Leon Trotsky briefly. Lev Trotsky - biography, information, personal life
Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born on October 26, 1879 on the Yanovka farm of the Elizavetgrad district of the Kherson province in the family of a wealthy Jewish landowner, who by that time had 100 acres of land purchased and over 200 leased land. In 1888 he entered the St. Paul's Lutheran Real School in Odessa; the first student, however, repeatedly came into conflict with teachers; communicated with the local liberal intelligentsia, joined the Russian classical literature and European culture. In 1896 he graduated from a real school in Nikolaev and entered the physics and mathematics faculty of Novorossiysk University as a volunteer, but soon left it. He joined a populist circle in Nikolaev, and learned about Marxism for the first time from a member of the circle, Alexandra Sokolovskaya. In 1897, together with her and her brothers, he formed the Social Democratic "South Russian Workers' Union", which began revolutionary propaganda among the workers. In January 1898, he was arrested, after a 2-year imprisonment in Nikolaev, Kherson, Odessa and Moscow, he was administratively exiled for 4 years to Eastern Siberia (to Ust-Kut, then Nizhneilimsk and Verkholensk, Irkutsk province). In 1899 in Butyrka prison he married Sokolovskaya Alexandra. Political parties Russia the end of the XIX - the first third of the XX century. Encyclopedia - M .: Russian Political Encyclopedia (ROSSPEN), 1996, p. 613
In August 1902, with the consent of his wife, who was left with two young daughters in her arms, he fled from exile, using for this a fake passport in the name of Trotsky, the warden of the Odessa prison. Arriving in Samara, where the office of the Russian organization Iskra was located, having fulfilled a number of instructions from the offices in Kharkov, Poltava and Kiev, illegally crossed the border and at the end of October 1902 arrived in London, where he met V.I. Lenin. On his recommendation, Trotsky worked at Iskra, gave essays for Russian émigrés and students.
In 1903, in Paris, he married Natalya Ivanovna Sedova. Participated in the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party with a mandate from the Siberian Union of the RSDLP.
At the end of 1904, he left the Mensheviks, but did not join the Bolsheviks either, and advocated the unification of both Social Democratic factions. After the events of January 9, 1905, he was one of the first to return to Russia (Kiev, then Petersburg), collaborated with a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP Leonid Borisovich Krasin, who stood on the position of the Bolshevik conciliators, as well as with the Mensheviks, but at odds with them in assessing the role of the liberal bourgeoisie in the revolution. Together with Parvus (A.L. Gelfand), Trotsky developed the theory of "permanent revolution".
In the course of the revolution of 1905-1907, from denying the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, Trotsky gradually came to the conclusion about the importance of the participation of the peasantry in the revolution with the obligatory leadership of the proletariat.
In 1905, Trotsky's qualities as a politician, organizer of the masses, orator, and publicist were directly revealed. In the fall of 1905, Trotsky was one of the leaders of the Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies, a speaker and author of resolutions on major issues. In December 1905 he was arrested, at the end of 1906 he was sentenced to "eternal settlement" in Siberia, but escaped along the way. In 1907, at the 5th Congress of the RSDLP, he headed a group of the center, not adhering to either the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks. Politicians of Russia in 1917: Biographical Dictionary / Chief Editor: P.V. Volobuev - M: Great Russian Encyclopedia, 1993, p. 321
Beginning in 1908, Trotsky collaborated in many Russian and foreign newspapers and magazines. In 1908, together with A.A. Ioffe and M.I. Skobelev established the publication in Vienna in Russian of the newspaper for workers "Pravda". Not recognizing the legality of the Prague Party Conference organized by the Bolsheviks in 1912, Trotsky, together with Martov, F.I. Dan called a general party conference in Vienna in August 1912, the anti-Bolshevik bloc ("Augustow") created at it collapsed in 1914, and Trotsky himself withdrew from it. In 1914 he published a brochure in German "War and the International". In September 1916, Trotsky was exiled from France to Spain for anti-war propaganda, where he was soon arrested and sent to the United States with his family. Since January 1917, Trotsky was an employee of the Russian international newspaper Novy Mir. In March 1917, upon his return to Russia, Trotsky, together with his family, was arrested in Halifax (Canada) and was temporarily imprisoned in an internment camp for sailors of the German merchant fleet. On May 4, 1917, he arrived in Petrograd, headed the organization of "Mezhraiontsy", with whom he was admitted to the RSDLP (b) and was elected to the Central Committee of the party, of which he was a member until 1927. On March 4, 1918, Trotsky was appointed chairman of the Supreme Military Council, on March 13 - people's commissar for military affairs, and with the creation of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic on September 2 - its chairman. In 1920-21, while remaining in military posts, he was temporarily appointed People's Commissar of Railways, was one of the leaders of the restoration of railway transport and other sectors of the national economy. On the basis of hostile relations between Stalin and Trotsky, a split was formed within the Politburo and the Central Committee, which resulted in the most acute internal party struggle, where Stalin and his supporters prevailed. In January 1925, Trotsky was released from work in the Revolutionary Military Council, in October 1926 he was expelled from the Politburo, in October 1927 - from the Central Committee. In November 1927, Trotsky was expelled from the party, after which he was exiled from Moscow to Alma-Ata, then to Turkey. Politicians of Russia in 1917: Biographical Dictionary / Chief Editor: P.V. Volobuev - M: Great Russian Encyclopedia, 1993, p. 324
After his expulsion from the USSR, Trotsky began his literary and journalistic activities. He fought against Stalin, whom he considered a traitor to the ideals of October. The last years of his life, Trotsky was in Mexico. Stalin set before his special services the task of destroying the hated enemy. The NKVD decided to murder Trotsky with the hands of their agent Ramon Mercador. The 26-year-old son of an influential Spanish communist was a participant in the Spanish Civil War, which ended in the defeat of the Republican forces. Jacques Mornard (according to the documents), who instantly turned into Frank Jackson, at first unsuccessfully tried to infiltrate the local Trotskyists. Meanwhile, the Mexican Communist Party, apparently on instructions from Moscow, decided to "duplicate" the actions of the special agent and organized its own conspiracy to assassinate Trotsky. On May 24, 1940, his villa came under armed attack. More than twenty masked militants literally turned the whole house upside down, but the owners managed to hide. Fate itself preserved the Kremlin exile: Trotsky, his wife and grandson did not suffer. After this scandalous incident, which became the property of the world press, Trotsky turned his house into a real fortress, where only people who were especially devoted to him were allowed. Among them were Sylvia (Trotsky's courier) and her husband Frank Jackson, who managed to gain confidence in the "teacher." At first, the young man, who showed an increased interest in Marxism, seemed to Trotsky too intrusive. But in the end, the old underground fighter, who considered it his sacred duty to raise a young generation of fighters for the "world revolution," was imbued with confidence in the charming American. Despite the hot day, on August 20, 1940, Frank Jackson appeared at Trotsky's villa in a tightly buttoned raincoat and hat. Under the cloak of a "family friend" there was a whole arsenal: a climbing ice ax, a hammer and a large-caliber automatic pistol. The guards, who often saw this man in the house and habitually considered him "theirs", took the guest to the owner, who was feeding the rabbits in the garden. It seemed strange to Natalya, Trotsky's wife, that Sylvia's husband had arrived without warning, but the guest was offered to stay for lunch. Refusing the invitation, Mercador-Jackson asked to see the article he had just written. The men went into the office. As soon as Trotsky went deep into his reading, Jackson pulled an ice ax from under his cloak and stuck it in the back of the victim's head. Considering the blow not reliable enough, the assassin swung the ice ax again, but by a miracle Trotsky, who had retained consciousness, grabbed him by the arm, forcing him to drop his weapon. Then he staggered out of the study and into the living room. "Jackson!" He shouted. "Look what you've done!" The guards who came running to the scream knocked Jackson down, who was aiming at his victim with a pistol. "Don't kill him," Trotsky stopped the guards. A few minutes later, Mercador Jackson and his victim were taken to the metropolitan emergency hospital. The stubbornness with which this mortally wounded man fought for his life shocked even the doctors. In their practice, there has never been a case that a victim with such a monstrous injury - a cut skull - lived, periodically regaining consciousness, for more than a day ... Ramon Mercador, aka Frank Jackson, aka Jacques Mornard, was sentenced to twenty years in prison ... After leaving a Mexican prison in March 1960, he settled in Cuba. Shortly before his death in Havana on October 18, 1978, Trotsky's killer received the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union.
On October 26, 1879, in the Kherson province, a fifth child was born to a family of landowners - a boy named Lev. His father, David Leontyevich Bronstein, came from peasants and learned to read and write when he was old enough, moreover, only to read books written by his son. Lev's mother, Anna Lvovna, nee Zhivotovskaya, was from a bourgeois family from Odessa. David and Anna were Jewish colonists on an agricultural farm near the village of Yanovka in the Elisavetgrad district. Their affairs were going uphill, and by the time Leo was born, the prosperity of the Bronsteins was not in doubt.
