Trotsky was born. Trotsky, Lev Davidovich. Leon Trotsky and Lenin

On October 26, 1879, in the Kherson province, a fifth child was born to a family of landowners - a boy named Lev. His father, David Leontyevich Bronstein, came from peasants and learned to read and write at a fairly advanced age, moreover, only in order to read books written by his son. Lev's mother, Anna Lvovna, nee Zhivotovskaya, was an Odessa native from a middle-class family. David and Anna were Jewish colonists on an agricultural farm near the village of Yanovka in Elisavetgrad district. Their affairs were going uphill, and by the time Lev was born, the Bronsteins’ prosperity was beyond doubt.

At the age of seven, Lev began studying at a private Jewish school, but his studies were not easy for him, since the teaching was conducted in Hebrew, which Lev knew poorly. As he himself later wrote, the first school only gave him the opportunity to learn to write and read in Russian.

In 1888, Lev became a student in the preparatory class of the St. Paul Real School in Odessa. Throughout his studies, he lived with the family of his mother’s nephew, Moses Shpenzer, who was the owner of the printing house and publishing house “Matesis”. The Odessa Real School was founded by the Germans, and its main pride was its highly qualified teachers. Real schools differed from the gymnasium of that time by a greater bias in favor of mathematical and natural sciences. However, it was during his studies at the school that Lev read Pushkin and Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Dickens, Veresaev and Nekrasov. Innate abilities and hard work helped the boy become the best student at the school in all subjects. True, in the second grade he was expelled from school because he quarreled with the French teacher - a big tyrant. Only the petition of influential relatives helped Lev to be reinstated in the school. It is possible that this was a revolutionary impulse of the future leader...

The boyish desire to stand out from the general gray crowd and somehow draw the attention of others to his own person is completely understandable. When the doctor discovered Lev was nearsighted and prescribed glasses, the boy was not upset, but, on the contrary, decided that the glasses gave him special significance. At the same time, young Bronstein began to show another trait - arrogance towards others. However, he, of course, had reasons for this: the best student, Leo treated his comrades with superiority and often emphasized his own primacy.

In his youth, Lev fell in love with the theater. He was fascinated not only by the action on stage itself, but also by the ability of artists to rise above the audience through their play. In general, he considered the world of creative people to be special, access to which was open only to a select few.

In 1896, Lev moved to Nikolaev to finish his studies and entered the seventh grade of a real school. This year generally became a turning point for his psyche. The knowledge acquired at the school gave Lev the opportunity to stay in the place of the first student, but at that time he became interested in public life. Lev met Franz Shvigovsky, a gardener, but a very educated man who closely followed politics and read a huge number of books. His parents demanded that he abandon this acquaintance, but in response Lev broke up with them, abandoned school and became a member of the Shvigovsky commune along with his older brother Alexander. It was here that he met Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who became his first wife. Members of the commune dressed in identical straw hats and blue blouses, and carried black sticks with them - perhaps that is why they were considered in the city as members of some mysterious sect. The Communards read a lot, but very randomly, distributed books, argued a lot, and even tried to create a “university based on mutual education.”

Lev Bronstein nevertheless graduated from a real school and, at the request of his parents, returned to Odessa. Here he began attending lectures at the university’s mathematics department, but revolutionary sentiments demanded something else, and he quit his classes again. In fact, Lev switched to working in semi-legal circles of radical youth and very soon became the informal leader of one of these groups. Lev's worldview was then quite far from Marxism - for the reason that he had not yet tried to acquire strong political convictions.

In 1897, a surge of revolutionary sentiment began in Russia, and a group of young people under the leadership of Lev began intensively looking for contacts in the working-class neighborhoods of Nikolaev. It was thanks to the efforts of Lev that the South of Russia acquired another revolutionary organization, called the “South Russian Workers' Union”. The Charter of the Union was written by Leo. Workers literally poured into the organization, but this contingent was not interested in strikes, since the earnings of factory workers were quite high. Much more workers wanted to understand social relations. Meetings and political studies with workers gradually developed into serious and painstaking work. Having obtained a hectograph, members of the Union began to print proclamations, and later the newspaper “Our Business”, which was published in a circulation of a couple of hundred copies. Basically, Lev Bronstein himself was responsible for the articles for the newspaper and the texts of the proclamations, and in addition, at May meetings he tested himself as a speaker.

Gradually, members of the Union established relations with other revolutionary cells in the circles of Social Democrats in Odessa. At this time, Lev Bronstein begins to argue that revolutionary work is needed not only among factory workers, but also in the ranks of artisans and the petty bourgeoisie. It cannot be said that the tsarist secret police were dozing all this time, and in January-February 1898 more than two hundred people were arrested in revolutionary circles. The first court in Lev Bronstein's life sentenced him to exile in Siberia for a period of four years. Already in the Moscow transit prison, Lev’s personal life improved - he married Alexandra Sokolovskaya. In the fall of 1900, their daughter Zina was born. At this time, the young family lived in the small village of Ust-Kut in the Irkutsk province. Here Lev Bronstein met Uritsky and Dzerzhinsky.

There was a fairly clear connection between the exiles, and Bronstein wrote leaflets and appeals for Social Democratic organizations. In the summer of 1902, he received previously ordered books, in the bindings of which tissue paper with the latest foreign publications was hidden. With this mail, one of the first issues of the Iskra newspaper and articles by Lenin arrived to the exiles. By this time, Lev had a second daughter, Nina, and the family moved to Verkholensk. Here Bronstein begins to prepare to escape. They gave him a fake passport, in which a new name was written - Trotsky. This pseudonym remained with Lev Davidovich for the rest of his life. Despite the fact that the wife was left with two small daughters, she fully supported Lev in organizing the escape.

Leon Trotsky went to Samara, where the main headquarters of the Iskra newspaper, headed by Krzhizhanovsky, was then located. Having received the order, Trotsky traveled to Kharkov, Kyiv and Poltava to establish connections with local revolutionary organizations. Soon Trotsky received an invitation from Lenin from London. Provided with money for the trip, Lev illegally crossed the Russian-Austrian border and went to London through Switzerland and France. This trip finally made Trotsky a professional revolutionary.

In the fall of 1902, in Europe, Trotsky met Natalya Sedova, who later became his second wife. True, he did not divorce Sokolovskaya, and therefore the marriage with Sedova was not registered. Nevertheless, they lived together until Trotsky’s death, and two boys were born into their family - Lev and Sergei.

During this period, conflicts began in the editorial office of the Iskra newspaper between its old members Axelrod, Plekhanov and Zasulich and the new ones - Lenin, Potresov and Martov. Lenin proposed introducing Trotsky to the editorial board, but Plekhanov blocked this decision in the form of an ultimatum. In the summer of 1903, the Second Congress of the RSDLP took place, at which Trotsky so ardently supported Lenin’s ideas that the sarcastic Ryazanov called Lev Davidovich “Lenin’s club.” However, the result of the congress and the exclusion of Zasulich and Axelrod from the Iskra editorial board prompted Trotsky to take the side of the offended and speak very critically about Lenin’s organizational plans. From this moment the countdown of the confrontation between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks begins.

Trotsky returned to Russia through illegal routes in 1905. Here he is elected chairman of the Council of Workers' Deputies of St. Petersburg. As a result of revolutionary events, Lev Davidovich was arrested and in 1907, by a court verdict, he was deprived of all civil rights and sent to Siberia for eternal settlement. Already at the beginning of next year, Leon Trotsky arrives with a convoy in the city of Obdorsk, in the Arctic. Thirty-five days later, the convoy of exiles reached Berezov, from where Trotsky decided to escape. This time he took a very big risk - the escape of a convict sentenced to eternal settlement without options doomed him to hard labor. Through a local peasant, Trotsky met a reindeer herder and, with the help of bribery with alcohol and chervonets of royal coinage on reindeer, he covered the seven hundred kilometers road to the Ural Mountains. From here he traveled by train to St. Petersburg and was sent abroad by the party leadership.

Since 1908, Trotsky has published the newspaper Pravda in Vienna. He did this until 1912, when the Bolsheviks “took over” the name of the newspaper. Trotsky went to Paris in 1914 and began publishing the daily newspaper Nashe Slovo. In the fall of 1915, Trotsky participated in the Zimmerwald Conference, where he passionately objected to the attacks of Lenin and Martov. In 1916, at the request of the Russian tsarist government, the French police expelled Lev Davidovich to Spain, and in turn, the Spanish authorities demanded the revolutionary’s departure to the United States.

Having learned about the February revolution, Leon Trotsky tried to leave for Russia by ship, but in Halifax, a Canadian port, the British authorities removed him and his family from the ship and placed him in a camp intended for internment of sailors of the German merchant fleet. The British put forward Trotsky’s lack of Russian documents as the reason for his detention, and they were not at all worried about the fact that he had an American passport, personally issued to Trotsky by US President Wilson. Soon the provisional government sent a written request for the release of Trotsky as an honored fighter against the regime of tsarism.

On May 4, 1917, Trotsky and his family arrived in Petrograd and immediately took the place of the informal leader of the group of so-called “Mezhrayontsy” who criticized the Provisional Government. After the July riots, Lev Davidovich was arrested and accused of spying for Germany. During the VI Congress of the RSDLP(b) in July, Lev Davidovich was in “Kresty” and was unable to read his report “On the Current Situation”. Nevertheless, he was elected to the Central Committee. Immediately after the suppression of the Kornilov revolt, Trotsky was released from prison, and on September 20 he took the post of chairman of the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies of Petrograd. While in this position, Trotsky was directly involved in the preparation and conduct of the October Revolution. Stalin points out in his memoirs that the revolution owes its success to Leon Trotsky. It was Trotsky who introduced the concept of “red terror” into politics and clearly described its principles in an address to the cadets on December 17, 1917.

In the spring of 1918, Lev Davidovich took the posts of Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR and People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. While in these posts, he did a lot to create a strong and combat-ready army. Trotsky's activities were highly appreciated by the government. Several cities were named in his honor, but with the beginning of the repressions against the Trotskyists, they were renamed. None other than Trotsky, back in 1920, proposed supplying peasants on the principle of “grain and manufactured goods” and replacing the predatory surplus appropriation with a percentage tax in kind. However, in the Central Committee he received only four votes out of fifteen, and Lenin, not yet ready to change the policy of war communism, accused Trotsky of “free trade.”

After the conflict in the Central Committee, which split the committee into two parts and gave rise to “discussions about trade unions,” relations between Lenin and Trotsky deteriorated greatly, and Lev Davidovich’s supporters were removed from the Central Committee. In 1922, an alliance emerged between Lenin and Trotsky, but Lenin’s illness and his withdrawal from political life did not allow Trotsky to carry out the necessary reforms. Problems between Stalin and Trotsky began during the defense of Tsaritsyn during the civil war, and the death of Lenin actually turned most of the party leadership against Lev Davidovich. This situation was skillfully fueled by Stalin, and Trotsky was accused of dictatorial plans, and also of the fact that he joined the Bolshevik Party only in 1917.

In 1923, Trotsky, in his articles, sharply opposed the “troika” of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, accusing these leaders of bureaucratizing the party apparatus. These accusations were rejected by the XIII Party Conference, and Trotsky's actions were sharply condemned. By the fall of 1924, Trotsky had lost the posts of chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council and People's Commissar of the Military Marine. The pressure on Trotsky increases, and, despite his attempts at resistance in the press, in 1926 he was removed from the Central Committee of the Politburo. After organizing an anti-government demonstration in early November 1927, Lev Davidovich was expelled from the CPSU (b) and exiled to Alma-Ata. The rest of his comrades and followers, which by that time included Zinoviev and Kamenev, either admitted they were wrong or were repressed - and both were shot a decade later.

In 1929, by decision of the Central Committee, Leon Trotsky was exiled to the Turkish island of Prinkipo, and in 1932 he lost his USSR citizenship. A year later he moved to France, in 1934 he was already in Denmark, in 1935 in Norway. The Norwegian government, in order not to worsen its relations with the Land of the Soviets, confiscated all of Trotsky’s works and actually placed him under house arrest. The oppression led to Lev Davidovich emigrating to Mexico in 1936. In exile, he closely followed developments in the USSR and reacted sensitively to any political events. In August 1936, Trotsky’s book “The Betrayed Revolution” was completed, in which he directly called what was happening in the USSR “Stalin’s Thermidor” - that is, a counter-revolutionary coup. Actually, Leon Trotsky was the first to understand what the “successful assimilation” of yesterday’s class enemies by Soviet society would lead to - later they were all exiled or destroyed. In 1938, Trotsky proclaimed the emergence of the Fourth International - in opposition to the Third. Supporters of this political organization still exist today.

In May 1940, the NKVD organized an attempt on the life of Leon Trotsky, as an irreconcilable enemy of Soviet power. Under the leadership of NKVD agent Grigulevich, a group of raiders, led by the Mexican raider and convinced Stalinist Siqueiros, burst into the room and shot all the cartridges from their revolvers, after which the attackers hastily fled. Siqueiros would later attribute the failure of this attack to his group's inexperience and nervousness. Trotsky was not injured then. However, the next attempt by the NKVD to settle scores with Lev Davidovich was crowned with success.

On August 20, early in the morning, Ramon Mercader, who was considered a staunch supporter of Lev Davidovich, came to see Trotsky. This NKVD agent brought the manuscript with him, and while Trotsky was reading it at his desk, Mercader took a gift ice pick from the wall and struck a fatal blow from behind. As a result of his wound, Trotsky died a day later - on August 21, 1940. He was buried next to the house in which he lived.

Ramon Mercader was convicted of murder in a Mexican court and received twenty years in prison. After his release, he arrived in Moscow in 1961, where he received the high title of Hero of the Soviet Union, as well as many great privileges...

L. D. Trotsky is an outstanding revolutionary of the twentieth century. He entered world history as one of the founders of the Red Army and the Comintern. L. D. Trotsky became the second person in the first Soviet government. It was he who headed the people's commissariat, was involved in naval and military affairs, and showed himself to be an outstanding fighter against the enemies of the world revolution.

Childhood

Leiba Davidovich Bronstein was born on November 7, 1879 in the Kherson province. His parents were illiterate people, but quite wealthy Jewish landowners. The boy had no friends the same age, so he grew up alone. Historians believe that it was at this time that Trotsky’s character trait, a sense of superiority over other people, was formed. From childhood, he looked at the children of farm laborers with disdain and never played with them.

Youth period

What was Trotsky like? His biography has many interesting pages. For example, in 1889 he was sent by his parents to Odessa, the purpose of the trip was to educate the young man. He managed to enter the St. Paul School under a special quota allocated for Jewish children. Quite quickly, Trotsky (Bronstein) became the best student in all subjects. In those years, the young man did not think about revolutionary activities; he was interested in literature and drawing.

At the age of seventeen, Trotsky found himself in a circle of socialists engaged in revolutionary propaganda. It was at this time that he began to study with interest the works of Karl Marx.

It’s hard to believe that his books were studied by millions of people and quickly turned into a real fanatic of Marxism. Even then, he differed from his peers in his sharp mind, showed leadership qualities, and knew how to conduct discussions.

Trotsky immersed himself in an atmosphere of revolutionary activity and created the “South Russian Workers' Union,” whose members were workers of the Nikolaev shipyards.

Persecution

When was Trotsky first arrested? The biography of the young revolutionary contains information about many arrests. He was first imprisoned for revolutionary activities in 1898 for two years. Next was his first exile to Siberia, from which he managed to escape. The name Trotsky was entered in the false passport, and it became his pseudonym for the rest of his life.

Trotsky - revolutionary

After escaping from Siberia, the young revolutionary leaves for London. It was here that he met Vladimir Lenin and became the author of the newspaper Iskra, publishing under the pseudonym “Pero”. Having found common interests with the leaders of Russian Social Democrats, Trotsky quickly became popular and accepted active agitators among migrants.

Trotsky easily established a trusting relationship with the Bolsheviks, using his oratorical abilities and eloquence.

Books

During this period of his life, Leon Trotsky fully supported Lenin’s ideas, which is why he received the nickname “Lenin’s club.” But a few years later, the young revolutionary goes over to the side of the Mensheviks and accuses Vladimir Ulyanov of dictatorship.

He failed to find mutual understanding with the Mensheviks, since Trotsky tried to unite them with the Bolsheviks. After unsuccessful attempts to reconcile the two factions, he declares himself a "non-factional" member of the Social Democratic society. Now, as his main goal, he chooses to create his own movement, different from the views of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.

In 1905, Trotsky returned to revolutionary St. Petersburg and found himself in the thick of events taking place in the city.

It is he who creates the St. Petersburg Council of Workers' Deputies, voices revolutionary ideas to people who have a revolutionary mood.

Trotsky actively advocated the revolution, so he ended up in prison again. It was at this time that he was deprived of his civil rights and sent to Siberia for eternal settlement.

But he manages to escape from the gendarmes, cross to Finland, and then leave for Europe. Since 1908, Trotsky settled in Vienna and began publishing the newspaper Pravda. A couple of years later, the publication was intercepted by the Bolsheviks, and Lev Davidovich left for Paris, where he managed the publishing house of the newspaper “Our Word”. In 1917, Trotsky decides to return to Russia and sets off from the Finlyandsky Station to the Petrograd Soviet. He is given membership and given the right to an advisory vote. A couple of months after his stay in St. Petersburg, Lev Davidovich manages to become the informal leader of those who advocate the creation of one common social democratic labor party.

In October of the same year, Trotsky formed the Military Revolutionary Committee, and on November 7 carried out an armed uprising, the goal of which was to overthrow the provisional government. This event in history is known as the October Revolution. As a result, the Bolsheviks come to power, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin becomes their leader.

The new government gives Trotsky the post of People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, a year later he becomes People's Commissar for Naval and Military Affairs. It was from this time that he was involved in the formation of the Red Army. Trotsky imprisons and shoots deserters and violators of military discipline, not sparing those who interfere with his active work. This period in history was called the Red Terror.

In addition to military affairs, Trotsky at this time actively collaborated with Lenin on issues related to foreign and domestic policy. His popularity peaked towards the end of the Civil War, but due to Lenin's death, Trotsky was unable to carry out all the reforms aimed at transitioning from War Communism to the New Economic Policy. He failed to become Lenin's full-fledged successor; Joseph Stalin took this place. He saw Leon Trotsky as a serious rival, so he tried to take steps to neutralize the enemy. In the spring of 1924, the real persecution of Trotsky began, as a result of which Lev Davidovich was deprived of his post and membership in the Central Committee of the Politburo.

Who replaced Trotsky as People's Commissar of Defense? In January 1925, this position was taken by Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze. In 1926, Trotsky tried to return to the political life of the country; he organized an anti-government demonstration. But the attempts were unsuccessful, he was exiled to Alma-Ata, then to Turkey, and deprived of Soviet citizenship.

We have already noted who replaced Trotsky as People's Commissar of Defense, but he himself did not stop his active struggle against Stalin. Trotsky began to publish the “Bulletin of the Opposition,” in which he tried to write about Stalin’s barbaric activities. In exile, Trotsky was working on creating an autobiography, writing the essay “History of the Russian Revolution,” talking about the necessity and inevitability of the October Revolution.

Personal life

In 1935, he moved to Norway and came under pressure from the authorities, who did not plan to spoil relations with the Soviet Union. The revolutionary's works were taken away and he was put under house arrest. Trotsky did not want to put up with such an existence, so he decides to go to Mexico, monitoring from a distance the events unfolding in the USSR. In 1936, he completed work on the book “The Betrayed Revolution,” in which he called the Stalinist regime an alternative counter-revolutionary coup.

Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya became Trotsky's first wife. He met her at the age of 16, when he had not yet thought about revolutionary activity.

Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya was six years older than Trotsky. It was she, according to historians, who became his guide to Marxism.

She became an official wife only in 1898. After the wedding, the young couple went into exile in Siberia, where they had two daughters: Nina and Zinaida. The second daughter was only four months old when Trotsky managed to escape from exile. The wife was left alone in Siberia with two babies. Trotsky himself wrote about that period of his life that he escaped with the consent of his wife, and it was she who helped him move to Europe.

In Paris, Trotsky met an active participant in the publication of the Iskra newspaper. This led to the breakup of his first marriage, but Trotsky managed to maintain friendly relations with Sokolovskaya.

A series of troubles

In his second marriage, Trotsky had two sons: Sergei and Lev. Since 1937, Trotsky's family began to face numerous misfortunes. The youngest son was shot for political activity. A year later, his eldest son dies during an operation. A tragic fate befalls the daughters of Lev Davydovich. In 1928, Nina dies of consumption, and in 1933, Zina commits suicide; she cannot get out of a state of severe depression. Soon, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, Trotsky’s first wife, was shot in Moscow.

Lev Davydovich’s second wife lived for another 20 years after his death. She died in 1962 and was buried in Mexico.

