Russian Jewish Revolutionary leader and Soviet politician, a close friend of Lenin, whose theory of "permanent revolution" became unpopular after Stalin had gained power in the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky was assassinated by one of Stalin's agents. Although Trotsky later condemned the Red Terror, he was, perhaps, one of its first proponents.

"The French minister of foreign affairs, Pichon, the sworn enemy of the Russia revolution, reports in Parliament on the sad state of affairs: "Odessa is being evacuated" (this was before the occupation of Odessa by Soviet troops); "the Bolsheviks are penetrating the Crimean peninsula, the situation in the north is not favorable." Things are not going well. The Greek soldiers landed on the shores of Crimea, according to the reports of Allied diplomats and newspapermen, were mounted on Crimean donkeys, but the donkeys were not able to arrive in time at the Perekop Isthmus. Things are not going well. Evidently even donkeys have begun to shake off the imperialistic harness." (from Trotsky's article in Petrograd Pravda, April  April 23, 1919, in Bolshevist Movement in Russia: Letter from the Secretary of State Transmitting to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, a Memorandum on Certain Aspects of the Bolshevist Movement in Russia, presented by Mr. Lodge, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920, p. 47)

Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) was born in Yanovka, Ukraine, the son of an illiterate Jewish farmer. Trotsky's father, David Bronshtein, had bought land near the small town of Bobrinets, and eventually he became a substantial landowner. During the revolution he lost his estate, but Trotsky set him up as the manager of a flour mill near Moscow. Trotsky's mother, Anna, came from Odessa, where she had received a modest education. "There was no display of tenderness in our family, especially during my early years, but there was a strong comradeship of labour between my father and mother", Trotsky recalled in his book of memoir. (My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator by Leon Trotsky, Thornton Butterworth, Limited, 1930, p. 22) Anna loved to read to her eight children and encouraged them to acquire a good education. She died in 1910. Only Lev, two sisters and a brother survived beyond childhood. After Trotsky was deported in 1929, his brother Alexander publicly disowned him, but he was shot in 1938. Liza, Trotsky's elder sister, died in 1924. Trotsky's younger sister Olga married an influential Bolshevik leader, Lev Kamenev, but she was shot in 1941. Her two young sons were shot in 1936.

After attending a Jewish primary school, Trotsky studied at a state school in Odessa. He was a very good student, who especially loved mathematics, but was expelled when he fell foul of his French teacher, "who kept swallowing tablets during the classroom hours, and regarded every pupil as a personal enemy." (My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator, p. 50)

Trotsky joined in 1896 the Social Democrats. Two years later he was arrested as a Marxist and exiled to Siberia. During this period Trostky occupied himself with Freemasonry, which he studied in prison. In 1902 he escaped and reached England. With him he carried a passport that used the name of a jailer in Odessa's prison, Trotsky.

In London Trotsky met Lenin and other Russian Revolutionary thinkers and collaborated in publication their journal of Iskra (The Spark). When the party split in 1903, and Trotsky broke with Lenin, he gained position as a leader of the Menshevik wing of the Social Democratic party, as opposed to the Bolshevik one under Lenin, prophesying that Leninist theory would result in a one-man dictatorship. In the abortive 1905 revolution Trotsky organized the first revolutionary Soviet council in St. Petersburg and was appointed president of the Soviet. About this time he propounded the doctrine of permanent revolution, which implied that revolution in one country must be followed by revolutions in other countries, eventually throughout the world. After the uprising ended he was again exiled to Siberia, and managed once more escape.

"Some time before the war the Austro-Hungarian government received a sharp note from St Petersburg, demanding that a stop be put to the activities of the Russian political emigrants in Vienna. The Minister of the Interior received the note and shook with laughter: 'Who do they think is going to start a revolution in Russia – perhaps that Herr Trotsky from the Café Central?'" (from Wit as a Weapon: The Political Joke in History by Egon Larsen, Frederick Muller Limited, 1980, p. 31)

Trotsky worked then as journalist in Vienna, and become editor of Pravda (truth). With the outbreak of World War I he moved to Zürich in 1914 and then to Germany, where he was imprisoned for opposing the war. During World War I Trotsky led the internationalist wing of the Mensheviks. He denounced Russia's involvement in the war. In 1915 Trotsky moved to Paris, editing the socialist weekly Nashe Slovo, but he was expelled from France as a result of his pacifist propaganda. After a short stay in New York as the editor of Novy Mir, and finding out that some Wall Street bankers were willing to finance a revolution, Trotsky returned to Russia in 1917. He joined the Bosheviks in St. Petersburg and established the magazine Vperied (Forward). Trotsky was arrested for a short time by Aleksandr Feodorovich Kerenski's provisional government, but after release he played a major role in the October Revolution.

