Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)

    Leon Trotsky was born in Yanovka, Ukraine. He studied at Odessa and become an ardent disciple of Karl Marx in his youth. In 1896 Trotsky joined the Social Democrats and two years later he was arrested as a Marxist and exiled to Siberia. Four years later he escaped and reached England by means of a forged passport in the name of Trotsky.

    In London Trotsky met Lenin and other Russian Revolutionary thinkers and collaborated in publication their journal of Iskra (Spark). When the party split in 1903, he gained position as a leader of the Menshevik wing of the Social Democratic party, as opposed to the Bolshevik one under Lenin, prophesying that Leninist theory would result in a one-man dictatorship. In 1905 Trotsky organized the first revolutionary Soviet council in St. Petersburg and was appointed president of the Soviet. About this time he propounded the doctrine of 'permanent revolution,' which implied that revolution in one country must be followed by revolutions in other countries, eventually throughout the world. After the uprising ended he was again exiled to Siberia, and managed once more escape.

    Trotsky worked then as journalist in Vienna, and become editor of Pravda (Truth). With the outbreak of World War I he moved to Zürich in 1914 and then to Germany, where he was imprisoned for opposing the war. During World War I Trotsky led the internationalist wing of the Mensheviks. In 1915 Trotsky moved to Paris, editing the socialist weekly Nashe Slovo, but he was expelled from France as a result of his pacifist propaganda. After a short stay in the United States as the editor of Novy Mir, Trotsky returned to Russia in 1917. He joined the Bosheviks in St. Petersburg and established the magazine Vperied (Forward). Trotsky was arrested for a short time by Aleksandr Feodorovich Kerenski's provisional government, but after release he played a major role in the October Revolution.

    At the conference in Brest-Litovsk in 1918 Trotsky was leader of the Russian delegate. From 1919 to 1927 he was a member of Politburo. Trotsky was made the Russian Civil War commissar for war (1918-25) and created in this post the Red army. For two and half years, as he explained in My Life , he lived in his heavy armored train with two engines, travelling from one front to another. The Red army grew from 800,000 to 3,000,000, and fought on sixteen fronts simultaneously.

    In 1921-22 the last remnants of non-Communist socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, were abolished. In May 1922 Lenin suffered a stroke which left him partly paralyzed, in early 1923 another took away his speech and in January 1924 he died. After Lenin's death, among the aspiring successors, Stalin and Trotsky were the leading figures.

    From 1925 to 1926 Trotsky held relatively minor administrative post, before he was ousted from the party by Stalin. In 1927 Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata, in Kazakstan, where he devoted himself to writing his memoirs and bitter pamphlets. The 'combined opposition' of Trotsky, Grigory Zinoview, and Lev Kamenev was unsuccessful. In 1929 Trotsky was totally expelled from the Soviet Union. With this stroke Stalin became the sole and undisputable leader of the Communist Party, and therefore of the Soviet Union.

   During the Great Purge (1934-38), a wave of terror by which Stalin aimed at eliminating the opposition, Trotsky was accused of espionage. A supposed family friend, Jacques van den Dreschd, wounded Trotsky mortally on August 21, 1940 with an ice pick.