Leon Trotsky

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Lev Dawidowitsch Bronstein, called Leon Trotsky (around 1929)

Leon Trotsky ( Russian Лев Троцкий Lew Trozki , scientific. Transliteration Lev Trotsky , October 26 * . Jul / 7. November  1879 greg. As Lev Davidovich Bronstein , Russian Лев Давидович Бронштейн , transliteration Lev Davidovič Bronštejn in Janowka , Kherson Gubernia , Russian Empire ; †  August 21, 1940 in Coyoacán , Mexico ) was a Russian revolutionary, communist politician and Marxist theorist.

Trotsky, as he called himself from 1902, was the main organizer of the October 25th revolution . / 7th November  1917 greg. who brought the Bolsheviks to power under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin . In the government that was subsequently formed, he was People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, for warfare, nutrition, transport and publishing. As war commissioner he founded the Red Army , in whose organization and in whose victory in the Russian Civil War he played a major role. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky was increasingly disempowered by Josef Stalin , forced into exile in 1929 and murdered by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940.

The direction of Trotskyism , which deviated from the Soviet party line of Marxism-Leninism , was named after him.

Life

Childhood and youth

Lew Bronstein as a 9-year-old, 1888

Lew Bronstein was born as the fifth child of Jewish colonists in Janowka , which was then part of the Russian state, in the Jelisawetgrad district , today's Bereslawka in the Ukrainian Oblast Kirowohrad , and attended the secondary school in the city of Nikolayev (today's Ukrainian name form Mykolaiv). His father Dawid Leontjewitsch Bronstein was a farmer who had achieved some prosperity. Indifferent to religion, with the help of wage laborers he ran the larger farm called Janowka near the small town of Bobrynez .

His mother, Anna, came from a middle-class family and was an educated woman who grew up in the city and followed the Jewish Orthodox religion.

His sister Olga later also joined the revolutionaries . She married Lev Kamenev , an influential party theorist of the Bolsheviks and one of the main characters in the Thermidorian triumvirate against the first so-called Left Opposition of the 1920s, but soon afterwards joined the United Opposition against Stalin with Zinoviev and was later executed.

The later People's Commissar did not experience the years in provincial Janowka as carefree or depressing. In his autobiography Mein Leben later he reported of a "staid petty bourgeois childhood, colorless in shading, limited in morality, not shaped by coldness and hardship, but also not characterized by love, abundance and freedom".

In 1886 Bronstein attended the Cheder , a religious elementary school, in the neighboring colony of Gromokley, where he learned Russian, arithmetic and Bible Hebrew. From 1888 Bronstein graduated from the German-Lutheran secondary school for Saint Paul in the port city of Odessa. There he learned to see rural, orthodox Judaism , as practiced by his family, from the enlightened point of view of the bourgeoisie and began to campaign for a cosmopolitan, assimilated Judaism. Nine years later he passed the Abitur in Nikolayev as the best of his class.

Lew Bronstein, 1897

A year earlier, the 17-year-old had already started to develop politically from a radical democratic oppositionist to a popular populist . Folkism, along with Marxism, was one of the two most popular oppositional directions of those days. He joined a discussion group of young opposition activists, in which he represented the positions of the popularists. His opponent and later first wife was Alexandra Sokolowskaja , who was seven years his senior , who saw herself as a Marxist and who ultimately convinced him of the Marxist theory. When Bronstein began to be politically active, his parents stopped their alimony.

In 1897, Bronstein, as a socialist, was instrumental in founding the Social Democratic South Russian Workers' Union. In this organization he acted as a propagandist and liaison between the groups in Nikolaev and Odessa.

First imprisonment and escape

Police photo of Bronstein after his arrest in 1898

In early 1898, the tsarist police arrested Bronstein as part of mass arrests, the cause of which was the betrayal of the carpenter Nesterenko, and imprisoned him in the prisons of Nikolayev, Cherson and Odessa. In 1899 he was sentenced to exile to Siberia , where he gave his fundamental criticism of the Saint Petersburg regime a theoretical foundation with intensive studies of dialectical and historical materialism as well as the Marxist worldview .

In 1900 the revolutionary married Alexandra Sokolovskaya in the Moscow transfer prison Butyrka , who accompanied him a little later into exile in Irkutsk . The following year their first daughter, Sinaida , was born and in 1902 the second daughter Nina (d. 1928).

In 1902 he left his wife and two young daughters because of his revolutionary work and fled from exile. In order to manage the escape, he got himself a forged passport in the name of Trotsky , with which, following his penchant for irony, he named himself after the superintendent of the prison in Odessa. He then used this name until the end of his life.

Before the overthrow

A little later, in the autumn of 1902, Leon Trotsky, at the invitation of Vladimir Lenin , came to London and lived with him.

In exile , he assumed the role of senior editor of the Social Democratic newspaper Iskra (The Spark), an activity that earned him the nickname "Leninist stick"; after the split in the Russian social democracy, however, he did not continue this work. Soon he joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia (RSDLP) Georgi Plekhanov and represented the so-called Siberian League at the Second Party Congress of the RSDLP in the British capital.

During this time Trotsky also met Alexander Parvus , actually Israil Lasarewitsch Helphand, who also came from a Jewish Stetl near Odessa and who had found his political field of activity in the German SPD . The elder Parvus had a very strong influence on the young Trotsky. His “ theory of permanent revolution ” is based in part on a similar conception by Parvus.

