Leon Trotsky

Communist Theorist, Leader of the Russian Revolution

At the age of eight, Trotsky was sent to school in Odessa, and then moved to Nikolayev where he was drawn into an underground socialist circle and introduced to Marxism. After briefly attending the University of Odessa, he returned to Nikolayev, where he helped organize the underground South Russian Workers’ Union. He then made his way to London where he joined the group of Russian Social-Democrats working on the newspaper, Iskra.

Upon outbreak of the revolutionary disturbances in 1903, Trotsky returned to Russia and became a leading spokesman for the St. Petersburg Council of Workers’ Deputies when it organized a strike movement and other measures of defiance against the tsarist government. In the aftermath, Trotsky was jailed and bought to trial in 1906. While incarcerated, Trotsky wrote one of his major works, "Results and Perspectives," setting forth his theory of permanent revolution.

In 1907, after a second exile to Siberia, Trotsky once again escaped and settled in Vienna where he supported himself as a correspondent in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. At the outbreak of WWI, Trotsky joined the majority of Russian Social-Democrats who condemned the war and refused to support the war efforts of the tsarist regime. His anti-war stance led to his expulsion from both France and Spain, two countries he had tried to inhabit. He reached New York City in 1917, where he joined the Bolshevik theorist Nikolay Bukharin in editing the newspaper, The New World.

During the 1917 Russian Revolution, Trotsky hailed the outbreak in Russia as the opening of the permanent revolution he had long ago predicted. He reached Pentrograd in May 1917, and assumed the leadership of a left-wind Menshevik faction. After a brief arrest for his involvement in the faction, Trotsky was formally admitted to the Bolshevik Party and was elected to membership on the Bolshevik Central Committee, and then as Chairman of the Pentrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

Trotsky functioned as the military leader of the Revolution when Kerensky vainly attempted to retake Pentrograd with loyal troops. Trotsky organized and supervised the forces that broke Kerensky’s efforts, and immediately afterward, Trotsky joined Lenin in defeated proposals for a coalition government including Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.

Trotsky next served as Foreign Commissar, where his charge was to implement the Bolsheviks program of peace by calling for immediate armistice negotiations among the warring powers. Following the concession of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky resigned as Foreign Commissar and became the War Commissar. Trotsky then proceeded to build a new Red Army out of the shambles of the Old Russian army, and attempted to defend Communism from the imminent threats of Civil War and foreign intervention. With the triumph of the Communist forces and the end of the Russian Civil War in 1920, Trotsky turned his energies into reconstructing the Russian economy.

After Lenin was stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage in 1922, Trotsky became the obvious candidate for succession. But Lenin soon recovered, and warned the government of Trotsky’s "too far-reaching self-confidence." When Stalin soon gained the majority power, Trotsky left Russian for the Black Sea Coast.

In 1928, Trotsky and his followers were exiled to remote parts of the Soviet Union. In 1936 he was forced to seek asylum in Mexico where he was killed by an ax-murderer, with the Soviet government disclaiming any responsibility.