The Revolutionary Brothers: Lenin and Trotsky
Every leader needs a right-hand man. Vladimir Lenin, the communist who successfully led the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, had Leon Trotsky. Trotsky and Lenin were the geniuses behind the Russian Revolution. They led a small group of professional revolutionaries known as Bolsheviks, a highly dedicated force who had been training for decades for this moment. They were going to seize the government of the world’s largest nation. Stalin and Trotsky were both Bolsheviks.
Trotsky’s Red Army and the Birth of Soviet Power
Just how do you seize something you cannot grasp with your hands?
- Gather a small independent army that is well-trained, professional, obedient, and willing to make sacrifices for the sake of destroying the status quo.
- Take over the newspapers and all other lines of communication. Immediately begin disseminating propaganda that extols your righteous cause. Insist on calling the propaganda “truth”, even though it is filled with audacious lies.
- Seize control of all the trains, train stations, highways, airports, and airways that lead to the corridors of power in the capital city where your revolution is taking place. Utilize these facilities for your use.
- Capture the palaces and the courts where power resides. Capture the bureaucratic infrastructure for your own purposes. With machine guns and light artillery (howitzers and mortars), guard the intersections that feed these bureaus.
- Confiscate whatever food there is to be had in the city and give it back to the people, doling it out as rations to reward them for their support.
- Never compromise. If someone is not for you, they’re against you. They are the enemy.
Leon Trotsky was a brilliant general. Starting with nothing, Trotsky gradually assembled his Red Army of professional Bolsheviks. Even though this Army in 1917 was outnumbered and outgunned by the various forces surrounding them, Trotsky took the fight to them, and he prevailed. One by one, the Red Army defeated the anti-communist forces, and the Russian Civil War ended in 1920 with a Bolshevik victory.
Vladimir Lenin could never have won without Leon Trotsky. In sheer intellectual power and rhetorical skill, no one could match Trotsky. As the co-leader of the revolution, the victorious war commissar, and creator of the Red Army, Trotsky was indispensable.
Stalin Rises in the Shadows
Meanwhile, neither Lenin nor Trotsky clearly foresaw the extent to which Joseph Stalin had made power flow to him simply by gathering his communist comrades to him and gradually pitting them against Lenin and Trotsky. “He was not much of a talker” says Orwell, “but had a reputation for getting his own way.”
Lenin wanted to curb Stalin’s growing power within the Soviet Central Committee (the Politburo), but in 1922, Lenin suffered the first of a series of massive strokes that eventually took his life in 1924. Naturally, Trotsky stepped in to take Lenin’s place of supreme leadership, but Stalin had already isolated Trotsky from the Politburo, and he forced Trotsky out of power. Leon Trotsky spent the next sixteen years- the rest of his life- running from Stalin.
Stalin and Trotsky: Bitter Enemies
After Trotsky’s removal from power, Stalin exiled Trotsky to frigid Kyrgyzstan where the winter wind chill was forty degrees below zero. But Kyrgyzstan was not far enough for Stalin, and to completely rid the Soviet Union of Trotsky’s baleful influence, Stalin exiled Trotsky to Turkey. Trotsky never saw his homeland again.
Through propaganda, Stalin turned Trotsky the revolutionary hero into an outlaw. Stalin rescinded Trotsky’s citizenship in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the citizenship of Trotsky’s entire family. The effects of the propaganda were twofold. The Russian people worshipped Stalin and made him into a hero. Trotsky’s downfall gave Stalin an enemy, an enemy of the Russian people. The Russian people excoriated and shunned Trotsky. Trotsky’s crime? The Russian people accused him of anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary ideology. What about Trotsky’s family and many friends and acquaintances? The Stalinist government denounced all of them as ‘Trotskyites’.
The Global Exile of Leon Trotsky
When he exiled Trotsky, Stalin removed from circulation all of Trotsky’s books in Russian bookstores and libraries. Stalin also annihilated Trotsky’s dreams that he had for Russia- the workers’ paradise that he had envisioned for his country became the Soviet hell of the gulag prison camps.
Trotsky and his wife Natalia left Turkey and fled to Paris. The French government let the Trotskys stay in France as long as Trotsky did not engage in any revolutionary movements of any kind. From France, Trotsky went to Norway, and from there, he and his family crossed the Atlantic Ocean to live with the Mexican Marxist and artist Diego Rivera in his home in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City.
Stalin’s Reign of Fear and the Death of a Dream
From the beginning of his reign as Communist czar, Stalin ruled the USSR with fear. Every citizen of the Soviet Union became terrified to say anything about their government. Under Stalin, many revolutionaries who had given up everything in the name of communism were tried in a series of show trials and forced confessions. Then they were taken away and shot. The very Russian Revolution that brought down the Romanov dynasty was destroyed by Stalin, and in its place was a reign of terror. In its place was Big Brother, smiling benevolently from under his mustache. In its place was the malignant tumor of Joseph Stalin, a worse dictator than even Ivan the Terrible.
In 1932, to obtain grain to sell on the open market, Stalin confiscated all of the Ukraine wheat harvest and sold it to obtain machinery to start industrializing the Soviet Union. At least four million Ukrainians starved to death- all in a year’s work for Joseph Stalin.
The Assassination of Leon Trotsky
As for Leon Trotsky, a dark and convoluted plot finally succeeded in taking his life in 1940. Stalinist secret agents succeeded in planting one of their double agents inside the Diego Rivera enclave. The agent, a man named Ramon Mercader, was a Spaniard pretending to be in love with a Trotskyite secretary. While Trotsky was concentrating on reading an article that Mercader had written. While he was reading the article, Mercader took out an ice axe and buried it two inches in the back of Trotsky’s head. Trotsky screamed with pain and betrayal, and fell on the floor, bleeding from the wound. He died 24 hours later. Mercader was allowed to live, but he served nearly twenty years in a Mexican prison for his deed.