In 1902 Trotsky stayed temporarily in Paris, where he met the art history student Natalia Sedova . She stayed by his side until the end of his life.

At the second party congress of the RSDLP (1903) the party split over the question of who could be considered a party member. Opponents in this dispute were on the one hand Lenin, in whose opinion only people who were personally involved could be party members, and on the other hand Martov , who only saw the support of the party as the basis for party membership. In the following vote, the supporters of Lenin won, who were subsequently called Bolsheviks (German: majority ); they were opposed by the Mensheviks (German: minority groups ). Trotsky tried on the one hand to mediate between the party factions, on the other hand he leaned heavily in the vicinity of the Mensheviks. He wrote writings in which he assumed Lenin's greed for power as the basis of his politics and called him a "candidate for dictator" or "Maximilien de Lénine" (as a critical allusion to the French revolutionary Maximilien de Robespierre ). The relationship between the two future leaders of the revolution was strained for a long time by these polemics. In later writings Trotsky withdrew his Menshevik positions.

From August 1904 onwards Trotsky lived in Munich for six months .

In the same year he broke with the Mensheviks and postulated in the “ theory of permanent revolution ” that the Russian bourgeoisie, which in his view was entirely discredited by the tsarist, would not dare to overthrow the French Revolution . Rather, the working class , which is still very small, will play an important role in the alliance with the poorest strata of the peasantry and the rural proletarians in establishing the “ dictatorship of the proletariat based on the peasant war”. This represents a decisive further development of Marxism, since Marx did not envision a proletarian revolution in an industrially backward country (90% of the population were peasants). He was of the opinion that only after a further advance of capitalism would society be ready for a communist overthrow.

During the revolution of 1905 , after the St. Petersburg uprising in October 1905, he returned to Russia, where he and Parvus became a member of the St. Petersburg " Soviet (Council) of Workers' Deputies". Trotsky took over the presidency of the council. After his arrest, Parvus succeeded him. While in exile, Trotsky wrote Balance and Outlook - Russia in the Revolution . In 1906 his third child was born, the son Lew . Two years later in Vienna the son Sergei followed . The mother of both children was Natalia Sedova .

The mass movement influenced by Trotsky was crushed. Trotsky, who in the meantime had risen to head the Soviet and was involved in the December uprisings, was sentenced to life in exile for a second time after a show trial . He was to begin his sentence in Tobolsk Governorate . He fled during the transport and, like Parvus, escaped to Habsburg Vienna.

At the 1907 party congress, again in London, Trotsky joined neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks, but headed a so-called centrist faction among the Bolsheviks . From 1908 he and Adolf Joffe published a newspaper called Pravda (German: "Truth" or "Justice"), not to be confused with the newspaper of the same name published by Lenin , which appeared from 1912. At that time, Kamenev in particular tried to convince Trotsky of the Bolshevik faction and Lenin's positions; Trotsky, however, remained a critic of Lenin, just as Lenin condemned Trotsky's positions.

Trotsky now led the life of a restless emigrant; first gained military experience in the Balkans and at times worked as a war reporter for the newspaper Kijewskaja mysl under the title The Balkan Wars .

There was a break between Trotsky and Parvus. The latter represented a different concept of the "theory of permanent revolution". From 1910 to 1914 Parvus joined the Young Turks and took part in the revolution against the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople. During the First World War he worked with official German agencies.

Leon Trotsky with his daughter Nina (1915)

After the outbreak of the First World War, Trotsky fled the threat of arrest in Austria to neutral Switzerland and moved to Paris in November 1914 to report on the war for Kijewskaya Mysl . From January 1915 he published the newspaper Nasche Slowo there , which functioned as the organ of the internationalist Mensheviks. At the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915, he and Lenin, whom he was steadily drawing closer to, were among the signatories of the International Socialist Anti- War Manifesto that he wrote . Because of his anti-war agitation, after a mutiny among Russian troops in France, he was deported by the French authorities to Spain in September 1916. There he was arrested and deported to New York in December 1916 .

October Revolution

In New York, where he lived in an apartment with his second wife Natalia Sedova and his two sons, Trotsky worked for the Russian and Yiddish-language newspapers Novy Mir and Der Forwerts . In March 1917 he received news of the Russian February Revolution , through which the bourgeois Provisional Government under Prince Lvov and his Social Democratic War Minister Kerensky came to power.

On the way to Russia, Trotsky was arrested on April 3, 1917 in Halifax , Nova Scotia , Canada , and taken to an internment camp for German prisoners of war. However, the Petrograd Soviet  - St. Petersburg had been renamed Petrograd in 1914 - put pressure on the Provisional Government to stand up for Trotsky. After his release, he arrived in Petrograd in May 1917. There he again joined a so-called centrist workers' party, this time the National Organization of United Social Democrats ( Meschrajonzy ), which had the goal of reconciling the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. After some disputes, the supraregional organization under the leadership of Trotsky, who in the theoretical debate only separated the question of a mass social-democratic party from Lenin, joined the Bolsheviks. Trotsky himself was on the VI. Bolshevik party congress in absentia (he was arrested after the Juliet uprising ) accepted into the party and received a seat on the Central Committee.