At the conference in Brest-Litovsk in 1918 Trotsky was leader of the Russian delegate. From 1919 to 1927 he was a member of Politburo. Trotsky was made the Russian Civil War commissar for war (1918-25) and created in this post the Red army. For two and half years, he travelled from one front to another in his heavy armored train, 65,244 miles in total during the time he lived on it. Due to its weight, the train required two engines, it shook the tracks, traveling at a speed of seventy or more kilometers an hour, "so that the map that hung from the ceiling of the car would rock like a swing," Trotsky said. (My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator, p. 357) All the crew wore leather uniforms and could handle arms. This moving command center also included a telegraph station, telephones, a printing press, a radio station, an electric-power generator, a library, a garage holding semiarmored vehicles, a bath and fuel reserve.

The Red army grew from 800,000 to 3,000,000, and fought on sixteen fronts simultaneously. With his speeches Trotsky encouraged villagers, troops, his illiterate audience who was cut off from the vital news. "These spring months become the decisive months in the history of Europe. At the same time this spring will decide definitely the fate of the bourgeois and rich peasant, anti-Soviet Russia." ('To the Red Army' by Leon Trotsky, April 1919, The World's Great Speeches, edited by Lewis Copeland, Lawrence W. Lamm and Stephen J. McKenna, 4th enl. 1999 ed., Dover Publications, 1999, p. 140)

In 1921-22 the last remnants of non-Communist socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, were abolished. In May 1922 Lenin suffered a stroke which left him partly paralyzed, in early 1923 another took away his speech and in January 1924 he died. After Lenin's death, among the aspiring successors, Stalin and Trotsky were the leading figures. In his writings Trotsky stressed the peculiarities of the Russian economic and social development. "The insignificance of the Russian cities, which more than anything else promoted the development of an Asiatic state, also made impossible a Reformation—that is, a replacement of the feudal-bureaucratic orthodoxy by some sort of modernised kind of Christianity adapted to the demands of a bourgeois society. The struggle against the state church did not go farther than the creation of peasant sects, the faction of the Old Believers being the most powerful among them." (The History of the Russian Revolution, translated from the Russian by Max Eastman, Victor Gollancz, 1984, p. 29) Russia, lacking the mature capitalist development, could go straight to a dictatorship of the proletariat, but Trotsky believed that it was impossible to build socialism in one country alone. In this he disagreed fatally with Stalin.

"A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands. In this sense, the Red Terror is not distinguishable from the armed insurrection, the direct continuation  of which it represents. The State terror of a revolutionary class can be condemned "morally" only by a man who, as a principle, rejects (in words) every form of violence whatsoever—consequently, every war and every rising. For this one has to be merely and simply a hypoctritical Qauker." (from Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky by Leon Trotsky, foreword by Max Shachtman, The University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 58-59)

Although Lenin had rejected Stalin as his successor, Stalin strengthened his position. He inclined towards concentrating on the development of a Communist order in Russia, while Trotsky was dedicated to the belief that Russia should catalyze worldwide Communist revolution. Stalin believed that socialism in one country was possible. A schism broke out in Communist ranks. Trotsky's Left Opposition tried to mobilize the Moscow proletariat, but this failed due to the workers' indifference. The failure proved that he was no longer a charismatic mass leader. Trotsky's influence began to decline and Stalin removed him from the commissariat for war.

Permanent revolution: Marx and Engels had predicted that the proletarian revolution would occur first in the industrialized nations of western Europe. Trotsky argued from his experience in 1905 that Russian bourgeois was too weak to carry through the coming revolutionary social changes which would have to be taken over by the proletariat. The proletariat would then be betrayed by the peasantry, who would join the mass of small owners opposing the socialist revolution. Since the proletariat in Russia was a minority, it would not be able to stay in power unless it could rely on the help from a socialist revolution in the West. The revolution in Russia would trigger a series of uprisings in the rest of Europe – revolution in one country leads to revolution internationally. "The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis in bourgeois society is the fact that the productive forces created by it conflict with the framework of the national state. From this follow, on the one hand, imperialist wars, and on the other, the utopia of the bourgeois United States of Europe. The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, is unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet." (The Permanent Revolution & results and prospects, introduction by Luma Nichol, Red Letter Press, 2010, p. 313)

The "domino theory" – a cornerstone of the U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia – superficially reflected Trotskyist way of thinking (Trotsky was never credited for this theory): if the U.S. did not make a stand in South Vietnam, then Communists would seize power in the rest of the nations of Southeast Asia and beyond, non-Communist countries would topple one after the other like dominoes. Even Japan, the Philippines, India and Australia would be at risk. 

