He was an ideologist and practitioner of the Red Terror. Vous avez compris que ce livre est indispensable… aux gens curieux du monde et de l’Histoire… Bonnes lectures. The notion that the Soviet state could have a capable voluntary or militia type military was seriously undermined. Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879 in Yanovka, Ukraine, then part of Russia. [44] Amid the resulting confusion, Trotsky returned from Finland to Saint Petersburg on 15 October 1905. The First World War was an important and eventful period in his life. The trade unions. Towards the end of 1939, Trotsky agreed to go to the United States to appear as a witness before the Dies Committee of the House of Representatives, a forerunner of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. [citation needed]. It is said he adopted the name of a jailer of the Odessa prison in which he had earlier been held. On 26 August 1936, eight policemen arrived at Knudsen's house demanding that Trotsky sign new conditions for residing in Norway. The men were called out of their barracks. After his escape from Siberia, Trotsky moved to London, joining Georgi Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov and other editors of Iskra. commissar of war in Russia, who reinstated the draft and insisted on ridged discipline, causing Communists to be triumphant. [42] At first he wrote leaflets for an underground printing press in Kyiv, but soon moved to the capital, Saint Petersburg. Although the text of these letters remained secret at the time, they had a significant effect on the Party leadership and prompted a partial retreat by the troika and its supporters on the issue of intra-Party democracy, notably in Zinoviev's Pravda article published on 7 November. The names Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky will forever be connected to that momentous social, political, and economic upheaval, which forever changed the course of humanity. To the left, a Russian soldier casts away his his hat, backpack, and rifle. Leon Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks in August 1917 after many years of separation. Vatsetis took charge of the day-to-day operations of the army. They had two children together, Lev Sedov (24 February 1906 – 16 February 1938) and Sergei Sedov (21 March 1908 – 29 October 1937), both of whom would predecease their parents. [121] According to Heijenoort, they only managed to meet Gorky's son, Maxim Peshkov, who reportedly told them that his father was indisposed, but promised to pass on their request. Throwing Trotsky overboard – surely you are hinting at that, it is impossible to interpret it otherwise – is the height of stupidity. On 8 December, Trotsky published an open letter, in which he expounded on the recently adopted resolution's ideas. Herrera, Hayden (1983). Many people familiar with 20th Century history know that when the Russian working class overthrew the tsar in February 1917, Lenin was in exile in Switzerland, soon to return to Petrograd in the famous sealed train. Travelling on his legendary train, he boosted the Red Army's morale. His brief stay in N.Y.C. The Politburo approved the proposal, but Trotsky "categorically refused".[98]. Nonetheless, Trotsky kept all of his posts, and the troika was careful to emphasise that the debate was limited to Trotsky's "mistakes" and that removing Trotsky from the leadership was out of the question. Some social democrats known as "economists" argued that the party should focus on helping industrial workers improve their lot in life and were not so worried about changing the government. General von Schlieffen. 26 October) 1879 into a farming family who lived in Yanovka in Kherson province in the Russian empire's region of New Russia, which is OTL's modern day southern Ukraine. The Russian Revolution occurred in the twentieth century and was rooted in the concept of Bolshevism. This is the militarisation of the working class."[87]. Comrade Trotsky has come to speak to you." [citation needed], Germany resumed military operations on 18 February. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. The new ideas infected them before my very eyes. of the U.S.S.R.", "The Stanford Daily, Volume 82, Issue 44, 5 December 1932", "Former Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, in exile visits ruins of ancient Roman sites with other dignitaries in Naples, Italy", "The Stalinists and Trotsky's Radio Speech to America", "Pierre Broué: The "Bloc" of the Oppositions against Stalin (January 1980)", "The House in Coyoacán - Reflection on Trotsky's last years", "The Unification of the Chinese Opposition", "Trotsky Injured in Attack on Home; Leon Trotsky and Home in Mexico Where He Was Attacked", Trotsky's grandson recalls ice pick killing, "To Build Communist Parties and an International Anew", "The mass uprising in Tunisia and the perspective of permanent revolution", Bibliography of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, "Socialism in One Country: A Reassessment", People's Commissar for Army and Navy Affairs, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, Left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks, Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, Group of forces in battle with the counterrevolution in the South of Russia, 14th Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 13th Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 12th Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 11th Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 10th Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 9th Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 8th Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leon_Trotsky&oldid=1000215172, Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union members, Expelled members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, People's Commissars and Ministers of the Soviet Union, Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner, Russian Social Democratic Labour Party members, People forcibly stripped of Soviet citizenship, Imperial Russian emigrants to the United Kingdom, Imperial Russian