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Top: Jewish Leaders
Folder: Trotsky (Bronstein)

Trotsky

Article on Trotsky appearing at Boise State University's http://www.idbsu.edu/surveyrc/Staff/jaynes/marxism/bios/trotsky.htm
on June 26, 1998

Originally named Lev Davidovich
Bronstein, Trotsky was born on November 7, 1879, in Kherson Province in
Ukraine, the son of Russified Jews. He was educated in Odesa and in
Mykolayiv and was a star pupil with enormous intellectual
capabilities.

Trotsky's political involvement began in 1896 in a
circle of Mykolayiv Populists, but he soon converted to Marxism. After a
brief stay at Odessa University, he returned to Mykolayiv in 1897 to
organize the Southern Russian Workers Union. For this he was arrested,
jailed, and exiled.

He escaped from Siberian exile in 1902, fleeing
to Europe and adopting the pseudonym Trotsky. Abroad he joined Lenin, L.
Martov, Georgy Plekhanov, and other Russian Social-Democrats, who were
publishing Iskra (The Spark). By vitue of his flair for polemic writing
and oratorical brilliance, he quickly rose in the party.

At the
party's Second Congress in 1903 Trotsky opposed Lenin and the Bolsheviks,
siding with the Mensheviks. His characteristic independence, however, kept
him from cementing any organizational ties. Alone of the major party
leaders, he rushed back to Russia to be an active participant in the 1905
Revolution, where he gained practical experience as chairman of the Saint
Petersburg Soviet of Workers Deputies. Jailed in December 1905 and later
exiled to Siberia, Trotsky used his time to reconsider the paradoxes of
revolution in backward Russia. He synthesized his thoughts in two books,
1905 and Results and Prospects.

Escaping from Siberia in 1907,
Trotsky spent the next decade defending his ideas and engaging in émigré
squabbling. The March Revolution of 1917 caught him by surprise in New
York City, where he wrote for a Russian newspaper. Trotsky reached Russia
in May, quickly assumed leadership of the independent left
Social-Democratic Interdistrict Group, and joined the Petrograd (as St.
Petersburg was renamed) Soviet. Within weeks, he had gained enormous
popularity as the most eloquent agitator of the Soviet left. In July,
after being courted by Lenin, he joined the Bolshevik party and was
elected to its Central Committee.

As a Bolshevik, Trotsky was
elected chairman of the Soviet in September. He sided with Lenin on the
need to overthrow the provisional government and devoted all his energies
to marshaling support for the armed uprising of the Bolsheviks. With Lenin
in hiding, Trotsky was the general in charge, and he successfully directed
the masses of workers and soldiers in the November revolution.

In the
ensuing Soviet government Trotsky first became commissar of foreign
affairs, negotiating a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk.
Later, as a ruthlessly practical commissar of war, he is credited with
creating, inspiring, and directing the Red Army that gained a great
victory in the civil war and saved the Revolution.

Trotsky was
second only to Lenin in the Politburo, and Lenin viewed him as
exceptionally able. He backed Lenin's major policy innovations, but had
his own plans for industrializing Russia. When a stroke removed Lenin from
active politics in May 1922, Trotsky was not in a position to take over.
Never particularly adept at party politics, he failed to outmaneuver the
troika of Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, and Stalin that took power.
Although he put himself at the head of a loosely knit left opposition,
Trotsky's polemic salvos were no match for Stalin's bureaucratic party
machine. In 1925 his adversaries removed him from the Commissariat of War;
in 1926 they expelled him from the Politburo; and in 1928 Stalin exiled
him to Central Asia and in 1929 expelled him from the USSR.

Trotsky
spent the rest of his life seeking a safe place to compose his savage
critiques of Stalinist Russia. In Turkey, France, Norway, and finally
Mexico he produced a flood of publications, including an autobiography, My
Life (1930; trans. 1930); an unmatched History of the Russian Revolution
(3 vol., 1931-33; trans. 1932-33); an insightful The Revolution Betrayed
(1937); and searing articles on the major issues of his day (Stalinism,
Nazism, fascism, the Spanish civil war). A Stalinist agent fatally wounded
Trotsky on August 20, 1940, in Coyoacán, Mexico. He died the following
day.

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