TROTSKY, LEV DAVIDOVICH. – Pseudonym of the Jew Leiba Bronstein, born at Yanovka on 7 Nov. 1879, assassinated near Mexico City on 20 Aug. 1940. Exiled to Siberia for four years while still young, he managed to escape. A Marxist, he wavered for several years between the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions before finally adhering in 1917 to the latter.
Trivulzio family – Façade of the T. chapel built by B. Suardi, known as Bramantino (15th cent.) – Milan.
After settling in London, he returned clandestinely to Russia in 1905; arrested, he fled a second time, settling first in Vienna, then Zurich, Paris, and later in the United States. He played a leading role in the organization of the Red Army. After Lenin’s death (v.), Stalin (v.), was first relieved of all offices, expelled from the Communist Party, and then from the U.S.S.R., struggling painfully to find asylum in various countries.
The writings of Antonio Labriola contributed greatly to converting T. from a generic “populism” to Marxism. Labriola trained T. to distinguish the most characteristic elements of Marxist thought from the frequent infiltrations of positivism and “vulgar” materialism, to reject schematic formulations, and to grasp the non-parallel development of the histories of different nations. In his books 1905 and History of the Russian Revolution, T. paints a vivid and original picture of Russian history. The antideterministic impulses inherent in Marxism are emphasized by T.: society, he argues, is not so rationally organized that the timing of revolution coincides with the moment when economic conditions have ripened for socialism. The last may be the first, and Russia, economically backward, may thus mature for revolution before the capitalist countries, already mature. “Backward spirit,” T. asserts, “is at certain moments ready to turn toward progress with striking boldness.” Owing to Russia’s historical backwardness, Marxism there initially signified not so much a critique of capitalist society as the argument for the inevitable development of the country along bourgeois lines, in opposition to the romantic visions of the “populists” regarding an entirely original development of Russia. But it follows that the equalitarian and social revolution will rapidly prevail over that of “immortal principles,” which has no 1789 or 1848 to its credit in Russia. Precisely because of its backwardness, Russia was the country in which Marxism as a doctrine and socialism as a party developed powerfully even before the bourgeois revolution. Yet for the victory of the socialist revolution in Russia to avoid giving rise to a “Thermidorian,” “Bonapartist,” or “nationalist” regime, it must rapidly become the signal for a world revolution. The Russian Revolution, in T.’s view, cannot survive without a subsequent revolution in the economically advanced countries. This vision is linked to T.’s rigid internationalism and his aversion to compromise, which led to his fundamental clash with Stalin and the theory of “socialism in one country.” T. devoted an entire book to the theory of the “permanent revolution.” “The triumph of the socialist revolution,” T. affirms, “begins on the national terrain, develops on the international plane, and reaches its end and fulfillment on the world stage.” Breaking with the international position always leads, inevitably, to national messianism, i.e., to the recognition of virtues and qualities inherent in one’s own country capable of enabling it to perform a task unattainable by others. For T., the “leader” and the working-class elite mature together, and one cannot be imagined without the other; from this stance springs his biting satire of the “cult of Stalin” and the “hieroglyph” associated with II.
T.’s anti-idealism is connected with the stance of all intransigent Russian Marxism: idealism is by him linked to political reaction and to reactionary forces in the cultural field. Idealism is for him merely a stage: from religion to materialism, or conversely, from materialism to religion. Though opposed to the banal formulas of schematic materialism and to “mandatory formulas” imposed from above, T. at times approaches idealistic and almost “actualist” positions. Between the “leader” and the masses, he holds, there is a relationship akin to the dialectical, reciprocal relationship between educator and educated. Man occupies a place of great importance in the unfolding of historical events. The Marxist revolution appears to T. as “the increase of man’s power over nature.” T. mercilessly crushed every form of opposition to Soviet power: bourgeois democratic opposition and that of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (direct heirs of the “populists”). Even in 1921 he harshly repressed the Kronstadt revolt, which broadly speaking demanded a democratization of the Soviet regime. Within the single party, however, he upheld the need for internal democracy; on the literary and cultural plane he abhorred governmental leveling from above, the so-called “controlled” and “manipulated” literature, and the formulas that were to become “socialist realism.” These contradictions lie at the root of the tragedy of his life and of his political activity.
A revolutionary of wide culture, T. is also notable as a writer and incisive ironist. Among his important works are My Life and The Life of Lenin.