TROTSKY, LEV DAVIDOVICH. - Pseudonym of the Jew Leiba Bronstein, b. at Janovka on 7 Nov. 1879, assassinated near Mexico City on 20 Aug. 1940. Exiled to Siberia for a period of four years while still of youthful age, he managed to escape. A Marxist, he wavered for some years between the Menshevik and the Bolshevik faction, before joining the latter in 1917.
Having settled in London, he returned clandestinely to Russia in 1905: arrested, he fled a second time, settling first in Vienna, Zurich, Paris and then in the United States. He played a role of the very first importance in the organization of the Red Army. Having come into conflict, after the death of Lenin (v.), with Stalin (v.), he was first relieved of all his 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 strongly to converting T. from a generic "populism" to Marxism. Labriola educated T. to distinguish the most characteristic nuclei of Marxist thought from the frequent infiltrations of positivism and of "vulgar" materialism, to an aversion for schematic formulations, to the perception of the non-parallel developments of the history of different nations. In his books 1905 and History of the Russian Revolution, T. traces a vivid and original picture of Russian history. The anti-deterministic suggestions inherent in Marxism are emphasized by T.: society is not, according to him, organized so rationally that the deadlines for revolution come to coincide with the moment when economic conditions have matured for socialism. The last may be the first and Russia, economically backward, may therefore be ripe for revolution before the countries of capitalism, already arrived at maturity. "The backward spirit – affirms T. – is ready at certain moments to turn toward progress with an impressive boldness." Because of Russia's historical backwardness, Marxism there has meant from the beginning not so much the critique of capitalist society as the argument of the country's inevitable development in a bourgeois sense, against certain romantic visions of the "populists" concerning an entirely original development of Russia. But it follows that the social revolution will come to prevail rapidly over that of the "immortal principles," which has to its credit in Russia no 1789 and no 1848. Precisely because of its backwardness, Russia was the country in which Marxism as a doctrine and socialism as a party had, in short, a powerful development even before the bourgeois revolution. But the victory of the socialist Revolution in Russia, in order to avoid the rise of a "Thermidorian," "Bonapartist" or "nationalist" regime, needs to become rapidly the signal of a world revolution. The Russian Revolution cannot, in short, live, according to T., without a subsequent revolution in the economically advanced countries. This vision is linked to T.'s rigid internationalism and to his aversion to compromises: hence the fundamental clash with Stalin and with the theory of "socialism in one country." To the theory of "permanent revolution" T. devoted an entire book. "The triumph of the socialist revolution – affirmed T. – begins on national ground, develops on the international one and reaches its end and crowning on the world one. The break with the international position leads always, inevitably, to national messianism, that is, to the recognition of virtues and qualities inherent in one's own country, capable of enabling it to have a task not realizable by others." The "leader" and the workers' elite come, for him, to mature together and one could not imagine one of the two terms disjoined from the other: from this stance springs T.'s pungent satire of the "cult of Stalin" and of the "hagiography" connected with it. T.'s anti-idealism is linked to the attitude of all intransigent Russian Marxism: idealism is by him linked with political reaction and with the retrograde forces in the field of culture. Idealism is for him nothing but a stage: from religion to materialism, or, on the contrary, from materialism to religion. An adversary, moreover, of the banal formulas of a schematic materialism and of "obligatory formulas" coming from above, T. sometimes grazes idealistic and almost "actualist" positions. Between the "leader" and the mass there runs, according to him, a relationship that is in a certain sense the dialectical, reciprocal relationship that runs between the one being educated and the educator. Man occupies a place 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 (direct heirs of the "populists"). Still in 1921 he harshly repressed the Kronstadt revolt which, in broad outline, postulated a democratization of the Soviet regime. Moreover, within the single party, he upheld the necessity of an internal democracy; on the literary and cultural plane he abhorred governmental leveling from above, the so-called "controlled" and "manipulated" literature, the formulas of what was to become "socialist realism." In these contrasts lies, at bottom, the drama of his life and of his activity as a political man. A revolutionary of vast culture, T. is also notable as a writer and as a mordant ironist. Important among his writings are My Life and The Life of Lenin.