Leon Trotsky - General Menshevikthread for the 12th of November 2021

(Lev Davidovich Bronstein, called Leon Trotsky or Trotsky; Yanovka, Ukraine, 1877 - Coyoacán, Mexico, 1940) Russian revolutionary. He was born into a Jewish family of tenant farmers and studied law at the University of Odessa. He participated from a young age in the clandestine opposition against the autocratic regime of the Tsars, organizing a Workers' League of the South of Russia (1897).

He was arrested several times and exiled to Siberia; but he managed to flee from there in 1902 and joined in London the one who already appeared as head of the Social Democratic opposition in exile: Lenin. Although he disagreed with his ideological conception of the party, he collaborated with him and tried in vain to reconcile the faction he led (the Bolsheviks) with the rival faction of the Russian Social Democracy (the Mensheviks).

He returned to Russia to participate in the 1905 Revolution (in which he organized the first Soviet or revolutionary council). When the revolution failed, he was deported again to Siberia and again escaped (1906). After traveling half the world coming into contact with the centers of revolutionary conspirators, he moved to Russia as soon as the February 1917 Revolution broke out, which overthrew Nicholas II.

Abandoning his previous career as an independent socialist (in relation to the Mensheviks), he put his talents as an organizer and agitator at the service of the Bolshevik Party and was elected president of the Petrograd Soviet. He played a central role in the victory of the bolsheviks: he was the main responsible for the taking of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks, which established the communist regime in Russia (October Revolution of 1917).

Although Lenin held the top of power, Trotsky played a crucial role in the Soviet government until its death. As the first Foreign Commissioner of Bolshevik Russia (1917-18), he negotiated with the Germans the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, which withdrew the country from the First World War to respond to the wishes of peace of the masses and concentrate on the consolidation of the Revolution.

Then he was commissioner of war (1918-25), a position from which he organized the Red Army under very difficult conditions and defeated in a long civil war the so-called white movement armies (counterrevolutionaries) and their western allies (1918-20). His work was therefore crucial to the survival of Early USSR.

After the rise of Joseph Stalin thanks to victory of the Centre faction over the Right and Left oppositions in the Communist Party of the USSR over what to do with the New Economic Policy and Foreign Policy (Permanent Revolution vs Socialism in One Country) , Trotsky was removed from his positions and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929.

He resided in Turkey, France, Norway and finally in Mexico, invited by General Lázaro Cárdenas, president of the country, in 1937. He initially lived in the home of the Mexican painter Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo.

Trotsky did not give up in his revolutionary struggle, which he channeled from exile writing in defense of his ideas (works such as The Permanent Revolution, 1930; or the History of the Russian Revolution, 1932) and leading a dissident communist current (grouped in the Fourth International since 1938). He was assassinated by a Soviet agent Ramón Mercader :pika-pickaxe: