I decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. When Trotsky started reading the article, he gave me a chance; I took the ice ax out of my cloak, grabbed it in my hand, and, closing my eyes, struck him a terrible blow to the head.

According to James P. Cannon, secretary of the Socialist Labor Party (USA), Trotsky's last words were: “I will not survive this attack. Stalin finally completed the task that he had tried unsuccessfully before. "

Maxim Lieber was Trotsky's literary agent at the end of his life.

Trotsky's legacy

Trotsky's house in Coyoacan is preserved in the same state as on the day of the assassination and is now a museum run by a council that includes his grandson Esteban Volkov. The current director of the museum is Carlos Ramirez Sandoval. On its territory is the grave of Trotsky. A new fund was created (International Friends of the Leon Trotsky Museum) to raise funds to further improve the museum.

Trotsky was not officially rehabilitated during the Soviet government, despite rehabilitating most of the other old Bolsheviks killed during the Great Terror during the glasnost era. His son Sergei Sedov, who was killed in 1937, was rehabilitated in 1988, as was Nikolai Bukharin. Most importantly, starting in 1989, Trotsky's books, banned until 1987, were finally published in the Soviet Union.

On June 16, 2001, Trotsky was rehabilitated by the decision of the General Prosecutor's Office (Rehabilitation Certificates No. 13 / 2182-90, No. 13-2200-99 in the Archives of the Memorial Research Center).

Trotsky's grandson, Esteban Volkov, who lives in Mexico, is an active supporter of his grandfather. Trotsky's great-granddaughter, Mexico-born Nora Volkova (Volkova's daughter), is currently the director of the National Institute for the Study of Drug Abuse in the United States.

Trotsky considered himself a "Bolshevik-Leninist" advocating the creation of a vanguard party. He considered himself a supporter of orthodox Marxism. His policies differed in many respects from those of Stalin or Mao Zedong, which is especially important in his rejection of the theory of socialism in one country and in his declaration of the need for an international "permanent revolution". Numerous Fourth Internationalist groups around the world continue to call themselves Trotskyists and consider themselves followers of this tradition, although they interpret the implications of this theory differently. Supporters of the Fourth International imitate Trotsky's opposition to Stalin's totalitarianism, advocating for political revolution, arguing that socialism cannot sustain itself without democracy.

Permanent revolution is a theory that bourgeois democratic tasks in countries with slow bourgeois-democratic development can only be achieved through the creation of a workers 'state, and that the creation of a workers' state will inevitably entail encroachment on capitalist property. Thus, the achievement of bourgeois-democratic tasks goes over to the achievement of proletarian tasks. Although most closely associated with Trotsky, the call for permanent revolution was first found in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in March 1850, in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, in the Central Committee's Address to the Communist Union:

Our interests and our tasks are to make the revolution continuous until all the more or less possessing classes are removed from domination, until the proletariat conquers state power until the associations of proletarians, not only in one country, but also in all the ruling countries of the world, develop so much that competition between the proletarians of these countries will cease, and until at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. ... Their slogan should be: "Constant revolution."

Trotsky's concept of Permanent Revolution is based on his understanding, based on the work of the founder of Russian Marxism, Georgy Plekhanov, that in "underdeveloped" countries a bourgeois-democratic revolution cannot be achieved by the bourgeoisie itself. This concept was first developed by Trotsky in collaboration with Alexander Parvus at the end of 1904-1905. Corresponding articles were later collected in Trotsky's 1905 books and in The Permanent Revolution, also containing his essay Results and Prospects.

According to the Trotskyists, the October Revolution (directed by Trotsky) was the first example of a successful Permanent Revolution. The proletarian, socialist October Revolution took place precisely because the bourgeoisie, which seized power in February, could not solve any of the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. She did not give land to the peasants (which the Bolsheviks did on October 25), did not give freedom to oppressed minorities and did not liberate Russia from foreign domination, ending the war, which at that moment was waged mainly to please English and French creditors. Trotskyists today argue that the state of the Third World shows that capitalism does not offer a path for underdeveloped countries, thereby proving again a central tenet of the theory. In contrast, Stalinist policies in former colonial countries were characterized by the so-called two-stage theory, which argues that the working class must fight for "progressive capitalism" along with the "progressive national bourgeoisie" before any attempt at socialism can be made.

Trotsky is an outstanding figure

Trotsky was the central figure in the Comintern at the first four congresses. During this time, he helped to generalize the strategy and tactics of the Bolsheviks for the newly formed communist parties throughout Europe and beyond. From 1921 onwards, the United Front, a method of uniting revolutionaries and reformists in a common struggle, persuading some workers to revolution, was the central tactic put forward by the Comintern after the defeat of the German revolution.