Mystery biography

Trotsky's death still remains an unsolved mystery for many people. Who is he, the secret agent who is associated with the death of Lev Davydovich? Who killed Trotsky? This issue deserves separate consideration. Pavel Sudoplatov, whose name is associated with the death of Trotsky, was born in 1907 in Melitopol. Since 1921, he became an employee of the Cheka, then was transferred to the ranks of the NKVD.

Some historians believe that it was he who committed the murder of Trotsky on the orders of Stalin. The task from the “leader of the peoples” was to eliminate Stalin’s enemy, who at that time lived in Mexico.

Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov was appointed to the position of deputy head of the 1st department of the NKVD, where he worked until 1942.

Perhaps it was the murder of Trotsky that allowed him to rise so high in the ranks. Lev Bronstein was Stalin's personal enemy and opponent all his life. No one knows exactly how Trotsky was killed; many legends are associated with the name of this man. Some consider Trotsky a state criminal who fled abroad trying to save his life.

How was Trotsky killed? This question still plagues domestic and foreign historians. It was Lev Bronstein who made a significant contribution to Russian history. There is no exact information about how Trotsky was killed, but Stalin tried to eliminate his rival by any means throughout his political life.

Lenin's and Trotsky's views on the reality of Soviet Russia differed significantly. Lev Bronstein considered the Stalinist regime to be a bureaucratic degeneration of the proletarian regime.

Secrets of death

How was Trotsky killed? In 1927, he was charged seriously with carrying out counter-revolutionary activities under Art. 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, Trotsky was expelled from the party.

The investigation into his case was short. Just a few days later, a car with prison bars was transporting Trotsky’s family to Alma-Ata, far from the capital. This journey became for the founder of the Red Army his farewell to the capital's streets.

For Stalin, Trotsky's death would have been an excellent way to eliminate a strong enemy, but he was afraid to deal with him directly.

In search of an answer to the question of who killed Trotsky, we note that many KGB agents tried to deal with Trotsky.

In exile, his family was given shelter by the Mexican artist Rivera. He protected Trotsky from attacks from local communists. Police were constantly on duty at Rivera's house; American supporters of Trotsky reliably protected their leader and helped him conduct active propaganda work.

Soviet counterintelligence in Europe was led at that time by Ignacy Reiss. He decided to stop his spy work and informed Trotsky that Stalin was trying to end his life with his supporters outside the Soviet Union. To do this, it was supposed to use various methods: blackmail, cruel torture, terrorist acts, interrogations. A few weeks after sending this letter to Trotsky, Reiss was found dead on the way to Lausanne, and about ten bullets were found in his body. Mexican police found out that the people who killed Reiss were spying on Trotsky's son. In 1937, Stalin's supporters were preparing an assassination attempt on Leo, but Trotsky's son did not arrive in Mulhouse on time. This incident made Stalin's supporters think about a possible leak of information, and they began searching for an informant. Trotsky's family, having learned about the planned murder, became even more circumspect and cautious.

Lev Davydovich wrote to his son that if an attempt was made on his life, Stalin would be the orderer of the murder.

In September 1937, an international commission headed by Dewey published the results of the Leon Trotsky case. They spoke of the complete innocence of Lev Sedov (son) and Lev Trotsky (father) of the charges brought against them in Moscow. This news gave Stalin's opponent strength for work and creative activity. But his joy was overshadowed by the death of his son Lev during the operation. The young man became a victim of the NKVD; death overtook him at the age of 32. The death of his son crippled Trotsky, he grew a beard, and the sparkle in his eyes disappeared.

The youngest son refused to renounce his father, for which he was sentenced to five years in the camps and deported to Vorkuta.

Only Zina’s son, Seva (Trotsky’s grandson), who was born in 1925 and lived in Germany, managed to survive.

Life in exile

Historians put forward different versions regarding the place where Trotsky was killed. In the spring of 1939, he settled in a house near Coyoacan in Mexico. An observation tower was built at the gate, police were on duty outside, and an alarm system was installed in the house. Trotsky grew cacti and raised rabbits and chickens.

Conclusion

In the winter of 1940, Trotsky wrote a will, where in every line one could read the expectation of tragic events. By that time, his relatives and supporters had been destroyed, but Stalin did not want to stop there. Criticism of Trotsky, sounded from the other end of the earth, cast a shadow on the bright image of the leader that had been created over so many years.

Lev Davydovich, in his messages addressed to Soviet sailors, soldiers, and peasants, tried to warn them about the corruption of GPU agents and commissars. He called Stalin the main source of danger for the Soviet Union. Of course, such statements were painfully perceived by the “leader of peoples”; he could not allow Trotsky to live. On Stalin's orders, NKVD agent Jackson, who was the son of the Spanish communist Caridad Mercader, is sent to Mexico.

The operation was carefully planned, thought out to the smallest detail. Jackson met Sylvia Agelof, Trotsky's secretary, and gained access to the house. On the night of May 24, 1940, an attempt was made on Lev Davydovich.

Together with his wife and grandson, Trotsky was hiding under the bed. Then they managed to survive, but on August 20, Stalin’s plans to eliminate the enemy were realized. Trotsky, who was hit in the head with an ice drill, did not die immediately. He managed to give some orders regarding his wife and grandson to his devoted workers.

When the doctor arrived at the house, part of Trotsky’s body was paralyzed. Lev Davydovich was taken to the hospital and began to prepare for surgery. The craniotomy was performed by five surgeons. Most of the brain was damaged by bone fragments, and part of it was destroyed. Trotsky survived the operation, and for almost a day his body desperately fought for life.

Trotsky died on August 21, 1940, without regaining consciousness after the operation. Trotsky's grave is located in the courtyard of a house in the Coyoacan area of ​​Mexico City; a white stone was erected over it and a red flag was placed.

Lev Davidovich Trotsky is a Russian revolutionary figure of the 20th century, an ideologist of Trotskyism, one of the currents of Marxism. Twice exiled under the monarchy, deprived of all civil rights in 1905. One of the organizers of the October Revolution of 1917, one of the creators of the Red Army. One of the founders and ideologists of the Comintern, a member of its Executive Committee.

Leon Trotsky (real name Leiba Bronstein) was born on November 7, 1879 into a family of wealthy landowners and tenants. In 1889, his parents sent him to study in Odessa with his cousin, the owner of a printing house and scientific publishing house, Moses Schnitzer. Trotsky was the first student at the school. He was interested in drawing and literature, wrote poetry, translated Krylov's fables from Russian into Ukrainian, and participated in the publication of a school handwritten magazine.

He began to conduct revolutionary propaganda at the age of 17, having joined a revolutionary circle in Nikolaev. On January 28, 1898, he was arrested for the first time and spent two years in prison, and it was then that he became familiar with the ideas of Marxism. During the investigation, he studied English, German, French and Italian from the Gospels, read the works of Marx, and became acquainted with the works of Lenin.

Leiba Bronstein at the age of nine, Odessa

A year before going to prison for the first time, Trotsky joined the South Russian Workers' Union. One of its leaders was Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who became Trotsky's wife in 1898. Together they went into exile in the Irkutsk province, where Trotsky contacted Iskra agents, and soon began collaborating with them, receiving the nickname “Pero” for his penchant for writing.

“I came to London a big provincial, in every sense. Not only abroad, but also in St. Petersburg, I had never been before. In Moscow, as in Kyiv, I lived only in a transit prison.” In 1902, Trotsky decided to escape from exile. It was then, when receiving a false passport, that he entered the name Trotsky (the name of the senior warden of the Odessa prison where the revolutionary was kept for two years).

Trotsky left for London, where Vladimir Lenin was then located. The young Marxist quickly gained fame by speaking at meetings of emigrants. He was extremely eloquent, ambitious and educated, everyone without exception considered him an amazing speaker. At the same time, for his support of Lenin, he was nicknamed “Lenin’s club,” while Trotsky himself was often critical of Lenin’s organizational plans.

In 1904, serious disagreements began between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. By that time, Trotsky had established himself as a follower of the “permanent revolution”, moved away from the Mensheviks and married Natalya Sedova for the second time (the marriage was not registered, but the couple lived together until Trotsky’s death). In 1905, they returned together illegally to Russia, where Trotsky became one of the founders of the St. Petersburg Council of Workers' Deputies. On December 3, he was arrested and, as part of a high-profile trial, was sentenced to eternal exile in Siberia with deprivation of all civil rights, but escaped on the way to Salekhard.

A split between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was brewing, supported by Lenin, who in 1912, at the Prague conference of the RSDLP, announced the separation of the Bolshevik faction into an independent party. Trotsky continued to advocate for the unification of the party, organizing the "August Bloc", which the Bolsheviks ignored. This cooled Trotsky’s desire for a truce; he preferred to step aside.

In 1917, after the February Revolution, Trotsky and his family tried to get to Russia, but were removed from the ship and sent to a concentration camp for internment of sailors. The reason for this was the revolutionary’s lack of documents. However, he was soon released at the written request of the Provisional Government as an honored fighter against tsarism. Trotsky criticized the Provisional Government, so he soon became the informal leader of the “Mezhrayontsy”, for which he was accused of espionage. His influence on the masses was enormous, as he played a special role in the transition of the soldiers of the rapidly decaying Petrograd garrison to the side of the Bolsheviks, which was of great importance in the revolution. In July 1917, the Mezhrayontsy united with the Bolsheviks, and Trotsky was soon released from prison, where he was accused of espionage.

While Lenin was in Finland, Trotsky effectively became the leader of the Bolsheviks. In September 1917, he headed the Petrograd Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, and also became a delegate to the Second Congress of Soviets and the Constituent Assembly. In October, the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) was formed, consisting mainly of Bolsheviks. It was the committee that was engaged in armed preparations for the revolution: already on October 16, the Red Guards received five thousand rifles; Rallies were held among the undecided, at which Trotsky’s brilliant oratorical talent again showed itself. In fact, he was one of the main leaders of the October Revolution.

Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Lev Kamenev

“The uprising of the popular masses does not need justification. What happened was a rebellion, not a conspiracy. We tempered the revolutionary energy of St. Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an uprising, and not for a conspiracy.”

After the October Revolution, the Military Revolutionary Committee remained the only authority for a long time. Under him, a commission was formed to combat counter-revolution, a commission to combat drunkenness and pogroms, and food supplies were established. At the same time, Leni and Trotsky maintained a tough position towards political opponents. On December 17, 1917, in his address to the cadets, Trotsky announced the beginning of the stage of mass terror against the enemies of the revolution in a more severe form: “You should know that no later than in a month, terror will take very strong forms, following the example of the great French revolutionaries. The guillotine, and not just prison, will await our enemies.” It was then that the concept of “red terror” appeared, formulated by Trotsky.

Soon Trotsky was appointed People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the first composition of the Bolshevik government. On December 5, 1917, the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee was dissolved, Trotsky transferred his affairs to Zinoviev and completely immersed himself in the affairs of the Petrograd Soviet. “Counter-revolutionary sabotage” began by civil servants of the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs, suppressed thanks to the publication of secret treaties of the tsarist government. The situation in the country was also complicated by diplomatic isolation, which was not easy for Trotsky to overcome.

To improve the situation, he said that the government would take an intermediate position of “neither peace nor war: we will not sign an agreement, we will stop the war, and we will demobilize the army.” Germany refused to tolerate this position and announced an offensive. By this time the army virtually did not exist. Trotsky admitted the failure of his policies and resigned from the post of People's Commissariat.

Leon Trotsky with his wife Natalya Sedova and son Lev Sedov

On March 14, 1918, Trotsky was appointed to the post of People's Commissar for Military Affairs, on March 28 to the post of Chairman of the Supreme Military Council, in April - Military Commissioner for Naval Affairs and on September 6 - Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR. Then the formation of a regular army begins. Trotsky became in fact its first commander-in-chief. In August 1918, Trotsky's regular trips to the front began. Several times Trotsky, risking his life, even speaks to deserters. But practice has shown that the army is not capable, Trotsky is forced to support its reorganization, gradually restoring unity of command, insignia, mobilization, a single uniform, military greetings and awards.

In 1922, Joseph Stalin, whose views did not coincide with the views of Trotsky, was elected general secretary of the Bolshevik party. Stalin was supported by Zinoviev and Kamenev, who believed that the rise of Trotsky threatened anti-Semitic attacks on the Soviet regime and condemned him for factionalism.

Lenin died in 1924. Stalin took advantage of Trotsky's absence in Moscow to put himself forward as the "heir" and strengthen his position.

In 1926, Trotsky teamed up with Zinoviev and Kamenev, whom Stalin began to oppose. However, this did not help him and was soon expelled from the party, deported to Alma-Ata, and then to Turkey.

Trotsky regarded Hitler's victory in February 1933 as the greatest defeat of the international labor movement. He concluded that the Comintern was ineffective due to Stalin's openly counter-revolutionary policies and called for the creation of the Fourth International.

In 1933, Trotsky was given secret asylum in France, which was soon discovered by the Nazis. Trotsky leaves for Norway, where he writes his most significant work, “The Betrayed Revolution.” In 1936, at a show trial in Moscow, Stalin called Trotsky an agent of Hitler. Trotsky is expelled from Norway. The only country that provided the revolutionary with refuge was Mexico: he settled in the house of the artist Diego Rivera, then in a fortified and carefully guarded villa on the outskirts of Mexico City - in the city of Coyocan.

After Stalin's speeches, the International Joint Commission to Investigate the Moscow Trials was organized in Mexico. The commission concluded that the accusations were slanderous and Trotsky was not guilty.

The Soviet intelligence services kept Trotsky under close surveillance, having agents among his associates. In 1938, under mysterious circumstances in Paris, his closest ally, his eldest son Lev Sedov, died in a hospital after surgery. His first wife and his youngest son Sergei Sedov were arrested and subsequently shot.

Leon Trotsky was killed with an ice pick in his home near Mexico City on August 24, 1940. The perpetrator was an NKVD agent, Spanish Republican Ramon Mercader (pictured), who infiltrated Trotsky's entourage under the name of Canadian journalist Frank Jackson.

Mercader received 20 years in prison for murder. After his release in 1960, he emigrated to the USSR, where he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. According to some estimates, the murder of Trotsky cost the NKVD approximately five million dollars.

The ice pick that killed Trotsky

From the will of Leon Trotsky: “I have no need to refute here again the stupid and vile slander of Stalin and his agents: there is not a single stain on my revolutionary honor. Neither directly nor indirectly, I have never entered into any behind-the-scenes agreements or even negotiations with the enemies of the working class. Thousands of Stalin's opponents died as victims of similar false accusations.

For forty-three years of my adult life I remained a revolutionary, forty-two of them I fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to start over, I would, of course, try to avoid certain mistakes, but the general direction of my life would remain unchanged. I see a bright green strip of grass under the wall, a clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is Beautiful. May future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, violence and enjoy it fully.”

Biography of Leon Trotsky

Leiba Davidovich Bronstein
Lev Davidovich Trotsky
2nd Chairman of the Petrograd Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies
October 8, 1917 - November 8, 1918
Predecessor: Nikolai Semenovich Chkheidze
Successor: 1st People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR
November 8, 1917 – March 13, 1918
Predecessor: position established; Mikhail Ivanovich Tereshchenko as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Republic
Successor:
1st Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR, USSR
September 6, 1918 - January 26, 1925
Predecessor: position established;
1st People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs of the USSR
July 6, 1923 - January 25, 1925
Predecessor: position created
Successor: Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze
2nd People's Commissar for Military Affairs of the RSFSR
March 14, 1918 - November 12, 1923
Predecessor: N.I. Podvoisky
Successor: position abolished; aka People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs of the USSR
Religion: atheist
Birth: October 26 (November 7), 1879
Yanovka village, Elisavetgrad district, Kherson province, Russian Empire now Bobrinetsky district, Kirovograd region
Death: August 21, 1940 (age 60)
Coyoacan, Mexico City, Mexico
Buried: there
Father: David Leontievich Bronstein (1847-1922)
Mother: Anna (Anetta) Lvovna Bronstein, born. Zhivotovskaya (died 1910 or 1912)
Spouse: 1st marriage in 1900 - Alexandra Lvovna, née Sokolovskaya (1872-1938?), 2nd marriage in 1903 - Natalya Ivanovna, née Sedova (1882-1962)
Children: 1st marriage: Zinaida (Volkova) (1901-1933),
Nina (Nevelson) (1902-1928)
2nd marriage: Sedovs: Lev (1906-1938), Sergei (1908-1937)
Party: RSDLP(b)/RCP(b) (1917-1927); SDPS
Education: secondary
Profession: statesman, writer
Lev Davidovich Trotsky(pseudonym, also: Pero, Antid Oto, L. Sedov, Old Man, etc.); birth name Leiba Davidovich Bronstein; October 26, 1879; Yanovka village, Elisavetgrad district, Kherson province - August 21, 1940; Coyoacan, Mexico City) - figure in the international labor and communist movement, theorist of Marxism, ideologist of one of its movements - Trotskyism. Twice exiled under the tsarist regime, deprived of all civil rights in 1905. One of the organizers of the October Revolution of 1917 and one of the creators of the Red Army. One of the founders and ideologists of the Comintern, member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In the Soviet government - People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs; in 1918-1925 - People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR, then the USSR. Since 1923 - leader of the internal party left opposition. Member of the Politburo of the CPSU(b) in 1919-1926. In 1927, he was removed from all posts and sent into exile. In 1929 he was expelled from the USSR. In 1932 he was deprived of Soviet citizenship. After being expelled from the USSR, he was the creator and chief theoretician of the Fourth International (1938). Author of works on the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia, creator of major historical works on the 1917 revolution, literary critical articles, and memoirs “My Life” (Berlin, 1930). Married twice, without dissolution of the first marriage. He was mortally wounded by NKVD agent Ramon Mercader on August 20, 1940 in Mexico.

Leiba Bronstein was born the fifth child in the family of David Leontyevich Bronstein (1843-1922) and his wife Anna (Anetta) Lvovna Bronstein (nee Zhivotovskaya) - wealthy landowners from among the Jewish colonists of an agricultural farm near the village of Yanovka, Elisavetgrad district, Kherson province (now the village of Bereslavka, Bobrinetsky district, Kirovograd region region, Ukraine). Leon Trotsky's parents came from the Poltava province. As a child, I spoke Ukrainian and Russian, and not the then widespread Yiddish. He studied at St. Paul's School in Odessa, where he was the first student in all disciplines. During his years of study in Odessa (1889-1895), Leon Trotsky lived and was raised in the family of his cousin (on his mother's side), the owner of the printing house and scientific publishing house "Matesis" Moisei Filippovich Shpenzer and his wife Fanny Solomonovna, the parents of the poetess Vera Inber.

The beginning of revolutionary activity

In 1896, in Nikolaev, Lev Bronstein participated in a circle, together with other members of which he conducted revolutionary propaganda.

In 1897 he participated in the founding of the South Russian Workers' Union. On January 28, 1898, he was arrested for the first time. In the Odessa prison, where Trotsky spent 2 years, he becomes a Marxist. “The decisive influence,” he said on this occasion, “was made on me by two studies by Antonio Labriola on the materialistic understanding of history. Only after this book did I move on to Beltov and Capital.” The appearance of his pseudonym Trotsky also dates back to this time; it was the name of a local jailer who made an impression on the young Leva (he would write it into his false passport after his escape). In 1898, in prison, he married Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who was one of the leaders of the Union. Since 1900, he was in exile in the Irkutsk province, where he established contact with Iskra agents, and on the recommendation of G. M. Krzhizhanovsky, who gave him the nickname “Pero” for his obvious literary gift, was invited to collaborate in Iskra.

According to the memoirs of Dr. G. A. Ziv, Trotsky had a tendency to lose consciousness, which, according to Trotsky himself, he inherited from his mother. G. A. Ziv, as a doctor, accurately determines that this was not just a tendency to lose consciousness, but real seizures, that is, Trotsky had epilepsy. G. A. Ziv himself knew Trotsky well - in the book “Trotsky - a biography in photographic documents” in photo No. 14 he is captured in the circle of exiles in Siberia along with Trotsky, his first wife Alexandra Sokolovskaya and his wife’s brother. In 1902 he escaped from exile abroad; In the false passport he “at random” entered the name Trotsky, after the name of the senior warden of the Odessa prison.

Arriving in London to see Lenin, Trotsky became a permanent contributor to the newspaper, gave abstracts at meetings of emigrants and quickly gained fame. A.V. Lunacharsky wrote about the young Trotsky: “... Trotsky impressed the foreign public with his eloquence, significant education and aplomb for a young man. ...They didn’t take him very seriously due to his youth, but everyone resolutely recognized his outstanding oratorical talent and, of course, felt that he was not a chicken, but an eaglet.”
First emigration [edit]

Insoluble conflicts in the editorial office of Iskra between the “old people” (G. V. Plekhanov, P. B. Axelrod, V. I. Zasulich) and the “young people” (V. I. Lenin, Yu. O. Martov and A. N. Potresov) prompted Lenin to propose Trotsky as the seventh member of the editorial board; however, supported by all members of the editorial board, Trotsky was voted out by Plekhanov in the form of an ultimatum.