At the age of seven, Leo began to study at a private Jewish school, but he was not given education, since the teaching was in Hebrew, which Leo did not know well. As he later wrote himself, the first school gave him the opportunity only to learn to write and read in Russian.
In 1888, Leo became a student of the preparatory class of St. Paul's real school in Odessa. Throughout his studies, he lived in the family of his mother's nephew, Moses Spenzer, who owned the printing house and publishing house "Matezis". The Odessa real school was founded by the Germans, and its main pride were highly qualified teachers. From the gymnasium of that time, real schools differed in a large bias in favor of mathematical and natural sciences. However, it was during his studies at the school that Lev read Pushkin and Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Dickens, Veresaev and Nekrasov. Inborn abilities and hard work helped the boy to become the best student of the school in all subjects. True, in the second grade, he was expelled from the school, as he quarreled with the teacher of the French language - a great tyrant. Only the petition of influential relatives helped Leo to recover at the school. It is possible that this was a revolutionary impulse of the future leader ...
The boyish desire to stand out from the general gray crowd and somehow draw the attention of others to his own person is quite understandable. When the doctor discovered Leo's myopia and prescribed the wearing of glasses, the boy was not upset, but, on the contrary, decided that glasses gave him special significance. At the same time, the young Bronstein began to show another trait - arrogance towards others. However, he certainly had reasons for this: the best student, Leo, treated his comrades with superiority and often emphasized his own primacy.
In his youth, Leo fell in love with the theater. He was fascinated not only by the action itself on stage, but also by the ability of the artists to rise above the audience with the help of the game. In general, he considered the world of creative people special, access to which was open only for a select few.
In 1896, Lev moved to Nikolaev to complete his studies, and entered the seventh grade of a real school. This year in general became a turning point for his psyche. The knowledge gained at the school gave Leo the opportunity to keep in the place of the first student, but at that time he became interested in social life. Lev met Franz Schwigovsky - a gardener, but a very educated person who closely follows politics and read a huge number of books. Parents demanded to abandon this acquaintance, but in response Lev broke up with them, abandoned school and became a member of Shvigovsky's commune along with his older brother Alexander. It was here that he met with Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who became his first wife. The members of the commune dressed in the same straw hats and blue blouses, carried black sticks with them - perhaps that is why they were considered members of some mysterious sect in the city. The communards read a lot, but they read very randomly, distributed books, argued a lot and even tried to create a "university based on mutual education."
Lev Bronstein still graduated from a real school and, at the request of his parents, returned to Odessa. Here he began attending lectures at the Faculty of Mathematics of the University, but revolutionary sentiments demanded another, and he again gave up classes. In fact, Lev switched to work in semi-legal circles of youth of radical sentiments and very soon turned into an informal leader of one of these groups. Leo's worldview was then quite far from Marxism - for the reason that he had not yet tried to gain strong political convictions.
In 1897, a surge of revolutionary sentiments began in Russia, and a group of young people led by Lev began to look for contacts in the workers' quarters of Nikolaev. It was thanks to the efforts of Lev that the South of Russia acquired another revolutionary organization called the "South Russian Workers' Union". The Charter of the Union was written by Leo. The workers literally poured into the organization in a stream, but the strikes did not interest this contingent, since the workers' earnings were quite high. Much more workers wanted to sort out social relations. Meetings and political studies with workers gradually grew into serious and painstaking work. Having obtained a hectograph, the members of the Union began to print proclamations, and later the newspaper Nashe Delo, which was published in a circulation of two or three hundred copies. Basically, Lev Bronstein himself was engaged in the articles for the newspaper and the texts of the proclamations, and in addition, at the May Day celebrations, he tested himself as an orator.
Gradually, the members of the Union established relations with other revolutionary cells in the circles of the Social Democrats of Odessa. At this time, Lev Bronstein begins to assert that revolutionary work is needed not only among the factory workers, but also among the artisans and the petty bourgeoisie. It cannot be said that tsarist secret police all this time she was dozing, and in January-February 1898 more than two hundred people were arrested in revolutionary circles. The first court in Lev Bronstein's life sentenced him to exile in Siberia for a period of four years. Already in the transit prison in Moscow, Lev's personal life improved - he married Alexandra Sokolovskaya. In the fall of 1900, their daughter Zina was born. At this time, the young family lived in the small village of Ust-Kut in the Irkutsk province. Here Lev Bronstein met Uritsky and Dzerzhinsky.
There was a fairly clear connection between the exiles, and Bronstein writes leaflets and appeals for the social democratic organizations. In 1902, in the summer, he receives previously ordered books, in the bindings of which tissue paper with the latest foreign editions is hidden. With this mail, one of the first issues of the newspaper Iskra and Lenin's articles arrived to the exiles. By this time, Lev had a second daughter, Nina, and the family moved to Verkholensk. Here Bronstein begins to prepare for his escape. They got him a fake passport, in which a new surname was inscribed - Trotsky. This pseudonym remained with Lev Davidovich for life. Despite the fact that the wife remained with two young daughters, she fully supported Lev in organizing the escape.
Leon Trotsky went to Samara, where the main headquarters of the Iskra newspaper, headed by Krzhizhanovsky, was then located. Having received this assignment, Trotsky traveled to Kharkov, Kiev and Poltava to establish contacts with local revolutionary organizations. Soon, Trotsky received an invitation from London from Lenin. Supplied with money for the trip, Lev illegally crossed the Russian-Austrian border and went through Switzerland and France to London. This trip finally made Trotsky a professional revolutionary.
In the fall of 1902, in Europe, Trotsky met Natalya Sedova, who later became his second wife. True, he did not divorce Sokolovskaya, and therefore the marriage with Sedova was not registered. Nevertheless, they lived together until the death of Trotsky, and two boys were born in their family - Lev and Sergei.
During this period, conflicts began in the editorial office of the Iskra newspaper between its old members Axelrod, Plekhanov and Zasulich and the new ones - Lenin, Potresov and Martov. Lenin proposed introducing Trotsky to the editorial board, but Plekhanov blocked this decision in an ultimatum. In 1903, in the summer, the Second Congress of the RSDLP was held, at which Trotsky so fervently supported Lenin's ideas that the caustic Ryazanov called Lev Davidovich "Lenin's club." However, the result of the congress and the expulsion of Zasulich and Axelrod from the editorial board of Iskra prompted Trotsky to side with the offended and to speak very critically about Lenin's organizational plans. From this moment, the countdown of the confrontation between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks begins.
Trotsky returned to Russia through illegal routes in 1905. Here he was elected chairman of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies of St. Petersburg. As a result of the revolutionary events, Lev Davidovich was arrested and in 1907, by a court verdict, deprived of all civil rights and sent to Siberia for an eternal settlement. Already at the beginning of next year, Leon Trotsky arrives with a stage in the city of Obdorsk, in the Arctic. Thirty-five days later, the convoy of exiles reached Berezovo, from where Trotsky decides to flee. This time he risked very much - the escape of the condemned to eternal settlement without options doomed him to hard labor. Through a local peasant, Trotsky got acquainted with a reindeer breeder and, with the help of bribing with alcohol and gold coins of the royal coinage on reindeer, overcame the road seven hundred kilometers to the Ural Mountains. From here he reached St. Petersburg by train and was sent abroad by the party leadership.
Since 1908, Trotsky has been publishing the Pravda newspaper in Vienna. This he did until 1912, when the Bolsheviks "intercepted" the name of the newspaper. Trotsky went to Paris in 1914 and started publishing the daily newspaper Nashe Slovo. In the fall of 1915, Trotsky took part in the Zimmerwald Conference, where he fervently objected to the attacks of Lenin and Martov. In 1916, at the request of the tsarist government of Russia, the French police expelled Lev Davidovich to Spain, and in turn the Spanish authorities demanded the departure of the revolutionary to the United States.
Upon learning of the February Revolution, Leon Trotsky tried to travel to Russia by steamer, but in Halifax, a Canadian port, the British authorities removed him and his family from the ship and placed him in a camp intended for interned sailors of the German merchant fleet. The British put forward the absence of Russian documents on Trotsky as the reason for the arrest, and they were not at all worried that there was an American passport, personally issued to Trotsky by US President Wilson. Soon the interim government sent a written request for the release of Trotsky as a well-deserved fighter against the tsarist regime.
On May 4, 1917, Trotsky and his family arrived in Petrograd and immediately took the place of the informal leader of a group of so-called "Mezhraiontsy" who criticized the Provisional Government. After the July riots, Lev Davidovich was arrested and charged with spying for Germany. During the VI Congress of the RSDLP (b) in July, Lev Davidovich was in the "Kresty" and could not read out his report "On the current moment". Nevertheless, he was elected to the Central Committee. Immediately after the suppression of the Kornilov revolt, Trotsky was released from prison, and on September 20 he holds the post of chairman of the Soviet of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies of Petrograd. While in this position, Trotsky directly participated in the preparation and implementation of the October Revolution. Stalin points out in his memoirs that the revolution owes its success to Leon Trotsky. It was Trotsky who introduced the concept of "red terror" into politics and clearly characterized its principles in his address to the cadets on December 17, 1917.