After the Bolsheviks had achieved a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky was elected chairman in September 1917 and in this function organized the “ combat units of the Red Guard ”. This quickly made him one of the most important men in the party. When, on October 10, 1917, the party's central committee decided to launch an armed uprising against the weak government of Alexander Kerensky , Trotsky voted in favor with a majority of his comrades. The claim later spread by Stalinist propaganda that Trotsky spoke out against the revolution is demonstrably false.

The winter palace

Under his leadership, the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet was founded on October 16, 1917. This committee suspended orders from the Provisional Government to send two-thirds of the Petrograd municipal garrison to the frontline of World War I. This was the beginning of the revolt of the Military Revolutionary Committee at the Smolny Institute , where messengers with messages from different parts of the city arrived to inform of the insurgents' events and achievements. After the takeover of train stations, post offices, telegraph offices, ministries and the state bank as well as the storming of the Winter Palace , the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies, a coalition government made up of Bolsheviks and left-wing Social Revolutionaries, was established on October 26 at 5 a.m. under the name of the Soviet of People's Commissars . Immediately afterwards the decrees On Peace and On Land were passed. The parties of the relatively ineffective Duma, with the exception of the Bolshevik faction, refused to recognize both the decisions of the Congress and the government.

Leon Trotsky 1918

After the Bolsheviks came to power, Trotsky was appointed People's Commissar (Russian: народный комиссар Narodnyj Commissar, short narcom ) for foreign affairs. He saw his main task in making peace with the German Reich and its allies (such as Austria-Hungary ). He ensured the declaration of an armistice between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers and led the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk . Due to the weak position of revolutionary Russia and the openly imperialist position of the (German) Supreme Army Command on the question of the territory of Ukraine, he tried to delay an agreement as long as possible. Trotsky's negotiating partner on the German side was General Ludendorff , who saw through his delaying tactics. On February 18, 1918, German troops crossed the Russian-German front line, which had existed since the armistice of December 15, 1917, and occupied the Ukraine, which had already declared itself independent in January 1918 and which the Central Powers, suffering from food shortages, considered " Granary “should serve (→  Ukrajinska Narodna Respublika ). Due to the military superiority of the Central Powers , Soviet Russia had to conclude the very disadvantageous peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, which resulted in the loss of Ukraine and other areas for Soviet Russia.

Trotsky's behavior during the negotiations was highly controversial within the government and the Central Committee of the Communist Party . While there was a group around Karl Radek and Nikolai Bukharin on the one hand , which demanded the unconditional continuation of the “revolutionary war” and the expansion of the Soviet territory without taking into account the desperate situation of its own troops, a minority around Lenin became a risky one Tactics of procrastination in the hope of an early proletarian revolution in Germany and Austria-Hungary favored. According to his autobiography, Trotsky himself wanted to sign a surrender only after another offensive by the German troops, but abstained from the decisive vote in the Central Committee in order to secure Lenin's majority and voluntarily resigned from the office of People's Commissar for diplomatic and tactical reasons for external affairs.

Founding of the Red Army and civil war

After the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk , which Trotsky viewed as a personal defeat, he campaigned for the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War , in which the Soviet "Reds" and the tsarist-bourgeois " Whites " faced each other. Trotsky was appointed People's Commissar for Warfare on March 14, 1918, and began building the Red Army of Workers and Peasants, or Red Army for short .

With his energetic and merciless approach, Trotsky made a decisive contribution to the military victory of the Bolsheviks. He organized the transformation of the hitherto scattered, disorganized Red Guards into a tightly managed territorial army; among other things, he reintroduced military ranks, badges and the death penalty in the army. From August 1918 to 1920 Trotsky interfered directly in the fortunes of the Red Army on board his armored train . In August 1918 he also ordered that in the event of a unit withdrawing unnecessarily from the point of view of the High Command, first the commissioner and then the military commander should be executed immediately. The command personnel had been elected by the soldiers until then. This democratic approach, however, hindered the transformation into a new, centrally managed army. Trotsky therefore largely abolished the democratic structures, released the conservative Cossacks from the cavalry and combined the defense of the new government with the struggle for freedom of various oppressed nationalities of the former tsarist empire. As early as September 1918, the retaking of the city of Kazan showed that Trotsky's measures were successful.

Among the Russians in exile, it was said that the Bolsheviks fought “with Latvian boots and Chinese opium ” because, for lack of experienced officers, Trotsky encouraged officers from the old tsarist army to join the Red Army. By the end of the war, around 75,000 served in the red officer corps . Some volunteered, others were drafted. Trotsky ordered their families to be held in kin as a means of control , if the officers would defer to the whites. The officers, officially referred to as “military specialists”, were also subjected to control by loyal supervisors, so-called political commissars . It was precisely this aspect that led to harsh criticism within the party; Josef Stalin in particular , who was Commissar of the Red Army in Tsaritsyn , later Stalin and today's Volgograd, complained about the appointment of General Sytin to the defense of the city. But because of Trotsky's military successes, he and the other opponents of the new military organization were not listened to by Lenin.

On April 6th Trotsky also took over the department of naval affairs. The government had moved from Petrograd to Moscow . In 1919 the Bolsheviks renamed themselves the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) (KPR (B)), which from 1925 was called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) (CPSU (B)). The undisputed leader was Vladimir Lenin , who in the meantime had become reconciled with Trotsky.