From 1925 to 1926 Trotsky held relatively minor administrative post, before he was ousted from the party by Stalin. In 1927 Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata, in Kazakstan, where he devoted himself to writing his memoirs and bitter pamphlets. The "combined opposition" of Trotsky, Grigory Zinoview, and Lev Kamenev was unsuccessful. In 1929 Trotsky was totally expelled from the Soviet Union. With this stroke Stalin became the sole and undisputable leader of the Communist Party, and therefore of the Soviet Union.

During the following years Trotsky lived in Turkey (1929-33), France (1933-35), Norway (1935-36), and finally found asylum in Mexico, where he was invited by the socialist artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957). With Frida Kahlo, Rivera's wife, he had a brief affair. She gave him a self-portrait, 'Between the Courtains' (1937), when the relationship finished. The French surrealist André Breton, who saw the painting in Trotsky's study, said: "She has painted herself dressed in a robe of wings gilded with butterflies . . . We are privileged to be present . . . at the entry of a young woman endowed with all the gifts of seduction, one accustomed to the society of men of genius." (Frida Kahlo by John Morrison, Chelsea House Publishers, 2003, p. 68)

On the death of his elder son Lev Sedov in 1934, Trotsky wrote: "Yagoda [head of the security organs] caused the premature death of one of my daughters, and drove the other to suicide. He arrested my two sons-in-law who simply disappeared without a trace. The GPU arrested my younger son, Sergei . . . and he then disappeared." (Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary by Dmitriĭ Volkogonov, translated and edited by Harold Shukman, The Free Press, 1996, p. 7) In Mexico Trotsky continued his attack on Stalin's leadership and the 'degeneration' of the political system in the Soviet Union. Trotsky regarded the dictatorship he and Lenin had established as justified because it was exercised in the interest of the proletariat, and so it was quite different from Stalin's dictatorship, because the latter acted only in its own interests. In the United States Trotskyism enjoyed support of influential critics and intellectuals, some of whom were associated with the literary and political journal the Partisan Review.

Literature and Revolution (1924), a collection of articles, was Trotsky's most important contribution to literature criticism. He had sympathy for Russian Futurism and praises Mayakovsky for placing his art at the service of the Revolution. According to Trotsky, "Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. But at present even the handling of a hammer is taught with the help of a mirror, a sensitive film which records all the movement. . . . The deeper literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically will it be able to "picture" life." (Literature and Revolution by Leon Trotsky, The University of Michigan Press, 1960, p. 137) Trotsky did not believe that it is possible to create genuine proletarian art at his time. In the 1920s the Bolshevik regime exercised a relatively tolerant cultural policy, and allowed experimentation, if it did nor criticize the Party or the Revolution. Trotsky did not reject Freud who was blacklisted in the Soviet Union. He showed some understanding of the Formalist school in its attempt to seek criteria for classification and valuation, but emphasized that the verbal art do not end with the word. "Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli which originate outside of art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment." (Ibid., p. 179) Later Formalism was condemned by Stalinist censors. All kinds of experiments were ended.

In 1938 Trotsky and his followers founded the Fourth International. During the Great Purge (1934-38), a wave of terror by which Stalin aimed at eliminating the opposition, Trotsky was accused of espionage. Stalin found a surprising ally in Winston Churchill, who was a consistent opponet of Communism, but saw in Trotsky an enemy of the establisehd order. When the Soviet Union attacked Finland in 1939, starting the Winter War, Trotsky sided with the Red Army.

"Down with Cain Stalin and his Camarilla!
Down with the Rapacious Bureaucracy!
Long Live the Soviet Union, the Fortress of the Toilers!
Long Live the World Socialist Revolution!"
(from 'Letter to the Workers of the USSR', May 1940, in The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology, edited, with an introduction, by Isaac Deutscher, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 284)

A supposed family friend, Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández (he used the name Frank Jackson), wounded Trotsky mortally in the head on August 20, 1940, with an ice axe, which he had concealed in his overcoat. Leon Trotsky died 26 hours later, on August 21, 1940. Mercader was an NKVD agent. In 1960, after being released from prison, he went to the Soviet Union, where he received the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. 