emigrants to Switzerland, Imperial Russian emigrants to the United States, Imperial Russian emigrants to Austria-Hungary, Contributors to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Articles containing Russian-language text, Articles containing Ukrainian-language text, Articles with unsourced statements from June 2018, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from July 2020, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2019, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2018, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2011, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2020, Articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases from February 2014, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2018, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2018, Articles with unsourced statements from May 2020, Pages using Sister project links with hidden wikidata, Articles with Marxists Internet Archive links, Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CINII identifiers, Wikipedia articles with MusicBrainz identifiers, Wikipedia articles with PLWABN identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. This page was last edited on 14 January 2021, at 03:56. This is suppressed and hidden history, but it goes along way toward explaining the 1920s so-called Fascist or Nationalist counter-reaction and widespread “anti-semitism” throughout Europe. An influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, Trotsky served as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and the People's Commissar of War and was the founder and commander of the Red Army. [99] Stalin had recently engineered the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), further centralising state control. The Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution. [27] He became aware of the differences within the party, which had been decimated by arrests in 1898 and 1899. [112], In one of the few political developments that affected Trotsky in 1925, the circumstances of the controversy over Lenin's Testament were described by American Marxist Max Eastman in his book Since Lenin Died (1925). Aleksandra disappeared in 1935 during the Great Purges in the Soviet Union under Stalin and was murdered by Stalinist forces three years later. On 7 October 1905, the railway workers of the Moscow–Kazan Railway went out on strike. The reorganization caused yet another conflict between Trotsky and Stalin in late September. In it, he described Zinoviev's and Kamenev's opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, something that the two would have preferred be left unmentioned. This environment contributed to the development of the young man's international outlook. [50] Trotsky and other Soviet leaders were tried in 1906 on charges of supporting an armed rebellion. A mountaineering ice axe has a narrow end, called the pick, and a flat wide end called the adze. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. The names Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky will forever be connected to that momentous social, political, and economic upheaval, which forever changed the course of humanity. Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein to David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847-1922) and Anna Lvovna (née Zhivotovskaya, 1850-1910) on 7 November 1879, the fifth child of a Ukrainian-Jewish family of wealthy farmers in Yanovka or Yanivka, in the Kherson governorate of the Russian Empire (now Bereslavka, in Ukraine), a small village 24 kilometres (15 mi) from the nearest post office. Trotsky continued publishing Pravda for another two years until it finally folded in April 1912. By the evening of 24 September, the workers at 50 other printing shops in Moscow were also on strike. This single strike grew into a general strike, and by 7 January 1905, there were 140,000 strikers in Saint Petersburg. He was held for the next two years in prison waiting trial, first in Nikolayev, then Kherson, then Odessa, and finally in Moscow. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. The 1917 revolution was not waged over abstract questions of law and order: people fought real battles over whose law and whose order would rule the … Given the lack of manpower and the 16 opposing foreign armies, Trotsky also insisted on the use of former Tsarist officers as military specialists within the Red Army, in combination with Bolshevik political commissars to ensure the revolutionary nature of the Red Army. [...] There has been created a very broad stratum of party workers, entering into the apparatus of the government of the party, who completely renounce their own party opinion, at least the open expression of it, as though assuming that the secretarial hierarchy is the apparatus which creates party opinion and party decisions. Trotsky's harsh treatment of his subordinates and other alleged mistakes during the Russian Civil War. At the XV Party Conference in October 1926, Trotsky could barely speak because of interruptions and catcalls, and at the end of the Conference he lost his Politburo seat. Leon Trotsky. His frustration with Trotsky was used by Stalin and Zinoviev with their support for Lenin's position, to improve their standing within the Bolshevik leadership at Trotsky's expense. People (Early WWI), Leon Trotsky. On that day, Trotsky spoke before the Saint Petersburg Soviet Council of Workers Deputies, which was meeting at the Technological Institute in the city. Who looks after this? They had two daughters, Zinaida (1901 – 5 January 1933) and Nina (1902 – 9 June 1928), both born in Siberia. The congress also adopted a secret resolution on "Party unity", which banned factions within the Party except during pre-Congress discussions. All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. [54], A majority of Bolsheviks controlled the Central Committee in 1910. Much of China was divided between various regional warlords. Acteur de l’assassinat, il n’en était pas le seul organisateur. The rest of the recently expanded Politburo (Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky, Bukharin) was