In the spring of 1918, Lev Davidovich took over as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR and People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. While in these posts, he did a lot to create a strong and efficient army. Trotsky's activities were highly praised by the government. Several cities were named after him, but with the beginning of the repressions against the Trotskyists, they were renamed. None other than Trotsky, back in 1920, proposed supplying the peasants on the principle of "grain-manufactured goods" and replacing the predatory surplus appropriation with an interest rate tax in kind. However, in the Central Committee, he received only four votes out of fifteen, and Lenin, not yet ready to change the policy of War Communism, accused Trotsky of "free trade".
After the conflict in the Central Committee, which split the committee into two parts and gave rise to "discussions about trade unions", relations between Lenin and Trotsky deteriorated greatly, and the supporters of Lev Davidovich were removed from the Central Committee. In 1922, an alliance was outlined between Lenin and Trotsky, but Lenin's illness and his departure from political life did not allow Trotsky to carry out the necessary reforms. Problems between Stalin and Trotsky began during the defense of Tsaritsyn during the civil war, and Lenin's death actually turned against Lev Davidovich most of the party leadership. Such a situation was skillfully fueled by Stalin, and Trotsky was accused of dictatorial plans, as well as the fact that he joined the Bolshevik party only in 1917.
In 1923, Trotsky in his articles sharply opposed the "troika" of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, accusing these leaders of bureaucratizing the party apparatus. These accusations were rejected by the Thirteenth Party Conference, and Trotsky's actions were sharply condemned. By the fall of 1924, Trotsky had lost the posts of chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council and People's Commissar of the military. The pressure on Trotsky grows, and, despite his attempts to resist in the press, in 1926 he was removed from the Central Committee of the Politburo. After organizing an anti-government demonstration in early November 1927, Lev Davidovich was expelled from the CPSU (b) and sent to Alma-Ata. The rest of his associates and followers, including Zinoviev and Kamenev by that time, either admitted they were wrong, or were repressed - while both were shot a decade later.
In 1929, by decision of the Central Committee, Leon Trotsky was exiled to the Turkish island of Prinkipo, and in 1932 he lost his USSR citizenship. A year later he moved to France, in 1934 he was already in Denmark, in 1935 - in Norway. The Norwegian government, in order not to worsen its relations with the Land of the Soviets, confiscated all of Trotsky's works and actually placed him under house arrest. Oppression led to the fact that in 1936 Lev Davidovich emigrated to Mexico. In exile, he closely followed the development of events in the USSR and was sensitive to any political events. In August 1936, Trotsky's book "Revolution Betrayed" was completed, in which he directly called what was happening in the USSR "Stalin's Thermidor" - that is, a counter-revolutionary coup. Actually, Leon Trotsky was the first to understand what the "successful assimilation" of yesterday's class enemies by Soviet society would lead to - later they were all exiled or destroyed. In 1938, Trotsky proclaimed the emergence of the Fourth International - in opposition to the Third. Supporters of this political organization exist in our time.
In May 1940, the NKVD organized an attempt on the life of Leon Trotsky, as an implacable enemy of Soviet power. Under the leadership of the NKVD agent Grigulevich, a group of raiders, led by the Mexican raider and staunch Stalinist Siqueiros, burst into the room and shot all the cartridges from revolvers, after which the attackers fled hastily. Siqueiros would later associate the failure of this attack with his group's inexperience and excitement. Trotsky was not hurt then. However, the next attempt by the NKVD to settle scores with Lev Davidovich was crowned with success.
On August 20, early in the morning, Ramon Mercader, who was considered a staunch supporter of Lev Davidovich, came to Trotsky. This NKVD agent brought the manuscript with him, and while Trotsky was reading it at his desk, Mercader removed a gift ice ax from the wall and dealt a fatal blow from behind. As a result of the wound received, Trotsky died a day later - on August 21, 1940. He was buried next to the house where he lived.
Ramon Mercader was convicted of murder by a Mexican court and received twenty years in prison. After his release, he arrived in Moscow in 1961, where he received the high title - Hero of the Soviet Union, as well as many great privileges ...
Leiba Bronstein was born on October 26 (November 7), 1879 in the village of Yanovka, Kherson province, in the family of landowner David Bronstein. In 1888 he entered the St. Paul's School in Odessa, graduated from graduation classes in Nikolaev. Lev Bronstein, 1888
The II Congress entered my life as a great milestone, if only for the fact that it divorced me and Lenin for a number of years
Trotsky L.
"My life"
In 1904, Trotsky left the Menshevik party. He and his wife arrived in Munich and settled in the apartment of Alexander Parvus. In Trotsky, having learned about the strike movement that had begun in Russia, he illegally arrived in Petersburg, where, together with Parvus, they actually led the Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies. During the workers' strike in October, Trotsky was in the thick of things.
Fifty-two days of the existence of the first Council were filled with work to capacity: the Council, the Executive Committee, continuous meetings and three newspapers. How we lived in this maelstrom is not clear to me myself
Trotsky L.
"My life"
On December 3, Trotsky was arrested for the Financial Manifesto, which called for accelerating the financial collapse of tsarism. In 1906, at the trial of the St. Petersburg Council of Workers' Deputies, which received a wide public response, Trotsky was sentenced to eternal settlement in Siberia with the deprivation of all civil rights. In 1907, he fled from a stage through Germany to Vienna, where he settled with his wife and children. 
Trotsky in the chamber of the Peter and Paul Fortress, 1905
During this period, his relationship with Lenin heated up. Trotsky publishes the newspaper Pravda for workers and opposition intelligentsia, and actively promotes the idea of uniting the Social Democrats. A hostile campaign was launched against the Vienna Pravda by the Bolsheviks. Lenin called Trotsky a "Jew" in the article "On the color of shame in Judas Trotsky", which was published only in 1932 in the newspaper "Pravda" in the USSR. Lenin sent letters and articles to party organs and the press in which he wrote that Trotsky and "Trotskyism" were dangerous. As a result, Lenin borrowed the name of Trotsky's newspaper and began publishing the Bolshevik Pravda in St. Petersburg. In the Soviet Union, it became the most influential newspaper.
On July 28, 1914, the First World War began. Trotsky becomes a war correspondent and is actively published. For revolutionary propaganda in the newspaper "Nashe Slovo" in September 1916 expelled from France.
In January 1917, Trotsky arrived on a steamer in New York, where he worked for the Russian newspaper Novy Mir. Having received the news about, together with his family he went to Russia on a steamer. In Halifax, Canada, he and several other socialists were dropped off and sent to a prisoner of war concentration camp. The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government, Miliukov, under pressure from the Council of Workers' Deputies, requested the release of the detainees. 
French passport of Leon Trotsky
Trotsky arrived in Petrograd via Sweden and Finland, where he joined the Interdistrict Organization and became its leader. By mid-1917, the group had grown from a few hundred to four thousand members. Lenin strove to unite with the Mezhdistrict members. The unification took place at the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (b), at the same time Trotsky was elected to the Central Committee of the party.
Lenin and Trotsky at the celebration of the second anniversary of the October Revolution, 1919
In this struggle, Trotsky was defeated - on January 26, 1925, he was deprived of military leadership. In 1926, Trotsky forms an opposition bloc with Kamenev and Zinoviev, his former opponents, and begins to openly oppose the Stalinist line. Soon the opposition platform went underground. There was organized harassment against her.
take the power of Mexico. Trotsky settled in Coyoacan, first in the Blue House by the artist Frida Kahlo, and then in a villa nearby.
Leon Trotsky (second from left) with Frida Kahlo.
Meanwhile, a show trial was organized in Moscow, at which Trotsky was named Hitler's agent and sentenced in absentia to death penalty.
Trotsky, on the other hand, began writing a book about Stalin, met with journalists from various publications, proclaimed the creation of the Fourth International - a Trotskyist international organization, which set its main goal world revolution and the victory of the working class.
Trotsky, in response to the Moscow trials, recorded a video message to the world community, in which he accused Stalin of despotism. “It was not communism and socialism that gave birth to this court, but Stalinism,” Trotsky says. He claims that the trial of him and his former comrades in the opposition (Kamenev, Zinoviev, Pyatakov and others) is based on false evidence in the interests of the ruling elite.
There were two attempts on Trotsky's life. On May 24, Mexican artist, Stalinist Jose David Alfaro Siqueiros with a group of militants drove up to Trotsky's villa and fired about two hundred bullets into the walls, doors and windows of the house. Trotsky and his family survived. In parallel with the Siqueiros group, the NKVD agent infiltrated Trotsky's confidence. He entered his house and on August 20, 1940, dealt a fatal blow with an ice pick, from which Trotsky died the next day.
The one really unlucky in Soviet historiography is Trotsky! They were deleted from everywhere, all the merits were disavowed. They physically destroyed both himself and almost all close relatives. The truth surfaced only decades later. Unattractive, bloody, uncomfortable - but what it really is.