For further reading: Three Who Made a Revolution by B.D. Wolfe (1948); Leon Trotsky by Irving Howe (1978); The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky by Baruch Knei-Paz (1978); Leon Trotsky: A Biography by Ronald Segal (1979); Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamics of His Thought by Ernest Mandel (1979); The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 by Isaac Deutscher (1980); The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-29 by Isaac Deutscher (1980); The Propher Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940 by Isaac Deutsher (1980); Trotsky: Fate of a Revolutionary by Robert S. Wistrich (1982); Trotskyism by Alex Callinicos (1990); A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, vol. 7, by René Wellek (1991); Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary by Antonovich Volkogorov (1996); Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary by Dmitri Volkogonov (2007); Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary by Bertrand M. Patenaude (2009); Trotski by Christer Pursiainen (2011; in Finnish); Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life by Joshua Rubenstein (2011); Trotsky: A Biography by Robert Service (2011); Trotsky in New York, 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution by Kenneth D. Ackerman (2016); James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38 by Bryan D. Palmer (2021); The Twilight of World Trotskyism by John Kelly (2023) See also: Isaak Babel depicted Jews in Odessa and the Russian Civil war his novel Red Army (1926). Vienna after the turn of the century attracted several intellectuals and writers. Café Central near Palais Frestel was the favorite place of Trotsky, Alfred Adler, Peter Altenbeg, Richard von Kraftt-Ebbing, Robert Musil, and many other intellectuals. - Film: The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), directed by Joseph Losey, screenplay by Nicholas Mosley, starring Richard Burton (Leon Trotsky), Alain Delon (Frank Jackson), Romy Schneider (Gita Samuels). 

Selected works:

• Itogi i perspektivy - Results & Prospects (tr. 1921)
• Terrorizm i kommunizm, 1920 - The Defence of Terrorism (tr. 1905) / Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (with a foreword by Max Schachtman, 1961; also titled as Dictatorship Vs. Democracy, with a preface by H. N. Brailsford, and a foreword by Max Bedact, 1922) / Terrorism and Communism (with a foreword by Slavoj Žizek, 2007)
• Novyi kurs, 1923 - The New Course (translated by Max Shachtman, 1943)
• Sochineniia, 1923-27 (12 vols.)
• Pyat' let Kominterna, 1924 (2 vols.) - The First Five Years of the Communist International (translated by John G. Wright & R. Chappell, 1974)
• Uroki Oktyabrya, 1924 - The Lessons of October (translated by John. G. Wright, 1937)
  
• Literatura i revoliutsiia, 1924 - Literature and Revolution (translated by Rose Strunsky, 1925)
• O Lenine, 1925 - Lenin: Notes for a Biographer (translated  by Tamara Deutscher, 1925)
• Kuda idet Angliya?, 1925 - Where Is Britain Going? (edited by R. Chappell and Alan Clinton, in Collectded Writings and Speeches on Britain, 3 vols., 1974)
• Voprosy byta, 1925 - Problems of Life (translated by Z. Vengerova, 1973) / Problems of Everyday Life and Other Writings on Culture and Science (tr. 1973)
• Moya zhizn', 1930 (2 vols.) - My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (introd. by Joseph Hansen, 1930)
• Permanentnaia revoliutsiia, 1930 - The Permanent Revolution (translated by Max Shachtman, 1931; John G. Wright, 1931; slightly corrected and revised version by Red Letter Press, 2010) - Jatkuva vallankumous (suom. Esa Adrian, 1970)
• Istoriya Russkoi Revolyutsii, 1931-33 - The History of the Russian Revolution (3 vols., translated by Max Eastman, 1932)
• Stalinskaia shkola falsifikatsii: popravki i dopolneniia k literature epigonov, 1932 - The Stalin School of Falsification (translated by Max Shachtman, 1937)
• Predannaia revolutsiia / La Révolution trahie, 1936 - The Revolution Betrayed (translated by Max Eastman, 1937)
• Ikh moral' i nasha, 1938 - Their Morals and Ours (tr. 1938)
• The Basic Writings of Trotsky, 1963 (edited by Irving Howe)
• The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology, 1964 (ed. by Isaac Deutscher)
• Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, 1970 (edited by Paul N. Siegel)
• The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922, 1971 (edited by Jan M. Meijer)
• Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933-1935: Writings on Lenin, Dialectics, and Evolutionism, 1986 (translated, annotated, and with introductory essays by Philip Pomper; Russian text annotated by Yuri Felshtinsky)
• Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935, 1976 (translated from the Russian by Elena Zarudnaya; with a foreword by Jean van Heijenoort)
• Dnevniki i pisʹma, 1986 (edited by Yuri Felshtinsky)
  
• Permanentnaia revolutsiia, 1993 (edited and with an introduction by Felix J. Kreisel)
• Pisʹma iz ssylki, 1928, 1995 (edited by Yuri Felshtinsky)
  
• Stalin: v dvukh tomakh, 1996 (2 vols., edited by Yuri Felshtinsky)
  
• Stalin: roman-otkrovenie, 2007
  
• Writings in Exile, 2012 (edited by Kunal Chattapadhyay and Paul Le Blanc)
• Trotskii protiv Stalina: Emigrantskii arkhiv L.D. Trotskogo 1933-1936 gody, 2015 (edited by IU.G. Felʹshtinskii) 
  
• Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, 2017 (foreword by Slavoj Žižek; preface by H.N. Brailsford)