At first the Bolsheviks were under great pressure. The territory of the Soviets was temporarily reduced to the territory of the old Moscow principalities by the so-called White Armies in 1918 . The supply situation in the cities was poor. In addition, the victorious powers of the First World War intervened by sending their own contingents of troops in the fighting on behalf of the opposition White Armies. Between 1918 and 1922 there were Japanese, US, British, Italian and French troop contingents on Russian territory. However, the Red Army, which had emerged from the Red Guards, was faced with an opponent who did not have a unified leadership and pursued contradicting objectives.

In 1919 Trotsky led the fight against the anarchist Nestor Makhno and his movement, the Makhnovshchina .

By 1920 the Red Army succeeded in a very costly battle in pushing the White troops back to the east of the Russian Empire. In February of the same year, the White Army suffered a heavy defeat in Siberia. Trotsky now proclaimed war against Poland and its Ukrainian allies and made it a top priority in the War Commissariat. However, the so-called “ miracle on the Vistula ” in mid-August hit the Red Army hard and badly defeated. The offensive against Poland had to be broken off. In the Riga Treaty, however, the Soviets acquired Belarus and Ukraine.

In May 1921 the Crimea fell , the last stronghold of the White Army. By the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922, the Red Troops under Trotsky's leadership conquered Azerbaijan , Armenia and Georgia , whose governments, partly Menshevik, partly nationalistic, had striven for state independence. In August there was a futile uprising in Georgia against the Red Army , which in the newly conquered countries was partly perceived as a liberator and partly as an occupying power.

The Kronstadt sailors' uprising in 1921 - they demanded immediate, equal and secret elections for the Soviets, freedom of speech and press for all anarchist and left-wing socialist parties, freedom of assembly, free trade unions and a fairer distribution of bread - was “ruthlessly” by the Red Army under Trotsky's leadership Hardship and mass shootings ”suppressed. Trotsky also vigorously defended press censorship. Also for the bloody suppression of peasant uprisings with thousands dead, e.g. B. in the area of ​​today's Ukraine, which were directed primarily against the grain confiscation, Trotsky was held responsible as the highest military leader. In the 1930s, Communists Max Eastman , Boris Souvarine , Ante Ciliga and Victor Serge criticized Trotsky's role in the brutal crackdown, which they saw as the beginning of Stalinism and the forerunner of the Great Terror of their day. Trotsky justified his approach:

“I don't know […] whether there were innocent victims (in Kronstadt) […]. I am ready to admit that civil war is not a school for human behavior. Idealists and pacifists have always accused the revolution of excesses. The difficulty of the matter is that the excesses arise from the very nature of the revolution, which is itself an excess of history. May those who feel like it (in their poor journalistic articles) reject the revolution for this reason. I do not reject them. "

After 1921, however, war communism was replaced by the new economic policy .

Power struggle with Stalin

Trotsky (right) with his internal party supporter Christian Rakowski , around 1924
Trotsky (4th from left) together with Stalin (3rd from right) as one of the pallbearers at the funeral of Felix Dzerzhinsky

After the establishment of the Soviet Union in late December 1922, Trotsky began to criticize the bureaucracy that was emerging , the totalitarianism of the Bolsheviks, and the emerging Russian nationalism . This met with both approval and rejection within the party. From 1924 he directed his criticism mainly against Josef Stalin .

Lenin expressed reservations about Trotsky's "excessive self-confidence" and his "excessive passion for purely administrative measures", but also said that Trotsky was "distinguished by excellent ability" and "personally probably the most capable man in the current Central Committee". After reading out the political will, in which Lenin called Stalin too “crude”, Stalin offered his resignation, but the resignation was rejected by a large majority. As a result, Stalin, together with Zinoviev and Kamenev , finally began to oust Trotsky from power. This included the fact that Lenin's will and the letters were not printed in the party press and later in the editions of the works. Only Trotsky and those who had been judged better than Stalin quoted Lenin's last will in their writings. It was not until 1956, when de-Stalinization began , that these documents were internally and publicly accessible.

In October 1923 Trotsky attacked the Central Committee , which was already dominated by Stalin , and a violent backlash followed. From this point on he lost more and more influence within the party at Stalin's instigation. During this time Trotsky also worked theoretically again and published his work Literature and Revolution in 1923 . In it he prophesied that the social structure of the Soviet Union, the physical-psychological self-education of the individual and, above all, the arts would create a "new person":

“Man becomes incomparably stronger, smarter and finer; his body becomes more harmonious, his movements become more rhythmic, and his voice becomes more musical. [...] The average type of person will rise to the level of Aristotle , Goethe and Marx. And new peaks will rise above this mountain range. "

After Lenin's death in 1924, an open power struggle finally broke out between Trotsky and Stalin over the future of the Soviet Union and the theoretical basis for the desired communism . Stalin began to impose so-called " socialism in one country " by force, while Trotsky was unable to retain the party's apparatus or the majority of the population. With his ex officio bureaucratic and military possibilities, Stalin consolidated the dictatorship in the Soviet Union. Trotsky represented the legacy of Marxism in a different interpretation and invoked the imperative of " world revolution " and " workers democracy ", according to the slogan from the Communist Manifesto " Workers of all countries, unite!" He tried to defend himself against all of what he called "reactionary attacks" by Stalin. Its aim was to help the international workforce to victory. Like Lenin, he assumed that only a global revolution could make the victory of socialism possible.

