Trotsky, the Fall of a War Hero

“They have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers’ right to elect representatives above the Party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers’ democracy!”

Leon Trotsky, speaking at the 10th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR

 

Trotsky was the big loser in the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death. He had been the great ideologue of the revolution, nearly on par with Lenin. Leon Trotsky, a fierce intellectual who took over the high command of the Soviet armies in 1918 and, within two years, defeated invaders and mutineers throughout Russia, saving the Bolshevik regime from both domestic and foreign enemies. A legend of communism who had to suffer firsthand the inhumanity of its own creation.

Trotsky did not become a communist right away. As a young college student, he derided the Marxism of the woman who would later be his first wife. He did not agree with Lenin for many years, preferring the theories of the Mensheviks (moderates) over the Bolsheviks of the great communist ideologue. But he was perhaps the main reason that the USSR regime was not buried from the start, and did not succumb to the first crises it faced. And also the person who led, in Lenin’s absence, the October Revolution.

In any case, there are two particularly intriguing aspects of his life story that help us understand the destiny of one of the great communist ideologues of the 20th century. Because they show the incredibly ideological side of this historic figure, and his tremendous sense of realism—an almost inconceivable combination.

The ideological side is what preceded the quote we opened with. It was during the 10th Congress of the Communist Party, which was to approve or reject Trotsky’s proposal to militarize the farmers. It was 1920, and the Russian Civil War and Polish War had taken their toll on the economy. The farmers, who had no incentives due to the suppression of trade, only produced for themselves, putting the food supply of cities at risk.

Given the situation, Trotsky believed the structure applied to the Army could work in the countryside, by establishing regiments of farmers who would be strongly controlled by commissioners to cultivate whatever the state mandated. The unions protested, as this went against the freedoms of those whom the revolution had set out to liberate. Were these policies not worse than those of the Czar?

The proposal that prevailed was an intermediate solution, which solidified the party’s power over the unions, but gave them a certain degree of autonomy. Later, toward the end of Lenin’s government, Lenin himself approved, at the suggestion of Trotsky, a set of measures to partially liberalize domestic trade. Measures that would prevent Stalin from imposing militarization again, the initial proposal of his archenemy.

Meanwhile, the sense of realism has do to with his emergence as a soldier. In March 1918, he agreed to become the Commissar of Defense, and would remain in his post for the following two and a half years. He, who had so strongly defended pacifism before the revolution; he, who had no prior military experience.

This is perhaps the clearest example of pragmatism that we find in his biography. It is safe to say that his leadership saved the USSR from an untimely death by the Polish invasion and the Civil War that erupted in those early years.

Trotsky was able to put pragmatism above idealism, for example, by getting rid of the citizen militias he had advocated for as the future of the Russian army. He realized he could not defeat any army like that, thus prompting his first reform: at least two-thirds of the officers of the new army were to be former officers of the czarist regime—controlled by political commissaries and their families duly threatened.

The former pacifist ultimately showed that he was only against wars that were not suitable for fueling the revolution. But by then his surly nature had begun to isolate him from his allies, and those who would later conspire against him started the campaign to destroy him: Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. It is rather tragic to contemplate how the political isolation of a leader can totally undermine the impact of their past and future achievements. Trotsky had the merit of saving the revolution, but was unable to leverage that to stay in power after Lenin.

Trotsky sacrificed many things for the revolution, becoming the most resolute and capable of its leaders. However, he would end up disappearing from Soviet history at the hands of Stalin, who erased him from the iconic photos of Lenin, with whom he always shared a place of honor in his speeches. He did not know how to fight against what later, now in exile, he would call the bureaucratic forces of the party, which in his eyes would have betrayed the revolution and taken Russia back to the much-loathed capitalism.

Perhaps, upon seeing their loved ones murdered one by one at the hands of Stalin, he would be struck with the terrible remorse of realizing that it was he and Lenin who decided the party (the end) should always rule the means: democracy and respect for people. Perhaps then he would understand, tragically, that he had created and fed the monster that would eventually kill him and millions of Russian compatriots.

These are the tough lessons we learn from Trotsky’s story:

• Someone who is immersed in a power struggle, in a hostile environment such as a dictatorship, cannot escape playing the game of thrones. It’s win or die.
• The prestige of a hero can be no match for the cunningness of someone who controls the party’s apparat and propaganda.
• Sociopathy inevitably leads one to see the other as an enemy or potential adversary.
• A sociopath will tend to think that unseating a rival is not enough: they must disappear.