Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky was a leading Marxist thinker and Russian revolutionary leader, first as Lenin’s most important lieutenant in the Bolshevik regime and Soviet state and then in exile from the Stalinist Soviet Union. Born Lev Davidovich Bronshteyn to a well-off farming family in the Kherson province of the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine), Trotsky was given a modern, Russian-language upbringing and education. Embracing socialism at age eighteen, Trotsky initially leaned toward the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which held that socialist revolution was only possible in societies that had gone through full-fledged capital­ist development, and that any effort to “jump over” that stage risked creating a dictatorial autocracy; the young Trotsky’s doubts about the Bolshevik leader Lenin’s idea of a “vanguard party” to orchestrate revolution, visible in this text, resonated with such concerns. However, there­after Trotsky’s views shifted decisively and he became an important theorist of the Bolshevik argument that worldwide socialist revolution could and should begin through a party-led revolution and “dictatorship of the proletarian” in less developed regions of the world like the Russian Empire. During the Russian Revolution of 1917 and ensuing Civil War, he played a leading role in the Bolshevik takeover in October, the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War, and the consolidation of the Soviet Union as a one-party state devoted to massive social revolution to turn what was still a largely agrarian country into a modernized juggernaut that could lead a world revolu­tion. Driven into exile when Stalin consolidated power after Lenin’s death, Trotsky elaborated an insight­ful if self-aggrandizing analysis of how the Soviet Union had descended into totalitarian dictatorship, developed a theory of “permanent revolution” that his followers deemed an alternative to Stalinism, and offered percep­tive—some would say prophetic—analyses of the rise of global fascism and the violence that it would unleash, including against Europe’s Jews. Soviet agents assas­sinated Trotsky in Mexico. Throughout his life, Trotsky disclaimed any particular Jewish identity or interest and was an uncompromising critic of any forms of Jewish national identity or politics, even the quite limited sort advocated by his fellow Russian Social Democrats in the Bund. But ironically, his leading role in the Bolshevik cause made him the premiere boogeyman in antisemitic analyses of socialism and communism as “Jewish plots”; this gave rise to the classic bit of Jewish black humor that the Trotskys make the Revolution, but the Bronshteyns are punished for it.