At the Second Congress of the RSDLP in the summer of 1903, Trotsky supported Lenin so ardently that D. Ryazanov dubbed him “Lenin’s club.” However, the new composition of the editorial board proposed by Lenin - Plekhanov, Lenin, Martov, with the exclusion of Axelrod and Zasulich from it, prompted Trotsky to go over to the side of the offended minority and be critical of Lenin’s organizational plans.

In 1903, in Paris, Trotsky married Natalya Sedova (this marriage was not registered, since Trotsky never divorced A.L. Sokolovskaya).

In August 1903, Trotsky visited, as a correspondent for Iskra, the VI Zionist Congress held in Basel under the chairmanship of Theodor Herzl. According to Trotsky, this congress demonstrated the “complete decomposition of Zionism,” in addition, in his article, Trotsky sarcastically ridiculed Herzl personally.

In 1904, when serious political differences emerged between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Trotsky moved away from the Mensheviks and became close to A.L. Parvus, who attracted him to the theory of “permanent revolution.” At the same time, like Parvus, he advocated the unification of the party, believing [where?] that the impending revolution would smooth out many contradictions.
Revolution of 1905-1907 [edit]

In 1905, Trotsky returned illegally to Russia with Natalya Sedova. He was one of the founders of the St. Petersburg Council of Workers' Deputies and joined its Executive Committee. Formally, the chairman of the Council was G. S. Khrustalev-Nosar, but in fact the Council was led by Parvus and Trotsky; after the arrest of Khrustalev on November 26, 1905. The Executive Committee of the Council officially elected Trotsky as chairman; but on December 3 he was arrested along with a large group of deputies. In 1906, at the trial of the St. Petersburg Council, which received wide public attention, he was sentenced to eternal settlement in Siberia with deprivation of all civil rights. On the way to Obdorsk (now Salekhard) he fled from Berezov.
Second emigration [edit]
Trotsky in exile in the Irkutsk province. 1900

During the period of his second emigration, Trotsky continued to position himself as a “non-factional social democrat”, oscillating between the two main factions of the RSDLP - the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks - without definitively joining either of them, and not fully sharing their beliefs. In 1912, Lenin finally set his sights on separating the Bolshevik faction into an independent party. Trotsky, who took a position of “conciliation,” insisted on overcoming the factional split and reunifying the party. In August 1912, he organized a party conference in Vienna under unifying slogans (“August Bloc”). However, in reality, Social Democracy continued to crumble into a motley mosaic of factions warring with each other; the Bolsheviks refused to participate in the work of the August Bloc, including even the Bolsheviks - “conciliators”, as well as the Plekhanov group and the “Forward” group. After the failure of the August Bloc, Trotsky began to cool toward “conciliationism,” leaving leadership in this movement to others.

In 1912-1913, Trotsky, as a war correspondent for the newspaper Kyiv Mysl, wrote about 70 reports from the fronts of the First and Second Balkan Wars. This experience gave him a certain, albeit superficial, understanding of the army and military operations. As Yu. V. Emelyanov writes in his work “Trotsky. Myths and personality,” “Agreeing that military reviews were not useless for the outlook of the future Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, it would probably be better for the Red Army if its leader in the past was not a journalist, but a grenadier captain.”

Trotsky recalled in 1923:

During my several years in Vienna I came into fairly close contact with the Freudians, read their works and even attended their meetings at that time.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Trotsky, fearing that he, as a citizen of Russia, would be interned by the Austrian authorities, fled to Zurich on August 3, 1914, and from there to Paris. In general, he took a pacifist position, and in his articles he repeatedly spoke out in favor of ending the war.

In 1914-1916, he published the daily newspaper “Our Word” in Paris.

In September 1915, he participated in the Zimmerwald Conference together with Lenin and Martov.

On September 14, 1916, the newspaper Nashe Slovo was banned for pacifist propaganda, and Trotsky himself was expelled from France. After Great Britain, Italy and Switzerland refused to accept him, he headed to Spain, from where they tried to deport him to Havana as a “dangerous anarchist.” After violent protests, he was sent to New York instead of Havana, where he arrived on January 13, 1917. He collaborated with the Russian-language left-wing newspaper “New World”, in which Bukharin, Kollontai, V. Volodarsky and G.I. Chudnovsky also worked.

New York made a huge impression on Trotsky as a major center of American capitalism. In his works, Trotsky predicted the growth of the influence of the United States (calling this country “the forge where the fate of mankind will be forged”) and the decline of the influence of the old European powers.

I found myself in New York, in the fabulously prosaic city of capitalist automatism, where the aesthetic theory of Cubism triumphs on the streets, and the moral philosophy of the dollar triumphs in the hearts. New York appealed to me because it most fully expresses the spirit of the modern era.

Trotsky did not expect an imminent revolution in Russia and, apparently, intended to stay in the United States for a long time, even buying furniture for his New York apartment in installments.
Return to Russia [edit]
Leon Trotsky in 1917
Main article: Leon Trotsky in 1917

Immediately after the February Revolution, Trotsky headed from America to Russia, but along the way, in the Canadian port of Halifax, he and his family were removed from the ship by the British authorities and sent to a concentration camp for internment of sailors of the German merchant fleet. The reason for the detention was the lack of Russian documents (Trotsky had an American passport issued personally by President Woodrow Wilson, with attached visas to enter Russia and British transit [source not specified 68 days]), as well as British fears about Trotsky’s possible negative influence on stability in Russia .

The Amherst military camp was located in an old, completely neglected building of an iron foundry, taken from the German owner. The sleeping bunks were located three rows up and two rows deep on each side of the room. 800 of us lived in these conditions. It is not difficult to imagine what kind of atmosphere reigned in this bedroom at night. People crowded hopelessly in the aisles, elbowing each other, lying down, standing up, playing cards or chess. Many crafted, some with amazing skill. I still have the products of the Amherst prisoners in Moscow. Among the prisoners, despite the heroic efforts they made for their physical and moral self-preservation, there were five insane. We slept and ate with these crazy people in the same room.

However, soon, at the written request of the Provisional Government, Trotsky was released as an honored fighter against tsarism and continued his journey to Russia through Sweden and Finland. In Sweden, what he most remembered was the bread cards, which Trotsky had never seen before.

On May 4, 1917, Trotsky arrived in Petrograd. At the border village (at that time) with Finland, Beloostrov, he was met by a delegation from the Social Democratic faction of the “united internationalists” and the Bolshevik Central Committee. Straight from the Finlyandsky Station he went to a meeting of the Petrosovet, where, in memory of the fact that he had already been chairman of the Petrosovet in 1905, he was given a seat with an advisory vote.

Soon he became the informal leader of the “Mezhrayontsy”, who took a critical position towards the Provisional Government. After the failure of the July uprising, he was arrested by the Provisional Government and accused, like many others, of espionage; at the same time, he was charged with traveling through Germany. (However, according to Mlechin: “In 1917, Trotsky did not appear on the list of those Bolsheviks whom the Provisional Government tried to charge with espionage.”)

Trotsky played a huge role in the “propaganda” and defection of the soldiers of the rapidly decaying Petrograd garrison to the side of the Bolsheviks. Already in May 1917, almost immediately after his arrival, Trotsky began to pay special attention to the Kronstadt sailors, among whom the positions of anarchists were also strong. He chose the Modern circus, which was closed in January 1917 by firefighters, as his favorite place for his performances. During the July events, Trotsky personally recaptured from the uncontrolled crowd the then popular Socialist Revolutionary leader, Minister of Agriculture of the Provisional Government, V. M. Chernov (although he was Trotsky’s political opponent).

In July, at the VI Congress of the RSDLP(b), the Mezhrayontsy united with the Bolsheviks; Trotsky himself, who was at the Kresty at that time, which did not allow him to deliver the main report at the congress - “On the Current Situation” - was elected to the Central Committee. After the failure of the Kornilov speech in September, Trotsky was released, like other Bolsheviks arrested in July.
Activities as Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (September-December 1917) [edit]

During the “Bolshevisation of the Soviets” in September - October 1917, the Bolsheviks received up to 90% of the seats in the Petrograd Soviet. On September 20, Trotsky was elected chairman of the Petrograd Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, which he had already headed during the 1905 revolution. In 1917, Trotsky was also elected to the Pre-Parliament and became a delegate to the Second Congress of Soviets and the Constituent Assembly.

According to Richard Pipes, in the absence of Lenin, who went into hiding in Finland in July, Trotsky actually led the Bolsheviks in Petrograd until his return.

After Trotsky was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he also became a member of the Pre-Parliament, where he headed the Bolshevik faction. Trotsky characterized the Pre-Parliament as an attempt by “qualified bourgeois elements” to “painlessly transfer Soviet legality into bourgeois-parliamentary legality” and defended the need for the Bolsheviks to boycott this body (in his own words, “he stood on the boycott position of not entering [the Pre-Parliament]”). Having received a letter from Lenin authorizing the boycott, on October 7 (20) at a meeting of the Pre-Parliament he announced that the Bolshevik faction was leaving the meeting room.
Activities of the Military Revolutionary Committee. October Revolution [edit]
Main article: Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee

On October 12, 1917, Trotsky, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, formed the Military Revolutionary Committee, consisting mainly of Bolsheviks, as well as left Socialist Revolutionaries. The Military Revolutionary Committee became the main body for preparing an armed uprising. To divert attention, the Military Revolutionary Committee was formally subordinate not to the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), but directly to the Petrograd Soviet, and a minor figure in the revolution, the left Socialist Revolutionary Lazimir P.E., was appointed its chairman. The main pretext for the formation of the Military Revolutionary Committee was a possible German offensive on Petrograd, or a repetition of the Kornilov speech .
Caricature. Trotsky blows the bubbles of socialism.

Immediately after its formation, the Military Revolutionary Committee began work to win over parts of the Petrograd garrison to its side. Already on October 16, the Chairman of the Petrosovet, Trotsky, ordered the distribution of 5 thousand rifles to the Red Guards.

On the question of the time of the uprising, Lenin, who fled to Finland, demands that the uprising begin immediately, Trotsky proposes to postpone it until the convening of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, in order to confront the Congress with the fact that the regime of "dual power" has been destroyed, and the Congress itself has been the highest and only authority in the country. Trotsky manages to win over the majority of the Central Committee to his side, despite Lenin's concerns about the postponement of the uprising.

Between October 21 and 23, the Bolsheviks held a series of rallies among wavering soldiers. On October 22, the Military Revolutionary Committee announced that orders from the headquarters of the Petrograd Military District without the approval of the Military Military District were invalid. At this stage, Trotsky's oratory greatly helped the Bolsheviks to win over the wavering parts of the garrison to their side. An eyewitness to one of these speeches, Menshevik N. N. Sukhanov, in his work “Notes on the Revolution,” notes:

“The Soviet government will destroy the trench battle. She will give land and heal internal devastation. The Soviet government will give everything that is in the country to the poor and the trench soldiers. You bourgeois have two fur coats - give one to the soldier. Do you have warm boots? Stay at home. The worker needs your boots..."

The audience was almost in ecstasy. It seemed that the crowd would now sing some kind of revolutionary anthem without any collusion... A resolution was proposed: to stand for the workers' and peasants' cause until the last drop of blood... Who is in favor? A crowd of thousands, as one person, raised their hands.

On October 23, Trotsky will personally “agitate” the garrison of the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Bolsheviks had strong doubts about this garrison, and Antonov-Ovseenko even prepared a plan to storm the fortress in case it remained loyal to the Provisional Government.

In fact, Trotsky was one of the main leaders of the October Revolution.

A year later, I. Stalin wrote about this period:

“All work on the practical organization of the uprising took place under the direct leadership of the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. It is safe to say that the party owes, first and foremost, to Comrade Comrade the quick transition of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the skillful organization of the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Trotsky. Comrades Antonov[-Ovseenko] and Podvoisky were the main assistants of Comrade Trotsky.”

A few more years later, with the beginning of a fierce struggle for power within the CPSU (b), Stalin already sharply changed his tone:

...it cannot be denied that Trotsky fought well during the October Revolution. Yes, that's true, Trotsky really fought well in October. But during the October period, not only Trotsky fought well; even people like the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who then stood side by side with the Bolsheviks, fought well. In general, I must say that during a period of a victorious uprising, when the enemy is isolated and the uprising is growing, it is not difficult to fight well. At such moments, even the retarded become heroes.

On October 25-26, he acts as the main Bolshevik speaker at the Second Congress of Soviets, having endured a stubborn struggle with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who declared a violent protest against the armed uprising that took place and left the Congress.

The uprising of the popular masses does not need justification. What happened was an uprising, not a conspiracy. We tempered the revolutionary energy of St. Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an uprising, and not for a conspiracy... To those who left here and who come up with proposals, we must say: you are pathetic units, you are bankrupt, your role has been played. And go to where you should be from now on: into the dustbin of history...

During the attack on Petrograd by the troops of General P. N. Krasnov in October (November) 1917, Trotsky organized the defense of the city. On October 29, he personally checked the preparation of artillery pieces and an armored train at the Putilov plant; on October 30, he personally arrived at the Pulkovo Heights, where the decisive clash took place between the revolutionary forces and the Cossacks of General Krasnov.

As eyewitness John Reed describes, Trotsky went to the Pulkovo Heights straight from the meeting of the Petrosoviet on October 29 (November 11):

The Petrograd Soviet was working in full swing, the hall was crowded with armed people. Trotsky reported: “The Cossacks are retreating from Krasnoe Selo (loud enthusiastic applause). But the battle is just beginning. Fierce fighting is taking place in Pulkovo. … The cruisers “Oleg”, “Aurora” and “Respublika” anchored on the Neva and aimed their guns at the approaches to the city...”

“Why aren’t you where the Red Guards are fighting?” - someone's sharp voice shouted.

"I'm leaving now!" - Trotsky answered, leaving the podium. His face was somewhat paler than usual. Surrounded by devoted friends, he left the room along a side passage and hurried to the car.

As Lunacharsky put it, Trotsky, during the preparation of the Bolshevik uprising, “walked like a Leyden jar, and every touch to him caused a shock.”
Military Revolutionary Committee in November-December 1917 [edit]

After the victory of the uprising in October 1917, the Military Revolutionary Committee, subordinate to the Petrograd Soviet, until its self-dissolution in December, actually turned out to be the only real force in Petrograd, in the absence of a new state machine that had not yet had time to form. The forces of the Red Guards, revolutionary soldiers and Baltic sailors remained at the disposal of the Military Revolutionary Committee. On November 21, 1917, a “commission for combating counter-revolution” was formed under the Military Revolutionary Committee; the Military Revolutionary Committee closed a number of newspapers under its authority (Birzhevye Vedomosti, Kopeika, Novoye Vremya, Russkaya Volya, etc.), organized food supplies cities. Already on November 7, Trotsky, on behalf of the Military Revolutionary Committee, published in Izvestia an appeal “To the attention of all citizens,” declaring that “The rich classes are resisting the new Soviet government, the government of workers, soldiers and peasants. Their supporters stop the work of state and city employees, call for an end to services in banks, try to interrupt railway and postal and telegraph communications, etc. We warn them - they are playing with fire... We warn the rich classes and their supporters: if they do not stop their sabotage and will bring the supply of food to a standstill - they themselves will be the first to feel the burden of the situation they have created. The rich classes and their servants will be deprived of the right to receive food. All supplies they have will be requisitioned. The property of the main culprits will be confiscated."

On December 2, the Petrograd Soviet, chaired by Trotsky, adopted a resolution “On drunkenness and pogroms,” which created an emergency commission to combat drunkenness and pogroms, headed by Blagonravov, and placed military force at the commission’s disposal. Commissioner Blagonravov was ordered to “destroy wine warehouses, clear Petrograd of hooligan gangs, disarm and arrest everyone who disgraced themselves by participating in drunkenness and destruction.”
Policy statements November-December 1917 [edit]

Almost immediately after the Bolsheviks came to power, both Lenin and Trotsky made a number of harsh statements about their complete readiness to fight their political opponents by any means. Thus, already on November 1 (14), 1917, Lenin, at a meeting of the Petrograd Committee of the RSDLP (b), declared that “...Even their short-term arrests have already given very good results... In Paris they were guillotined, and we will only deprive them of food cards.” However, at the same meeting, Trotsky made it clear that, in his opinion, the matter would not be limited to deprivation of cards:

You can't, they say, sit on bayonets. But you can’t do it without bayonets. We need a bayonet there to sit here... All this bourgeois bastard who is now incapable of taking either side when he finds out that our government will be strong with us... The petty-bourgeois masses are looking for a force to which they must obey. Whoever does not understand this does not understand anything in the world, much less in the state apparatus.

On October 30 (November 12), 1917, in the newspaper Izvestia, Trotsky spoke out in favor of banning the Cadet Party, stating that

During the French Revolution, more honest men than the Cadets were guillotined by the Jacobins because they stood in opposition to the people. We have not executed anyone and do not intend to do so, but there are moments when the rage of the people is difficult to control.

On December 17, 1917, in his address to the cadets, L. Trotsky announced the beginning of the stage of mass terror against the enemies of the revolution in a more severe form:

You should know that in no later than a month, terror will take very strong forms, following the example of the great French revolutionaries. The guillotine, and not just prison, will await our enemies.

The very concept of “red terror” was formulated by Trotsky in his work “Terrorism and Communism” as “a weapon used against a class doomed to death that does not want to die.”
Activities as People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (1917-1918) [edit]
Main article: Trotsky's activities as People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (1917-1918)
See also: People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
White Guard poster “Exile of Trotsky from Kuban.” Signature: “This guy is not about us
Come on, brother, from the Kuban... rrrr!!”

The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies appointed Trotsky People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs in the first composition of the Bolshevik government. As the Bolshevik Milyutin V.P. and Trotsky himself testify, Trotsky was the author of the term “People's Commissar” (people's commissar).

Until December, Trotsky combines the functions of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs with the functions of the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet; According to my own recollections, “I never visited this People’s Commissariat for a long time, as I was in Smolny.” On December 5, 1917, the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee announced its self-dissolution and formed a liquidation commission; on December 13, Trotsky transferred the powers of the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet to G. E. Zinoviev. In practice, this leads to the fact that in October-November 1917, Trotsky rarely appears in the People's Commissariat and is involved in it relatively little affairs due to the workload of current issues in the Petrograd Soviet.

The first challenge that Trotsky had to face immediately after taking office was the general boycott (in Soviet historiography - “counter-revolutionary sabotage”) of civil servants of the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Relying on his assistant, the Kronstadt sailor N. G. Markin, Trotsky gradually overcomes their resistance and begins publishing secret treaties of the tsarist government, which was one of the program tasks of the Bolsheviks. Secret treaties of the “old regime” were widely used in Bolshevik propaganda to demonstrate the “predatory” and “aggressive” spirit of the First World War.

Also, the new government soon faced international diplomatic isolation; Trotsky's negotiations with the foreign ambassadors who were in Petrograd did not produce results. All Entente powers, and then neutral states, refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new government and broke off diplomatic relations with it.

Trotsky’s “intermediate” platform of “neither peace nor war: we sign no treaty, we stop the war, and we demobilize the army” receives the approval of the majority of the Central Committee, but fails. Germany refuses to tolerate any further delay in negotiations, and on February 22, 1918, goes on the offensive. By this time, the former Russian Imperial Army had completely ceased to exist and was unable to interfere with the Germans in any way. Having recognized the failure of his policy, Trotsky resigned from the post of People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs on February 22.

In the face of the German ultimatum, Lenin demanded that the Central Committee accept German conditions, threatening otherwise with his resignation, which actually meant a split in the party. Also, under pressure from the “left communists,” Lenin put forward a new “intermediate” platform, representing the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty as a “respite” before a future “revolutionary war.” Under the influence of the threat of Lenin's resignation, Trotsky, although he had previously been against signing peace on German terms, changes his position and supports Lenin. At the historic vote of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) on February 23 (March 10), 1918, Trotsky, along with four of his supporters, abstained, which provided Lenin with a majority of votes.
Activities at the post of the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council 1918-1919 [edit]
Main article: Trotsky's activities as People's Commissar of Military Affairs (1918-1924)
Trotsky in 1918

Soon after his resignation from the post of People's Commissar, Trotsky received a new appointment. On March 14, he received the post of People's Commissar for Military Affairs, on March 28 - Chairman of the Supreme Military Council, in April - People's Commissar for Naval Affairs, and on September 6 - Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR.