This corresponded not only to the previous Marxist tradition, but also to his own theory of permanent revolution , which he had formulated in the text Results and Perspectives after the revolution of 1905 and presented again in polemical form in 1929, since the Stalinists increasingly subject him to foreign views under this name and tried to brand this theory as "Menshevik deviation". Essentially, it said that the revolution in backward countries had to go through a bourgeois-democratic and a proletarian phase without interruption, that the victory of the revolution would be necessary at least in the most advanced countries for successful socialist construction, and finally also in the workers' states political, cultural and economic Revolutions could and must be carried out in order to move to socialism.

After Stalin had become more and more powerful, Trotsky lost his post as war commissioner in 1925 and had to perform various subordinate activities in the civil service over the next few years. "Trotskyism" was labeled as "deviant" and "treason". All writings and works of the "Jewish conspirator" and "lackeys of fascism" were considered heresy. Stalin had Trotsky's name and photos removed from all official documents and texts. He also denied its role in the October Uprising and the civil war.

In 1926 Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo and in November 1927 from the CPSU . On the XV. At the CPSU (B) party congress in December 1927, the opposition no longer had a voting delegate. Trotsky and other opposition members were exiled to Alma-Ata (in present-day Kazakhstan ) on January 17, 1928 . From there he was expelled to Turkey.

exile

The house on the island of Buyukada near Istanbul where Trotsky lived

The Turkish state under Ataturk granted Trotsky political asylum in 1929 . He spent the years between 1929 and 1933 on the island of Büyükada in Turkey. Trotsky was forced to write in order to earn a living. The expenses were high because he always needed bodyguards for his protection and because his further political work should be financed. He was therefore able to accept an offer from the New York publishing house Charles Scribner's Sons to finance the writing of Trotsky's autobiography and to publish it. It was published in 1929 and the German version was entitled Mein Leben. Attempt an autobiography . The success encouraged Trotsky to accept an offer from the New York publishing house Simon & Schuster to write a history of the Russian Revolution , which appeared in 1932. In the period from 1930 onwards Trotsky dealt intensively with German National Socialism , which he analyzed as a mass movement supported by the petty bourgeoisie , developed autonomously by the bourgeoisie and whose objective function was to smash the entire labor movement . As a counter-strategy, Trotsky sat down in writings such as Against National Communism , Should Fascism Really Triumph , How is National Socialism Defeated? and what now? Fate questions of the German proletariat for a united front of SPD , KPD and free trade unions against the NSDAP .

In 1929 Stalin began to revise the " New Economic Policy ", to implement the collectivization of agriculture with great cruelty and to establish the heavy industry of the Soviet Union with labor armies . This too was sharply criticized by Trotsky and his supporters, the underground party of the Left Opposition . Trotsky had spoken out in favor of extensive industrialization at a slower pace and a voluntary collectivization of the peasantry on the basis of a newly established Soviet democracy . Trotsky wrote pamphlets against Stalin in exile, which were published exclusively in the New York Times , among other places .

On February 20, 1932 Trotsky was stripped of his Soviet citizenship , which at the same time began the persecution by the Soviet secret service GPU . With the defeat of the German labor movement without a fight, which Trotsky viewed essentially as the result of the failure of the KPD and Comintern , Trotsky abandoned his strategy of reforming the Stalinist parties and the Comintern, which he had advocated from 1929 to 1933, and set course for the establishment of a new, " fourth “Communist International and in this context initially also led (mostly ultimately unsuccessful) negotiations with the groups united in the London office such as the SAPD or the Dutch organization around Henk Sneevliet .

Daladier's French government granted him asylum in France. He stayed first in Saint Palais sur Mer , later in Barbizon . He was not granted access to Paris. As early as 1935, it was signaled to him that his stay in France was no longer desired. He accepted an offer from Norway for asylum. He lived there as a guest of Konrad Knudsen in Hønefoss near Oslo . With his lively journalistic activity he attacked Stalinism with the Moscow trials in which he had been accused in absentia as the head of a major conspiracy against Stalin and his system. As a result of diplomatic pressure from the Soviet Union, Trotsky was placed under house arrest by the Norwegian authorities. After negotiations with the Norwegian government, he was able to travel to Mexico on a cargo ship, subject to strict secrecy.

Leon Trotsky in Mexico 1938
Trotsky (center) shortly before his death

Together with Frida Kahlo , Diego Rivera had campaigned with the Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río to grant Trotsky political asylum in Mexico. On the condition that the latter would not be politically active, the President approved the request. In January 1937 Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova were received in Kahlo's blue house in Coyoacan. In 1938 Rivera also hosted the surrealist thought leader André Breton and his wife Jacqueline . The two artists signed a manifesto written by Trotsky for a revolutionary art.

In his exile he continued to agitate against Stalin, uncovered the crimes of the GPU and the Gulags as much as possible and published various communist writings, for example 1936 The betrayed revolution , in which he described the Soviet Union as a “bureaucratically degenerate workers state” and the Soviet working class called for a political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy and for the restoration of council democracy. The Soviet press, controlled by the censorship, attacked him as the “wolf of fascism”.