Biography and activities of Leon Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Trotsky (real name - Bronstein) was born in 1879 on the Yanovka farm in southern Russia. He was the fifth child in the family of a very wealthy landowner. The father of the family did not even know how to read, which, however, in no way prevented him from succeeding in life. Both parents worked in the field along with numerous farm laborers. The father of the family grew richer from year to year, and the family continued to live in a dugout with a thatched roof.
Leo received a certain education - first in Nikolaev, then in Odessa. He was always the first in his studies. He had an excellent memory, fresh thinking and a fatherly bulldog grip. The youth of the future revolutionary fell on the time of the cult of the People's Will. They were almost deified. Leo was ambitious, grasping, and extremely ambitious. He was completely devoid of all splendor and did not build utopian dreams. He quickly matures.
Leva Bronstein at the beginning was far from revolutionary impulses. He was torn between mathematics and social activities. In the end, he dropped out and devoted himself to revolutionary ideas. He started as a populist, in the late 90s. XIX century. For agitation he was arrested and spent two years in prison. Communication with other prisoners made him a convinced Marxist.
In 1900, Lev was sent into exile in the Irkutsk province. There he spent two years, got married, became the father of two daughters. Then he left his wife and went to Europe, explaining that the revolutionary duty is above all. To escape, he used a fake passport, in which he entered the name of the former prison warden - Trotsky. She became the party pseudonym of Lev Bronstein.
Trotsky arrived in London, met with, began to collaborate in the newspaper "Iskra". Agreement reigned between the two leaders only as long as Trotsky did not show his own ambitions. It was then that he earned the labels that stuck to him tightly - "Juda" and "political prostitute." Lenin, as you know, did not hesitate in expressions, even in the address of the allies. They quarreled with Trotsky and made peace again.
In 1905, Trotsky was arrested and put in solitary confinement at the Peter and Paul Fortress. There he did not feel slighted: he wrote a lot, and then handed over the manuscripts to his lawyers, whom no one examined at the exit. By the verdict of the court, he was waiting for an eternal settlement in Siberia. However, Trotsky did not even get to his destination and again flees abroad, to France, where he takes an active part in the publication of socialist newspapers. Now he is finally becoming an independent political figure.
The French authorities send him to America. There he learned about. He is in a hurry to return to Russia. He plunges headlong into business. He is elected Chairman of the Council of Workers 'and Peasants' Deputies. It was Trotsky who was the organizer and inspirer. Lenin seizes the initiative a little later. Trotsky forms the Red Guards. Lenin and Trotsky stimulated the lawlessness of the masses in every possible way.
The culminating moment in Trotsky's biography is the civil war and the formation of the Red Army. This "demon of revolution" travels on all fronts on his personal armored train, agitates, shoots, and gives orders. He was not a commander - he relied on unbridled terror and intimidation of dissidents. After the war, Trotsky became the people's commissar of railways. Begins a period of his factional activity, opposition to the rising Stalin and many other party comrades.
Trotsky found himself alone and lost in the struggle for power. They were afraid of him. Trotsky did not lose so much - he was defeated by other former party comrades, in particular Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky. Bukharin was the main ideologist of the party, Rykov headed the government, Tomsky headed the trade unions. In 1925, Trotsky was removed from the post of People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs.
In 1926 he was removed from the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b). The next year he was removed from all posts and sent into exile in Alma-Ata. In 1929, Trotsky was expelled from the USSR, and then stripped of his Soviet citizenship. His wife, Natalya Sedova, and their son Lev left with him. Trotsky turned out to be of no use to anyone and a burden to everyone. He often changed his place of residence, rushed around the world (France, Denmark, Norway), until he settled in Mexico. Here he breathed freely. He began to form parties all over the world. Created the IV International.
Stalin gave the order to destroy Trotsky at any cost. Having gained confidence in Trotsky, Soviet agent Ramon Mercader smashed his head with an ice pick on August 20, 1940.
- Trotsky's killer served a twenty-year sentence, returned to Moscow, where he received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
Biography of Leon Trotsky
Leiba Davidovich Bronstein
Lev Davidovich Trotsky
2nd Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies
October 8, 1917 - November 8, 1918
Predecessor: Nikolay Semyonovich Chkheidze
Successor: 1st People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR
November 8, 1917 - March 13, 1918
Predecessor: position established; Mikhail Ivanovich Tereshchenko as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Republic
Successor:
1st Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR, USSR
September 6, 1918 - January 26, 1925
Predecessor: position established;
1st People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs of the USSR
July 6, 1923 - January 25, 1925
Preceded: position established
Successor: Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze
2nd People's Commissar for Military Affairs of the RSFSR
March 14, 1918 - November 12, 1923
Predecessor: N.I. Podvoisky
Successor: position abolished; he is the People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs of the USSR
Religion: Atheist
Born: October 26 (November 7) 1879
Yanovka village, Elisavetgrad district, Kherson province, Russian Empire now Bobrinets district, Kirovograd region
Death: August 21, 1940 (age 60)
Coyoacan, Mexico City, Mexico
Buried: same place
Father: David Leontievich Bronstein (1847-1922)
Mother: Anna (Anetta) Lvovna Bronstein, nee. Zhivotovskaya (died 1910 or 1912)
Wife: 1st marriage in 1900 - Alexandra Lvovna, nee Sokolovskaya (1872-1938?), 2nd marriage in 1903 - Natalia Ivanovna, nee Sedova (1882-1962)
Children: 1st marriage: Zinaida (Volkova) (1901-1933),
Nina (Nevelson) (1902-1928)
2nd marriage: Sedovs: Leo (1906-1938), Sergei (1908-1937)
Party: RSDLP (b) / RCP (b) (1917-1927); SDPSh
Education: secondary
Profession: statesman, writer
Lev Davidovich Trotsky(pseudonym, also: Perot, Antid Oto, L. Sedov, Starik, etc.); birth name Leib Davidovich Bronstein; October 26, 1879; the village of Yanovka, Elisavetgrad district, Kherson province - August 21, 1940; Coyoacan, Mexico City) - leader of the international workers' and communist movement, theorist of Marxism, the ideologist of one of its currents - Trotskyism. Twice exiled under the tsarist regime, deprived of all civil rights in 1905. One of the organizers of the October Revolution of 1917 and one of the founders of the Red Army. One of the founders and ideologists of the Comintern, a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In the Soviet government - the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs; in 1918-1925 - People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR, then the USSR. Since 1923 - the leader of the internal party left opposition. Member of the Politburo of the CPSU (b) in 1919-1926. In 1927 he was removed from all posts and sent into exile. In 1929 he was exiled from the USSR. In 1932 he was deprived of Soviet citizenship. After being expelled from the USSR, he was the founder and chief theoretician of the Fourth International (1938). Author of works on the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia, the creator of major historical works on the revolution of 1917, literary critical articles, memoirs "My Life" (Berlin, 1930). Married twice, without divorce. He was mortally wounded by NKVD agent Ramon Mercader on August 20, 1940 in Mexico.
Leiba Bronstein was born the fifth child in the family of David Leontyevich Bronstein (1843-1922) and his wife Anna (Anetta) Lvovna Bronstein (née Zhivotovskaya) - wealthy landowners from among the Jewish colonists of an agricultural farm not far from the village of Yanovka, Elisavetgrad district of the Kherson province Beretslavkane (now in the Sierra oblast, Kherson province, Sverdlovsk region) region, Ukraine). Parents of Leon Trotsky came from the Poltava province. As a child, he spoke Ukrainian and Russian, and not the then widespread Yiddish. Studied at St. Paul's School in Odessa, where he was the first student in all disciplines. During his studies in Odessa (1889-1895), Leon Trotsky lived and was brought up in the family of his cousin (on the maternal side), owner of the printing house and scientific publishing house "Matezis" Moisei Filippovich Spenzer and his wife Fanny Solomonovna, the parents of the poet Vera Inber.
The beginning of revolutionary activity
In 1896 in Nikolaev, Lev Bronstein participated in a circle, together with other members of which he led revolutionary propaganda.
In 1897 he participated in the founding of the South Russian Workers' Union. On January 28, 1898 he was arrested for the first time. In the Odessa prison, where Trotsky spent 2 years, he becomes a Marxist. “The decisive influence,” he said on this occasion, “was influenced by two studies by Antonio Labriola on the materialistic understanding of history. Only after this book did I move on to Beltov and Capital. " The appearance of his pseudonym Trotsky also dates back to the same time; it was the name of the local warden-jailer, who impressed the young Lev (he would write it down in his fake passport after his escape). In 1898, in prison, he married Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who was one of the leaders of the Union. From 1900 he was in exile in the Irkutsk province, where he established contact with the agents of Iskra, and on the recommendation of GM Krzhizhanovsky, who gave him the nickname "Pen" for his obvious literary gift, was invited to cooperate with Iskra.