By February 1918, the former tsarist army had actually ceased to exist under the influence of the corrupting propaganda of revolutionary forces, including the Bolsheviks, having found themselves, as a result of the efforts of anti-state forces, unable to in any way delay the German offensive. Already in January 1918, the formation of the Red Army began, however, as Richard Pipes notes, until the summer of 1918, the Red Army existed mostly on paper. The principles of voluntary recruitment and election of commanders that existed at that time led to its small numbers, weak control, and low combat readiness (“partisanship”).

The main impetus that forced the Bolsheviks to move to the formation of a massive regular army was the performance of the Czechoslovak corps. The forces of the Czechoslovak legionnaires amounted to only about 40-50 thousand people, which seemed insignificant for Russia, which just a year ago had an army of almost 15 million. However, at that time, the Czechoslovaks turned out to be almost the only military force in the country that retained combat readiness.

Having received a new appointment under such conditions, Trotsky effectively became the first commander-in-chief of the Red Army and one of its key founders. Trotsky’s contemporary Ziv G.A. stated that as a People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, Trotsky “found his real profession: ... inexorable logic (which took the form of military discipline), iron determination and unshakable will, which did not stop at any considerations of humanity, insatiable ambition and dimensionless self-confidence, specific oratory art."

In August 1918, Trotsky formed a carefully organized “train of the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council”, in which, from that moment, he basically lived for two and a half years, continuously traveling along the fronts of the Civil War. As the "military leader" of Bolshevism, Trotsky displayed undoubted propaganda abilities, personal courage and outright cruelty. Arriving at the Sviyazhsk station on August 10, 1918, Trotsky personally led the fight for Kazan. In the most draconian ways, he imposes discipline among the Red Army soldiers, resorting, among other things, to shooting every tenth soldier of the 2nd Petrograd Regiment who fled without permission from their combat positions.

According to Richard Pipes, Trotsky's only undoubted personal contribution to the fighting of the Civil War was the defense of Petrograd in 1919. Despite the fact that the Red 7th Army had an almost fivefold advantage in manpower over Yudenich's Northwestern Army, Petrograd was gripped by panic, including in front of the White Guard tanks, and Lenin seriously considered the prospect of surrendering the city. Trotsky, with his speeches, was able to raise the fallen morale of the troops, while simultaneously spreading the rumor that Yudenich’s tanks were “made of painted wood.” After this, the Red Army soldiers were finally able to take advantage of their numerical advantage and defeat the White Guard.

Trotsky made personal appearances on the front line several times; in August 1918, his train was almost captured by the White Guards, and later that month he almost died on a destroyer of the Volga River Flotilla. Several times Trotsky, risking his life, gives speeches even to deserters. At the same time, the vigorous activity of the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, which was constantly traveling along the fronts, began to increasingly irritate a number of its subordinates, leading to many loud personal quarrels. The most significant of them was Trotsky’s personal conflict with Stalin and Voroshilov during the defense of Tsaritsyn in 1918. According to S.I., a contemporary of the events, Lieberman, although Stalin’s actions then violated the requirements of military and party discipline, which was condemned by the Central Committee, the majority of communist leaders did not like the “upstart” Trotsky and supported Stalin in this conflict.

As the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, Trotsky consistently promotes the widespread use of “military experts” in the Red Army, for whose control he introduces a system of political commissars and a hostage system. Convinced that the army, built on the principles of universal equality and voluntariness, turned out to be ineffective, Trotsky supported its gradual reorganization in accordance with more traditional principles, gradually restoring mobilizations, unity of command, insignia, uniform uniforms, military salutes and parades.
In power at the end of the Civil War (1920-1921)[edit]
Main article: Trotsky in power in the early 1920s

In 1920, the Red Army, led by Trotsky, managed to achieve a decisive turning point in the Civil War (“Red Flood”). In November 1919, after Trotsky’s personal intervention in the defense of Petrograd, General Yudenich’s troops retreated to Estonia, where they were interned by local authorities; in December, the Kolchak front finally collapsed. In February 1920, Denikin's troops began a rapid retreat to Crimea, where General Denikin's successor, Baron Wrangel, trying to attract as wide a segment of the population as possible, reformatted the Armed Forces of Southern Russia into the Russian Army. By November 1920, the Soviet-Polish war had generally come to an end, which made it possible to concentrate forces at least three times greater against Wrangel. The fall of Crimea was only a matter of time; in mid-November, the White Guards evacuated from five Crimean ports in an organized manner.

The end of the Civil War shifted priorities from armed struggle to economic construction. After seven years of war (first world war and then civil war), the country lay in ruins, and the exhausted population could no longer support the gigantic military machine created by Trotsky. In December 1920, Lenin authorized the start of demobilization of the Red Army; Its main deterrent was the extreme collapse of the railways that occurred during the war years: they were no longer capable of transporting millions of demobilized soldiers home in a short time. The “Red Flood” of 1919-1920 began to give way to the “Green Flood” - mass uprisings of peasants dissatisfied with the surplus appropriation system. The "green" rebels were fueled by huge masses of deserters from the Red Army; Often demobilized Red Army soldiers, returning home, also joined the rebels. The historic decision to replace the surplus appropriation system with a tax in kind, adopted in March 1921 by the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), helped to bring pacification to the peasant masses; The uprisings gradually faded away.

As the end of the war approached, Trotsky began to show increasing interest in peaceful economic activities. His first experiment in this field was the organization of the First Labor Army in January 1920, which became possible in connection with the disbandment of the Kolchak front. The experiment, however, turned out to be a complete failure: the Labor Army soldiers showed extremely low labor productivity, and the combat organization turned out to be poorly adapted for peaceful labor. According to various estimates, at the time of the creation of the labor army, only 10 - 23% of its personnel were engaged in labor activity as such, constantly distracted from work by drill training and wearing orders.

However, the entire year of 1920 and the first months of 1921 passed under the sign of “war communism,” including the organization of new labor armies. In the posts of Chairman of the Council of the First Labor Army (January - February 1920) and People's Commissar of Railways (March 1920 - April 1921), Trotsky established himself as an ardent supporter of the militarization of the national economy. In his speech at the III All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions on April 9, 1920, he formulated his credo:

When the Mensheviks say about their resolution that forced labor is always unproductive, then they are in captivity of bourgeois ideology and deny the very foundations of the socialist economy... We know civilian labor, which the bourgeoisie calls free. We contrast this with socially rationed labor on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory for the entire people, i.e. compulsory for every worker in the country. Without this, it is impossible to even think about the transition to socialism... They say that forced labor is unproductive. If this is true, then the entire socialist economy is doomed to destruction, because there can be no other paths to socialism other than the distribution of the entire labor force of the country by the economic center, the distribution of this force in accordance with the needs of the national economic plan...

If the workers retain what was called freedom of movement, the freedom to leave the factory at any time, in search of a better piece of bread, then in the present conditions, in the conditions of the terrible instability of all life, of the entire production and transport apparatus, this will lead to complete economic anarchy, to complete the defeat and dispersion of the working class, to the complete inability to take into account the future of our industry. The militarization of labor is not an invention of individual politicians or an invention of our military department. The militarization of labor...is the inevitable basic method of organizing the labor force...

During the internal party discussion on trade unions (November 1920 - March 1921), Trotsky spoke as a supporter of the general militarization of industry, using trade unions as “drive belts”. According to the memoirs of Lieberman’s contemporary S.I., with the end of the Civil War, Trotsky was not going to demobilize the army, but, on the contrary, to militarize the national economy. At the same time, such a desire to use military-command methods in the economy was largely consistent with the spirit of the times; Bolshevism was born in the fire and roar of war, and for many decades inherited the phraseology of “fronts” and “campaigns” in relation to peaceful activities themselves.

During the years of the revolution and the Civil War, Trotsky actually became the second person in the state; the powerful propaganda machine of Bolshevism, of which he himself was one of the creators, created around Trotsky a heroic aura of “the leader of the victorious Red Army.” For his participation in the defense of Petrograd, Trotsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, a destroyer and an armored train were named in his honor, and in 1923 Gatchina was renamed Trotsk. However, many other Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, received similar honors at the same time.

However, Trotsky's participation in the organization of labor armies and his proposal to “shake up the trade unions” extremely undermined his authority; The country could no longer endure further “tightening the screws” in the spirit of “war communism.” Meanwhile, in reality, Trotsky’s attitude towards the regime of “war communism” was in fact much more complex - it was he who, back in February 1920, was the first to propose measures to abolish the surplus appropriation system (although these measures did not exactly coincide with the decisions adopted a year later by the Tenth Congress ).

The transition to the NEP evoked clear analogies among contemporaries with the Thermidor of the French Revolution - the counter-revolutionary Bonapartist coup that put an end to the radicalism of the Jacobins. Paradoxically, in the early 1920s, it was Trotsky, as a popular military leader and supporter of authoritarian, military-command methods, who seemed the most obvious candidate for Bonaparte.

However, the NEP, having actually become the restoration of capitalism in the economy, did not lead to liberalization in politics. On the contrary, the economic liberalization of the 1920s unfolded simultaneously with a general tightening of the screws in the political sphere. All non-Bolshevik parties that had retained legality until that time were finally dissolved, and within the party itself a course was adopted towards the gradual destruction of any opposition and the establishment of complete unanimity on all issues. The party also paid the closest attention to the main ideological support of the “old regime” - the church, which stubbornly refused to recognize the new government. With the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks organized a campaign to confiscate church property. An intra-church movement of “renovationism” was initiated; according to Trotsky's plan, it was supposed to become a kind of Orthodox analogue of the Protestant Reformation.

Trotsky took an active part in all these processes. He spoke extremely negatively about the “workers’ opposition” Shlyapnikov - Kollontai, saying that it was making a fetish out of the slogan of internal party “democracy”. Supported show trials against the Socialist Revolutionaries on charges of terrorist activities against the Bolsheviks; at Trotsky's proposal, death sentences were replaced with “suspended” sentences on the condition that the AKP would not engage in more armed struggle against Bolshevism. Thus, the leaders of the Social Revolutionaries were, in fact, taken hostage.

The Red Army led by Trotsky managed to win the Civil War, thereby protecting Bolshevism from physical destruction. However, with the end of the war, Trotsky was no longer needed. Finding himself at the head of the army in wartime, Trotsky gained almost unlimited power into his hands for several years. The years of the Civil War strengthened his commitment to an authoritarian style of leadership, while the party of that time adopted a collegial style. According to Naglovsky A.D., Trotsky created an atmosphere of “Arakcheevism” around himself.

The old Bolsheviks were forced to recognize Trotsky’s enormous services to the party, but considered him an upstart who joined Bolshevism only in July 1917. Before the revolution, Trotsky wavered for a long time between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, not completely joining either one or the other; in fact, he always gravitated towards creating his own party and his own teaching.

The harsh wartime methods used by Trotsky created many enemies for him, the most dangerous among whom were Zinoviev and Stalin. After Lenin's final withdrawal from political activity, Trotsky's fate was sealed - the majority of the party leaders united against him.
Political activity 1919-1921 [edit]

In March 1919, the VIII Congress of the RCP(b) recreated the Bolshevik Politburo as a permanent body, and Trotsky became a member of the first Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b).

In 1922, due to dissatisfaction with the activities of the Rabkrin and the solution to the national question, an alliance between Trotsky and Lenin began to take shape again, but Lenin fell ill and retired from political life.
Trotsky in the last years of Lenin's life. The beginning of the struggle for power within the RCP(b) [edit]

During 1921, the Civil War generally came to an end. On March 18, 1921, the Treaty of Riga was signed, ending the Soviet-Polish war of 1920-1921. The center of anti-Bolshevik resistance in Crimea was destroyed. After the announcement of the replacement of the surplus appropriation system with a tax in kind, peasant uprisings began to wane. In the Far East, in April 1920, a puppet DDA was formed, a “buffer” between the Bolsheviks and the Japanese interventionists in Vladivostok.

At the same time, from July 1921, Lenin’s health began to deteriorate noticeably. Trotsky notes in his memoirs that a particular deterioration began on December 7, 1921. On May 25, 1922, Lenin suffered his first stroke.
1922 Formation of the “troika” Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin [edit]
Soviet propaganda poster

The deteriorating health of the Bolshevik leader and the actual end of the Civil War brought to the fore the question of power, the question of who would become Lenin's successor and the new head of state. The doctors' secret report, sent to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee, emphasized the extremely serious nature of Lenin's illness. Immediately after the stroke, a “troika” was formed consisting of Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin to jointly fight with Trotsky as one of the likely successors. In December 1922, Lenin's condition again deteriorated greatly; on December 16, a second stroke occurred. It becomes finally clear to the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin himself, that he does not have long to live.

On April 3, 1922, at the proposal of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) was established, to which, at their proposal, Stalin was appointed. Initially, this position was understood as a technical one and therefore of no interest to Trotsky, and the head of state was understood as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. Stalin actually heads a number of similar “technical” bodies of the Central Committee: the Secretariat of the Central Committee, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee, is part of the Politburo, and heads the main Soviet control body Rabkrin. Stalin also promotes his supporter Kuibyshev to the post of head of the main party control body, the Central Control Commission (CCC). Thus, Stalin manages to head the “technical” state apparatus just during a period of particularly sharp growth of his influence.

Richard Pipes notes that the enormous growth of the bureaucracy in the early 1920s was predetermined. Since at least December 1917, the Bolsheviks have been heading towards the general nationalization of the economy and the elimination of local self-government, which, when multiplied by the enormous size of Russia, caused a colossal growth of the state apparatus, which took on many functions in the performance of which the state did not interfere before the revolution. This process is discussed in detail by researcher Mikhail Voslensky in his fundamental work “Nomenclature”. Voslensky notes that with the end of the Civil War, a mass of “impudent careerists” poured into the ruling Communist Party, each of whom individually Lenin could have shot, exiled, or imprisoned, “but all together they were irresistible.” The strengthening of the party bureaucracy is superimposed on the general fatigue of the population from the protracted war (as Trotsky put it, the sentiment “we are not for the revolution, but now the revolution is for us” has won), and the widespread failure of the revolutionary movement in Europe.

During 1922, Lenin managed to return to work for some time. He personally intervenes in the heated debate on the national question, criticizing Stalin's plan for the “autonomization” of the RSFSR. Having stated to Stalin that “Russified foreigners often oversell the truly Russian mood,” Lenin promoted a plan for the structure of the USSR as a union of union republics. Also in 1922, Lenin invited Trotsky to become one of the four deputies of the Predsovnarkom; All members of the Politburo vote for the resolution proposed by Lenin - all except Trotsky himself, who is dissatisfied with such an insignificant appointment, in his opinion.

After his temporary return to work in 1922, Lenin was amazed at the turbulent process of building the state apparatus that unfolded in connection with the end of the Civil War: during Lenin’s illness, the Council of People’s Commissars managed to form 120 new commissions, while, according to Lenin’s calculations, 16 should have been enough. In January 1923 In the year 1999, Lenin wrote a programmatic article, “How can we reorganize the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate,” in which he tries to turn this body into a counterweight to the growing bureaucracy. According to Richard Pipes,

The failure of attempts to export the revolution meant that there was a need to create a stable state and a professional bureaucracy to govern that state. Such a task required a completely different type of people than a professional revolutionary who spent most of his adult life underground. ... Lenin's comrades were incapable of leading a normally functioning state, dealing with heaps of all kinds of writings, issuing instructions to party cells scattered throughout the country, appointing low-level officials - all this seemed unbearably boring to them. Stalin was the only one among the major Bolsheviks who had both a taste and a talent for such a routine. This became the decisive factor in his ascent to the pinnacle of power. ... The Soviet bureaucracy grew to such incredible proportions because under communism, everything without exception that involved two or more people had to be carried out under the direction of party organs. The entire economy of the country, previously mainly in private hands, was now controlled from a single center; the situation was exactly the same with all social institutions, with all cultural associations, with the clergy, with everything down to the smallest cells of society, because, being experienced revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks understood perfectly well that the most harmless organizations at first glance could serve as a screen for political activity. This meant the creation of a gigantic bureaucratic machine.

In the words of researcher Mikhail Voslensky, “when you read Lenin’s last works, you clearly see how the leader, who is on the edge of his grave, is rushing about in front of this unexpected problem”; as Lenin himself put it, “our worst internal enemy is the bureaucrat. This is a communist who sits in a responsible (and then in an irresponsible) Soviet post and who enjoys universal respect as a conscientious person.”

In his 1922 work, “On the Question of Nationalities or “Autonomization,” Lenin extremely sharply criticized both the growth of the bureaucratic apparatus and Stalin’s “great power” plan for “autonomization” (the inclusion of the former national borderlands of the Russian Empire into the RSFSR as autonomous republics instead of the USSR project): "... this whole idea of ​​“autonomization” was fundamentally wrong and untimely. They say that the unity of the apparatus was required. But where did these assurances come from? Was it not from the very Russian apparatus, which, as I already indicated in one of previous issues of his diary, we borrowed from tsarism and only a little smeared with Soviet myrrh... to be honest... [the apparatus] is in fact still completely alien to us and is a bourgeois and tsarist mishmash. ... "freedom to leave the union" which we justifying ourselves will turn out to be an empty piece of paper, unable to protect Russian foreigners from the invasion of that truly Russian man, a Great Russian chauvinist, in essence, a scoundrel and a rapist, which is a typical Russian bureaucrat. There is no doubt that an insignificant percentage of Soviet and Sovietized workers will drown in this sea of ​​chauvinistic Great Russian trash, like a fly in milk... have we taken measures with sufficient care to really protect foreigners from the truly Russian holdover? I think that we did not take these measures..."

Since 1922, in parallel with the strengthening of Stalin’s influence as the head of the “technical” apparatus, his influence as the secretary of Lenin, who was gradually retiring from affairs, also increased. According to Richard Pipes, Lenin in this regard was much more comfortable dealing with Stalin than with the willful, explosive Trotsky: “When Lenin, having lost the ability to engage in state affairs, lived in Gorki, Stalin visited him more often than anyone else. As for Trotsky, at the end of 1922 he asked how to get to Gorki - apparently, he had never been there. Trotsky constantly bombarded Lenin with lengthy memorandums in which he explained how much was going wrong in Soviet Russia and how to correct the mistakes made. Lenin often scrawled the resolution “To the archives” on these memoranda, which meant that no action should be taken on Trotsky’s conclusions and proposals. Stalin, on the contrary, sent him only short notes containing point-by-point proposals on how best to implement the decisions made by Lenin, without ever challenging these decisions themselves.” Trotsky himself, in his autobiographical work “My Life,” admits on this matter: “there is no doubt that for current affairs it was in many cases more convenient for Lenin to rely on Stalin, Zinoviev or Kamenev than on me... I had my own views, his methods of work, his techniques... he understood too well that I was not suitable for assignments.”

After the second stroke that happened to Lenin on December 16, 1922, the “troika” Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin, from January 1923, finally formalized the mechanism of their work. One of Stalin's secretaries, Boris Bazhanov, describes him this way:

The Politburo is the central government body. It solves all the most important issues of governing the country (and the world revolution). ...But the order of the day for the Politburo meeting...is approved by the troika. On the eve of a meeting of the Politburo, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin gather, first often in Zinoviev’s apartment, then usually in Stalin’s office in the Central Committee. Officially - to approve the Politburo agenda. No charter or regulations provide for the issue of approving the agenda. ...this meeting of the troika is a real meeting of the secret government, deciding, or rather, predetermining all the main issues. Formally, the troika decides whether to raise the issue at a Politburo meeting or give it a different direction. In fact, the members of the troika are conspiring on how this issue should be resolved at tomorrow’s Politburo meeting, thinking about the decision, even distributing roles among themselves when discussing the issue at tomorrow’s meeting... Tomorrow at the Politburo meeting there will be a discussion, decisions will be made, but everything important is discussed here, in a close circle; discussed frankly, among themselves (there is nothing to be ashamed of each other) and between the true holders of power. Actually, this is the real government.

As Trotsky himself later asserted, in December 1922 - January 1923, their positions with Lenin again became closer on issues of the monopoly of foreign trade, the national administrative structure of the USSR (the project of “union republics” versus the project of “autonomization of the RSFSR”) and the fight against the strengthening of the bureaucracy. Lenin’s plan “to fight bureaucracy” consisted of expanding the Central Committee several times, strengthening the control body - the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin), and forming a Central Committee commission to combat bureaucracy. The measures proposed by Lenin were formally implemented by the “troika” Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin - the Central Committee was expanded from 27 to 40 people (instead of the 50-100 proposed by Lenin), and various control bodies (Rabkrin, Central Control Commission, etc.) made no progress in the fight against bureaucracy have not reached. Following the results of the XII Congress of the RCP (b), held in April 1923, the Rabkrin was merged with the Central Control Commission, led by Stalin’s supporter Kuibyshev. According to Lenin’s proposals, workers “from the machine” were indeed introduced into the Rabkrin, but they made up only a third of the members of this control body.
1923 Lenin's retirement. The beginning of an active struggle for power [edit]
Boris Bazhanov. Memoirs of Stalin's former secretary

Firstly, the mechanism of power...Things begin to change with the end of the civil war. A real party apparatus is being created and quickly begins to grow. Here the centrally unifying activities in the matter of governance, which are carried out by the Politburo in the center, begin to be taken over in the regions by the regional and regional Bureaus of the Central Committee, in the provinces by the Bureau of Gubernia Committees. And in the provincial committees the secretary comes first - he begins to become the master of his province instead of the chairman of the provincial executive committee and various representatives of the center... The Politburo is elected by the Central Committee. Have the majority of the Central Committee in your hands and you will choose the Politburo as you need. Place your provincial committee secretaries everywhere, and the majority of the congress and the Central Committee will follow you. ... since January 1926, after the congress, Stalin reaps the fruits of his many years of work - his Central Committee, his Politburo - and becomes a leader...