In 1938 Trotsky founded the Fourth International in order to counteract the Third International , which was now under Stalin's dominance . For the newly founded organization, Trotsky wrote fundamental programmatic documents in the same year with The death throes of capitalism and the tasks of the 4th International (better known as "The Transitional Program ") and in 1940 with the Manifesto of the 4th International on the imperialist war and the world proletarian revolution . In addition, in the last year of his life he devoted himself to the thesis advocated by James Burnham and Max Shachtman that the Soviet Union had developed into a stable new form of class society.

assassination

The fortress-like house where Trotsky was murdered

On May 24, 1940, Trotsky survived an attack on his house in Coyoacán on Avenida Río Churubusco 410. Trotsky was attacked by several agents sent by Stalin and disguised as Mexican police officers, albeit so amateurishly that many believed in a production that Trotsky should return to the center of attention internationally. For fear of further attacks, he then had the house expanded and guarded: the walls were raised, wooden doors were replaced by iron doors, and some windows were bricked up. Seven to eight security guards voluntarily and unpaid protected the small property in the busy inner ring road in the south of Mexico City around the clock.

The study in which Leon Trotsky was murdered
Trotsky's grave in the garden of the Museo Casa de León Trotsky

Three months later, an assassination attempt commissioned by Stalin was successful: the Soviet agent Ramón Mercader , as Frank Jacson , became engaged to a secretary of Trotsky's and thus gained access to his estate. On August 20, he visited Trotsky and asked to read a political article he had written. Shortly after 5 p.m. Mercader attacked Trotsky with an ice ax in his study , seriously injuring Trotsky in the head. His bodyguards found him covered in blood but still conscious. One day later, Leon Trotsky died as a result of this attack.

Many in Mexico mourned Trotsky. 300,000 people attended Trotsky's funeral procession in Mexico. His body was cremated and buried in the garden of his home. 22 years later the ashes of his wife Natalja, who died in Paris , were added. Today a white stone marked with a hammer and sickle and a red flag marks this place . The house of the attack can now be visited as the Museo Casa de León Trotsky . Trotsky's grandson Esteban Volkov was involved in building the museum .

Arnold Zweig noted in his diary that Trotsky was the man "who had under the top of his skull the most precious and best-organized brain that was ever struck with a hammer."

In 2005 the ice ax, believed to be lost, was found. After Trotsky's death, the murder instrument was exhibited in the Criminological Museum in Mexico City, but was then replaced by a copy because of the risk of theft. A Mexican secret service agent, also a co-founder of the museum, took the original ax and kept it, wrote the Mexican daily La Jornada . His daughter reported that her father tried four times to no avail to return the ice ax. But nobody wanted the original back. Then this daughter took the ice ax and presented it on a radio broadcast.

reception

West German student movement in the 1960s
Man at the crossroads / Man controls the universe , detail with Trotsky portrait, Diego Rivera

After his expatriation, Trotsky increasingly fell victim to the Damnatio memoriae in the Soviet Union : his achievements for the party and the prominent role he had played in the October uprising, in the establishment of the Red Army, or in the bloody suppression of the Kronstadt uprising were concealed, denied or denounced . In the Short Course in the History of the CPSU (B) , an official account published under the aegis of Stalin in 1938, his role was reduced in October 1917 to that of an adversary to Lenin and a loudmouth who betrayed the date of the uprising and thereby endangered its success.

The memory of Trotsky was erased from Soviet visual memory even more radically. Photos in which he was seen together with Lenin or Stalin were cropped or retouched. The most famous examples are the pictures that Grigori Goldstein took of a speech by Lenin in front of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on May 5, 1920 : in the thirties only excerpts from images that did not contain Trotsky were allowed to be published, in the sixties it was completely retouched from the picture.

In 1940 Trotsky's murderer Ramón Mercader was awarded the Order of Lenin by Stalin , the order was given to his mother. After serving a 20-year prison sentence, Mercader was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on May 31, 1960 and was invited to Moscow . There, in 1961, he was presented with the Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union and the corresponding Order of Lenin.

The CPSU never rehabilitated the revolutionary leader and organizer of the Red Army ; both Nikita Khrushchev and the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev refused to give him any posthumous appreciation. The news magazine Der Spiegel published an interview in 1987 with the former dissident Roi Medvedev on the rehabilitation of Bukharin and a report according to which Gorbachev's confidante Yegor Yakovlev called Stalin's archenemy a “hero and martyr”. In 1989, however, Yakovlev said to the German politician Gregor Gysi : "Trotsky was a merciless man whose hands are stained all over with blood."

Trotsky's son Sergei Sedov , who was deported and murdered in 1937, was rehabilitated in 1988. Trotsky's previously banned writings were partially published in 1987 and then in full from 1989.

Aftermath

Even at the beginning of the 21st century, many countries had small and large Trotskyist associations . In Great Britain, France and some countries in Latin America, such as Mexico, larger Trotskyist organizations have survived and have become increasingly important there in recent years. The Fourth International is now divided into several associations, the influence of which is very limited.

→ see also : Trotskyism

Fonts

Books in German
Compilations and compilations
  • Leon Trotsky: socialism or barbarism! A selection from his writings. Edited by Helmut Dahmer, Promedia Verlag, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-85371-240-1 .
  • Leon Trotsky: Lessons. Political experiences in the age of permanent revolution. Edited by George Novack et al. H. Dahmer, AdV-Verlag, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-950219142 .
  • Collected works, volumes 1 and 2, writings on Germany. 967 pages, EVA, Ffm. 1971, DNB 458442607 .
  • A new German-language edition of Leon Trotsky's writings was started in 1988 by the Rasch und Röhring publishing house. Seven volumes had appeared by 2001. All texts were presented in a new or revised translation. The volumes contain numerous first German publications. It is an annotated edition with an extensive critical apparatus that offers bibliographical information and explanations on people and facts that are no longer generally known today. Edited by Helmut Dahmer u. a., are responsible for the scientific processing: Horst Lauscher, Reiner Tosstorff and Rolf Wörsdörfer.
    • Writings Volume 1.1: Soviet Society and Stalinist Dictatorship (1929–1936). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 978-3-89136-090-3 .
    • Writings Volume 1.2: Soviet Society and Stalinist Dictatorship (1936–1940). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 978-3-89136-091-0 .
    • Writings Volume 2.1: About China (1924–1928). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 978-3-89136-216-7 .
    • Writings Volume 2.2: About China (1928–1940). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 978-3-89136-390-4 .
    • Writings Volume 3.1: Left Opposition and IV International (1923–1926). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 978-3-89136-217-4 .
    • Writings Volume 3.2: Left Opposition and IV International (1927–1928). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 978-3-89136-071-2 .
    • Writings Volume 3.3: Left Opposition and IV International (1928–1934). Neuer ISP-Verlag, Cologne 2001, ISBN 978-3-89900-910-1 .
Speeches, articles, brochures
Terrorism and communism. Anti-Kautsky

literature

(Non-fiction and literary works)

  • Heinz Abosch : Trotsky Chronicle. Data on life and work. Compiled by Heinz Abosch. Carl Hanser Verlag, Hamburg 1973 (Hanser 130 series), ISBN 3-446-11788-1 .
  • Heinz Abosch: Trotsky for an introduction. Junius-Verlag, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-88506-853-2 .
  • Tariq Ali & Phil Evans: Trotsky for Beginners. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1980, ISBN 3-499-17537-1 .
  • Denise Avenas: Trotsky's Marxism. Economy and Politics in Trotsky's Theory. International Socialist Publications, Frankfurt 1975.
  • Heinz Brahm : Trotsky's struggle to succeed Lenin. 1964.
  • Pierre Broué : Trotsky. A political biography. ISP, Cologne 2003. Volume 1: From the Ukrainian farmer's son to the exile of Stalin. ISBN 3-929008-31-9 . Volume 2: The struggle against Stalinism and fascism. ISBN 3-929008-32-7 .
  • Joel Carmichael: Trotsky. Frankfurt 1973.
  • Isaac Deutscher : Trotsky. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart (Original title: The Prophet: Armed, Unarmed, Outcast. 1954–1963). Volume 1: The Armed Prophet. 1879–1921 1962. Volume 2: The Unarmed Prophet. 1921–1929 1962. Volume 3: The rejected prophet. 1929-1940 1963.
  • Willy Huhn : Trotsky, the failed Stalin. Kramer, Berlin 1973, ISBN 3-87956-017-X .
  • Mario Keßler : Leon Trotsky on anti-Semitism and fascism , Pankower Lectures series, Issue 208, 2017, 40 pages, Helle Panke, Berlin 2017
  • Barbara Kingsolver : The Lacuna. 2009
  • Ernest Mandel : Trotsky as an alternative. Dietz, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-320-01730-6 .
  • David North : Defense of Leon Trotsky. Mehring-Verlag, Essen 2010, ISBN 978-3-88634-085-9 .
  • Bertrand M. Patenaude : Trotsky: The Revolutionary Betrayed. Translated from the English by Stephan Gebauer. Propylaea, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-549-07377-3 .
  • Victor Serge : Profession: Revolutionary. S. Fischer, 1967.
  • Victor Serge: Vie et mort de Leon Trotsky. Paris 1951. In German as Leon Trotsky. Life and death. Translation by Peter Linnert, Europa-Verlag, Vienna 1973, ISBN 3-203-50681-5 ; several editions. As paperback DTV, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-423016809 .
  • Robert Service : Trotsky - A Biography. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge / Massachusetts 2009., ISBN 978-0-330-43969-5 . (German: Trotsky - Eine Biographie. ) Translated from the English by Friedrich Griese, Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-518-42235-9 . (The work of Robert Service is viewed critically in professional circles.)
  • Leon Trotsky. 1879-1940. In the eyes of contemporaries. Junius, Hamburg 1979, ISBN 3-88506-100-7 .
  • Peter Weiss : Trotsky in exile. 1970 (literary processing of Trotsky's life).
  • Harry Wilde : Trotsky in personal testimonies and pictorial documents. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1969; last 1995, ISBN 3-499-50157-0 .
  • BD Wolfe: Three men who shook the world. 1951. Vers .: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. Three who made a revolution. Ffm. 1965.
  • Dimitri Volkogonov : Trotsky. The Janus face of the revolution. ECON-Verlag, Düsseldorf u. a. 1992, ISBN 3-430-19827-5 .

