Stalin's Most Hated Rival

Mitch Addison, '28

During his rule in the Soviet Union, Stalin made many enemies. Normally, those who disagreed with him would disappear, but there was one that Stalin could not kill, at least not publicly. This man is known as Leon Trotsky, known for his rivalry with Stalin until his death.

Trotsky was born to a family of Jewish farmers in Yanovka, Ukraine. Once he turned eight, he went to school in Odessa, a city in Ukraine along the Black Sea. There, he spent eight years with his mother’s nephew, an intellect in liberal politics, and his family. This likely influenced him to go down the path that led to his communist beliefs. This would only be further pushed when he moved to Nikolayev and pulled into an underground socialist circle that introduced him to Marxism. He would return after attending a University in Odessa, and organized the South Russian Workers’ Union. Trotsky would be arrested for his revolutionary activity, spending four and a half years in prison before being exiled to Siberia. There, he married his fellow revolutionary Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, and together they had two daughters. They permanently separated, however, when Trotsky escaped Siberia without his wife and children. Trotsky then fled to London to find fellow revolutionaries in the Russian Social-Democrats and their publication of the Iskra. This is where he met a man by the name of Vladimir Ulyanov, or more commonly known as Vladimir Lenin.

As it is well known, Lenin and his radical approach to socialism and communism led to a split of the Russian Social-Democrats into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Trotsky sided with the Mensheviks, or those who favored a more democratic form of socialism and favored slower, more diplomatic change into communism. Trotsky made his return to Russia in 1905, when the Dumas and other small democratic reforms were being put into effect by Tsar Nicholas II. These changes did not last long, however, and most authority and power remained with the Tsar. Nevertheless, Trotsky became a leading figure and voice of the Saint Petersburg Soviet, or workers’ council. When a revolutionary strike was organized and put into effect, Trotsky was jailed again. While in jail, he wrote one of his important works, Respects and Prospects, which outlined his ideas behind permanent revolution. Trotsky, one more, was exiled to Siberia. He escaped a second time, however, and fled to Vienna. Vienna is the current capital of Austria, and was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1914, World War I broke out, and Trotsky was one of the many Russian Social-Democrats who condemned the war and the war effort of the Tsar and his government. Some Bolsheviks and Mensheviks condemned the war, including Lenin himself, but the differences between the opposing parties still kept them apart, although they did not entirely prevent them from working together. Trotsky, like most other Mensheviks, traveled between warring and neutral nations, but he was expelled from most, such as Spain and France. This led him to go to New York City in 1917, where he met with a prominent Bolshevik theoretician called Nikolay Bukharin. Together, they edited a newspaper written in Russian called The New World. Although the outbreak of another revolution would cause him to return to Russia.

The February Revolution, or the revolution that installed a temporary government designed to institute real, lasting reforms in the Russian government, had just taken place. Trotsky had heard of this and felt it was the perfect event to institute his ideals of permanent revolution. So, he made his return to Russia, reaching Petrograd, formerly Saint Petersburg, in mid-May. Trotsky then assumed leadership of a Menshevik faction residing there. After a halted attempt at uprising in July, Trotsky was arrested in a crackdown on communist leadership. Trotsky had returned to jail and had decided to side with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He formally joined while in jail and was voted into the Bolshevik Central Committee. The Committee was the highest point one could reach in the party, and it determined policy objectives until the establishment of the Politburo in the October Revolution. The Politburo would effectively replace and control the Committee following Stalin’s rise to power and the Great Purge, and it would remain that way until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Trotsky was then released in September and quickly became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. Trotsky would emerge as a leading figure of counterattacking government raids, as well as assuring the public that these forces would only be used for defense and nothing more. As the Russian government crumbled, Petrograd was in the hands of the Bolsheviks, which was only reinforced by Lenin’s return on November 7th to take control of the revolution. Trotsky remained a loyal ally and military commander, even preventing any formation of a coalition government between the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks, alongside Lenin.