On March 10, 1923, Lenin suffered a third stroke, and he finally retired. The Bolshevik leader finds himself unable to make a traditional Political Report at the XII Congress of the RCP(b) held in April. The Politburo hesitates for some time as to who should speak instead of Lenin. The main contenders for power prefer to maneuver. Stalin proposes Trotsky, but Trotsky refuses and offers to read the report to Stalin himself, but he also refuses. As a result, the Politburo instructs Zinoviev to read the report as chairman of the Comintern.

Beginning in 1922, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, subordinate to Stalin, began to bypass the principle of electing secretaries of lower-level party committees locally, “recommending” them under the pretext of fighting “parochial interests.” During 1923, Stalin further strengthened his power by expanding the powers of the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Central Committee (Uchraspred), which is part of the Secretariat of the Central Committee. After the XII Congress, the Uchraspred, which had previously been responsible for appointments within party committees at various levels, also began to manage movements in almost all government bodies, from industry to the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.

In the second half of 1923, the dying Lenin was already completely unable to conduct any political activity. At this time, the NEP regime entered its first crisis. The Bolshevik Party is literally shaken by the “workers’ opposition”, which actually continued to exist, despite its sharp condemnation by Lenin at the XI Congress of the RCP(b). The financial situation of workers in big cities, primarily in Petrograd and Moscow, still remains worse than before 1914; since the summer of 1923, strikes began in the country. Discontent also penetrates into the Bolshevik Party, which remained the only place where in the early 1920s it was possible to somehow express one’s opinion. Labor oppositionists accuse the party leadership of “bureaucratic degeneration”; their demands often balance on the brink of anarcho-syndicalism and “intellectualist” proposals such as the forced transfer of party intellectuals to the machine in order to combat their “separation from the masses”. Peasants also express their dissatisfaction: as of October 1923, prices for industrial goods amounted to 276% of the 1913 level, while prices for food products amounted to only 89%. Illustrating the current situation on a graph, Trotsky calls this phenomenon “price scissors.”

In July 1923, the majority of the Central Committee, controlled by the “troika” Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin, formed a commission to check the state of affairs in the army under the pretext of aggravating the revolutionary situation in Germany. The commission was composed of Stalin's supporters and in the fall of 1923 it made a predictable conclusion that the army was “collapsed” and Trotsky “does not pay enough attention to the activities of the Revolutionary Military Council.” These conclusions did not entail any consequences, other than an angry rebuke from Trotsky himself.

On September 23, 1923, the “troika” launched a decisive offensive against Trotsky, proposing at the plenum of the Central Committee to expand the composition of the Revolutionary Military Council, while expanding it was proposed exclusively by Trotsky’s opponents. The proposal quickly grew into a scandal: Trotsky, fully understanding what was happening, proposed to the Central Committee to send him “as a simple soldier into the brewing German revolution.” The floor was taken by Zinoviev, who mockingly proposed to send both him and Stalin to Germany as a “soldier of the revolution,” who demanded that the Central Committee “not risk the two precious lives of their beloved leaders.” After a statement from the Leningrad representative Komarov - “I don’t understand one thing, why Comrade Trotsky is so nomadic,” Trotsky finally lost his temper and left the meeting, finally trying unsuccessfully to slam the door. The Plenum of the Central Committee sends a delegation after Trotsky with a proposal to return to the meeting, but Trotsky refuses to return. A direct witness to this demarche of Trotsky, Politburo secretary B. G. Bazhanov describes this scene as follows:

It was a break. The silence of the historical moment reigned in the hall. But full of indignation, Trotsky decided to slam the door for greater effect when leaving.

The meeting took place in the Throne Hall of the Royal Palace. The door of the hall is huge, iron and massive. To open it, Trotsky pulled it with all his might. The door floated slowly and solemnly. At this moment it was necessary to realize that there are doors that cannot be slammed. But Trotsky, in his excitement, did not notice this and tried with all his might to slam it. To close, the door floated just as slowly and solemnly. The idea was this: the great leader of the revolution broke with his insidious minions and, to emphasize the break, leaving them, slammed the door in his heart. And it turned out like this: an extremely irritated man with a goatee flounders on the doorknob in an impossible struggle with a heavy and blunt door. It didn't turn out well.

On October 8, 1923, Trotsky writes a letter on economic issues to the Central Committee. Noting the urgent economic crisis, he calls the current situation in the party a “secretary hierarchy” and sharply criticizes the “party bureaucracy,” which he blames for the crisis. Having attacked Molotov, Trotsky launched into discussions about “soulless party bureaucrats who, with their stone backsides, stifle every manifestation of free initiative and creativity of the working masses,” to which Molotov replies: “Not everyone can be a genius, Comrade Trotsky.” Already on October 15, 1923, Trotsky’s note was supplemented by the louder “Statement 46”, signed by 46 prominent Bolsheviks with pre-revolutionary party experience.

On October 19, the majority of the Central Committee organized a counter-statement “Response of members of the Politburo to the letter of Comrade. Trotsky", in which he was accused of organizing the "letter of 46", factional activities and striving for personal dictatorship. As Boris Bazhanov points out, during this period Trotsky demonstratively distanced himself from both the majority of the Central Committee and the oppositionists:

...Trotsky was silent, did not take part in the discussion and did not respond to all the accusations. At Politburo meetings, he read French novels, and when one of the Politburo members addressed him, he pretended to be extremely surprised by this. ...The fact was that the opposition in the fall of 1923 (the so-called first opposition) was not Trotskyist at all. …Generally speaking, Trotsky was, so to speak, “to the left” than the Central Committee, that is, he was a more consistent communist. Meanwhile, the Central Committee stuck him to the “right” opposition. This right-wing opposition represented something like a failed ideological Thermidor, a completely spontaneous reaction that developed spontaneously within the party, without a program, without leaders. ...Trotsky quickly figured out the right-wing essence of the opposition. But then his situation became very difficult. If he had been an unprincipled opportunist, becoming the head of the opposition and adopting its right-wing course, he, as it soon became clear, had every chance of winning a majority in the party and winning. But this meant a course to the right, Thermidor, the elimination of communism. Trotsky was a fanatical and 100% communist. He could not take this path. But he could not openly declare that he was against this opposition - he would have lost his weight in the party - both among the followers of the Central Committee and the opposition who attacked him, and would have remained an isolated general without an army. He chose to remain silent and remain ambivalent. The tragedy was that the opposition, which arose spontaneously and had neither leaders nor programs, had to accept Trotsky, who was imposed on it as a leader. This soon ensured her quick defeat.

Stalin I.V. About the discussion, about Rafail, about the articles of Preobrazhensky and Sapronov and about Trotsky’s letter. December 15, 1923

How does Sapronov think about curing the shortcomings of our internal party life? His cure is as simple as his diagnosis. “Review our officer corps”, remove current employees from their posts - this is Sapronov’s remedy. ... In the ranks of the opposition there are those like Beloborodov, whose “democracy” is still remembered by the Rostov workers; Rosengoltz, whose “democracy” was bad for our watermen and railway workers; Pyatakov, from whose “democracy” the whole Donbass did not scream, but howled; Alsky, whose “democracy” is known to everyone; The bull, from whose “democracy” Khorezm still howls. Does Sapronov think that if the current “party pedants” are replaced by the above-mentioned “respected comrades”, democracy within the party will triumph? May I be allowed to doubt this somewhat.

In December 1923, Trotsky nevertheless intervened in what was happening. On December 11, 1923, he published in Pravda a series of four articles, “The New Course,” with a sharp protest against bureaucratization. Drawing attention to his wide support among student youth, Trotsky declares that “youth - the truest barometer of the party - react most sharply to party bureaucracy.” On December 24, the head of the Political Directorate of the Revolutionary Military Council (PUR), V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, issues circular PUR No. 200, in which he proposes to his subordinates to change political training in the army in the spirit of the provisions of the “New Course”. In response to the Politburo’s demand to cancel the circular, Antonov-Ovseenko hints that the army is protesting against the “vile recall of the Soviet Carnot.” According to the memoirs of G.Z. Besedovsky, during the first two weeks of 1924 Moscow was “waiting for a coup.” In his letter to the Central Committee, Antonov-Ovseyenko directly promised that the “silent people” would “call the presumptuous leaders to order,” which the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee defined as “a threat to the Central Committee.”

However, by mid-January 1924, the “troika” of Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin managed to defeat the “workers’ opposition” as a whole, and they also began an attack on Trotsky’s supporters in the army. Zinoviev accuses Trotsky of preparing a “Bonapartist” military coup and even demands his arrest. On January 17, Antonov-Ovseenko was removed from his post and replaced by A.S. Bubnov, PUR circular No. 200 was cancelled. On January 11, 1924, the deputy of the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, E.M. Sklyansky, was removed, and a year later he died under unclear circumstances. His place is taken by Mikhail Frunze, who replaced a number of Trotsky’s supporters in the army and a year and a half later also died.

Trotsky himself behaves ambiguously during these acute events. Since 1922, Trotsky vehemently accused the majority of the Central Committee of “bureaucratic degeneration” and “movement towards Thermidor.” However, at the same time, Trotsky understood perfectly well that the proposed military coup through the forceful dispersal of the Central Committee and its re-election through the convening of the Extraordinary Congress would be precisely the “Bonapartist Thermidor.” Trotsky actually withdraws from events, not taking part in them in any way, under the pretext of illness. On December 14, 1923, the Politburo of the Central Committee granted Trotsky sick leave with treatment in Sukhumi, where he left on January 16.

The Troika also makes a series of successful “mines” under Trotsky’s main post - the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council. During 1923, she replaced the commanders of military districts with her supporters, the plenum of the Central Committee on January 16, 1924 formed a commission selected from Stalin’s supporters to examine the situation in the Red Army on January 18, 1924. The XIII Party Conference accuses Trotsky of organizing factional activities, defines “Trotskyism” as “petty-bourgeois deviation,” Trotsky’s supporters Joffe, Krestinsky and Rakovsky were sent as ambassadors to China, Germany and England, respectively. During this period, Stalin expressed skepticism about Trotsky’s accusations of usurpation of power by the bureaucratic apparatus: “For Trotsky, talking about democracy is just a maneuver,” “Who, Tit Titych, will offend you? You yourself will offend everyone.” One of the key decisions of the XIII Party Conference was the decision on the mass recruitment of up to 100 thousand workers “from the machine” into the party and the ban on admitting “persons of non-proletarian origin” to the party.

In the midst of these preparations, on January 21, 1924, Lenin died.
The struggle for power within the CPSU(b) after the death of Lenin [edit]
1924 Removal of Trotsky from the post of pre-revolutionary military council [edit]

The news of Lenin's death on January 21, 1924 found Trotsky the next day, on his way to a health trip to Sukhum; he did not show up for the funeral. According to Trotsky, he was deceived about the date of the funeral.

At the funeral itself, Stalin was only the fourth to speak, uttering a loud “oath” that outlined his claim to the role of one of Lenin’s possible successors. [source not specified 68 days]

One of the questions that the ruling “troika” Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin faced immediately after Lenin’s death was the question of who would take his place in the increasingly decorative post of Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. None of the members of the “triumvirate” dares to nominate themselves in this capacity, since this would immediately cause claims from the other two “triumvirs”. As a result, the majority of the Politburo of the Central Committee, controlled by the “troika,” promotes the appointment of the secondary and harmless A. I. Rykov to this position.

Trotsky can only helplessly watch what is happening. In February 1924, a commission organized by the Troika recognized the “collapse” in the army, and, under the pretext of strengthening its leadership of the masses, introduced many of Trotsky’s opponents, including Voroshilov, into the army leadership. During 1924, Trotsky gradually lost control of the army. The commander of the Western Front, Tukhachevsky, was transferred to the position of assistant chief of staff of the Red Army in Moscow. Muralov N.I. was removed from the Moscow Military District, Frunze M.S. was appointed deputy of the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, and the head of the political department Antonov-Ovseenko was removed back in January. A. S. Bubnov, who replaced him, discovered in the spring of 1924 that the theme “Comrade Trotsky - Leader of the Red Army” was still stubbornly preserved in the political training program for Red Army soldiers. Embittered Stalin demands that classes on this topic be removed, identified and punished by the author of the wording, also replacing it with “The Revolutionary Military Council is the leader of the Red Army.”

In May 1924, Trotsky was subjected to real persecution at the XIII Congress of the RCP (b), the first after Lenin's death. Rykov condemns Trotsky’s “attacks” on the apparatus, equating them with attacks on the party itself, and also rejects Trotsky’s call to “look up to the youth” as the “true barometer of the party.” Zinoviev finally signifies his claim to leadership in the ruling triumvirate by delivering a Political Report at the Congress, which only Lenin did before his illness. The second “triumvir”, Kamenev, becomes the chairman of this congress. The congress sharply condemned “Trotskyism”, demanding that Trotsky renounce factional activities and admit mistakes. In his response, Trotsky admitted that the majority of the Central Committee and the majority of the party were right, but he flatly refused to admit mistakes.

Zinoviev G.E., having spoken at two consecutive congresses of the RCP (b) with a Political Report, actually claims to be the main successor of Lenin. Although this corresponds less and less to the real balance of power within the ruling “troika” Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin, Stalin prefers for now to remain on the sidelines. Zinoviev’s ambitions only lead to the fact that the main target for supporters of the still dangerous Trotsky becomes Zinoviev himself, and not Stalin. Stalin prefers to maneuver in case Trotsky somehow miraculously manages to win. At this stage, Stalin positions himself as a “moderate”, and even restrains the particularly “bloodthirsty” demands of Zinoviev (for example, in January 1924, Zinoviev demanded the arrest of Trotsky as allegedly preparing a “Bonopartist” military coup). Bazhanov B.G. testifies:

The members of the troika enter three or four minutes later, one after another - they apparently discussed something before entering. Zinoviev enters first, he does not look in Trotsky’s direction, and Trotsky also pretends not to see him and examines the papers. Stalin enters third. He goes straight to Trotsky and, with a sweeping, wide gesture, shakes his hand in a friendly manner. I clearly sense the falseness and deceit of this gesture; Stalin is an ardent enemy of Trotsky and cannot stand him. I remember Lenin: “Don’t trust Stalin: he will make a rotten compromise and deceive.”

Meanwhile, Stalin, starting in 1922, methodically placed his supporters in all key positions in the party. He pays special attention to the secretaries of provincial and district party committees, since they form delegations to party congresses, and the congresses have the right to re-elect the party leadership.

The “troika” was not hindered at all by the “bomb” that Lenin left before his death, which “exploded” in May 1924 - the so-called “Testament of Lenin”. The text proposed removing Stalin from the post of General Secretary as a “rude” man who had “concentrated immense power in his hands.” For Stalin, such “compromising evidence” was a heavy blow. At the same time, the ambiguity of the “Testament” was also in the fact that “compromising evidence” fell on the heads of all the main contenders in the struggle for power. Lenin recalled Kamenev and Zinoviev to their position in October 1917 and accused Trotsky of being “excessively involved in the purely administrative side of the matter,” clearly referring to the discussion about trade unions. Lenin called Bukharin “a most valuable theoretician” and “a favorite of the party,” but at the same time he also brought down “compromising evidence” on him, saying that “his theoretical views can very doubtfully be classified as completely Marxist, because there is something scholastic in him ( he never studied and, I think, never fully understood dialectics).”

On May 1, 1924, at an emergency plenum of the Central Committee, the “testament” was read out. Zinoviev and Kamenev, considering Stalin not dangerous, propose not to remove him from the post of General Secretary. The majority controlled by the “troika” re-elects Stalin as general secretary, Trotsky can only depict “with energetic facial expressions his extreme contempt for this whole comedy.” In addition, the plenum decides not to disclose the letter.

In February-August 1924, Stalin organized the so-called “Leninist call” - a massive recruitment of 230 thousand workers into the party, even exceeding the figure of 100 thousand people adopted at the XIII Party Conference. The number of RCP(b) increased by one and a half times, qualitatively and dramatically changing the mood of minds. The “Leninist call” caused mass psychosis throughout the country; in just a few months, up to 300 thousand applications to join the party were submitted.

The demand for the so-called “classification” of the party began to be widely heard, starting with the emergence of the “workers’ opposition” in late 1920 - early 1921, but in practice it began to be implemented en masse in 1924. During the period when the Communist Party began to be shaken by particularly fierce ideological discussions, The party included huge masses of uneducated people who often understood the meaning of these discussions only superficially, but were well aware of their privileges over non-party members, and looked at the party “like a pie with filling.” These people saw clearly that the vast non-party majority of the Russian population was completely powerless before the dictatorship of the Communist Party, and was crushed by the terror of the GPU, so they perceived the loud calls of the oppositionists for “democracy” in internal party life as a farce.

During the Civil War, membership in the Communist Party often meant only a good chance of getting shot or caught in a noose, which often resulted in the party being filled with young fanatics or adventurers of all sorts. Beginning at least in 1920, the massive influx of careerists into the party, which began as the war approached its end, became apparent to the Bolshevik leaders. To some extent, regular mobilizations of communists to the front become a deterrent; in particular, 300 people were mobilized to suppress the Kronstadt uprising directly from the X Congress of the RCP(b). In the second half of 1921, the Central Committee organized the first mass purge of the party from “slouched” careerists and “petty-bourgeois elements”; According to various estimates, the size of the party as a result of the purge was reduced by a third, or even by half.

The implementation of the “Leninist call” thus turned the previously pursued policy 180°, turning the party from an “elite” into a mass one. At the same time, mass recruitment opened the floodgates for careerists, contemptuously characterized by Trotsky as “petty-bourgeois elements.” The “recruits” of 1924, choosing between the main contenders who were at each other’s throats in the struggle for power, increasingly chose Stalin’s side, since the distribution of appointments, rations, apartments and various privileges ultimately depended on him, as the head of the party apparatus. . Stalin's behavior in the 1920s was strikingly different from the image of the “bloodthirsty dictator” with which he entered history. Stalin receives and listens attentively to everyone, puffing friendly on his pipe, which makes a sharp contrast with the arrogant, arrogant Trotsky.

In this environment, Trotsky became less and less in demand. As Isaac Deutscher notes, if during the Civil War Trotsky's violent energy and theatrical showy gestures were quite appropriate, with the advent of peace they began to smack of hysteria. If in 1917 Trotsky gathered whole crowds of workers and soldiers in the Petrograd Circus “Modern” who listened to his bright speeches as a revelation, then already in 1923 he was able to ignite only young fanatics with his sermons. The time of fanatics and ideologists has passed, the time has come of organizers who looked at Marxist phraseology only as a convenient tool. According to M. S. Voslensky, the meaning of the struggle for power in the 1920s - 1930s was that “communists by conviction were replaced by communists by name.” Illustrating the prevailing mood of minds, Politburo Secretary B. G. Bazhanov gives the following example:

...During the first time of my secretaryship at the Politburo, my ear caught the ironic meaning of the term “educated Marxist.” It turned out that when it was said “educated Marxist”, one had to understand: “a blockhead and a windbag.”

It could have been clearer. People's Commissar of Finance Sokolnikov, who is carrying out the reform on duty, submits for approval by the Politburo the appointment of Professor Yurovsky as a member of the Narkomfin board and head of the currency department. Yurovsky is not a communist, the Politburo does not know him. One of the members of the Politburo asks: “I hope he is not a Marxist?” “What are you talking about,” Sokolnikov hastens to answer, “the currency department, there you don’t have to talk your tongue, but be able to get things done.” The Politburo approves Yurovsky without objection.

During 1924, Trotsky gradually loses control over the army, where the “troika” introduces a number of his opponents. Having lost real power, Trotsky can only appeal to his authority as a figure in the revolution and the Civil War, using his oratorical and journalistic abilities. But until the autumn of 1924, Trotsky was waiting for an opportune moment.

