Leon Trotsky

Anyone asking who was Leon Trotsky has to begin far from any capital city, on a farm in the southern Ukrainian steppe. He was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on October 26, 1879, in the small settlement of Bereslavka (also rendered Yanovka) in Kherson province of the Russian Empire, the son of David Bronstein, a prosperous Jewish farmer, and his wife Anna ^[1]. The family was unusual: Jewish colonist farmers were rare in the empire, and the Bronsteins worked their land with hired labor rather than living in a town.

At the age of eight the boy was sent to Odessa to attend the St. Paul's Realschule, lodging with relatives. The move from a rural estate to a cosmopolitan port city shaped him. He excelled academically, developed a lasting appetite for literature, and finished his secondary schooling in Nikolayev in 1896 ^[1]. There, at seventeen, he fell in with a circle of radicals and helped organize the South Russian Workers' Union, an early attempt to agitate among dockworkers and factory hands.

The police broke up the group in 1898. Bronstein spent nearly two years in prison awaiting sentence, married fellow revolutionary Aleksandra Sokolovskaya while in custody, and was deported to eastern Siberia ^[2]. In 1902 he escaped, leaving his wife and two infant daughters behind with her consent. On a forged passport he wrote the surname of one of his former jailers in Odessa: Trotsky. The alias became the name by which history knows him ^[1].

Trotsky made his way to London in 1902 and presented himself to Vladimir Lenin, then editing the émigré newspaper Iskra. Lenin was impressed by the young writer's fluency, and Trotsky quickly earned the nickname "The Pen" among Russian socialists abroad ^[2]. Yet when the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party split in 1903 into Lenin's Bolsheviks and the rival Mensheviks, Trotsky sided against Lenin, objecting to his centralized model of party organization. For more than a decade he remained a factional independent, trusted fully by neither wing ^[1].

The revolution of 1905 gave him his first taste of real leadership. Returning to Russia at twenty-five, he became chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies during its brief existence, a role that made him one of the best-known revolutionaries in the country ^[2]. Arrested when the soviet was crushed, he used his 1906 trial as a platform, was again sentenced to Siberian exile, and again escaped before reaching his destination.

During the years that followed he lived in Vienna, edited the popular émigré paper Pravda (a separate publication from the later Bolshevik daily), covered the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 as a correspondent, and refined his theory of permanent revolution. The theory held that in a backward country like Russia the working class could seize power ahead of the bourgeoisie, but that its survival would depend on revolution spreading to the industrial West ^[3]. Successive wartime expulsions pushed him from France to Spain to New York, where he was living when the tsar fell in February 1917 ^[1].

Any honest account of Leon Trotsky achievements centers on 1917 and the civil war that followed. He reached Petrograd in May 1917, concluded that his differences with Lenin had dissolved, and formally joined the Bolshevik party that summer. By September he was again chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, and as head of its Military Revolutionary Committee he directed much of the practical work of the October insurrection that put the Bolsheviks in power ^[2].

In the first Soviet government Trotsky served as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He led the delegation at Brest-Litovsk negotiating peace with Germany, where he advanced the unorthodox formula of "neither war nor peace" before Lenin forced acceptance of the harsh German terms in March 1918 ^[1]. Trotsky then moved to the post that defined his reputation: People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs.

From almost nothing he organized the Red Army, which grew into a force of millions during the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1920. He conscripted former tsarist officers as military specialists, paired them with political commissars, imposed severe discipline, and spent much of the war aboard an armored train that carried him from front to front ^[3]. The Red Army's victory over the White armies and foreign intervention forces secured the Soviet state, and contemporaries ranked Trotsky second only to Lenin in the revolutionary government ^[2].

Lenin suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1922, and the question of succession opened long before his death in January 1924. Trotsky's rivals, above all Joseph Stalin, who had become general secretary of the party, allied with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to isolate him ^[1]. Trotsky's late arrival in the party, his abrasive self-assurance, and his lack of patience for committee intrigue all worked against him.

The dispute was also about ideas. Against Trotsky's insistence on internationalism and his warnings about growing bureaucracy, Stalin advanced the doctrine of "socialism in one country," which held that the Soviet Union could complete its revolution without waiting for uprisings abroad ^[3]. In pamphlets such as The New Course and later The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky argued that a privileged bureaucratic caste was strangling the democracy of the soviets ^[4].

