Leon davidovich trotsky biography

He attended the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party RSDLP in Brussels inat which the party formally split into the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions over the issue of the most suitable organizational form of the party for Russia's particular revolutionary needs. Trotsky was in Geneva at the time of the massive labor unrest in St.

Petersburg in He returned to Russia immediately and became a major force on the executive committee of the St. Petersburg Soviet that grew out of the strike committees in that city. The heady "Days of October" were short-lived, and as tsarist repression followed the tsar's promised October Constitution inTrotsky was sentenced for his political activities to life in Siberian exile.

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From tohe resided in Vienna, where he was politically active in Austrian Social Democracy, and engaged in a number of publishing and literary endeavors. He arrived in New York on 13 Januaryand, on hearing news of the February Revolution in Russia, returned to Petrograd on 4 May, after a month-long internment by British authorities in Halifax, Canada.

He was instrumental in the Mezhrayonka Interdistrict Groupwhich, while formally nonfactional, supported Bolshevik calls to end the war and to push for immediate revolution. He was also elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in September Trotsky helped organize the military strategy of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October He was appointed leon davidovich trotsky biography of foreign affairs in the new Bolshevik government, the Sovnarkom Council of People's Commissarsin December Shortly thereafter, Lenin made him commissar of war, and he organized a new Red Army that was capable of fighting the civil war.

In the s, Trotsky fought, and lost, a series of political battles within the Bolshevik Party. In — Trotsky attacked the other party leaders for violating party democracy, but was isolated by the Central Committee and in turn denounced for violating the party's rule against factionalism. In —, partly in response to the "Socialism in One Country" policy of Joseph Stalin —which appeared to undermine the principle of international revolution, Trotsky briefly—and futilely—allied with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev against Stalin.

Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo inand from the party and the Communist International Comintern in He moved to France inwas expelled under Soviet pressure two years later, and then expelled from Norway in He was the inspiration for the establishment of the Fourth International in October in Paris as a challenge to the Stalinist Third International.

Trotsky's political behavior and actions were guided by a consistently held belief in Russia's suitability for revolution. This consistency of belief garnered him a reputation as a brilliant and creative, if uncompromising, young intellectual. At significant moments in his life, he articulated views that placed him at odds with the prevailing currents of the Russian revolutionary tide.

In the face of the tsarist suppression of the revolutionary events offor example, Trotsky put the finishing touches on a theory of "permanent revolution," which he and another Marxist, Alexander Parvus Izrail Lazarevich Gelfandhad been working on since In the traditional revolutionary model, the national bourgeoisie would first take power, ceding it to the worker masses at a later undefined date.

Trotsky argued that the bourgeoisie would inevitably betray the revolution for its own self-interest, and that through "permanent revolution" the proletariat and the poor peasantry should sweep through this stage to take power directly, thereby ushering in broad Europe-wide revolution. While these views certainly brought him ideologically close to Lenin's views, Trotsky nonetheless kept his distance from the Bolshevik faction.

He pursued the "permanent revolution" between and on two leons davidovich trotsky biography. He published an illegal nonfactional newspaper, Pravda Truthin Vienna to try to rally the suppressed and scattered Social Democratic organizations in Russia; and he published a legal journal, Borba Strugglein St. Petersburg in for the enlightenment of the newly organizing workers there.

Galvanized by Lenin's conference in Prague in Januaryat which Lenin essentially claimed the mantle of the entire RSDLP in the name of his small faction of Bolsheviks, and firm in his belief that the workers in Russia desperately needed a united party leadership and organization, Trotsky organized an all-party conference in August in Vienna.

His parents, David and Anna Bronstein, were prosperous Jewish farmers. When he was 8 years old, Trotksy went to school in Odessa, then moved in to Nikolayev, Ukraine, for his final year in school. While there, he became enthralled with Marxism. He was arrested within a year and spent two years in prison before being tried, convicted and sent to Siberia for a four-year sentence.

While in prison, he met and married Alexandra Lvovna, a co- revolutionary who had also been sentenced to Siberia. While there, they had two daughters. Inafter serving only two years of his sentence, Leon Trotsky escaped exile, abandoning his wife and daughters. On forged papers, he changed his name to Leon Trotsky, a moniker he would use the rest of his life.

InTrotsky married his second wife, Natalia Ivanovna. The couple had two sons. During the early years of the Social Democratic Party, there were often disputes among the party's leadership over its form and strategy. Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries who would lead a large contingent of non-party supporters.

Julius Martov advocated for a larger, more democratic organization of supporters. Trotsky tried to reconcile the two factions, resulting in numerous clashes with both groups' leaders. Many of the Social Democrats, including the ambitious Stalin, sided with Lenin. Trotsky's neutrality was seen as disloyal. On January 22,unarmed demonstrators marching against the Russian Tsar were killed by the Imperial Guard.