at first uncommitted, but eventually joined the troika. His father, David Leontyevich, had lived in Poltava, and later moved to Bereslavka, as it had a large Jewish community. While passing through Ryazan, I decided to take a look at them. "[165] Mercader was tried and convicted of the murder and spent the next 20 years in a Mexican prison. Many people familiar with 20th Century history know that when the Russian working class overthrew the tsar in February 1917, Lenin was in exile in Switzerland, soon to return to Petrograd in the famous sealed train. [...] We very much need a seventh member, both as a convenience in voting (six being an even number) and as an addition to our forces. In mid-1933, after the Nazi takeover in Germany and the Comintern's response to it, he changed his mind. Other senior communists who had similar concerns sent The Declaration of 46 to the Central Committee on 15 October in which they wrote: [...] we observe an ever progressing, barely disguised division of the party into a secretarial hierarchy and into "laymen", into professional party functionaries, chosen from above, and the other party masses, who take no part in social life. [68] Therefore Trotsky replaced Joffe as the leader of the Soviet delegation during the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk from 22 December 1917 to 10 February 1918. At the XIIth Party Congress in April 1923, however, just after Lenin's final stroke, Trotsky did not raise the issue. I did not look to the side, I elbowed away those who interfered with military success, or in the haste of the work trod on the toes of the unheeding and was too busy even to apologize. And so, we must compel the bourgeois experts, under the leadership of the proletariat, to build up our edifice with these bricks. [163], According to James P. Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (USA), Trotsky's last words were "I will not survive this attack. The attempt was generally unsuccessful. During these years, Trotsky began developing his theory of permanent revolution and developed a close working relationship with Alexander Parvus in 1904–07. [63], Trotsky's speeches and agitation incurred the wrath of German officer inmates who complained to the British camp commander, Colonel Morris, about Trotsky's "anti-patriotic" attitude. [154] After forcefully denying Stalin's accusations that he had betrayed the working class, he thanked his friends and above all his wife, Natalia Sedova, for their loyal support: In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. Trotsky later speculated that it may have been due to Kamenev's love of comfort, which Trotsky found "repelled me." [126] At this time, he made requests to enter Belgium, France, Norway, Germany and the United Kingdom,[127] but they all refused it. The Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky does an excellent job of laying the foundation of how Communism came to Russia, how WWI fanned the flames, and how eventually Communism became the dividing line between the whole world for almost … He was a brilliant speaker and military organizer. In reality, Trotsky had already been cut off from the decision-making process. Though he quickly got over the disagreement, the message was intercepted by the Russian police, and a copy was put into their archives. [4][5] In 1938, Trotsky and his supporters founded the Fourth International in opposition to Stalin's Comintern. Thus, the accomplishment of bourgeois democratic tasks passes over into proletarian tasks. Also known as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, Trotsky was a communist, a leader of the Russian Revolution, a writer and one of the most memorable politicians of Russian history. [35], In Vienna, Trotsky became close to Adolph Joffe, his friend for the next 20 years, who introduced him to psychoanalysis. The same day, while Trotsky was in the south, Vācietis was suddenly arrested by the Cheka on suspicion of involvement in an anti-Soviet plot, and replaced by Sergey Kamenev. Under the pen name Pero ("feather" or "pen"), Trotsky soon became one of the paper's leading writers.[9]. He was detained for a month at Amherst Internment Camp in Nova Scotia. At this point Lenin again argued that the Soviet government had done all it could to explain its position to Western workers and that it was time to accept the terms. [144], While in Mexico, Trotsky also worked closely with James P. Cannon, Joseph Hansen, and Farrell Dobbs of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States, and other supporters. He allowed them house arrest for a time. Otázky týkající se vzdáleného učení? Trotsky defended his position in a series of seven letters which were collected as The New Course in January 1924. Disagreements threatened to get out of hand, and many Bolsheviks, including Lenin, feared that the party would splinter. In reality, however, the Republic controlled very little of the country. The struggle became open at the September 1925 meeting of the Central Committee and came to a head at the XIV Party Congress in December 1925. The foundation "International Friends of the Leon Trotsky Museum" has been organized to raise funds to improve the museum further. According to Sudoplatov's Special Tasks, the NKVD proceeded to set up three NKVD agent networks to carry out the murder. Their leading supporters, from Kamenev down, were expelled in December 1927 by the XV Party Congress, which paved the way for mass expulsions of rank-and-file oppositionists as well as internal exile of opposition leaders in early 1928. While in Mexico, Trotsky worked with André Breton and Diego Rivera to write the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, which inspired the creation of the organization, the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI) in 1938. The revolutionary programs of the two were closely aligned, and Trotsky became Lenin's closest aide.In July 1917, in the turmoil after the Kerensky Offensive and the failed coup attempt by the conservative General Kornilov, the provisional government first imprisoned leaders opposing the war, then freed and armed them to