According to the memoirs of Dr. G. A. Ziv, Trotsky had a tendency towards loss of consciousness, which, according to Trotsky himself, he inherited from his mother. G.A.Ziv, as a doctor, precisely determines that it was not just a tendency to loss of consciousness, but real seizures, that is, Trotsky had epilepsy. GA Ziv himself knew Trotsky well - in the book "Trotsky - a biography in photographic documents" in photo No. 14 he was captured in a circle of exiles in Siberia together with Trotsky, his first wife Alexandra Sokolovskaya and his wife's brother. In 1902 he escaped from exile abroad; in the false passport "at random" entered the name Trotsky, after the name of the senior warden of the Odessa prison.
Arriving in London to see Lenin, Trotsky became a regular employee of the newspaper, gave essays at meetings of emigrants and quickly gained fame. A. V. Lunacharsky wrote about the young Trotsky: “... Trotsky impressed the foreign public with his eloquence, education, significant for a young man, and aplomb. ... They did not take him very seriously because of his youth, but everyone resolutely recognized him as an outstanding oratorical talent and, of course, felt that this was not a chicken, but an eaglet. "
First emigration [edit]
Unsolvable conflicts in the edition of Iskra between the "old people" (G.V. Plekhanov, P. B. Axelrod, V. I. Zasulich) and the "young" (V. I. Lenin, Yu. O. Martov and A. N Potresov) prompted Lenin to propose Trotsky as the seventh member of the editorial board; however, supported by all the members of the editorial board, Trotsky was blackballed by Plekhanov in an ultimatum.
At the Second Congress of the RSDLP in the summer of 1903, Trotsky supported Lenin so ardently that D. Ryazanov christened him "Lenin's club." However, the new composition of the editorial board proposed by Lenin - Plekhanov, Lenin, Martov, with the exclusion of Axelrod and Zasulich from it, prompted Trotsky to go over to the side of the offended minority and be critical of Lenin's organizational plans.
In 1903, in Paris, Trotsky married Natalia Sedova (this marriage was not registered, since Trotsky never divorced A. L. Sokolovskaya).
In August 1903, Trotsky visited, as a correspondent for Iskra, the VI Zionist Congress held in Basel under the chairmanship of Theodor Herzl. According to Trotsky, this congress demonstrated the "complete disintegration of Zionism", in addition, in his article Trotsky sarcastically ridiculed Herzl personally.
In 1904, when serious political differences emerged between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Trotsky moved away from the Mensheviks and became close to A. L. Parvus, who carried him away with the theory of "permanent revolution". At the same time, like Parvus, he advocated the unification of the party, believing [where?] That the impending revolution would smooth out many contradictions.
Revolution of 1905-1907 [edit]
In 1905, Trotsky returned illegally to Russia with Natalia Sedova. He was one of the founders of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies, became a member of its Executive Committee. Formally, the Council was chaired by GS Khrustalev-Nosar, but in fact the Council was led by Parvus and Trotsky; after the arrest of Khrustalev on November 26, 1905. The executive committee of the Soviet officially elected Trotsky as chairman; but on December 3 he was arrested along with a large group of deputies. In 1906, at the trial of the St. Petersburg Council, which received a wide public response, he was sentenced to eternal settlement in Siberia with the deprivation of all civil rights. On the way to Obdorsk (now Salekhard), he fled from Berezovo.
Second emigration [edit]
Trotsky in exile in the Irkutsk province. 1900
During the period of the second emigration, Trotsky continued to position himself as a "non-factional Social Democrat", hesitated between the two main factions of the RSDLP - the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks - without finally joining any of them, and not fully sharing their beliefs. In 1912, Lenin finally took the course of separating the Bolshevik faction into an independent party. Standing on the position of "conciliation" Trotsky insisted on overcoming the factional split and reuniting the party. In August 1912, he organized a party conference in Vienna under the slogans of unification ("August bloc"). However, in reality, social democracy continued to crumble into a motley mosaic of factions warring with each other, the Bolsheviks, including even the Bolsheviks - "conciliators", also the Plekhanov group and the Vperyod group refused to participate in the work of the August bloc. After the failure of the August bloc, Trotsky began to cool towards "conciliation", leaving the leadership in this movement to others.
In 1912-1913, Trotsky, as a war correspondent for the Kievskaya Mysl newspaper, wrote about 70 reports from the fronts of the First and Second Balkan Wars. This experience gave him a definite, albeit superficial, understanding of the army and military operations. As Yu. V. Emelyanov writes in his work “Trotsky. Myths and personality "," While agreeing that military reviews were not useless for the outlook of the future Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, it would probably be better for the Red Army if its leader in the past was not a journalist, but a captain of grenadiers. "
Trotsky recalled in 1923:
During my several years in Vienna, I came into close contact with Freudians, read their works and even attended their meetings at that time.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Trotsky, fearing that he, as submitted to Russia, would be interned by the Austrian authorities, on August 3, 1914, fled to Zurich, and from there to Paris. In general, he took pacifist positions, in his articles he repeatedly spoke out in favor of ending the war.
In 1914-1916 in Paris he published the daily newspaper Nashe Slovo.
In September 1915 he took part in the work of the Zimmerwald Conference together with Lenin and Martov.
On September 14, 1916, the newspaper Nashe Slovo was banned for pacifist propaganda, and Trotsky himself was expelled from France. After Great Britain, Italy and Switzerland refused to accept him, he went to Spain, from where they tried to expel him to Havana as a "dangerous anarchist". After violent protests, he was sent instead of Havana to New York, where he arrived on January 13, 1917. Collaborated with the Russian-language left-wing newspaper Novy Mir, which also included Bukharin, Kollontai, V. Volodarsky and Chudnovsky G. I.
New York made a huge impression on Trotsky as a major center of American capitalism. In his writings, Trotsky predicted the growth of US influence (calling this country "the forge where the fate of mankind will be forged") and the decline of the influence of the old European powers.
I found myself in New York, in a fabulously prosaic city of capitalist automatism, where the aesthetic theory of Cubism triumphs on the streets, and the moral philosophy of the dollar in our hearts. New York impressed me because it most fully expresses the spirit of the modern era.
Trotsky did not expect an imminent revolution in Russia and, apparently, was going to stay in the United States for a long time, even bought furniture for his New York apartment in installments.
Return to Russia [edit]
Leon Trotsky in 1917
Main article: Leon Trotsky in 1917
Immediately after the February Revolution, Trotsky went from America to Russia, but on the way, in the Canadian port of Halifax, together with his family he was removed from the ship by the British authorities and sent to a concentration camp for interned sailors of the German merchant fleet. The reason for the detention was the absence of Russian documents (Trotsky possessed an American passport issued personally by President Woodrow Wilson, with visas for entry into Russia and a British transit visa attached [source unspecified 68 days]), as well as British fears about Trotsky's possible negative influence on stability in Russia ...
The military camp "Amherst" was located in an old, to the last degree neglected building of an iron foundry, taken from a German owner. The sleeping buns were located three rows up and two rows deep on each side of the room. 800 people lived in these conditions. It is not difficult to imagine the atmosphere that reigned in this bedroom at night. People crowded hopelessly in the aisles, elbowing each other, lying down, getting up, playing cards or chess. Many did, some with amazing skill. I still have the products of the Amherst prisoners in Moscow. Among the prisoners, despite the heroic efforts they made for their physical and moral self-preservation, there were five madmen. We slept and ate with these geeks in the same room.
However, soon, at the written request of the Provisional Government, Trotsky was released as an honored fighter against tsarism and continued on his way to Russia through Sweden and Finland. In Sweden, he remembered the bread cards that Trotsky had never seen before.
On May 4, 1917, Trotsky arrived in Petrograd. At the border (at that time) with Finland, the village of Beloostrov, he was met by a delegation from the Social Democratic faction "United Internationalists" and the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks. Directly from Finland Station I went to a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, where, in memory of the fact that he was already chairman of the Petrosoviet in 1905, he was given a seat with an advisory voice.
Soon he became the informal leader of the "Mezhraiontsy", who held a critical position in relation to the Provisional Government. After the failure of the July uprising attempt, he was arrested by the Provisional Government and accused, like many others, of espionage; however, he was charged with traveling through Germany. (However, according to Mlechin: "In 1917, Trotsky did not appear in the list of those Bolsheviks whom the Provisional Government tried to charge with espionage."
Trotsky played a huge role in the "propaganda" and the transition to the side of the Bolsheviks of the soldiers of the rapidly decaying Petrograd garrison. Already in May 1917, almost immediately after his arrival, Trotsky began to pay special attention to the Kronstadt sailors, among whom the positions of the anarchists were also strong. His favorite place for his performances, he chose the circus "Modern", closed in January 1917 by firemen. During the July events, Trotsky personally repulsed the then popular Socialist-Revolutionary leader, Minister of Agriculture of the Provisional Government VM Chernov (although he was Trotsky's political opponent) from the crowd that was not controlled by anyone.
In July, at the 6th Congress of the RSDLP (Bolsheviks), the “Mezhraiontsy” united with the Bolsheviks; Trotsky himself, who at that time was in the "Kresty", which did not allow him to speak at the congress with the main report - "On the current situation" - was elected to the Central Committee. After the failure of the Kornilov speech in September, Trotsky was released, like the other Bolsheviks arrested in July.
