TROCKIJ, LEV DAVIDOVIČ. — Pseudonym of the Jew Leiba Bronstein, born at Janovka on 7 November 1879, assassinated near Mexico City on 20 August 1940. Exiled to Siberia for four years while still a young man, he succeeded in escaping. A Marxist, for several years he oscillated between the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions, before joining the latter in 1917.
Having settled in London, he returned clandestinely to Russia in 1905: arrested, he escaped a second time, settling first in Vienna, Zurich, and Paris, and then in the United States. He played a role of the very greatest importance in the organization of the Red Army. Stalin (v.), after Lenin’death (v.), he was first relieved of all offices, expelled from the Communist Party, and then from the U.S.S.R., laboriously seeking asylum in various countries.
The writings of Antonio Labriola contributed greatly to converting T. from a generic «populism» to Marxism. Labriola taught T. to distinguish the most characteristic nuclei of Marxist thought from the frequent infiltrations of positivism and «vulgar» materialism, to abhor schematic formulations, and to perceive the non-parallel developments of the histories of different nations. In his books 1905 and History of the Russian Revolution, T. offers a vivid and original picture of Russian history. T. emphasizes the antideterministic elements inherent in Marxism: society is not, in his view, organized so rationally that the dates set for the revolution coincide with the moment when economic conditions have matured for socialism. The last may become the first, and Russia, economically backward, may therefore be ripe for revolution before the countries of capitalism, which has already reached maturity. «The backward spirit,» T. asserts, «is ready at certain moments to turn toward progress with astonishing boldness.» Because of Russia’s historical backwardness, Marxism there initially signified not so much a critique of capitalist society as the argument for the country’s inevitable development in a bourgeois direction, against certain romantic visions of the «populists» concerning an entirely original development of Russia. But it follows that the revolution of equality and society will rapidly come to prevail over that of the «immortal principles,» which in Russia has not had a 1789 or an 1848 to its credit. Precisely because of its backwardness, Russia was, in short, the country in which Marxism as a doctrine and socialism as a party underwent powerful development even before the bourgeois revolution. But the victory of the socialist Revolution in Russia, in order to avoid the emergence of a «Thermidorian,» «Bonapartist,» or «nationalist» regime, needs rapidly to become the signal for a world revolution. In short, according to T., the Russian Revolution cannot survive without a subsequent revolution in the economically advanced countries. This vision is linked to T.’s rigid internationalism and his aversion to compromises: hence the fundamental clash with Stalin and with the theory of «socialism in one country». T. devoted an entire book to the theory of «permanent revolution». «The triumph of the socialist revolution,» T. asserted, «begins on the national terrain, develops on the international one, and reaches its end and crowning on the world stage. The break with the international position always, inevitably, leads to national messianism, that is, to the recognition of virtues and qualities inherent in one’s own country, capable of enabling it to undertake a task that cannot be accomplished by others.» For him, the «leader» and the dite of the working class mature together, and one of the two terms cannot be imagined apart from the other: from this position arose T.’s biting satire of the «cult of Stalin» and the «hagiography» associated with II. T.’s anti-idealism is connected with the attitude of all uncompromising Russian Marxism: he associated idealism with political reaction and with reactionary forces in the field of culture. For him, idealism is merely a stage: from religion to materialism, or, conversely, from materialism to religion. Nevertheless, as an opponent of the banal formulas of schematic materialism and of «obligatory formulas» issued from above, T. sometimes came close to idealist and almost «actualist» positions. Between the «leader» and the masses there exists, in his view, a relationship that is in a certain sense the dialectical, reciprocal relationship between the one being educated and the educator. Man occupies a position of great importance in the development of historical events. The Marxist revolution appears to T. as «the increase of man’s power over nature». T. ruthlessly crushed every form of opposition to Soviet power: the «bourgeois» democratic opposition and that of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (the direct heirs of the «populists»). Still in 1921, he harshly suppressed the Kronstadt revolt, which, broadly speaking, called for the democratization of the Soviet regime. Within the single party, however, he upheld the necessity of internal democracy; on the literary and cultural plane, he abhorred governmental leveling from above, the so-called «controlled» and «manipulated literature,» and the formulas of what was to become «socialist realism». In these conflicts lies, fundamentally, the drama of his life and his activity as a politician. A revolutionary of broad culture, T. is also noteworthy as a writer and as a mordant ironist. Important among his writings are My Life and The Life of Lenin.