Trotsky, Leon

(Lev Davidovich Bronstein)

(1879–1940)

   Russian revolutionary leader. The son of a farmer, Trotsky grew up in the Ukraine. Scholars disagree about the extent of his Jewish education - in any case, he quickly rebelled against his origins. He joined the militant Social Democratic Party, and in 1898 was arrested and exiled to Siberia. He escaped to England but returned to play a key role in the abortive 1905 revolution. In 1917 he joined the Bolsheviks and after the October Revolution became commissar for foreign affairs, in which capacity he negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, much against his own judgment.

   As people’s commissar for military affairs from March 1918, Trotsky was the founder of the Red Army, which he led to victory against the ‘White’ counter- revolutionary forces in 1918–20. He then reconstructed the Russian railway system. LENIN on his death-bed favoured Trotsky as his successor, but in the ensuing power struggle, Trotsky proved little match for STALIN, who relentlessly deprived him of all positions of power, expelled him from the party, exiled him, and finally arranged for his murder in Mexico in 1940. Trotsky was brilliant as a political organizer, military strategist, orator and writer. He believed firmly that the seizure of power in Russia was only a prelude to world revolution, and rejected Stalin’s policy of ‘Socialism in one country’. After his ousting, Soviet history was rewritten to discredit his major role in the revolution. In 1938 a Trotskyite Fourth International was proclaimed at a conference in Switzerland, but produced only marginal groups of his disciples in the left-wing movements in various countries. During his exile, he wrote a three- volume History of the Russian Revolution (1932–3) as well as ah autobiography, My Life (1930), and The Permanent Revolution (1931). These works were translated into many languages, and are regarded as modern classics. Trotsky’s revolutionary universalism had no room for any element of distinctive Jewish identity. The best solution for the Jewish problem, he contended, was total assimilation. Anti-Semitism was a disease of bourgeois society and would disappear after the revolution, which Jews therefore had a special reason for supporting. He was violently critical of Zionism (though it is only a myth that he debated the subject with Dr WEIZMANN in Switzerland) and also of the Jewish autonomist revolutionary party, the Bund. Yet his enemies inside and outside the Bolshevik Party were ready to use anti-Semitism as a weapon against him. A newspaper report shortly before Trotsky’s death had it that, faced with the fact of Nazi persecution, he conceded that a territorialist nationalist solution of the Jewish problem might be possible, though not in Palestine.