Activity as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (September-December 1917) [edit]
In the course of the "Bolshevization of the Soviets" in September - October 1917, the Bolsheviks received up to 90% of the seats in the Petrograd Soviet. On September 20, Trotsky was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies, which he had already headed during the 1905 revolution. In 1917, Trotsky was also elected to the Pre-Parliament, became a delegate to the II Congress of Soviets and the Constituent Assembly.
According to Richard Pipes, in the absence of Lenin, who went into hiding in Finland in July, Trotsky actually led the Bolsheviks in Petrograd until his return.
After the election of Trotsky as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he also became a member of the Pre-Parliament, where he headed the Bolshevik faction. Trotsky characterized the Pre-Parliament as an attempt by "qualified bourgeois elements" to "painlessly translate Soviet legality into bourgeois-parliamentary legality" and defended the need for the Bolsheviks to boycott this body (in his own words, "stood on the boycott position of not entering [the Pre-Parliament]"). Having received a letter from Lenin authorizing the boycott, on October 7 (20) at a meeting of the Pre-Parliament announced that the Bolshevik faction was leaving the meeting room.
VRK activity. October Revolution [edit]
Main article: Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee
On October 12, 1917, Trotsky, as chairman of the Petrosovet, formed the Revolutionary Revolutionary Committee, which consisted mainly of the Bolsheviks, as well as the Left Social Revolutionaries. The Military Revolutionary Committee became the main body for the preparation of an armed uprising. To divert the eyes of the Revolutionary Revolutionary Committee, it was formally subordinated not to the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), but directly to the Petrosoviet, and a secondary leader of the revolution, the left Socialist Revolutionary P.E. Lazimir was appointed its chairman. ...
Caricature. Trotsky inflates bubble socialism.
Immediately after its formation, the Military Revolutionary Committee began work on persuading units of the Petrograd garrison to its side. Already on October 16, the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky, ordered the delivery of 5,000 rifles to the Red Guards.
On the question of the time of the uprising, Lenin, who fled to Finland, demands to start the uprising immediately, Trotsky proposes to postpone it until the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies is convened, in order to present the Congress with the fact that the regime of "dual power" was destroyed, and the Congress itself was the highest and only authority in the country. Trotsky manages to win over the majority of the Central Committee to his side, despite Lenin's worries about the postponement of the uprising.
Between October 21-23, the Bolsheviks hold a series of rallies among wavering soldiers. On October 22, the Military Revolutionary Committee announced that the orders of the headquarters of the Petrograd Military District were invalid without the approval of the Military Revolutionary Committee. At this stage, Trotsky's oratory greatly helped the Bolsheviks to win over the vacillating parts of the garrison to their side. An eyewitness to one of such speeches, the Menshevik Sukhanov N. N. in his work "Notes on the Revolution", notes:
“The Soviet power will destroy the trench harvest. She will give land and heal internal devastation. The Soviet government will give everything that is in the country to the poor and comfrey. You bourgeois have two fur coats - give one to a soldier. Do you have warm boots? Stay at home. The worker needs your boots ... "
The audience was almost ecstatic. It seemed that the crowd would now sing, without any collusion, some revolutionary anthem ... A resolution is proposed: to stand for the workers 'and peasants' cause to the last drop of blood ... Who is for? A thousand-strong crowd, as one person, threw up their hands.
On October 23, Trotsky will personally "propagate" the garrison of the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Bolsheviks had strong doubts about this garrison, and Antonov-Ovseenko even prepared a plan to storm the fortress in case it remained loyal to the Provisional Government.
In fact, Trotsky was one of the main leaders of the October Revolution.
A year later, Stalin wrote about this period:
“All the work on the practical organization of the uprising took place under the direct supervision of Comrade Trotsky, chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be said with confidence that the party owes first and foremost to Comrade Trotsky. Comrades Antonov [-Ovseenko] and Podvoisky were the main assistants of Comrade Trotsky. "
A few more years later, with the beginning of a fierce struggle for power within the CPSU (b), Stalin was already dramatically changing his tone:
... it cannot be denied that Trotsky fought well during the October Revolution. Yes, that's right, Trotsky fought really well in October. But during the October Revolution it was not only Trotsky who fought well, even such people as the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who then stood side by side with the Bolsheviks, fought well. In general, I must say that in the period of a victorious uprising, when the enemy is isolated and the uprising is growing, it is not difficult to fight well. At such moments, even the retarded become heroes.
On October 25-26, he acts as the main Bolshevik orator at the Second Congress of Soviets, having withstood a stubborn struggle with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, who protested violently against the armed uprising that had taken place and left the Congress.
The uprising of the popular masses needs no justification. What happened was a rebellion, not a conspiracy. We tempered the revolutionary energy of the Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an uprising, not for a conspiracy ... To those who left here and who come up with proposals, we must say: you are a miserable unit, you are bankrupt, your role has been played. And go where you ought to be from now on: into the rubbish basket of history ...
When the troops of General P. N. Krasnov attacked Petrograd in October (November) 1917, Trotsky organized the defense of the city. On October 29, he personally checks the preparation of artillery guns and an armored train at the Putilov plant, on October 30 he personally arrived at the Pulkovo Heights, where a decisive clash between the revolutionary forces and the Cossacks of General Krasnov took place.
As an eyewitness to the events, John Reed, describes, Trotsky went to the Pulkovo Heights directly from the meeting of the Petrosovet on October 29 (November 11):
The Petrograd Soviet was working at full speed, the hall was overflowing with armed people. Trotsky reported: “The Cossacks are retreating from Krasnoe Selo (loud enthusiastic applause). But the battle is just beginning. Fierce battles are going on in Pulkovo. ... The cruisers Oleg, Aurora and Respublika anchored on the Neva and directed their guns towards the city ... "
"Why aren't you where the Red Guards fight?" shouted a harsh voice.
"I'm leaving now!" Trotsky replied, stepping down from the rostrum. His face was somewhat paler than usual. Surrounded by devoted friends, he left the room along a side aisle and hurried to the car.
In the words of Lunacharsky, Trotsky, during the preparation of the Bolshevik uprising, "walked like a Leiden bank, and every touch to it caused a discharge."
VRK in November-December 1917 [edit]
After the victory of the uprising in October 1917, the Revolutionary Revolutionary Committee, subordinate to the Petrograd Soviet until its self-dissolution in December, actually turned out to be the only real force in Petrograd, in the absence of a new state machine that had not yet had time to form. The forces of the Red Guards, revolutionary soldiers and Baltic sailors remained at the disposal of the VRK. On November 21, 1917, a “commission for combating counter-revolution” was formed under the VRK, the VRK closed a number of newspapers (Birzhevye vedomosti, Kopeyka, Novoye Vremya, Russkaya Volya, etc.), organizes food supplies cities. Already on November 7, Trotsky, on behalf of the All-Russian Revolutionary Committee, published in Izvestia an appeal to the attention of all citizens, announcing that “The rich classes are resisting the new Soviet government, the government of workers, soldiers and peasants. Their supporters stop the work of state and city employees, call for the termination of service in banks, try to interrupt rail and postal and telegraph services, etc. We warn them - they are playing with fire ... We warn the wealthy classes and their supporters: if they do not stop they will be the first to feel the burden of the situation they have created themselves. The wealthy classes and their minions will be deprived of the right to receive food. All the supplies they have will be requisitioned. The property of the main culprits will be confiscated. "
On December 2, the Petrosovet, chaired by Trotsky, adopted a resolution "On drunkenness and pogroms," which created an extraordinary commission to combat drunkenness and pogroms, headed by Blagonravov, and provided the commission with military force. Commissar Blagonravov was ordered to "destroy wine warehouses, cleanse Petrograd of hooligan gangs, disarm and arrest everyone who defamed themselves by participating in drunkenness and defeat."
Policy statements November-December 1917 [edit]
Almost immediately after the Bolsheviks came to power, both Lenin and Trotsky made a number of tough statements about their complete readiness to fight their political opponents by any means. So, already on November 1 (14), 1917, at a meeting of the Petrograd Committee of the RSDLP (b), Lenin declared that "... Even their short-term arrests have already yielded very good results .... In Paris, they guillotined, and we will only deprive them of ration cards." However, at the same meeting, Trotsky made it clear that, in his opinion, the deprivation of cards would not be limited to:
You can't, they say, sit on bayonets. But even without bayonets it is impossible. We need a bayonet there to sit here ... All this bourgeois bastard who is now unable to stand on either side when he learns that our power will be strong with us ... The petty bourgeois masses are looking for a force to which they must obey. Those who do not understand this do not understand anything in the world, even less in the state apparatus.
On October 30 (November 12), 1917, in the Izvestia newspaper, Trotsky spoke out in favor of banning the Cadet party, stating that
During the French Revolution, more honest people than the Cadets were guillotined by the Jacobins for being in opposition to the people. We have not executed anyone and are not going to do so, but there are times when the people's fury is difficult to control.