After he was ousted and politically marginalized by Stalinism, Trotsky continued to argue in favor of a united front against fascism in Germany and Spain. According to Joseph Chunara of the British Socialist Labor Party in International Socialism, his articles on the united front are an important part of his political legacy.

Lev Davidovich Trotsky - Russian revolutionary leader of the XX century, the ideologist of Trotskyism - one of the currents of Marxism. Twice exiled under the monarchy, deprived of all civil rights in 1905. One of the organizers of the October Revolution of 1917, one of the founders of the Red Army. One of the founders and ideologists of the Comintern, a member of its Executive Committee.

Leon Trotsky (real name Leib Bronstein) was born on November 7, 1879 in a family of wealthy landowners-tenants. In 1889, his parents sent him to study in Odessa to cousin, the owner of the printing house and scientific publishing house Moses Schnitzer. Trotsky was the first student at the school. He was fond of drawing, literature, wrote poetry, translated Krylov's fables from Russian into Ukrainian language, participated in the publication of the school handwritten magazine.

He began to conduct revolutionary propaganda at the age of 17, joining a revolutionary circle in Nikolaev. On January 28, 1898, he was first arrested and spent two years in prison, it was then that he joined the ideas of Marxism. During the investigation, he studied English, German, French and italian languages, read the works of Marx, got acquainted with the works of Lenin.

Leiba Bronstein at the age of nine, Odessa

A year before going to prison for the first time, Trotsky joined the South Russian Workers' Union. One of its leaders was Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who became Trotsky's wife in 1898. Together they went into exile in the Irkutsk province, where Trotsky contacted the Iskra agents, and soon began to cooperate with them, receiving the nickname "Pero" for his penchant for writing.

“I came to London as a big provincial, and in every sense. Not only abroad, but also in St. Petersburg, I had never been before. In Moscow, as well as in Kiev, he lived only in a transit prison ”. In 1902, Trotsky decided to escape from exile. It was then, receiving a fake passport, that he entered the name Trotsky there (the name of the senior warden of the Odessa prison, where the revolutionary was held for two years).

Trotsky went to London, where Vladimir Lenin was then. The young Marxist quickly rose to prominence by giving lectures at émigré meetings. He was extremely eloquent, ambitious and educated, everyone, without exception, considered him an amazing speaker. At the same time, for his support of Lenin, he was nicknamed "Lenin's club", while Trotsky himself was often critical of Lenin's organizational plans.

In 1904, serious disagreements began between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. By that time, Trotsky had established himself as a follower of the "permanent revolution", departed from the Mensheviks and married a second time to Natalya Sedova (the marriage was not registered, but the couple lived together until Trotsky's death). In 1905, they together illegally returned to Russia, where Trotsky became one of the founders of the Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies. On December 3, he was arrested and, as part of a high-profile trial, was sentenced to eternal exile to Siberia with the deprivation of all civil rights, but fled on his way to Salekhard.

A split between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks was brewing, supported by Lenin, who in 1912 at the Prague conference of the RSDLP announced the separation of the Bolshevik faction into an independent party. Trotsky continued to advocate for the unification of the party, organizing the "August bloc", which the Bolsheviks ignored. This cooled Trotsky's desire for an armistice, he chose to step aside.

In 1917, after the February Revolution, Trotsky and his family tried to get to Russia, but was removed from the ship and sent to a concentration camp for interned sailors. The reason for this was the fact that the revolutionary had no documents. However, he was soon released at the written request of the Provisional Government as an honored fighter against tsarism. Trotsky criticized the Provisional Government, so he soon became the informal leader of the "Mezhraiontsy", for which he was accused of espionage. His influence on the masses was enormous, so he played a special role in the transition to the side of the Bolsheviks of the soldiers of the rapidly decaying Petrograd garrison, which was of great importance in the revolution. In July 1917, the "Mezhraiontsy" united with the Bolsheviks, and Trotsky was soon released from prison, where he was on charges of espionage.

While Lenin was in Finland, Trotsky actually became the leader of the Bolsheviks. In September 1917, he headed the Petrograd Soviet of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies, and also became a delegate to the II Congress of Soviets and the Constituent Assembly. In October, the VRK (Military Revolutionary Committee) was formed, which consisted mainly of the Bolsheviks. It was the committee that was engaged in the armed preparation of the revolution: already on October 16, the Red Guards received five thousand rifles; rallies were held among the wavering, at which Trotsky's brilliant oratorical talent again manifested itself. In fact, he was one of the main leaders of the October Revolution.

Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Lev Kamenev

“The uprising of the masses does not need justification. What happened was a rebellion, not a conspiracy. We tempered the revolutionary energy of the Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an uprising, not for a conspiracy. "

After the October Revolution, the Military Revolutionary Committee remained for a long time the only organ of power. There were formed: a commission to combat counter-revolution, a commission to combat drunkenness and pogroms, food supplies were established. At the same time, Leni and Trotsky adhered to a tough position in relation to political opponents. On December 17, 1917, in his address to the Cadets, Trotsky declares the beginning of the stage of mass terror against the enemies of the revolution in a more harsh form: “You should know that within a month, the terror will take very strong forms, following the example of the great French revolutionaries. Our enemies will be awaited by a guillotine, and not just a prison. " It was then, formulated by Trotsky, that the concept of the "Red Terror" appeared.

Soon, Trotsky was appointed People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the first composition of the Bolshevik government. On December 5, 1917, the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee was disbanded, Trotsky transferred his affairs to Zinoviev and completely immersed himself in the affairs of the Petrograd Soviet. The "counter-revolutionary sabotage" of civil servants of the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs began, suppressed thanks to the publication of secret treaties of the tsarist government. The situation in the country was complicated by diplomatic isolation, which was not easy for Trotsky to overcome.

To improve the situation, he said that the government would take an intermediate position "neither peace, nor war: we do not sign an agreement, we stop the war, and we demobilize the army." Germany refused to tolerate this position and announced an offensive. By this time, the army actually did not exist. Trotsky admitted the failure of his policy and resigned from the post of Commissar.

Leon Trotsky with his wife Natalya Sedova and son Lev Sedov

On March 14, 1918, Trotsky was appointed to the post of people's commissar for military affairs, on March 28 to the post of chairman of the Supreme Military Council, in April - military commissar for naval affairs and on September 6 - chairman of the revolutionary military council of the RSFSR. At the same time, the formation of a regular army begins. Trotsky actually became its first commander-in-chief. In August 1918, Trotsky's regular trips to the front began. Several times Trotsky, risking his life, speaks even to deserters. But practice has shown that the army is incapable, Trotsky is forced to support its reorganization, gradually restoring one-man command, insignia, mobilization, uniform uniform, military greetings and awards.

In 1922, Joseph Stalin was elected general secretary of the Bolshevik party, whose views did not coincide with those of Trotsky. Stalin was supported by Zinoviev and Kamenev, who believed that the rise of Trotsky threatened with anti-Semitic attacks on the Soviet regime, condemned him for factionalism.

Lenin dies in 1924. Stalin took advantage of Trotsky's absence in Moscow to promote himself as an "heir" and to consolidate his position.

In 1926, Trotsky united with Zinoviev and Kamenev, whom Stalin began to oppose. However, this did not help him and soon followed by expulsion from the party, deportation to Alma-Ata, and then to Turkey.

Hitler's victory in February 1933 was regarded by Trotsky as the greatest defeat for the international labor movement. He concluded that the Comintern was incapacitated because of Stalin's openly counter-revolutionary policies and called for the creation of the IV International.

In 1933, Trotsky was granted secret asylum in France, which the Nazis soon discovered. Trotsky leaves for Norway, where he writes his most significant work, Revolution Betrayed. In 1936, at a show trial in Moscow, Stalin named Trotsky as Hitler's agent. Trotsky is expelled from Norway. The only country that provided refuge to the revolutionary was Mexico: he settled in the house of the artist Diego Rivera, then in a fortified and carefully guarded villa on the outskirts of Mexico City - in the city of Coyocan.

After Stalin's speeches in Mexico, an International Joint Commission was organized to investigate the Moscow trials. The commission concluded that the charges were defamatory and that Trotsky was not guilty.

The Soviet secret services kept Trotsky under close scrutiny, with agents among his associates. In 1938, under mysterious circumstances in Paris in a hospital after an operation, his closest comrade-in-arms, the eldest son Lev Sedov, died. His first wife and his youngest son Sergei Sedov were arrested and subsequently shot.

Leon Trotsky was killed by an ice pick at his home near Mexico City on August 24, 1940. The perpetrator was an NKVD agent, the Spanish republican Ramon Mercader (pictured), who infiltrated Trotsky's entourage under the name of Canadian journalist Frank Jackson.

For the murder, Mercader received 20 years in prison. After his release in 1960, he emigrated to the USSR, where he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. According to some estimates, Trotsky's assassination cost the NKVD about $ 5 million.

The ice ax that killed Trotsky

From the will of Leon Trotsky: “There is no need for me to refute here once again the stupid and vile slander of Stalin and his agents: there is not a single stain on my revolutionary honor. Neither directly nor indirectly have I ever entered into any behind-the-scenes agreements or even negotiations with the enemies of the working class. Thousands of Stalin's opponents died as victims of similar false accusations.

For forty-three years of my conscious life, I remained a revolutionary, of which forty-two I fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to start over, I would, of course, try to avoid this or that mistake, but the general direction of my life would remain unchanged. I see a bright green strip of grass under the wall, clear blue skies above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is Beautiful. May future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, violence and enjoy it completely. "