Trotsky's passivity led to the fact that already from June 1924 the ruling “troika”, in the absence of a common enemy, began to fall apart. On June 17, Stalin, speaking at a course for secretaries of district party committees under the Central Committee of the RCP (b), attacked Zinoviev and Kamenev, “finding fault” with the clause “Nepman Russia” instead of “NEP Russia” in Lenin’s quote “from NEP Russia there will be socialist Russia.” In the context of the fierce ideological battles that reigned at that time, such a reservation would mean an admission that Russia is ruled not by communists, but by Nepmen; the very fact of such a reservation was characterized by Stalin as a “distortion of Leninism.” Carried away, Stalin attacked the doctrine of “dictatorship of the party” proclaimed by Zinoviev at the XII Congress, calling it “nonsense,” since Marxist theory defined the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and not the “dictatorship of the party.” Zinoviev responded by organizing a meeting of the Central Committee, which condemned Stalin’s thesis about the “dictatorship of the party” as “erroneous.”

At the same time, Zinoviev and Kamenev increase pressure on Trotsky, demanding his expulsion from the party, but do not gather a majority of the Central Committee. At this time, Stalin, maneuvering between two groups, protested against the expulsion of Trotsky from the party.

Seeing that the “troika” had actually split, Trotsky decided to go on the offensive. In October 1924, he published the article “Lessons of October,” placed in the third volume of Trotsky’s collected works as a preface. In this article, Trotsky recalled his role as the organizer of the October Revolution, and by way of “compromising evidence” he reminds readers that Zinoviev and Kamenev were generally against the speech, and Stalin did not play any role in it. The article provoked a so-called “literary discussion” in which the “troika” attacked Trotsky with counter “compromising evidence”, recalling his non-Bolshevik past and mutual abuse with Lenin before the revolution.

Stalin contemptuously characterizes Trotsky’s attempts to remind of his merits as “Arabian fairy tales,” and declares that “talks about Trotsky’s special role are a legend spread by obliging “party gossips.”
1925 Troika split. Stalin against Zinoviev and Kamenev [edit]
Kamenev L. B., speech at the XIV Congress of the CPSU (b), December 1925

...I have repeatedly said this to Comrade Stalin personally, precisely because I have repeatedly told a group of Leninist comrades, I repeat it at the congress: I have come to the conviction that Comrade. Stalin cannot serve as a unifier of the Bolshevik headquarters. (Voices from the seats: “Wrong!”, “Nonsense!”, “That’s what it’s all about!”, “The cards have been revealed!” Noise. Applause of the Leningrad delegation. Shouts: “We will not give you commanding heights,” “Stalin!” , “Stalin!" The delegates stand up and greet Comrade Stalin. Stormy applause. Shouts: “This is where the party has united. The Bolshevik headquarters must unite.”

Evdokimov from the seat: “Long live the Russian Communist Party. Hooray! Hooray!" The delegates stand up and shout “Hurray!” Noise. Stormy, long-lasting applause)

Evdokimov from the seat: “Long live the Central Committee of our party! Hooray! (The delegates shout “Hurray!”). The party is above everything! That’s right” (applause and shouts of “Hurray!”) Voices from the field: “Long live comrade. Stalin!!!" (Stormy, prolonged applause, shouts of “Hurray!” Noise.)

Chairman: “Comrades, please calm down. Comrade Kamenev will now finish his speech.” Kamenev: “I began this part of my speech with the words: we are against the theory of unity of command, we are against creating a leader! With these words I end my speech.”

The “war of incriminating evidence” started by Trotsky fell on him, damaging his authority much more than the “triumvirs” who had reunited for some time. At the plenum of the Central Committee in January 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded that Trotsky be expelled from the party. Stalin, continuing to maneuver, proposes that Trotsky not only not be expelled, but even left him in the Central Committee and the Politburo, finally taking away from him only the key posts of the People's Commissar of Military Affairs and the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council. Frunze becomes the new People's Commissar for Military Affairs, and Voroshilov becomes his deputy.

According to Trotsky himself, he even accepted his “overthrow” with relief, since this to some extent averted accusations of preparing a “Bonapartist” military coup. Trotsky asks the Central Committee to direct him to economic activities, since with the end of the Civil War it is becoming increasingly important. The Plenum of the Central Committee appoints Trotsky to a number of minor posts: chairman of the Main Committee for Concessions (Glavkontsessky), chairman of a special meeting at the Supreme Economic Council on product quality, chairman of the Electrical Technical Committee.

After such a blow to Trotsky, the “troika” Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin finally disintegrates, supporters of Zinoviev and Kamenev form the so-called “new opposition”. The main pretext for the split is the doctrine developed by Stalin of “building socialism in a single country.”

As researcher N.V. Volsky-Valentinov points out, the impossibility of “building socialism in a single country” was obvious to Lenin until at least 1922. The need for a “world revolution” was clear both to Trotsky or Zinoviev and Kamenev, and to Stalin, who back in April 1924 argued that

Overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie and establishing the power of the proletariat in one country does not mean ensuring the complete victory of socialism. The main task of socialism - the organization of socialist production - remains ahead. Is it possible to solve this problem, is it possible to achieve the final victory of socialism in one country, without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No impossible. To overthrow the bourgeoisie, the efforts of one country are enough - the history of our revolution tells us this. For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially a peasant one like Russia, are no longer enough; this requires the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries. Therefore, developing and supporting revolution in other countries is an essential task of a victorious revolution. Therefore, the revolution of the victorious country should consider itself not as a self-sufficient quantity, but as an aid, as a means for accelerating the victory of the proletariat in other countries.

However, the “literary discussion” in the fall of 1924 prompted Stalin to strengthen his position in the struggle for power, beginning to position himself as a theoretician of communist ideology, as opposed to Trotsky and Zinoviev. After a “careful analysis of Lenin’s works,” Stalin already on December 17, 1924 opposed the idea of ​​​​spreading the revolution to the West (“permanent revolution”) promoted by Trotsky. The new doctrine was finally formalized at the XIV Party Conference on April 27-29, 1925.

Stalin’s ideological innovation directly contradicted Engels, who argued that “The communist revolution will not only be national, but will take place simultaneously in all civilized countries... It is a world revolution and will therefore have a worldwide arena,” but it came at just the right time for a country tired of a protracted war - first the First World War, and then the Civil War. However, it was met with hostility by Zinoviev. Zinoviev himself developed the doctrines of “Trotskyism”, as a “petty-bourgeois current and hostile to Leninism,” and “social fascism” (the label attached to European social democracy), and Stalin’s claim to the role of a major theorist irritated Zinoviev extremely.

The resolution of the XIV Party Conference still assumed the character of a compromise between Stalin and Zinoviev, but during 1925 violent antagonism was brewing. On September 4, the “platform of four” Zinoviev-Kamenev-Krupskaya-Sokolnikov is formed. At the XIV Congress of the RCP(b) in December 1925, Zinoviev declared that Stalin’s doctrine “smacks of national narrow-mindedness.”

According to Stalin’s secretary B.G. Bazhanov, by 1925 Stalin had already, in general terms, completed the process of placing his supporters in key positions as secretaries of provincial party committees:

To be in power, you had to have your majority in the Central Committee. But the Central Committee is elected by the party congress. To elect your own Central Committee, you had to have your majority at the congress. And for this it was necessary to have a majority of delegations to the congress from provincial, regional and regional party organizations. Meanwhile, these delegations are not so much chosen as they are selected by the leaders of the local party apparatus - the secretary of the provincial committee and his closest employees. Select and seat your people as secretaries and key workers of the Gubernia Committees, and thus you will have a majority at the congress. This is the selection that Stalin and Molotov have been systematically engaged in for several years. This does not go smoothly and simply everywhere. For example, the path of the Central Committee of Ukraine, which has several provincial committees, is complex and difficult. We have to combine, shift, move, then put Kaganovich on the Central Committee of Ukraine as the first secretary in order to restore order in the apparatus, then move, promote and remove obstinate Ukrainian workers. But in 1925, the main thing in this seating of people was done.

Stalin's main rivals also placed their supporters in key positions. Trotsky limited himself to the promotion of his supporters, who by 1925 had already been mostly displaced, within the army (Sklyansky, Gamarnik, Tukhachevsky, Antonov-Ovseenko, etc.), Zinoviev planted his “clan” in Petrograd and the Comintern, Bukharin actually controlled the newspaper “ Pravda" and the Institute of Red Professorship, but Kamenev was not involved in such activities at all, and, in the words of B. G. Bazhanov, "sat in Moscow by inertia." Stalin, having headed the party apparatus, had the opportunity to promote his appointees on a special scale.

On October 31, 1925, M. V. Frunze, who replaced Trotsky in the posts of People's Commissar of Military Affairs and Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, dies on the operating table. This death still seems suspicious to a number of researchers. Trotsky's supporters blame Stalin for this death. Boris Pilnyak in 1926 plays on this version in his book “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon.” On the other hand, B. G. Bazhanov, who was Stalin’s secretary during these events, finds Frunze’s activities in 1924-1925 extremely suspicious. Thus, Frunze achieved the reorganization of the army, the abolition of the political control of the commissars, which irritated the commanders of units and associations, and appointed military personnel far from communism to a number of key positions in the army. At the same time, Frunze himself was not perceived by his contemporaries as a Stalinist, although he was personally nominated by Stalin. All these circumstances aroused strong suspicions in Bazhanov that Frunze was allegedly playing his own game, and was preparing a military coup, both anti-Trotskyist and anti-Stalin. According to Bazhanov, exactly the same suspicions arose in one of Stalin’s close associates, L.Z. Mehlis, and, apparently, in Stalin himself too.

Throughout 1925, Stalin “undermined” Zinoviev. With the help of Molotov, he manages to win over the head of the Moscow party organization, Zinoviev appointee N.A. Uglanov, and one of Stalin’s closest supporters, L.M. Kaganovich, organizes a purge of Zinovievites in Ukraine.

By December, the situation is especially aggravated: the Leningrad and Moscow party organizations exchange accusations against each other, Zinoviev accuses the Moscow organization of “liquidator disbelief in the victory of socialism,” and Stalin of “semi-Trotskyism.” The Leningrad party organization headed by Zinoviev is trying to print opposition literature, which the Stalinist majority characterizes as the organization of factional activity.

At the XIV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, it was discovered that only the Leningrad delegation acted on the side of Zinoviev with “monolithic unity,” but Stalin opposed all the other delegations, which also acted in the same “monolithic unity.” Zinoviev-Kamenev’s hopes for the support of the Moscow and Ukrainian delegations were not justified. The defeat of the “new opposition” was complete: Zinoviev lost his key posts as head of the Leningrad City Council and the Comintern, and Kamenev lost his post as head of Moscow.

Trotsky at this time completely ignores politics, immersing himself in work in the “technocratic” positions provided to him.

I diligently visited numerous laboratories, attended experiments with great interest, listened to the explanations of the best scientists, studied chemistry and hydrodynamics textbooks in my free hours and felt like half an administrator, half a student... As the head of the electrical engineering department, I visited power plants under construction and did, in particular, a trip to the Dnieper, where extensive preparatory work was carried out for the future hydroelectric station. Two boatmen lowered me between the rapids along the whirlpools in a fishing boat, along the old route of the Zaporozhye Cossacks. This was, of course, a purely sporting interest. But I became deeply interested in the Dnieper enterprise, both from an economic and technical point of view. To insure the hydroelectric station against miscalculations, I organized an American examination, subsequently supplemented by a German one. I tried to connect my new work not only with the current tasks of the economy, but also with the main problems of socialism. In the struggle against the stupid national approach to economic issues (“independence” through self-sufficient isolation), I put forward the problem of developing a system of comparative coefficients for our economy and the world. This problem arose from the need for correct orientation in the world market, which should, in turn, serve the objectives of import, export and concession policy. By its very essence, the problem of comparative coefficients, arising from the recognition of the dominance of world productive forces over national ones, meant a campaign against the reactionary theory of socialism in a particular country.

However, Trotsky’s activities in these positions did not bring any significant results, since these posts themselves were secondary and of little significance. According to Boris Bazhanov, “These appointments were both provocative and comical... Trotsky was not well suited for these fraudulent operations - that’s why he was probably appointed there. He was even less suitable for monitoring the quality of products of Soviet factories. A brilliant orator and polemicist, a tribune of difficult turning points, he was funny as an observer of the quality of Soviet pants and nails. However, he made an attempt to conscientiously fulfill this task assigned to him by the party; created a commission of specialists, toured a number of factories with it and presented the results of the study to the Supreme Council of the National Economy; His conclusions, of course, had no consequences.”

Beginning with his defeat in January, throughout 1925, Trotsky did not engage in any noticeable political activity, and did not even speak at the XIV Congress of the CPSU (b), gloatingly watching from the side the defeat of Zinoviev and Kamenev. However, it was in 1925 that Trotsky strengthened his position as an ideologist by publishing in Pravda a series of policy articles “Towards Socialism or Capitalism?”, developing the ideas of his supporters Preobrazhensky, Pyatakov and Smirnov. Trotsky’s articles were based primarily on Preobrazhensky’s work, “The Law of Socialist Primary Accumulation,” also published in 1925.

In all these works, Trotsky and his supporters put forward the ideological doctrine of so-called “super-industrialization.” One of the most fundamental contradictions between 19th-century orthodox Marxism and its actual implementation was already evident from 1917 - the revolution triumphed in peasant Russia, while Marx and Engels clearly believed during their lifetimes that this would happen in industrial Western Europe. Trotsky proposes to eliminate this contradiction by embarking on accelerated industrialization at the expense of the countryside. B. G. Bazhanov commented on this: “a purely Bolshevik approach: in order to do something, you need to rob someone.”

Trotsky proposes to pay primary attention to the development, first of all, of the military industry, and heavy industry, and the production of means of production. Such views are beginning to resonate with the platform of Zinoviev and Kamenev. By 1925, the material standard of living of workers in large industrial cities was still below 1913 levels. In this regard, in large cities, primarily in Leningrad and Moscow, dissatisfaction with the NEP regime grew increasingly stronger; such discontent was personified in the images of “NEPman” and “kulak”. Zinoviev and Kamenev, as heads of the Leningrad and Moscow party organizations, became conductors of such discontent.

The doctrine of “super-industrialization”, which Trotsky’s group and the Zinoviev-Kamenev group came to in parallel, gives them a convenient excuse to attack Stalin. Not wanting to give his competitors a trump card, Stalin turned to the future bloc of the “right” - Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky - as a “counterbalance”. Bukharin puts forward a competing ideological doctrine of “the growing of the peasant into socialism,” and harshly criticizes the doctrine of “super-industrialization,” accusing Trotsky’s supporters of instilling “internal colonialism” and robbing the countryside.
1926-1927. "United opposition" against the Stalin-Bukharin bloc [edit]

By the beginning of 1926, there was a convergence of the political platforms of the Trotsky group and the Zinoviev-Kamenev group based on a unity of views on the possibility of “building socialism in one country” and “super-industrialization.” In April-July 1926, the “old” (“Trotskyist”) and “new” (Zinovievsky-Kamenevsky) oppositions united (“Trotskyist-Zinovievsky bloc”), which was clearly evident at the plenums of the Central Committee held in April and July. Also adjacent to the block from the Trotsky side are A. A. Ioffe, V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, E. A. Preobrazhensky, N. N. Krestinsky, K. B. Radek, A. G. Beloborodov, I. T. Smilga. and others, on the part of Zinoviev - Sokolnikov G. Ya., Lashevich. The oppositionists are also joined by Lenin’s widow N. K. Krupskaya and fragments of the defeated “workers’ opposition”, primarily A. G. Shlyapnikov.

By 1926, the main oppositionists had completely lost real power. Trotsky lost the posts of People's Commissar of Military Affairs and Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, Zinoviev - chairman of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council and chairman of the executive committee of the Comintern, Kamenev - head of the Moscow party organization, deputy chairman of the People's Commissar and chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense. Although they still retain membership in the Central Committee, and even membership in the Politburo, at all plenums of the Central Committee, meetings of the Politburo and at all party congresses they already find themselves in the minority. In the absence of any power, the opposition can only transfer their struggle with Stalin into the realm of pure ideology in the hope of winning the party majority to their side. The opposition fiercely accuses the General Secretary of “bureaucratic degeneration of the party,” “movement towards Thermidor,” reluctance to carry out “super-industrialization” and sabotage of the construction of the “international system of socialism.”

As noted by a direct witness to these processes, B. G. Bazhanov, by 1926 Stalin had already generally completed the process of placing his supporters in all key positions in the party, and “continued this fuss with the opposition only in order to reveal his hidden enemies.”

A fierce ideological struggle is taking place against the backdrop of more and more mass recruitments of workers “from the machine” into the party organized by Stalin. In 1923, the party numbered 386 thousand people, in 1924 735 thousand people, in 1927 1,236 thousand, in 1930 1,971 thousand, in 1934 - 2,809 thousand people. If in 1917 the number of people with higher education in the Bolshevik party was 32% completed and 22% unfinished, as a result of the so-called “employment” the number of people with higher education by 1927 dropped to 1%, 27% of party members did not even have a primary education. The level of education, which was already low among the Bolsheviks compared to other revolutionary parties, fell sharply. Researcher N. N. Maslov points out that during the period 1920-1929, the number of the working class, due to the restoration of industry to the pre-war level, increased five times, primarily due to declassed peasant youth. In 1927-1929, every seventh worker could not read and write.

In such conditions, the fierce discussions raging at the top, during which the warring parties masked their thirst for power, “grinding” each other with complex ideological doctrines, or accusations of “deviating from Ilyich’s covenants,” are becoming more and more incomprehensible to the lower party ranks. As researcher V.Z. Rogovin notes, the unification of the Trotsky group and the Zinoviev-Kamenev group, which were until recently warring, in fact only led to their mutual discredit. Back in 1924, Zinoviev fiercely attacked Trotsky, developing the doctrine of “Trotskyism” as a “petty-bourgeois current hostile to Leninism.” In 1926, he chose to bloc with the same Trotsky. As Kirov S.M. later noted, “nowhere was Trotskyism so defeated... as in Leningrad [led by Zinoviev]... then suddenly the famous fraternization between Zinoviev and Trotsky suddenly took place. This step seemed to the Leningrad organization something completely magical.” In a private conversation with Trotsky, Zinoviev honestly admits that the doctrine of “Trotskyism” was entirely invented by him for the purpose of the struggle for power.

In the eyes of the “working” uneducated majority, such, in the words of B. G. Bazhanov, “volt-face” only led to an increasing loss of both the Zinovievs and the Trotskys of their authority. Stalin, meanwhile, uses the “compromising evidence” of his own opponents, now accusing the author of “Trotskyism” itself, Zinoviev, of “Trotskyism”, since he formed a bloc with Trotsky. During the “literary discussion” of 1924, Trotsky “reminded” Zinoviev and Kamenev of their position in October 1917; Now Stalin is happy to “intercept” these slogans too. Lenin's widow, Krupskaya N.K., at the XIV Congress of the CPSU (b) unsuccessfully tries to appeal to “party democracy”, reminding the delegates that Lenin himself was in the minority at the “Stockholm” congress, but no one listened to her. Stalin counters Krupskaya’s speech with a statement: “What, exactly, is different about Comrade. Krupskaya from any other responsible comrade? Don’t you think that the interests of individual comrades should be placed above the interests of the party and its unity? Don’t comrades from the opposition know that for us, for the Bolsheviks, formal democracy is a dummy, and the real interests of the party are everything?”

More and more often, Trotsky’s nationality is also being reproached; notes from localities with statements like “Trotsky rejects the possibility of building socialism in one country because, because of his nationality, he does not believe in the strength of the Russian people” are increasingly being submitted to the presidiums. “Trotsky could not be a communist; his very nationality indicates that he needs speculation.” In 1927, Trotsky attacked such notes, calling them “Black Hundreds”: “the devil knows what, they ask what kind of ‘means’ the opposition is using to carry out its ‘work’.” Here too, Stalin positions himself as a “moderate”, making an ambiguous statement that “we are fighting against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev not because they are Jews, but because they are oppositionists.”

In an effort to find a counterbalance to the ideological innovations of the oppositionists, Stalin united with the group N. I. Bukharin - A. I. Rykov - M. P. Tomsky, whose views were subsequently condemned as a “right deviation”. However, at this stage, one of the main party theorists, Bukharin, was still useful to Stalin. Bukharin fiercely attacks the “left” oppositionists, accusing their doctrine of “super-industrialization” of building “internal colonialism” and undermining the “bond” between city and countryside. From the point of view of the “right,” one of the sins of “Trotskyism” was excessive reliance only on the workers and neglect of the peasantry. At this stage, Stalin still positions himself as a “moderate” centrist, restraining the radicalism of both the left and right wings of the party. On the one hand, Stalin opposes the left with their demand for the continuation of the grueling “world revolution” and no less grueling industrialization. On the other hand, Stalin also “pulls back” the overly carried away Bukharin, condemning his famous slogan to the peasants “Get rich!” as “not ours.”