On December 17, 1917, in his address to the Cadets, L. Trotsky declares the beginning of the stage of mass terror against the enemies of the revolution in a more harsh form:
You should know that within a month, the terror will take on very strong forms, following the example of the great French revolutionaries. Our enemies will be awaited by the guillotine, and not just the prison.
The very concept of the "Red Terror" was formulated by Trotsky in his work "Terrorism and Communism" as "a weapon used against a class doomed to perish, which does not want to perish."
Activities at the post of Commissar (1917-1918) [edit]
Main article: Activities of Trotsky as People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (1917-1918)
See also: People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and the Peace of Brest
White Guard poster "The expulsion of Trotsky from the Kuban." Signature: "This uncle is not about us
Come on, brother, with the Kuban ... rrraz !! "
The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies appointed Trotsky as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the first composition of the Bolshevik government. As the Bolshevik VP Milyutin and Trotsky himself testify, Trotsky owns the authorship of the term "People's Commissar" (People's Commissar).
Until December, Trotsky combines the functions of the people's commissar with the functions of the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet; according to my own recollections, “I am this Narkomindel long time I have never visited, since I was in Smolny. " On December 5, 1917, the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee announces its self-dissolution and forms a liquidation commission; on December 13, Trotsky transfers the powers of the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet to G.E. Zinoviev. affairs due to the workload of current issues in the Petrosovet.
The first challenge that Trotsky has to face immediately after taking office is a general boycott (in Soviet historiography - "counter-revolutionary sabotage") of civil servants of the old Foreign Ministry. Relying on his assistant, the Kronstadt sailor N.G. Markin, Trotsky gradually overcomes their resistance and begins to publish secret treaties of the tsarist government, which was one of the programmatic tasks of the Bolsheviks. Secret treaties of the “old regime” were widely used in Bolshevik agitation to show the “predatory” and “predatory” spirit of the First World War.
Also, the new government soon faced international diplomatic isolation; Trotsky's negotiations with the foreign ambassadors who were in Petrograd yielded no results. All the Entente powers, and then the neutral states, refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new government and severed diplomatic relations with it.
Trotsky's "intermediate" platform "neither peace, nor war: we do not sign a treaty, we stop the war, and we demobilize the army" receives the approval of the majority of the Central Committee, but fails. Germany refuses to tolerate further delays in negotiations, and on February 22, 1918, goes on the offensive. The former Russian imperial army by this time completely ceases to exist and is unable to interfere with the Germans in any way. Recognizing the failure of his policy, Trotsky on February 22 resigns from the post of Commissar.
In the face of a German ultimatum, Lenin demands that the Central Committee accept the German conditions, otherwise threatening to resign, which in fact meant a split in the party. Also, under the pressure of the "left communists", Lenin put forward a new "intermediate" platform, representing the Brest-Litovsk world as a "respite" before the future "revolutionary war". Under the influence of the threat of Lenin's resignation, Trotsky, although he was previously against the signing of peace on German terms, changes his position and supports Lenin. In the historic vote of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) on February 23 (March 10), 1918, Trotsky, along with four of his supporters, abstained, which provided Lenin with a majority of votes.
Activities at the post of the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council 1918-1919 [edit]
Main article: Activities of Trotsky as People's Commissariat for Military Affairs (1918-1924)
Trotsky in 1918
Soon after his resignation from the post of Commissar, Trotsky received a new appointment. On March 14, he received the post of People's Commissar for Military Affairs, on March 28 - Chairman of the Supreme Military Council, in April - People's Commissar for Naval Affairs, and on September 6 - Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR.
By February 1918, the former tsarist army had practically ceased to exist under the influence of the corrupting propaganda of the revolutionary forces, including the Bolsheviks, and as a result of the efforts of anti-state forces, it was unable to in any way delay the German offensive. Already in January 1918, the formation of the Red Army began, however, as noted by Richard Pipes, until the summer of 1918 the Red Army existed mostly on paper. The then existing principles of voluntary recruitment and election of commanders led to its small number, poor controllability, low combat readiness ("partisanism").
The main impetus that forced the Bolsheviks to move to the formation of a massive regular army was the performance of the Czechoslovak corps. The forces of the Czechoslovak legionnaires were only about 40-50 thousand people, which seemed insignificant for Russia, which a year ago had an army of almost 15 million. However, at that time, the Czechoslovakians were almost the only military force in the country that remained on alert.
Having received a new appointment in such conditions, Trotsky becomes, in fact, the first commander-in-chief of the Red Army and one of its key founders. Trotsky's contemporary Ziv G.A. stated that as the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs, Trotsky “groped for his real profession: ... inexorable logic (which took the form of military discipline), iron determination and unyielding will that did not stop at any considerations of humanity, insatiable ambition and immeasurable self-confidence specific oratory ”.
In August 1918, Trotsky formed a carefully organized "train of the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council", in which, from that moment, he basically lived for two and a half years, continuously traveling along the fronts of the Civil War. As the "military leader" of Bolshevism, Trotsky displays undeniable propaganda ability, personal courage and sheer brutality. Arriving on August 10, 1918 at the Sviyazhsk station, Trotsky personally leads the struggle for Kazan. In the most draconian ways, he imposes discipline among the Red Army soldiers, having resorted, among other things, to the execution of every tenth soldier of the 2nd Petrograd regiment, who fled from their combat positions without permission.
According to Richard Pipes, Trotsky's only undoubted personal contribution to the hostilities of the Civil War was the defense of Petrograd in 1919. Despite the fact that the Red 7th Army had an almost fivefold advantage in manpower over the North-Western Army of Yudenich, Petrograd was seized with panic, including in front of White Guard tanks, and Lenin was seriously considering the prospect of surrendering the city. Trotsky, with his speeches, was able to raise the fallen morale of the troops, simultaneously spreading the rumor that Yudenich's tanks were "made of painted wood." After that, the Red Army were finally able to take advantage of their numerical advantage and defeat the White Guard.
Trotsky repeatedly personally appears on the front line, in August 1918 his train was almost captured by the White Guards, and later that same month he almost died on the destroyer of the Volga river flotilla. Several times Trotsky, risking his life, makes speeches even to deserters. At the same time, the stormy activity of the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, which continuously traveled along the fronts, increasingly begins to irritate a number of its subordinates, leading to many high-profile personal quarrels. The most significant of these was Trotsky's personal conflict with Stalin and Voroshilov during the defense of Tsaritsyn in 1918. According to SI Lieberman, contemporary of the events, although Stalin's actions then violated the requirements of military and party discipline, which was condemned by the Central Committee, most communist leaders disliked Trotsky's "upstart" and supported Stalin in this conflict.
As a Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, Trotsky consistently promotes the widespread use of "military experts" in the Red Army, for the control of which he introduces a system of political commissars and a system of hostages. Convinced that the army, built on the basis of universal equality and voluntariness, turned out to be incapable of fighting, Trotsky supported its gradual reorganization in accordance with more traditional principles, gradually restoring mobilization, unity of command, insignia, uniform uniforms, military greetings and parades.
In power at the end of the Civil War (1920-1921) [edit]
Main article: Trotsky in power in the early 1920s
In 1920, the Red Army, led by Trotsky, managed to achieve a decisive turning point in the course of the Civil War (the "red flood"). In November 1919, after Trotsky's personal intervention in the defense of Petrograd, the troops of General Yudenich retreated to the territory of Estonia, where they were interned by the local authorities, in December the Kolchak front finally collapsed. In February 1920, the Denikinites began a rapid retreat to the Crimea, where the successor of General Denikin, Baron Wrangel, in an effort to attract the widest possible strata of the population, reformatted the Armed Forces of the South of Russia into the Russian Army. By November 1920, in general terms, the Soviet-Polish war had come to an end, which made it possible to concentrate forces against Wrangel, at least three times greater. The fall of Crimea was only a matter of time; in mid-November, the White Guards evacuated in an organized manner from five Crimean ports.
The end of the Civil War shifted priorities from armed struggle to economic development. After seven years of war (first a world war and then a civil war), the country lay in ruins, and the exhausted population could no longer contain the gigantic military machine created by Trotsky. In December 1920, Lenin authorized the beginning of the demobilization of the Red Army; its main deterrent was the most extreme collapse that occurred during the war years railways: they were no longer able to carry millions of demobilized soldiers home in a short time. The "red flood" of 1919-1920 began to give way to the "green flood" - mass uprisings of peasants dissatisfied with the surplus appropriation system. The "green" rebels were fueled by huge masses of deserters from the Red Army; often demobilized Red Army soldiers, returning home, also joined the rebels. The historic decision to replace the surplus appropriation system with a tax in kind, adopted in March 1921 by the X Congress of the RCP (b), helped to bring peace to the peasant masses; the uprisings gradually came to naught.