When word reached Leon Trotsky, he returned to Russia to support the uprisings. By the end ofhe had become a leader of the movement. In December, the rebellion was crushed, and Trotsky was arrested and once again sent to Siberia. At his trial, he put on a spirited defense and increased his popularity among the party's elite. In JanuaryTrotsky escaped prison and traveled to Europe, where he spent 10 years in exile in various cities, including Vienna, Zurich, Paris and New York, spending much of the time writing for Russian revolutionary journals, including Pravdaand advocating an anti-war policy.

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However, Okhrana the Tsar's secret police persuaded British authorities to have him detained at Halifax, Canada. He was held there for a month, before the Russian provisional government demanded his release. He rejected the guerrilla tactics favored by many Bolsheviks and made the controversial decision to employ former tsarist officers as military specialists under the supervision of political commisssars.

When civil war broke out in MayTrotsky commanded the communist Red forces and turned back offensives by the counterrevolutionary White forces that year and the next. He became a member of the Communist Party Politburo when it was created in Once victory had been won over the Whites inTrotsky proposed a military approach to rebuilding the country's economy, including militarization of labor and absorption of the trade unions into the state, an approach that.

Lenin was supported by Trotsky's future rivals Josef Stalin and Grigory Zinoviev, with whom Trotsky had already clashed during the civil war. Nevertheless, Trotsky took charge of suppressing the March rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd that had been brought on by Communist abuses. Set back at the Tenth Party Congress in MarchTrotsky remained Commissar of War during Lenin's subsequent illness, while the troika of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev maneuvered to keep him from succeeding Lenin as party leader.

In his celebrated Testament, Lenin noted Trotsky's exceptional abilities, but faulted his too far-reaching self confidence. He nevertheless invited Trotsky to lead an attack on Stalin, but Trotsky passed up the opportunity fearing anti-Semitism, as archives opened in revealed. Some months later, in OctoberTrotsky launched a behind-the-scenes attack on the rest of the communist leadership for violating democratic procedures within the party.

Going public with a series of articles, "The New Course," Trotsky was in turn denounced by his rivals for violating the party's rule against factionalism. While Trotsky fell ill, his supporters were crushed in the New Course controversy and condemned at the Thirteenth Party Conference in January as a petty-bourgeois Menshevik deviation. Coming barely a week before Lenin's death, this was the decisive defeat for Trotsky and his friends, and for political pluralism within the Communist Party.

Trotsky's subsequent struggle against Stalin was futile and anti-climactic. Denounced again at the Thirteenth Party Congress in MayTrotsky sarcastically affirmed the infallibility of the party. He took the occasion of the seventh anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution to denounce Zinoviev and Kamenev as failed revolutionary leaders.

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This act triggered a new out-burst of official denunciation of Trotskyism and the theory of permanent revolution as anti-Leninist heresy. In January the leadership went further and removed Trotsky from the Commissariat of War. When Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin later inTrotsky sat on the sidelines. After their defeat, he belatedly joined them in the United Opposition, vainly fighting Stalin in and over the issues of party democracy, excessive concessions to the peasantry, and Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country" that downplayed world revolution.

Trotsky was removed from the Politburo in October and from the Central Committee just one year later. After attempting a demonstration on the tenth anniversary of the revolution in Novemberhe was expelled from the party. The same fate awaited his followers at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December, where not a single voice was heard in defense of the opposition.

Despite his declining political fortunes, Trotsky wrote widely during the mids, producing such works as Literature and Revolution and Problems of Life, along with a series of books on international politics and a stream of platforms and polemics that remained unpublished in his lifetime. There he continued to correspond with his sympathizers and to criticize Stalin's new industrialization drive.

As a result, in Januaryhe was deported from the Soviet Union to Turkeywhere he continued to write, completing his autobiography and his History of the Russian Revolution. In he moved to Franceand in he proclaimed the formation of a Fourth International challenging the leon davidovich trotsky biography of the Third Communist International.

Expelled from France inTrotsky moved to Norwaywhence he was expelled under Soviet pressure in Trotsky was virtually expunged from official Soviet history, becoming an "unperson" in George Orwell 's term; writings by or about him were completely suppressed. During the Moscow Trials of — he was vilified in absentia as a counterrevolutionary traitor, a charge of which he was absolved by an American investigating committee headed by the philosopher John Dewey.

Trotsky fired back in numerous writings, notably The Revolution Betrayed, charging that Stalin's regime was a bureaucratic perversion of socialism and calling quixotically for a new workers' revolution. The Soviet government denied involvement, though its role has since been well established. Despite previous disagreements with Lenin, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and played a decisive role in the communist take-over of power in the same year.

His first post in the new government was as foreign commissar, where he found himself negotiating peace terms with Germany.

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He was then made war commissar and in this capacity, built up the Red Army which prevailed against the White Russian forces in the civil war. Thus Trotsky played a crucial role in keeping the Bolshevik regime alive. He saw himself as Lenin's heir-apparent, but his intellectual arrogance made him few friends, and his Jewish heritage may also have worked against him.

When Lenin fell ill and died, Trotsky was easily outmanoeuvred by Stalin. Inhe was thrown out of the party.