Movies

Web links

Wikisource: Leon Trotsky  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Leon Trotsky  - album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Leon Trotsky  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Service: Trotsky: A Biography, p. 328 [1]
  2. ^ The Communist Party and the Red Army on marxists.org , accessed on August 17, 2015.
  3. ^ Evan Mawdsley : The Russian Civil War. Edinburgh 2005, p. 61; Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik Regime. New York 1993, p. 55.
  4. ↑ Jens Berger and Frank Benedikt: In times of war. In: Telepolis . February 15, 2009, accessed August 21, 2013 .
  5. ↑ Manfred Hildermeier : History of the Soviet Union 1917-1991. Beck, 1998, ISBN 3-406435882 , p. 155.
  6. ↑ Manfred Hildermeier: History of the Soviet Union 1917-1991. Beck, 1998, ISBN 3-406435882 , p. 149.
  7. ↑ Boris Frezinskij: Pisateli i sovetskie voždi. Moscow 2008, p. 86.
  8. ↑ On this, Issac Deutscher: Trotsky, Vol. 3, The rejected prophet, 1929–1940. 2nd Edition. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart a. a. 1972, p. 404.
  9. ↑ Isaac Deutscher , Trotsky. The armed prophet, Vol. 3 Kohlhammer-Verlag, Stuttgart 1972
  10. ↑ Lenin: Collected Works. Volume 36. Moscow 1966, p. 595.
  11. ↑ Leon Trotsky: Literature and Revolution . Arbeiterpresseverlag, Essen 1994, p. 252. Quoted from Klaus-Georg Riegel: Marxism as a “political religion” . In: Gerhard Besier and Hermann Lübbe (eds.): Political religion and religious policy. Between totalitarianism and civil liberty . Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005, p. 33.
  12. ^ Feroz Ahmad: History of Turkey. Magnus Verlag, Essen 2005, p. 106.
  13. ^ Bertrand M. Patenaude: Trotsky: The betrayed revolutionary. Propylaeen Verlag 2010, ISBN 978-3-549-07377-3 , p. 220ff.
  14. ↑ In the third part of a four-part series of essays, Trotsky describes Stalin as "a mediocre politician who pursues a zigzag policy", "understands nothing about what is going on in the world" and "invented a new theory to justify every inconsistent act" . The New York Times gave the series such weight that it preceded it with a copyright notice with "world rights". The issue of February 28, 1929 is cited here
  15. ^ Karl Retzlaw : Spartakus - Aufstieg und Niedergang, remembrance of a party worker, New Criticism Publishing House, Frankfurt 1971, p. 375, ISBN 3-8015-0096-9 .
  16. ↑ Andrea Kettenmann: Rivera. taschen, Cologne 2001, p. 69.
  17. ↑ Boris Frezinskij: Pisateli i sovetskie voždi. Moscow 2008, p. 101.
  18. ^ The Last Trotsky , taz, November 13, 2004
  19. ↑ BBC : Trotsky murder weapon "in Mexico" , June 17, 2005
  20. ↑ History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) - short course (edited by a commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B); Approved by the Central Committee of the CPSU (B) 1938, Chapter VII) ( Memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  21. ↑ Klaus Waschik: Where is Trotsky? Soviet image politics as a memory control in the 1930s. In: Gerhard Paul (Ed.), The Century of Pictures, Vol. 1: 1900–1949. Special edition for the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2009, pp. 252–259; Tobias Kruse : Erased comrades , fluter , November 12, 2014 with Goldstein's original and the retouched photo without Trotsky, accessed on April 5, 2017.
  22. ↑ Jörg R. Mettke: Stalin needed Bukharin's blood. Spiegel interview with Soviet historian Roy Medvedev about the rehabilitation of Stalin comrade Bukharin . In: Der Spiegel. Issue 52/1987 of December 21, 1987.
  23. ↑ A blow with the pimple. Gorbachev condemned the Stalin terror for the first time. Trotsky, the dictator's archenemy, is now considered a "hero and martyr". In: Der Spiegel. Issue 31/1987 of July 27, 1987.
  24. ↑ Trotsky 1930 (autobiography) - My life at marxists.org - Reiner Stach (Ed.): 100 years of S. Fischer Verlag, 1886–1986. Small publishing history. S. Fischer, 1986 and 2003 ISBN 3-10075106X , p. 101 f.
  25. ^ Trotsky 1931 (history) - in the transfer by Michael Gavin on marxists.org - 2017 by Mehringverlag: DNB 1126505242
  26. ↑ "Non-persons". Who were they really? Bukharin, Rykov, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-320-01547-8 , p. 97.
  27. ^ Trotsky 1936 (Lenin Biography) - complete text at marxists.org
  28. ^ Trotsky 1914 (War) - The War and the International at marxists.org
  29. ^ Review by Mario Keßler in the archive for social history; [2]
  30. ↑ https://www.wsws.org/de/articles/2011/11/webe-n26.html Robert Service did not write a polemic but a diatribe. An interview with Hermann Weber. World Socialist Website, November 26, 2011.
  31. ↑ Josef Lang : Too much private, too little political. In: Tages-Anzeiger from August 26, 2012, here from Lang's personal homepage, viewed on February 21, 2018.
  32. ↑ Gerd Koenen : Controversial biography. With the ice ax - Robert Service tries to make the dead revolutionary even dead. The time July 12, 2012.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on October 16, 2005 .
personal data
SURNAME Trotsky, Leo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bronstein, Lev Dawidowitsch; Sedov, Leo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet revolutionary, politician and founder of the Red Army
DATE OF BIRTH November 7, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Yanowka , Kherson Governorate , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH August 21, 1940
Place of death Coyoacan , Mexico