He lost at every step. Removed as war commissar in 1925, expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and from the party itself in November 1927, he was deported to Alma-Ata in Soviet Central Asia in January 1928. A year later the Politburo ordered him banished from the Soviet Union altogether, and in February 1929 he was put on a ship to Turkey ^[1].

Trotsky married twice. His first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, the Marxist who had helped convert him from populism in Nikolayev, bore him two daughters, Zinaida and Nina, before his 1902 escape ended their life together ^[2]. In Paris he met Natalia Sedova, an art student and fellow revolutionary, who became his lifelong companion. Their two sons, Lev Sedov and Sergei Sedov, were born in 1906 and 1908 ^[1].

The family paid a terrible price for his politics. Nina died of tuberculosis in 1928, and Zinaida, exiled with her father's cause hanging over her, took her own life in Berlin in 1933. Sergei, who had stayed in the Soviet Union and avoided politics, disappeared into the purges and was shot in 1937. Lev Sedov, his father's closest collaborator in exile, died in a Paris clinic in 1938 under circumstances his family blamed on Soviet agents ^[4].

Away from the podium Trotsky was a compulsive writer with wide literary interests, the author of essays on culture and everyday life as well as politics. Friends and enemies alike described a man of formidable energy and equally formidable pride. In exile he kept a strict working routine, dictating for hours each day, and relaxed by hunting, fishing, and, in Mexico, collecting cacti for his garden ^[5].

No country wanted the Soviet Union's most famous outcast. Trotsky spent four years on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, then moved to France in 1933 and to Norway in 1935, each government restricting his activity before easing him out ^[1]. In December 1936 he sailed for Mexico, where President Lázaro Cárdenas granted him asylum. He and Natalia first lived at the Blue House of the painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Coyoacán, then moved to a fortified house nearby on Avenida Viena ^[5].

Exile was his most productive literary period. He completed his autobiography, My Life, in 1930 and the three-volume History of the Russian Revolution between 1930 and 1932, works still read for their narrative force ^[3]. When the Moscow show trials of 1936 to 1938 cast him as the mastermind of vast conspiracies, an independent commission of inquiry chaired by the American philosopher John Dewey examined the charges in Mexico in 1937 and pronounced them frauds ^[4]. In 1938 he founded the Fourth International as a rival to Stalin's Comintern.

Stalin wanted more than his silence. In May 1940 a squad led by the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros raked the Coyoacán house with machine-gun fire; Trotsky and Natalia survived by rolling from their bed. Three months later Ramón Mercader, a Spanish agent of the Soviet NKVD who had wormed into the household through a relationship with one of Trotsky's secretaries, struck him in the skull with an ice axe in his study. Trotsky died in a Mexico City hospital on August 21, 1940, at the age of sixty ^[6].

Every Leon Trotsky biography confronts a double reputation: the brilliant organizer of October and the Red Army, and the defeated prophet who spent his last decade denouncing the state he helped create. Inside the Soviet Union his name became an all-purpose curse; "Trotskyite" served as a capital charge during the purges, and he was airbrushed from photographs and histories until the late 1980s, when the Gorbachev era allowed his story to be discussed openly ^[1].

Outside Russia his influence persisted through the small but durable Trotskyist movement, which kept alive his critique of Stalinism from the left and splintered into competing internationals after his death ^[3]. Historians continue to argue over his record, from the crushing of the Kronstadt rising in 1921 to the counterfactual question of what a Trotsky-led Soviet Union might have become. Isaac Deutscher's three-volume study, published in the 1950s and 1960s, fixed the image of the prophet armed, unarmed, and outcast, and later biographers such as Robert Service have offered far harsher judgments ^[2][7].

His afterlife in culture is unusually rich for a defeated politician. My Life and the History of the Russian Revolution remain in print, George Orwell modeled characters on him in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the house where he died is now the Museo Casa de León Trotsky, preserved with the bullet holes of the Siqueiros raid still in its walls ^[5]. Among the basic Leon Trotsky facts, perhaps the most telling is that his assassin served twenty years in a Mexican prison and then received the Hero of the Soviet Union award, a measure of how much his survival had mattered to Stalin ^[6].