Le Blanc Paul - Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky

Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their major works.

In the same series

Leon Trotsky

Paul Le Blanc

REAKTION BOOKS

This book is dedicated
to the memory of George Breitman

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2015
Copyright Paul Le Blanc 2015

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9781780234717

Contents

Introducing a Life

A son of a bitch, but the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ is how Trotsky was described by Raymond Robins, a Teddy Roosevelt Progressive and representative of the American Red Cross in Petrograd. It was late 1917, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia inaugurated the birth of modern Communism. Robins was involved in frustrating, fascinating negotiations with Trotsky, who was second only to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin among Russias revolutionary Marxist leaders.

The actual name of the man was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, but most of the world has known him by his revolutionary nom de plume. Twenty-three years later, an agent of the Communist regime that Trotsky had helped to establish would plunge an alpine ice axe into his head. The assassin after serving a twenty-year prison sentence in Mexico travelled to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and was awarded the Order of Lenin.

Since his martyrdom in 1940, it can be said that Trotsky has experienced an ongoing resurrection, with well over a dozen biographies and continuing publication of his major writings. Restricting ourselves to the English language, in the past two decades no fewer than ten book-length studies of Trotskys life and ideas have appeared. If we include studies in which he and his ideas figure prominently, plus novels, songs, poems, plays and both documentary and non-documentary films, then there is the equivalent of a significant work every six months, reflecting the impact he had on the history of the twentieth century, which continues to reverberate down to our own time.

A Russian Civil War poster by Victor Deni, with Trotsky as a revolutionary St George, slaying the dragon of capitalism.

For millions of people throughout the world, Leon Trotsky was initially seen as a revolutionary liberator. Bertrand Patenaude, one of the more careful critics among his recent biographers, notes that Trotsky winning over vast crowds of workers, soldiers, and sailors in Petrograd with his spellbinding oratory in 1917 proved to be Lenins most important ally when the Bolsheviks stormed to

He elaborated on this to a radical journalist from the United States, John Reed, in an interview just before the Bolshevik insurrection. The Bolshevik slogan was all power to the Soviets, the democratic councils that had sprung up in the revolutionary upsurges of 1905 and again in 1917. The Soviets are the most perfect representatives of the people perfect in their revolutionary experience, in their ideas and objects, Trotsky explained. Based directly upon the army in the trenches, the workers in the factories, and the peasants in the fields, they are the backbone of the Revolution.

Locating the Person

In Trotsky: A Graphic Biography, Rick Geary summarizes the story in the first four frames:

In 1917, Leon Trotsky burst upon the international stage as the brain behind the Russian Revolution. He presided over the complete transformation of his country, not merely a change of government but a total restructuring of society on every level. To many, he was the heroic St George, slaying the dragon of capitalist repression. To others, he was the ruthless and Satanic purveyor of bloody rebellion, the cold, detached theorist gone mad with power. In truth, he fitted neither of these images. He was a writer, a thinker, a nation-builder albeit a reluctant one with deep roots in his Russias agricultural heartland. Trotskys dream was for a world free from injustice, inequality,