Trotsky gained the role of Foreign Commissar, and his first duties were to make peace with the new government and the Central Powers. Peace talks began at Brest-Litovsk, and were proposed with the loss of much Russian territory. Trotsky, however, was not a fan of this proposed treaty. So, he came up with ‘No war, no peace”, meaning that the Russians will not fight, nor will they accept the peace deal. The Germans then continued to push into the territory, forcing the Central Committee to vote on a treaty, resulting in the loss of more land. Trotsky and his followers did not participate in the vote. After this, Trotsky resigned as Foreign Commissar in exchange for being the new Commissar of War. He was tasked with building up the Red Army from the remnants of the old Russian Army. He also had little time to do this since a civil war was getting closer by the day. Trotsky abandoned the revolutionary ideals of democratization and guerrilla tactics in favor of a smaller, more disciplined, and militarily competent army. This, of course, was met with much criticism from his revolutionary fellows and party rivals, including Joseph Stalin. Stalin would not stop criticizing Trotsky there, he would go on to judge his defense of Tsaritsyn and more. As time went on and the newly founded Soviet Union became victorious over the White Army, Trotsky’s critics would silence themselves. The Civil War period clearly established Trotsky as Lenin’s second-in-command, and he held much political influence within the party. Eventually, the party would begin to turn in on itself as the members began to consolidate power after Lenin’s death.

In May of 1922, Lenin’s health began to decline, making the party members wonder who it was that should succeed him. Trotsky seemed like the most obvious candidate, but his comrades in the party became jealous and began to form alliances with one another. The most prominent was between Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, and Stalin. This group was Trotsky’s primary opposition, and they did everything they could to remove Trotsky from power. Trotsky regularly criticized the party and the decisions they made, especially after the secret police were being used against various party members. His criticisms were then manipulated into propaganda, painting Trotsky as a Menshevik and a deviant. By 1925, Trotsky was removed as Commissar of War. Eventually, a split between Kamenev and Zinovyev and Stalin separated them, and Trotsky found new allies in Zinovyev and Kamenev. Stalin continued to consolidate power amongst his allies in the party, and he began to put his views of what the Soviet Union should be in place. This brought much criticism from Trotsky, Zinovyev, and Kamenev. Trotsky was then removed from the Politburo, and  Zinovyev and Trotsky were kicked out of the Central Committee. They began to protest once more with a failed attempt in 1927 on the anniversary of the October Revolution. This led to their expulsion from the party before they were inevitably exiled from the Soviet Union as a whole.

In exile, Trotsky lived on an island near Istanbul. There, he wrote his autobiography and his telling of the Russian Revolution. He would label Stalin as a totalitarian dictator, and he hoped that he and his followers would be able to reform the Soviet Union and Stalin’s regime. After Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, however, Trotsky began to think that another Revolution would be necessary to remove Stalin from power. Now in France, Trotsky was calling his followers to form a new organization called the Fourth International. A small founding meeting was held in 1938, but the Fourth International was never a significant force. Before this, Trotsky had moved to Norway in 1935 and finally to Mexico in 1936. However, Stalin was far from finished with Trotsky. While Trotsky was hopping between countries, Stalin had many agents hunting him and his allies. Many disappeared or were found dead. Trotsky was found guilty of treasonous plotting in the Soviet Union, giving Stalin a loose justification for tracking Trotsky down. In 1940, men armed with machine guns entered Trotsky’s home in an attempt to assassinate him. Trotsky survived this attempt, although he would die three months later. He was killed by a man named Ramón Mercader, who had gained the trust of Trotsky and the rest of the people in his home before attacking Trotsky with an ice pick. Mercader was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and he and the Soviets denied working with each other. The Soviet Union’s involvement in both the attempted and successful assassination of Trotsky is debated, but most believed the operations were organized by the NKVD, the Soviet Union's former intelligence agency. Trotsky was one of Stalin’s most hated rivals. Unfortunately, Stalin could not publicly execute Trotsky due to his loyal followers in and around the Soviet Union. So, Trotsky was exiled from the union he helped to build, and finally, he was assassinated in his home in Mexico.