18 December 2006: who was Leon Trotsky?

The history of Marxism in the past 100 years is dominated by the fate of the Russian Revolution. In Russia, after 1917, there was a society that claimed to stand for the workers against the bosses, for women, and for national minorities. But this same society was soon controlled by bosses of its own. The leaders of the Communist Party had larger houses, better salaries, better food. And no-one had elected them. The system became brutal. Stalin killed literally tens of millions of people. In such hands, Marxism was turned in its opposite. When workers were jailed in the Russian labour camps, they were woken each morning by the socialist hymn the 'Internationale'.

The great achievement of Leon Trotsky was to resist the betrayal of the revolution. There were many other Marxists who had known the Soviet Union since its beginning. Trotsky alone resisted Stalin and the Stalinist system.

Born in 1879, to a peasant family, Trotsky became a revolutionary almost by chance. He was a student, his friends were Marxists. Trotsky refused to accept Marxism. He called it mechanical. He said Marxism was as dry as dust. He tried to show that it was possible to fight always for the workers and the peasants without actually believing anything. But the longer he remained an activist, the more attractive Marxism became to him. 

Trotsky decided to join the Marxists. He began to organise socialist newspapers, and unions of the workers. Trotsky was jailed and then exiled. After years in detention, he escaped to London.

In 1903, Trotsky allied with the Mensheviks. The Mensheviks he preferred because they were less disciplined. It was a decision he took quickly. It was a mistake. For years afterwards he would regret it. He argued later that in 1903 the issues were still not clear. The difference between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks became clear only in time. 

When the first Russian Revolution broke out in 1905, Trotsky was among the first of the exiles to return. The workers of St. Petersburg began to meet in a great workers' council or soviet. Trotsky was elected its leader. The soviet began to challenge for power. One again Trotsky was arrested. Again he was exiled. Again, he escaped.

The lesson that Trotsky drew from 1905 was that the workers of Russia were already revolutionary. This insight, however, caused problems for Marxism. Hadn't Marx said that the revolution would break out first in the advanced countries? Wasn't Marxism based on the idea of taking the most advanced industries and opening them to workers' control? How could you have a revolution, in a poor, rural country such as Russia?

Trotsky solved these problems by means of an idea that he called 'permanent revolution'. If the revolution spread from the poor countries like Russia, to the developed societies like Germany or Britain, then it would no longer be isolated. It would be able to make use of the most advanced resources. The problem would be solved.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was the first historical test of the theory. As well as in Russian, there were workers' revolutions in Hungary and in parts of Germany: the revolution spread through Europe and beyond. Yet for all its success, the revolt did not spread fast enough. Russia was indeed isolated. The resulting society could not be socialist.

In 1917, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks. While Lenin tried to remain safe in hiding, Trotsky spoke each night for the revolution. After the uprising, he became People's Commissar for War. When the German generals demanded that Russia sign a peace treaty, Trotsky visited Germany, speaking always to the crowd, taking great bundles of leaflets with him wherever he went.

When a year after the revolution, a civil war broke out, Trotsky founded the Red Army. It was a movement of peasants and class-conscious workers. It saved the revolution.

Yet for all Trotsky's brilliance, he had enemies in the Bolshevik Party. Some accused him of joining Lenin's party too late. After Lenin's death, he was slowly isolated by less talented people. Trotsky saw that the revolution was degenerating. The party was becoming more bureaucratic. There was less democracy in the society. He attempted to campaign for change from within the party but was isolated.

In 1924, he wrote, 'The essential incomparable advantage of our party consists in its being able, at every moment, to look at industry with the eyes of the communist machinist, the communist specialist, the communist director and the communist merchant, collect the experience of these mutually complementary workers, draw conclusions from them, and thus determine its line for directing the economy in general and each enterprise in particular. It is clear that such leadership is reliable only on the basis of a vibrant and active democracy inside the party.'

Trotsky continued to argue that Russia was isolated, and the revolution needed to spread. In Britain and in China, there were moments of possibility, but Stalin squandered them. With each defeat for Marxists internationally, Trotsky's position in Russia weakened.

In 1926, Trotsky established a United Opposition with Kamenev and Zinoviev in an attempt to stop the rise of Stalin. They were defeated. In January 1928, he was deported from Russia. Trotsky was lucky. Because of his reputation, Stalin did not dare jail or kill him. Hundreds of thousands of Communists were killed by Stalin between 1934 and 1937: Trotsky in exiled remained alive.

Trotsky wrote furiously. His greatest book The History of the Russian Revolution describes how the revolution was made and defends Lenin's tactics from 1917. 

Another book, The Revolution Betrayed, began to explain how Stalin had taken power. It looks at the isolation of the revolution, and the rise of the Communist Party, the creation of this new class of people who turned Russian into one giant prison. Yet through all his last years, Trotsky continued to hope that some reform movement would take over the Communist Party and return the revolution to what it had been. Even Trotsky couldn't understand just far badly the revolution had been betrayed.

Trotsky fought to keep the revolution possible. He fought to hold the revolution to its original ideas. 

Stalin's assassins killed Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.