Tools of Revolution
Trotsky moved from Turkey to France to Norway and finally settled down in Mexico. Throughout his exile, he continued to write criticisms of Stalin and attempted to keep in touch with his allies in Russia. However, there were few allies left. The bloody purges that marked Stalin's rule are evidence of how he dealt with dissent, real and imagined. Stalinist agents finally caught up with Trotsky, stabbing him to death with an ice pick in his own garden.
Trotsky once wrote that terror and violence were the necessary tools of the revolution. In his years of exile he watched as Stalin put those ideas into deadly practice. Trotsky's tools would eventually consume him.
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
Attracted to Radical Politics
Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879, Trotsky was the son of a prosperous farmer. He attended the most prestigious private schools and entered Odessa University with the intention of studying mathematics.
Like many university students at that time, he was attracted to radical politics and became a Marxist at age 17. Unlike most students though, Trotsky decided to make the cause of Marxism his life's work. While attempting to organize a workers' union in 1900, he was arrested by the czar and exiled to Siberia. Two years later he would escape to England with the help of a phony passport bearing the name of one of his Siberian jailers, Trotsky.
While in England, Trotsky met fellow exile, Vladimir Lenin, but the two had differing views of how and when the “great Marxist revolution” should take place. From exile, Lenin and Trotsky assumed the leadership of two separate factions. Lenin controlled the Bolsheviks, the majority, while Trotsky led the Mensheviks, the minority.
The Consummate Outsider
When revolution finally did come in 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks emerged on top. Seeking to unite the different Communist Party factions, Lenin brought Trotsky into his government as commissar of foreign affairs and later commissar of war, much to the displeasure of Lenin's Bolshevik comrades, most notably Joseph Stalin.
For the next seven years, although a member of the ruling elite, Trotsky remained an outspoken critic of a number of Lenin's policies. A revolutionary and outsider all his life, Trotsky, when finally placed in a position of power, could not make the transition to insider.
Upon Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky and Stalin were the chief rivals for succession. In the end, Stalin won and Trotsky's fall from grace began. He was removed as commissar of war in 1925. He was expelled from the party in 1927, deported to Turkestan in 1928, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, and stripped of his citizenship in 1932.