defend against Kornilov's coup.Kerensky's failure increased the calls for an immediate end to the war. Like Lenin, he admitted that the old Russian military, inherited from the monarchy and the Provisional Government and in advanced stages of decomposition, was unable to fight:[72]. Trotsky left the Mensheviks in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. When he could no longer delay the negotiations, he withdrew from the talks on 10 February 1918, refusing to sign on Germany's harsh terms. [157] Trotsky's other guards fended off the attackers. If our generation happens to be too weak to establish Socialism over the earth, we will hand the spotless banner down to our children. [citation needed], Trotsky was one of the first Bolshevik leaders to recognize the problem[citation needed], and he pushed for the formation of a military council of former Russian generals that would function as an advisory body. According to Sudoplatov, all three networks were designed to operate entirely autonomously from the NKVD's hitherto-established spy networks in the U.S. and Mexico. For the next seven years, he often took part in the activities of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and, occasionally, of the German Social Democratic Party. By 22 October, the Red Army was on the offensive and in early November, Yudenich's troops were driven back to Estonia, where they were disarmed and interned. The "comrade-deserters" were looking at me with such curiosity that it seemed as if their eyes would pop out of their heads. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals that we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear. When later living in Mexico, Trotsky was utterly scathing about the treatment he received during his 108 days at Hurum, and accused the Norwegian government of trying to prevent him from publicly voicing his strong opposition to the Trial of the Sixteen and other show trials, saying: When I look back today on this period of internment, I must say that never, anywhere, in the course of my entire life — and I have lived through many things — was I persecuted with as much miserable cynicism as I was by the Norwegian "Socialist" government. At the same time, Trotsky became chairman of the newly formed Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and retained overall control of the military. In January 1915 in Paris, he began editing (at first with Martov, who soon resigned as the paper moved to the left) Nashe Slovo ("Our Word"), an internationalist socialist newspaper. The discontent with Trotsky's policies of strict discipline, conscription and reliance on carefully supervised non-Communist military experts eventually led to the Military Opposition (Russian: Военная оппозиция), which was active within the Communist Party in late 1918–1919. Trotsky intended to use the forum to expose the NKVD's activities against him and his followers. That we could no longer fight was perfectly clear to me and that the newly formed Red Guard and Red Army detachments were too small and poorly trained to resist the Germans. The fascist burglars targeted Trotsky's works and archives for vandalism. Trotsky approached the Russian Central Committee to seek financial backing for the newspaper throughout 1909. For Trotsky, 1925 was a difficult year. Lenin and his supporters, the Bolsheviks, argued for a smaller but highly organized party, while Martov and his supporters, the Mensheviks, argued for a more massive and less disciplined party. The discussion lasted most of December and January until the XIIIth Party Conference of 16–18 January 1924. [citation needed], At the 3–4 July Central Committee meeting, after a heated exchange, the majority supported Kamenev and Smilga against Vācietis and Trotsky. Lev Davidovich Trotsky was born on November 7th (O.S. Money was very scarce for the publication of Pravda. Stalin later killed all Trotsky’s friends, all his family members, everyone named Bronstein, anyone who had ever even spoken to Trotsky. Trotsky's position was between these two Bolshevik factions. Upon the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. [citation needed], However, some significant changes to the leadership of the Red Army were made. Jul 18, 2014 - People's Commissar of Defense of the Russian SFSR, Leon Trotsky, in Red Army uniform. In May 1925, he was given three posts: chairman of the Concessions Committee, head of the electro-technical board, and chairman of the scientific-technical board of industry. [82], By October 1919, the government was in the worst crisis of the Civil War: Denikin's troops approached Tula and Moscow from the south, and General Nikolay Yudenich's troops approached Petrograd from the west. Although the exact sequence of events is unclear, evidence suggests that at first the troika nominated Trotsky to head second-rate government departments (e.g., Gokhran, the State Depository for Valuables). Oct 3, 2014 - Explore evan cohen-doty's board "Komrad Trotsky" on Pinterest. Still, they were dead set against signing any peace treaty. This page was last changed on 30 May 2019, at 01:04. Rank-and-file oppositionists were increasingly harassed, sometimes expelled from the Party and even arrested. [citation needed] The findings were published in the book "Not Guilty". The Last Period of Struggle Within the Party)", "Leon Trotsky: An Open Letter to the French Workers", "Open Letter to the C.E.C. Among the resolutions adopted by the XIIth Congress were those calling for greater democracy within the Party, but these were vague and remained unimplemented. [48] Indeed, to the outside world, Khrustalev-Nosar was the embodiment of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. Lev Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, was added to the editorial board from the Bolsheviks, but the unification attempts failed in August 1910. He was appointed there to rebuild the rail system ruined by the Civil War. Saved from en.wikipedia.org. Well-known in European radical socialist circles, his writings appeared in left and liberal newspapers, chiefly Nashe Slovo (Our Word), Kievskaya Mysl (Kievan Thought), and N…