Maneuvering between his opponents, Stalin continues to restrain their particularly “bloodthirsty” statements, which at this stage sound much more militant than the statements of Stalin himself. Trotsky in 1927 describes Stalin's role as a "peacemaker" as follows:

At all cells, specially trained speakers raise the question of the opposition in such a way that a worker, most often along the line, gets up and says: “Why are you bothering with them, isn’t it time to shoot them?” Then the speaker, with a modestly hypocritical mien, objects: “comrades, there is no need to rush.” ... all this in order to evoke a frenzied reaction from the deceived listeners, from the raw young party members with whom you artificially fill the party ranks, and then to be able to say: “look, we would be ready to endure, but the masses demand.”

In January 1924, Stalin restrained Zinoviev, who demanded the arrest of Trotsky for the alleged preparation of a “Bonapartist” military coup; in July and December, Zinoviev demanded that Trotsky be expelled from the party. In December 1925, Stalin defended Bukharin from Zinoviev’s attacks. In 1926-1927, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were quite definitely “running ahead” of Stalin, demanding repression. Thus, Bukharin in November 1926 stated that

Comrade Zinoviev said... how well Ilyich dealt with the opposition, not turning everyone off when he had only two votes out of everyone at the professional meeting. Ilyich understood the matter: come on, exclude everyone when you have two votes (Laughter). But then, when you have everyone, and you have two voices against you, and these two voices are screaming about Thermidor, then you can think. (Exclams of “That’s right.” Applause, laughter. Stalin from his seat: “Great, Bukharin, great. He doesn’t speak, he cuts.”)

Tomsky in November 1927 expresses himself even more clearly:

The opposition very widely spreads rumors about repressions, about expected prisons, about Solovki, etc. To this we will say to nervous people: “If you still don’t calm down when we took you out of the party, then now we say: calm down, we’re just We will politely ask you to sit down, because it is uncomfortable for you to stand. If you now try to go to the factories and factories, we will say “please sit down” (Stormy applause), because, comrades, in the situation of the dictatorship of the proletariat there can be two or four parties, but only under one condition: one party will be in power , and everyone else is in prison." (Applause).

Rykov speaks in the same spirit, at the XV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in December 1927, who noted that “one cannot guarantee that the population of prisons will not have to be increased somewhat in the near future.” As a gift to the congress, the delegates were sent a broom from Stalingrad. Rykov personally handed it to Stalin with the words: “I give the broom to Comrade Stalin, let him sweep out our enemies with it.”

The majority organized by Stalin is increasingly pushing the oppositionists out of the legal field, depriving them of the opportunity to conduct discussions at plenums, congresses, and in the press. In July 1926, Zinovievite Lashevich organized an illegal meeting of the opposition in a forest near Moscow, for which Zinoviev was removed from the Politburo as “leading factional activities.” The intensity of passions leads to the fact that during the joint July plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, F. E. Dzerzhinsky has a heart attack right in the meeting room, and on July 20 he dies.

In the fall of 1926, the opposition tried to organize campaigning in the “grassroots” party cells, which was accompanied by well-organized obstructions and expulsions of opposition supporters from the party “for factional activities.” Trotsky furiously attacks Stalin, declaring that “ideological squalor has been replaced by apparatus omnipotence,” and “a caste has been created at the top, divorced from the masses.”

The device gave a furious rebuff. The ideological struggle was replaced by administrative mechanics: telephone calls from the party bureaucracy to meetings of workers' cells, frantic congestion of cars, blaring horns, well-organized whistles and roars when oppositionists appeared on the podium. The ruling faction pressed with mechanical concentration of its forces and the threat of repression. Before the party masses had time to hear, understand and say anything, they were afraid of a split and disaster.

At the same time, oppositionists Zinoviev, Peterson, Muralov and Trotsky, in their letter to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the Presidium of the Central Control Commission, and the Executive Committee of the Comintern dated September 6, 1927, admit that “in the past of our party such means [disruption of meetings] were used by us at meetings , convened by bourgeois parties, as well as at meetings with the Mensheviks after the final split with them. Within our party, such methods must be most resolutely prohibited, because they interfere with the solution of party issues through party means.”

The gradual “squeezing out” of the oppositionists beyond the framework of “Soviet legality” leads to the fact that, under the pretext of “violation of party discipline,” Trotsky and Kamenev were expelled from the Politburo in October 1926. Also in the fall of 1926, N.K. Krupskaya left the opposition, declaring that “the opposition has gone too far.” Nevertheless, Trotsky remained a member of the Central Committee, from time to time violently attacking Stalin at his plenums. On November 26, 1926, Kamenev L.B. was removed from Russia and sent to Italy as a plenipotentiary. One of the main “Zinovievites”, Sokolnikov G. Ya., back on January 16, 1926, was transferred from the post of People’s Commissar of Finance to the post of Deputy Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR.

The gradual “agony” of the opposition is being postponed for some time by the political crisis in China. At the end of 1926, the Stalin-Bukharin bloc insisted that the Communist Party of China pursue a moderate policy and form an alliance with the Kuomintang movement led by Chiang Kai Shek. Such tactics were sharply different from the tactics of the Communists themselves in 1917, and ended in failure; in April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, fearing rivalry with the Chinese communists, dispersed them by force.

The political crisis in China was widely used by the opposition to criticize Stalin as "sabotage of the construction of the international system of socialism." Trotsky described the Chinese events as "the obvious bankruptcy of Stalin's policy."

In June 1927, the main control body of the party, the Central Control Commission, considered the cases of Zinoviev and Trotsky, but decided not to expel them from the party. In July, Trotsky puts forward the ambiguous “Clemenceau thesis,” which Stalin described on August 1 at the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission as a promise to “seize power by rebel means in the event of war.” The majority organized by Stalin condemns Trotsky for “conditional defencism” and the desire to “organize a second party " At the same time, Stalin opposed the expulsion of Trotsky from the party; as a result, the plenum was limited to the announcement of a severe reprimand to Zinoviev and Trotsky.

In the fall of 1927, Stalin finally “squeezed” the left opposition out of the framework of “Soviet legality.” In September, oppositionists organized illegal workers' meetings in Moscow and Leningrad, which were attended by up to 20 thousand people. In a number of cities, speeches by oppositionists at meetings of party activists are interrupted by shouts and whistles; in Leningrad, during a speech by the opposition in the conference hall, the lights were turned off; at a meeting of the party activists of the Petrograd region, the opposition speaker was attacked and the draft resolution he proposed was torn up. A number of oppositionists receive assignments abroad, in particular, G.I. Safarov, who has never worked in trade, is “exiled” to the Soviet trade mission in Turkey, but refused to leave. Mass expulsions of ordinary oppositionists from the party began, reaching at least 600 people by November 1927; on August 26, a directive was issued not to accept opposition candidates as party members.

To print propaganda literature, an illegal printing house is organized following the model of pre-revolutionary underground activities.

On November 7, 1927, an opposition demonstration takes place on the anniversary of the October Revolution. The demonstration was organized under the leadership of Smilga and Preobrazhensky in Moscow near the former Paris Hotel on the corner of Okhotny Ryad and Tverskaya Street, and under the leadership of Zinoviev, Radek and Lashevich in Leningrad. Opposition demonstrations were attacked by crowds who threw “ice floes, potatoes and firewood” at them, shouted slogans “beat the opposition”, “down with the opposition Jews”, etc. Smilga, Preobrazhensky, Grunstein, Enukidze and others were dragged from the balcony by the crowd, and beaten, several shots were fired after the car with Trotsky, Kamenev and Muralov, after which unknown persons attempted to pull them out of the car.

On November 11, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) demands that the opposition stop illegal meetings in private apartments (the so-called “smychki”), in some cases gathering several hundred people, and taking place, in particular, at the Technical School. A number of such meetings were accompanied by clashes with Stalin’s supporters, in particular, according to Trotsky, in Kharkov it came down to “revolving shots.”

At the joint XIII Congress of the RCP (b) (May, 1924) of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, Trotsky demands that the “Testament of Lenin” be read out, and, in accordance with it, Stalin be removed from the post of General Secretary. Stalin is forced to actually announce the text of the “Testament”. At the XIII Congress of the RCP (b) (May, 1924), Stalin asked the plenum of the Central Committee to accept his resignation from the post of General Secretary, but the Central Committee, controlled by Stalin himself, did not accept the resignation.

The organization of an illegal printing house and an illegal October demonstration by the oppositionists became the reason for the expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky from the party on November 16, 1927. During these events, one of Trotsky’s main supporters, the terminally ill Ioffe A.A., committed suicide.
“Export of revolution” projects [edit]
Soviet-Polish War (January 1920 - March 1921) [edit]
Main article: Soviet-Polish War
Project for a campaign to help the Hungarian Soviet Republic [edit]
India Trek Project[edit]
In power [edit]

"Red" propaganda poster, 1919

OSVAG poster “Peace and freedom in the Soviet Deputies”. 1919

“White” poster “Lenin and Trotsky - “doctors” of sick Russia”

Awards [edit]

Trotsky's period as pre-revolutionary military council and people's commissar for military affairs coincided with the formation of a new state, military and propaganda machine, one of the founders of which was Trotsky himself. An integral part of the propaganda system built by the Bolsheviks was the glorification of honored figures of the revolution, their election to the “honorary presidiums” of a variety of congresses and meetings (from party congresses to school meetings), the receipt of various kinds of honorary titles (“honorary miner”, “honorary metallurgist” ", "honorary Red Army soldier", etc.), renaming cities, hanging portraits and publishing romanticized biographies.

One of the forms of glorifying honored figures of the revolution in early Soviet propaganda was “leaderism,” which as such appeared even before October 1917. Even Ataman Kaledin in August 1917 called himself “leader of the army,” and one of the obvious manifestations of “leaderism” was the pronounced cult of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, popular among soldiers, which spread at least since 1915. In Soviet propaganda, Lenin was usually called the “leader of the revolution”, and Trotsky - the “leader of the Red Army”. During the Civil War, two armored trains were named after Trotsky, No. 12 named after Trotsky and No. 89 named after Trotsky. Such names were quite common; The Red Army also included, for example, armored train No. 10 named after Rosa Luxemburg, No. 44 named after Volodarsky, or No. 41 “Glorious Leader of the Red Army Egorov.”

At least since 1919, the election of “Lenin and Trotsky” to the so-called “honorary presidiums” has become traditional. So, on November 4, 1923, Lenin, Trotsky and Rykov were elected to the honorary presidium of the Red Rubber plant. In August 1924, Rykov and Trotsky (mentioned in this order) were elected to the honorary presidium of the First All-Union Chess and Checkers Congress. In his memoirs, Trotsky mentions other examples: back in November 1919, the Second All-Russian Congress of Muslim Communist Peoples of the East elected Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Stalin as its honorary members; in April 1920, the same composition was elected as the honorary presidium of the First All-Russian Congress of Chuvash Communist Sections.

The total number of such “honorary presidiums” cannot be counted, as well as the number of various kinds of honorary titles. Lenin was elected as an “honorary Red Army soldier” by a total of about twenty different military units, the last time just before his death. Trotsky was also elected an “honorary Red Army soldier” and even an “honorary Komsomol member.” In April 1923, a meeting of workers at the Glukhov factory named after Lenin decided to appoint Trotsky as an honorary spinner in the seventh category, and the representative of this factory, Andreev, speaking at the XII Congress of the RCP (b), stated that “And one more order I must tell you from our workers is that The deadline for Comrade Trotsky to appear at the factory is May 1, and we ask the presidium to tell Comrade Trotsky to show up at our factory at least once during the entire revolution and say his weighty word to our workers.” Researchers Pykhalova and Denisov also indicate that Trotsky in the 1920s was also listed as the honorary chief of the Kondrovskaya and Troitskaya paper mills in the Kaluga region. In 1922, the destroyer Lieutenant Ilyin was named after Trotsky.

In 1923, as a sign of Trotsky’s services to Bolshevism during the fight against the forces of Kerensky-Krasnov in 1917 and during the defense of Petrograd in 1919, the city of Gatchina was renamed the city of Trotsk, and on November 5, 1923, the city council even elected Lenin as its “honorary chairmen” , Trotsky and Zinoviev.

In fact, by the end of the Civil War, the “cult of Trotsky” was being formed as an honored figure of the revolution and the Civil War. Its peculiarity, in comparison with the later “cult of personality of Stalin,” was that the “cult of Trotsky” existed in parallel with a number of other “cults” comparable in size: the cult of personality of Lenin, the cult of the “Leningrad leader” and the “leader of the Comintern” Zinoviev, the cults of Krupskaya, Tomsky, Rykov, Kosior, Kalinin, the cults of a number of military leaders of the Civil War (Tukhachevsky, Frunze, Voroshilov, Budyonny), etc., up to the smaller cult of the famous poet Demyan Bedny, in whose honor it was named in 1925 city ​​of Spassk. Researcher Sergei Firsov considers the Bolshevik cults of revolutionary figures to be an “inverted” version of the Christian cult of saints. According to Sergei Firsov, after Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927 and expelled from the USSR in 1929, the process of his “desacralization” began, which can be traced through biographical information in the notes to editions of Lenin’s collected works. In 1929, Trotsky was designated in them as “expelled from the USSR”, in 1930, as a “social democrat”, in 1935 his “social democracy”-“Trotskyism” was already characterized as “the vanguard of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie”. Already since 1938, Trotsky has been described as a universal anti-hero, a fiend of the “bourgeois-fascist” hell, a demon of the world communist system.

Order of the Red Banner in commemoration of services to the world proletarian revolution and the workers' and peasants' army, and specifically for the defense of Petrograd, by a resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Council of Workers, Peasants, Cossacks and Red Army Deputies of November 7, 1919.

In 1929, he was exiled on the Soviet ship "Ilyich" outside the USSR - to Turkey to the island of Buyukada or Prinkipo - the largest of the Princes' Islands in the Sea of ​​Marmara near Istanbul. In 1932 he was deprived of Soviet citizenship. In 1933 he moved to France, in 1935 to Norway. Norway, fearing to worsen relations with the USSR, tried with all its might to get rid of the unwanted immigrant, confiscating all of Trotsky’s works and placing him under house arrest, and Trotsky was also threatened to hand him over to the Soviet government. Unable to withstand the oppression, Trotsky emigrated to Mexico in 1936, where he lived in the house of the family of artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

In early August 1936, Trotsky completed work on the book “The Revolution Betrayed,” in which he called what was happening in the Soviet Union “Stalin’s Thermidor.” Trotsky accused Stalin of Bonapartism.

Trotsky wrote that “the lead backside of the bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution,” while he stated that “with the help of the petty bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy managed to tie the proletarian vanguard hand and foot and crush the Bolshevik opposition”; His real indignation was the strengthening of the family in the USSR, he wrote: “The revolution made a heroic attempt to destroy the so-called “family hearth,” that is, an archaic, musty and inert institution... The place of the family... was supposed to be taken, according to the plan, by a complete system of public care and services..."

In 1938 he proclaimed the creation of the Fourth International, the heirs of which still exist.

In 1938, Trotsky’s eldest son, Lev Sedov, died in a hospital in Paris after an operation.
Trotsky Archive [edit]

During his exile from the USSR in 1929, Trotsky was able to take out his personal archive. This archive included copies of a number of documents signed by Trotsky during his time in power in the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, the Central Committee, the Comintern, a number of Lenin’s notes addressed personally to Trotsky and not published anywhere else, also a number of valuable information for historians about the revolutionary movement before 1917, thousands letters received by Trotsky, and copies of letters sent to him, telephone and address books, etc. Relying on his archive, Trotsky in his memoirs easily cites a number of documents signed by him, including sometimes even secret ones. In total, the archive consisted of 28 boxes.

Stalin was unable to prevent Trotsky from taking out his archives (or he was allowed to, which Stalin later in personal conversations called a big mistake, as well as deportation), however, in the 30s, GPU agents repeatedly tried (sometimes successfully) to steal some of their fragments, and in March 1931, some of the documents were burned during a suspicious fire. In March 1940, Trotsky, in dire need of money and fearing that the archive would eventually fall into the hands of Stalin, sold most of his papers to Harvard University.

At the same time, a number of other documents related to Trotsky’s activities are, according to historian Yu. G. Felshtinsky, also in other places, in particular, in the archives of the President of the Russian Federation, in the archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, etc. .
Murder [edit]
Main article: Operation Duck

In May 1940, an unsuccessful attempt was made on Trotsky's life. The assassination attempt was led by secret NKVD agent Grigulevich. The group of raiders was led by the Mexican artist and convinced Stalinist Siqueiros. Having burst into the room where Trotsky was, the attackers shot all the cartridges without aim and hastily disappeared. Trotsky, who managed to hide behind the bed with his wife and grandson, was not injured. According to Siqueiros, the failure was due to the fact that the members of his group were inexperienced and very worried.

Early in the morning of August 20, 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader, who had previously penetrated Trotsky’s entourage as a staunch supporter of his, came to Trotsky to show his manuscript. Trotsky sat down to read it, and at that time Mercader hit him on the head with an ice pick, which he carried under his cloak. The blow was struck from behind and above the seated Trotsky. The wound reached 7 centimeters in depth, but Trotsky lived for almost another day after receiving the wound and died on August 21. After cremation, he was buried in the courtyard of a house in Coyocan.

The Soviet government publicly denied its involvement in the murder. The killer was sentenced by a Mexican court to twenty years in prison; in 1960, Ramon Mercader, who was released from prison and came to the USSR, was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin.

Protocol of the decision to expel Trotsky from the USSR

On deathbed

Trotsky's grave

Rehabilitation [edit]

Leon Trotsky was not officially rehabilitated by the Soviet government. And even during the period of Perestroika and Glasnost, M. S. Gorbachev, on behalf of the CPSU, condemned the historical role of Trotsky.

At the request of the Memorial Research Center, L. D. Trotsky (Bronstein) was rehabilitated on May 21, 1992 by the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation (resolution of the OS KOGPU dated December 31, 1927 on deportation for 3 years to Siberia), and then rehabilitated on June 16, 2001 by the General Prosecutor's Office Russian Federation (decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated January 10, 1929 and resolution of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR dated February 20, 1932 on expulsion from the USSR, deprivation of citizenship with a ban on entry into the USSR). Certificates of rehabilitation No. 13/2182-90, No. 13-2200-99 (Archive of the National Research Center "Memorial").
Memory [edit]

In 1923-1929. the city of Gatchina in the Leningrad region was called Trotsk.
In 1923-1929. the city of Chapaevsk in the Samara region was called Trotsk.
In 1921-1928. Nakhimov Avenue in Sevastopol was called Trotsky Street.
In 1923-1929. Shevchenko Square in Dnepropetrovsk was called Trotsky Square, 8 March Street was called Trotsky Street.
Central Moscow Airfield named after. Until 1925, M. V. Frunze bore the name of Trotsky.
In 1926-1928. Ozemblovsky Street in Belgorod was called Trotsky Street.

Descendants of Trotsky[edit]

All descendants of Trotsky:

From his first marriage to Alexandra Sokolovskaya (born 1872, executed 1938)

Nina Bronstein (married Nevelson) (born 1902, died of tuberculosis 1928)
Lev Nevelson (born December 3, 1921, disappeared without a trace)
Volina Nevelson (born 1925, disappeared without a trace)
Zinaida Volkova (born 1901, committed suicide 1933)
Alexandra Moglina (married Bakhvalova) (1923-1989), was repressed, rehabilitated in 1956
Olga Bakhvalova (born 1958, lives in Moscow)
Vsevolod Volkov (aka Esteban Volkov Bronstein). His three daughters live in Mexico
Veronica Volkova (born 1954, Mexico City)
Nora Dolores Volkova (born March 27, 1955), emigrated to the USA
Patricia Volkow-Fernandez (born 1956)
Natalia Volkov-Fernandez (Patricia and Natalia are twins)

Lev Sedov (born 1906, died in 1938 after surgery, wife Anna Samoilovna Ryabukhina was shot on January 8, 1938)
Lev Lvovich Sedov (born 1926, disappeared without a trace in 1937)
Sergei Sedov (born 1908, executed in the USSR in 1937) + Henrietta Rubinstein
Yulia Rubinstein (married Axelrod)
David Axelrod (born 1961, lives in Israel)

Known descendants[edit]

During the struggle for power within the CPSU (b), all four of Trotsky’s children from two marriages died, as well as his first wife and sister, two nephews (sons of Olga’s sister) and two sons-in-law (daughter’s second husband Platon Volkov and sister Kamenev’s first husband). Even the sister of his second wife, Natalya Sedova, was repressed.

Trotsky's daughter Nina Nevelson died of tuberculosis in 1928 during Trotsky's exile in Alma-Ata, and Trotsky himself was denied permission to visit her. The second daughter, Zinaida Volkova, also became infected with tuberculosis and received permission from the Soviet authorities to go to Berlin for treatment. In January 1933, after Germany demanded that she immediately leave the country, she committed suicide in a state of depression.

Trotsky's eldest son Lev Sedov, an active Trotskyist and one of his father's closest aides during the Alma-Ata exile and after expulsion from the USSR, died after an operation in Paris in 1938 under suspicious circumstances. Trotsky dedicated the article “Lev Sedov. Son, friend, fighter,” in which he actually blamed “GPU poisoners” for his death.

Trotsky's other son, Sergei Sedov, refused to take part in his father's political activities. According to Trotsky himself, Sergei “turned his back on politics from the age of 12.” During his father’s exile, he visited him several times; during his exile, he traveled with him to Odessa, but refused to leave the USSR.

On the night of March 3-4, 1935, Sergei Sedov was arrested on suspicion of connections with Kamenev’s nephew L.B., Rosenfeld Boris Nikolaevich. In May 1935, Trotsky managed to receive a message about the arrest of his son. Trotsky and Natalya Sedova tried to appeal to the international community, but to no avail; all their letters were ignored. The investigation's version of the preparation by Sedov and Rosenfeld for the murder of Stalin was not confirmed, but Sedov himself, by a resolution of an extrajudicial body - the Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR - in July 1935 was exiled for 5 years to Krasnoyarsk for "Trotskyist talk." By the time his son was expelled from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk, Trotsky was already in a gradually increasing isolation from news from the USSR, and in his diary he only noted that letters from his son had stopped, “obviously, he was expelled from Moscow.”

In September, Sergey Sedov was hired as a specialist engineer for gas generator units at the Krasnoyarsk Machine-Building Plant. Already in May-June 1936, Sergei Sedov was arrested on charges of so-called “sabotage” and an attempt to allegedly “poison workers with generator gas.” According to the research of historian Dmitry Volkogonov, the pretext for the repression was an incident: the mechanic on duty B. Rogozov fell asleep, forgetting to turn off the gasifier tap, after which the workshop was filled with gas. In the morning, the workers ventilated the room; the incident did not cause any consequences.

On October 29, 1937, Sergei Sedov was shot without pleading guilty or giving any evidence. Sergei Sedov's wife, Henrietta Rubinstein, was sentenced to 20 years in the camps, the couple is survived by their daughter Yulia (married Axelrod, born August 21, 1936, emigrated to the USA in 1979, and to Israel in 2004). By the time his son was executed, Trotsky’s isolation from events in the USSR had become final: at least as early as August 24, 1938, he did not know about what had happened, believing that Sergei Sedov “disappeared without a trace.”
Mexican passport of Natalia Sedova

Trotsky's sister and first wife of Kamenev L.B. - Olga - was expelled from Moscow in 1935. Both of her children (Trotsky’s nephews) were shot in 1938-1939, Olga Trotskaya herself was shot in 1941.

The grandson of Leon Trotsky (the son of his eldest daughter Zinaida Volkova) - Vsevolod Platonovich Volkov (Seva, born March 7, 1926, Moscow) - later the Mexican chemist and Trotskyist Esteban Volkov Bronstein. One of the four daughters of Vsevolod (great-granddaughters of L. D. Trotsky) - Nora D. Volkow (born March 27, 1956, Mexico City) - a famous American psychiatrist, professor at Brookhaven National Laboratory, since 2003 - director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse within the National Institutes of Health (USA). Another daughter is Patricia Volkow-Fernández (born March 27, 1956, Mexico City) - a Mexican doctor, author of scientific research in the field of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. The eldest daughter, Veronica Volkow, born 1955, Mexico City, is a famous Mexican poet and art critic. The youngest daughter, Natalia Volkow, or Natalia Volkow Fernández, is an economist and deputy director for relations with educational institutions at the Mexican National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics.

As for Trotsky's great-great-grandchildren, they currently live in three different countries: Olga Bakhvalova's daughter in Moscow, several grandchildren of Vsevolod Volkov in Mexico City, as well as three children of David Axelrod in Israel.
Trotsky in culture [edit]

Two full-length feature films were shot about Trotsky: “The Assassination of Trotsky” (USA, 1972) with Richard Burton in the title role and “Trotsky” (Russia, 1993) with Viktor Sergachev. The image of Trotsky is also present in the films “Hostile Whirlwinds”, “In the Days of October”, “Red Bells. Film 2. I saw the birth of a new world”, “Frida”, “Zina”, “Yesenin”, “Stolypin”, “Romanovs”, “Fights. A woman classified as "secret", "The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno", "The Passion for Chapai" and many others.

Trotsky became the prototype of the “leader of the opposition” in two novels by J. Orwell - “Animal Farm” (Snowball - Snowball) and “1984” (Goldstein).
See also [edit]

Leon Trotsky House Museum in Mexico City
Trotskyism
Trotsky and Lenin
Trotsky (film, 2009)

Notes [edit]

State power of the USSR. Supreme authorities and management and their leaders. 1923-1991 / Comp. V. I. Ivkin. - M.: “Russian Political Encyclopedia”, 1999.
CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE CPSU, CPSU(b), RCP(b), RSDLP(b): Historical and biographical reference book / Comp. Goryachev Yu. V. - M.: Parade Publishing House, 2005.
1 2 Ivan Krivushin, encyclopedia “Around the World”
Plekhanov's pseudonym.
Figures of the USSR and the revolutionary movement of Russia. Encyclopedic Dictionary Pomegranate. Moscow: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1989. p. 720
1 2 Transcripts of the court of time. 23. Trotsky
1 2 Trotsky L. D. My life. M., 2001. P. 140
Figures of the USSR and the revolutionary movement of Russia. Encyclopedic Dictionary Pomegranate. Moscow: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1989. p. 721.
Lunacharsky A. Lev Davidovich Trotsky // Silhouettes: political portraits. M., 1991. P. 343
Trotsky L. D. My life. pp. 156-159
Deutscher I. Armed Prophet. M., 2006. P. 90
World Socialist Web Site - Russian Edition
Read online "Leon Trotsky. Revolutionary. 1879–1917" by Yuri Georgievich Felshtinsky - RuLIT.Net - Page 51. Retrieved April 27, 2013.
S. Tyutyukin, V. Shelokhaev. Strategy and tactics of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the revolution
Pseudology.org
Stalin I.V. October Revolution // Pravda. November 6, 1918.
Stalin I.V. Trotskyism or Leninism?
L. Trotsky. Stalin's school of falsifications
Lantsov S.A. Terror and terrorists: Dictionary.. - St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg Publishing House. University, 2004. - 187 p.
Trotsky L. “Terrorism and communism.” P. 64. // Akim Arutyunov “Lenin’s dossier without retouching”
Semyon (Simon) Isaevich Liberman. Building Lenin’s Russia - Building Lenin’s Russia

1 2 Boris Bazhanov. Memoirs of Stalin's former secretary
Russia in the 20th century: M. Geller, A. Nekrich
On the issue of nationalities or autonomy
CHAPTER 13. GPU. THE ESSENCE OF POWER
The mystery of Lenin's death. Death of Lenin. Lenin V.I.
CHAPTER 5. OBSERVATIONS OF THE POLITBURO SECRETARY
Stalin I.V. About the discussion, about Rafail, about the articles of Preobrazhensky and Sapronov and about Trotsky’s letter
http://kz44.narod.ru/kadry_1930_5.htm
Кандидат Ð¸ÑÑ‚Ð¾Ñ€Ð¸Ñ‡ÐµÑÐºÐ¸Ñ Ð½Ð°ÑƒÐº, доцент преподаватеÐ"ÑŒ
http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/coe21/publish/no5_ses/glava04.pdf p. 97
CHAPTER 4. STALIN'S ASSISTANT - POLITBURO SECRETARY
CHAPTER 7. I BECOME AN ANTI-COMMUNIST
Stalin I.V. On the results of the XIII Congress of the RCP (b): Report at the courses of secretaries of the committees of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) June 17, 1924
Kamenev L. B. at the XIV Congress of the CPSU (b) - 1925
PowWeb. Archived from the original on April 3, 2013. Retrieved April 1, 2013.
(K. Marx, F. Engels, Works, vol. 4, p. 334)
Stalin's foreign policy doctrine. Chapter 1
CHAPTER 11. POLITIBURO MEMBERS
CHAPTER 12. STALIN'S COUP
Smilga Ivar Tenisovich
Armored trains of the Red Army in 1918-1920
career advice | Stewart Cooper Coon Blog - About airplanes and aviation IL2U.ru
Altai Truth N 310-312 (24929 - 24931), Friday November 05, 2004
A book about Stalin. Stalin in the People's Commissariat of Nationalities
Gatchina
The mystery of the monuments to Lenin in Gatchina
Inverted religion: Soviet mythology and communist cult - Orthodoxia.org
"Izvestia" 09.11.1919.
Platonov O. A. History of the Russian people in the 20th century. Volume 1
On 9 Thermidor, according to the French republican calendar, the Jacobin radical government of Robespierre was overthrown
L. D. Trotsky. Revolution Betrayed: What is the USSR and where is it going?
Almost immediately after his death, a version appeared about the involvement of the NKVD in it. There is no documentary evidence of this. The version of the murder is denied by both defector Walter Krivitsky (“I was an agent of Stalin”) and one of the leaders of the NKVD at that time, P. A. Sudoplatov
MILITARY LITERATURE -[ Biographies ]- Heroes and anti-heroes of the Fatherland
Encyclopedia for children. Russian history. XX century / chapters. ed. S. Ismailova - M: Avanta+, 1995. - P. 254.
M. S. Gorbachev. October and perestroika: the revolution continues. // Communist. 1987. No. 17. P.10-15.
V. V. Iofe. Understanding the Gulag. National Research Center "Memorial"
Library of the Independent Academy. Yu. B. Borev. Power-faces
You can read about the circumstances of this from Joseph Berger.
Leon Trotsky on IMDb
Isaac Deutscher: the prophet, his biographer and the watchtower
George Orwell: The Critical Heritage Book by Jeffrey Meyers; Routledge, 1997

Literature [edit]

Deutscher I. Trotsky. Armed Prophet. 1879-1921 - M.: ZAO Tsentrpoligraf, 2006. - P. 527. - ISBN 5-9524-2147-4
Deutscher I. Trotsky. Unarmed Prophet. 1921-1929 - M.: ZAO Tsentrpoligraf, 2006. - P. 495. - ISBN 5-9524-2155-5
Deutscher I. Trotsky. Exiled Prophet. 1929-1940 - M.: ZAO Tsentrpoligraf, 2006. - P. 527. - ISBN 5-9524-2157-1
See also excerpts: “Trotsky in the October Revolution”; "Drama of Brest-Litovsk"
David King. Trotsky. Biography in photographic documents. - Ekaterinburg: "SV-96", 2000. - ISBN 5-89516-100-6
Paporov Yu. N. Trotsky. The murder of the "big entertainer". - St. Petersburg: Publishing House "Neva", 2005. - P. 384. - ISBN 5-7654-4399-0
Vadim Rogovin. “Was there an alternative?”: ““Trotskyism” - a look through the years”, “Power and oppositions”, “Stalin’s neo-NEP”, “1937”, “Party of the executed”, “World revolution and world war”, “The end means the beginning” .
Isaac Don Levine. The Mind of an Assassin, New York, New American Library/Signet Book, 1960.
Dave Renton. Trotsky, 2004.
Sirotkin, Vladlen G. Why did Trotsky lose to Stalin? M., Algorithm, 2004.
Leon Trotsky: the Man and His Work. Reminiscences and Appraisals, ed. Joseph Hansen. New York, Merit Publishers, 1969.
The Unknown Lenin, ed. Richard Pipes (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996).
Mikhail Stanchev, Georgy Chernyavsky. L. D. Trotsky, Bulgaria and the Bulgarians. Sofia, BAN, 2008.
Robert Service. Trotsky: A Biography (Harvard, Belknap Press, 2009).
Gergiy Chernyavsky. Leon Trotsky. M.: Young Guard, 2010 (Life of wonderful people, 1261).
Kembaev Zh. M. The idea of ​​the “United States of Europe” in the political and legal views of V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky // Law and Politics. 2011. No. 9. P.1551-1557.
D. A. Volkogonov. Trotsky; "Demon of the Revolution" M.: Yauza, Eksmo, 2011. 704 pp., Series “10 Leaders”, 2000 copies, ISBN 978-5-699-52130-2
Stoleshnikov A.P., “There will be no rehabilitation! Anti-Archipelago", 2005.

TROTSKY(real name Bronstein) Lev Davidovich (1879-1940), Russian politician. In the Social Democratic movement since 1896. Since 1904 he advocated the unification of the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. In 1905, he basically developed the theory of “permanent” (continuous) revolution: according to Trotsky, the Russian proletariat, having realized the bourgeois one, will begin the socialist stage of the revolution, which will win only with the help of the world proletariat. During the revolution of 1905-07 he proved himself to be an extraordinary organizer, speaker, and publicist; the de facto leader of the St. Petersburg Council of Workers' Deputies, editor of its Izvestia. He belonged to the most radical wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In 1908-12, editor of the newspaper Pravda. In 1917, chairman of the Petrograd Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, one of the leaders of the October armed uprising. In 1917-18, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs; in 1918-25, People's Commissar for Military Affairs, Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic; one of the founders of the Red Army, personally led its actions on many fronts of the Civil War, and made extensive use of repression. Member of the Central Committee in 1917-27, member of the Politburo of the Central Committee in October 1917 and in 1919-26. Trotsky's fierce struggle with I.V. Stalin for leadership ended in Trotsky's defeat - in 1924 Trotsky's views (so-called Trotskyism) were declared a "petty-bourgeois deviation" in the RCP(b). In 1927 he was expelled from the party, exiled to Alma-Ata, and in 1929 - abroad. He sharply criticized the Stalinist regime as a bureaucratic degeneration of proletarian power. Initiator of the creation of the 4th International (1938). Killed in Mexico by an NKVD agent, Spaniard R. Mercader. Many of his works describe the history of Russia. Author of literary critical articles, memoirs "My Life" (Berlin, 1930).

TROTSKY Lev Davidovich(real name and last name Leiba Bronstein), Russian and international political figure, publicist, thinker.

Childhood and youth

Born into the family of a wealthy landowner from among the Jewish colonists. His father only learned to read in his old age. Trotsky's childhood languages ​​were Ukrainian and Russian; he never mastered Yiddish. He studied at a real school in Odessa and Nikolaev, where he was the first student in all disciplines. He was interested in drawing and literature, wrote poetry, translated Krylov's fables from Russian into Ukrainian, and participated in the publication of a school handwritten magazine. During these years, his rebellious character first appeared: due to a conflict with a French teacher, he was temporarily expelled from the school.

Political universities

In 1896 in Nikolaev, young Lev joined a circle whose members studied scientific and popular literature. At first he sympathized with the ideas of the populists and vehemently rejected Marxism, considering it a dry and alien teaching. Already during this period, many traits of his personality appeared - a sharp mind, polemical gift, energy, self-confidence, ambition, and a penchant for leadership.

Together with other members of the circle, Bronstein taught political literacy to workers, took an active part in writing proclamations, publishing a newspaper, and acted as a speaker at rallies, putting forward demands of an economic nature.

In January 1898 he was arrested along with like-minded people. During the investigation, Bronstein studied English, German, French and Italian from the Gospels, studied the works of Marx, becoming a fanatical adherent of his teachings, and became acquainted with the works of Lenin. He was convicted and sentenced to four years of exile in Eastern Siberia. While under investigation in Butyrka prison, he married a fellow revolutionary, Alexandra Sokolovskaya.

Since the fall of 1900, the young family was in exile in the Irkutsk province. Bronstein worked as a clerk for a millionaire Siberian merchant, then collaborated with the Irkutsk newspaper Eastern Review, where he published literary critical articles and essays about Siberian life. It was here that his extraordinary ability to use a pen first appeared. In 1902, Bronstein, with the consent of his wife, leaving her with two small daughters - Zina and Nina, fled alone abroad. When escaping, he entered into a false passport his new surname, borrowed from the warden of an Odessa prison, Trotsky, by which he became known throughout the world.

First emigration

Arriving in London, Trotsky became close to the leaders of Russian Social Democracy living in exile. He read abstracts defending Marxism in the colonies of Russian emigrants in England, France, Germany, and Switzerland. Four months after his arrival from Russia, Trotsky, at the suggestion of Lenin, who highly appreciated the abilities and energy of the young adept, was co-opted to the editorial office of Iskra.

In 1903 in Paris, Trotsky married Natalya Sedova, who became his faithful companion and shared all the ups and downs that abounded in his life.

In the summer of 1903, Trotsky participated in the Second Congress of Russian Social Democracy, where he supported Martov’s position on the issue of the party charter. After the congress, Trotsky, together with the Mensheviks, accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of dictatorship and destruction of the unity of the Social Democrats. But in the fall of 1904, a conflict broke out between Trotsky and the leaders of Menshevism over the issue of attitude towards the liberal bourgeoisie and he became a “non-factional” Social Democrat, claiming to create a movement that would stand above the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

Revolution 1905-1907

Having learned about the beginning of the revolution in Russia, Trotsky returned to his homeland illegally. He spoke in the press, taking radical positions. In October 1905 he became deputy chairman, then chairman of the St. Petersburg Council of Workers' Deputies. In December, he was arrested along with the council.

In prison he created the work “Results and Prospects”, where the theory of “permanent” revolution was formulated. Trotsky proceeded from the uniqueness of the historical path of Russia, where tsarism should be replaced not by bourgeois democracy, as the liberals and Mensheviks believed, and not by the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, as the Bolsheviks believed, but by the power of the workers, which was supposed to impose its will on the entire population of the country and rely on the world revolution.

In 1907, Trotsky was sentenced to eternal settlement in Siberia with deprivation of all civil rights, but on the way to his place of exile he fled again.

Second emigration

From 1908 to 1912, Trotsky published the newspaper Pravda in Vienna (this name was later borrowed by Lenin), and in 1912 he tried to create an “August bloc” of Social Democrats. This period included his most acute clashes with Lenin, who called Trotsky “Judass”.

In 1912, Trotsky was a war correspondent for "Kyiv Thought" in the Balkans, and after the outbreak of World War I - in France (this work gave him military experience that was later useful). Having taken a sharply anti-war position, he attacked the governments of all the warring powers with all the might of his political temperament. In 1916 he was expelled from France and sailed to the USA, where he continued to appear in print.

Return to revolutionary Russia

Having learned about the February Revolution, Trotsky headed home. In May 1917 he arrived in Russia and took a position of sharp criticism of the Provisional Government. In July, he joined the Bolshevik Party as a member of the Mezhrayontsy. He showed his talent as an orator in all its brilliance in factories, educational institutions, theaters, squares, and circuses; as usual, he acted prolificly as a publicist. After the July days he was arrested and ended up in prison. In September, after his liberation, professing radical views and presenting them in a populist form, he became the idol of the Baltic sailors and soldiers of the city garrison and was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. In addition, he became chairman of the military revolutionary committee created by the council. He was the de facto leader of the October armed uprising.

At the pinnacle of power

After the Bolsheviks came to power, Trotsky became People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Participating in separate negotiations with the powers of the “quadruple bloc,” he put forward the formula “we stop the war, we don’t sign peace, we demobilize the army,” which was supported by the Bolshevik Central Committee (Lenin was against it). Somewhat later, after the resumption of the offensive by German troops, Lenin managed to achieve the acceptance and signing of the terms of the “obscene” peace, after which Trotsky resigned as People’s Commissar.

In the spring of 1918, Trotsky was appointed to the post of People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and chairman of the revolutionary military council of the republic. In this position he showed himself to be a highly talented and energetic organizer. To create a combat-ready army, he took decisive and cruel measures: taking hostages, executions and imprisonment in prisons and concentration camps of opponents, deserters and violators of military discipline, and no exception was made for the Bolsheviks. Trotsky did a great job of recruiting former Tsarist officers and generals ("military experts") into the Red Army and defending them from attacks by some high-ranking communists. During the Civil War, his train ran on railroads on all fronts; The People's Commissar of Military and Marine supervised the actions of the fronts, made fiery speeches to the troops, punished the guilty, and rewarded those who distinguished themselves.

In general, during this period there was close cooperation between Trotsky and Lenin, although on a number of issues of a political (for example, discussion about trade unions) and military-strategic (the fight against the troops of General Denikin, the defense of Petrograd from the troops of General Yudenich and the war with Poland) nature between them there were serious disagreements.

At the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the 1920s. Trotsky's popularity and influence reached their apogee, and a cult of his personality began to take shape.

In 1920-21, he was one of the first to propose measures to curtail “war communism” and transition to the NEP.