With the end of the war approaching, Trotsky began to show an increasing interest in peaceful economic activities. His first experiment in this field was the organization in January 1920 of the First Labor Army, which became possible in connection with the disbandment of the Kolchak front. The experience, however, turned out to be a complete failure: the labor army showed extremely low labor productivity, and the military organization turned out to be ill-adapted for peaceful labor. According to various estimates, at the time of the creation of the labor army, only 10 - 23 %% of its personnel were engaged in labor activities as such, were constantly distracted from work by drill and carrying orders.
Nevertheless, the whole of 1920 and the first months of 1921 passed under the sign of "war communism", including the organization of new labor armies. In the posts of chairman of the council of the first labor army (January - February 1920) and the people's commissar of railways (March 1920 - April 1921), Trotsky established himself as a zealous supporter of the militarization of the national economy. In his speech at the III All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions on April 9, 1920, he formulated his credo:
When the Mensheviks say about their resolution that forced labor is always unproductive, they are held captive by bourgeois ideology and deny the very foundations of a socialist economy ... We know free-wage labor, which the bourgeoisie calls free. We contrast this with socially normalized labor on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory for the entire people, that is, compulsory for every worker in the country. Without this, one cannot even think about the transition to socialism ... They say that forced labor is unproductive. If this is true, then the entire socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, for there can be no other paths to socialism, except for the distribution of power by the economic center of the entire labor force of the country, the distribution of this force in accordance with the needs of the national economic plan ...
If the workers retain what was called freedom of movement, the freedom to leave the plant at any time, in search of a better piece of bread, then under present conditions, in conditions of the terrible shakiness of all life, the entire production and transport apparatus, this will lead to complete economic anarchy, to complete the rout and dispersal of the working class, to the complete impossibility of taking into account the future of our industry. The militarization of labor is not the invention of individual politicians or the invention of our military department. The militarization of labor ... is the inevitable basic method of organizing the workforce ...
During the internal party discussion on trade unions (November 1920 - March 1921), Trotsky advocated the general militarization of industry, using the trade unions as "driving belts." According to the memoirs of a contemporary of Lieberman S.I., with the end of the Civil War, Trotsky was not going to demobilize the army, but, on the contrary, to militarize the national economy. At the same time, such a desire to use military command methods in the economy was in many ways consistent with the spirit of the times; Bolshevism was born in the fire and roar of war, and for many decades inherited the phraseology of "fronts" and "campaigns" in relation to the most peaceful activities.
During the years of the revolution and the Civil War, Trotsky actually became the second person in the state; the powerful propaganda machine of Bolshevism, of which he himself was one of the creators, created around Trotsky the heroic halo of "the leader of the victorious Red Army." For his participation in the defense of Petrograd, Trotsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, a destroyer and an armored train were named in his honor, in 1923 Gatchina was renamed Trotsk. However, many other Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, received similar honors at the same time.
However, Trotsky's participation in organizing the labor armies and his proposal to "shake up the trade unions" greatly undermined his authority; further "tightening the screws" in the spirit of "war communism" the country could no longer endure. Meanwhile, in reality, Trotsky's attitude to the regime of "war communism" was in fact much more complicated - it was he who, back in February 1920, was the first to propose measures to abolish the surplus appropriation system (although these measures did not exactly coincide with the decisions adopted a year later by the X Congress ).
The transition to NEP evoked clear analogies among contemporaries with the Thermidor of the French Revolution - a counter-revolutionary Bonapartist coup that put an end to the radicalism of the Jacobins. Paradoxically, in the early 1920s, it was Trotsky, as a popular military leader and supporter of authoritarian, military-command methods, who seemed the most obvious candidate for Bonaparte.
However, the NEP, having become in fact the restoration of capitalism in the economy, did not lead to liberalization in politics. On the contrary, the economic liberalization of the 1920s unfolded simultaneously with the general tightening of the screws in the political sphere. All non-Bolshevik parties that had retained their legality until that time were finally disbanded; within the party itself, a course was adopted for the gradual destruction of any opposition, and the establishment of complete unanimity on all issues. The party also paid close attention to the main ideological support of the "old regime" - the church, which stubbornly refused to recognize the new government. With the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks organized a campaign to seize church valuables. An intra-church movement of "Renovationism" was initiated; according to Trotsky's plan, it was to become a kind of Orthodox analogue of the Protestant Reformation.
Trotsky took the most active part in all these processes. He spoke extremely negatively about the "workers' opposition" Shlyapnikov - Kollontai, stating that it makes a fetish out of the slogan of internal party "democracy". Supported show trials against the Social Revolutionaries on charges of terrorist activities against the Bolsheviks; at Trotsky's suggestion, the death sentences were changed to "conditional" on the condition that the AKP would not engage in a more armed struggle against Bolshevism. Thus, the leaders of the Social Revolutionaries were, in fact, taken hostage.
The Red Army led by Trotsky managed to win the Civil War, thereby protecting Bolshevism from physical destruction. However, with the end of the war, Trotsky was no longer needed. Once at the head of the army in wartime, Trotsky received practically unlimited power in his hands for several years. The Civil War years strengthened his commitment to an authoritarian leadership style, while the party adopted a collegiate style. According to AD Naglovsky, Trotsky created an atmosphere of "Arakcheevism" around him.
The old Bolsheviks were forced to acknowledge Trotsky's enormous services to the party, but they considered him an upstart who joined Bolshevism only in July 1917. Before the revolution, Trotsky hesitated for a long time between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, not fully joining either one or the other; in fact, he always gravitated towards creating his own party and his own doctrine.
The harsh wartime methods used by Trotsky created many enemies for him, the most dangerous of which were Zinoviev and Stalin. After Lenin's final departure from political activities the fate of Trotsky was a foregone conclusion - the majority of the party leaders united against him.
Political activity 1919-1921 [edit]
In March 1919, the VIII Congress of the RCP (b) recreated the Bolshevik Politburo as a permanent body, and Trotsky became a member of the first Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b).
In 1922, on the basis of dissatisfaction with the activities of the Rabkrin and the solution of the national question, an alliance between Trotsky and Lenin began to take shape again, but Lenin fell ill and withdrew from political life.
Trotsky in the last years of Lenin's life. The beginning of the struggle for power within the RCP (b) [edit]
During 1921, the Civil War generally came to an end. On March 18, 1921, the Riga Treaty was signed, which ended the Soviet-Polish war of 1920-1921. The center of anti-Bolshevik resistance in the Crimea has been destroyed. After the announcement of the replacement of the surplus appropriation system with the tax in kind, peasant uprisings began to subside. In the Far East in April 1920, a puppet FER was formed, a "buffer" between the Bolsheviks and the Japanese invaders in Vladivostok.
At the same time, from July 1921, Lenin's health began to deteriorate noticeably. Trotsky notes in his memoirs that a particular deterioration began on December 7, 1921. On May 25, 1922, Lenin suffered his first stroke.
1922 year. Formation of the "troika" Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin [edit]
Soviet propaganda poster
The deteriorating health of the Bolshevik leader and the actual end of the Civil War brought to the fore the question of power, the question of who would become Lenin's successor and the new head of state. In the secret conclusion of doctors sent to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee, the extremely serious nature of Lenin's illness was emphasized. Immediately after the stroke, a "troika" of Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin is formed to jointly fight Trotsky as one of the likely successors. In December 1922, Lenin's condition deteriorated again; on December 16, a second stroke occurred. It is finally becoming clear to the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin himself, that he will not have long to live.
On April 3, 1922, at the suggestion of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the post was established The Secretary General Central Committee of the RCP (b), to which, at their suggestion, Stalin was appointed. Initially, this position was understood as a technical one and therefore did not interest Trotsky in any way, and the head of state was understood as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. Stalin actually heads a number of similar "technical" bodies of the Central Committee: the Secretariat of the Central Committee, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee, is a member of the Politburo, and heads the main Soviet control body, the Rabkrin. Stalin also promoted his supporter Kuibyshev to the post of head of the main party control body, the Central Control Commission (CCC). Thus, Stalin manages to head the "technical" state apparatus just at a time of particularly sharp growth of his influence.
Richard Pipes notes that the tremendous growth of bureaucracy in the early 1920s was predetermined in advance. Since at least December 1917, the Bolsheviks have been taking a course towards the general nationalization of the economy and the elimination of local self-government, which, multiplied by the enormous size of Russia, caused a colossal growth of the state apparatus, which assumed many functions in the performance of which the state did not intervene before the revolution. This process is considered in detail by the researcher Mikhail Voslensky in his fundamental work "Nomenclature". Voslensky notes that with the end of the Civil War, a mass of "impudent careerists" poured into the ruling Communist Party, each of whom could be shot, exiled, or imprisoned by Lenin, "but all together they were irresistible." The strengthening of the party bureaucracy is superimposed on the general fatigue of the population from the protracted war (as Trotsky put it, the sentiment “not us for the revolution, but now the revolution is for us” won), and the widespread failure of the revolutionary movement in Europe.
During 1922, Lenin managed to return to work for a while. He personally intervenes in a heated debate on the national question, criticizing Stalin's plan to "autonomize" the RSFSR. Stalin said to Stalin that “Russified foreigners often overdo it on the part of a truly Russian mood,” Lenin promoted a plan for organizing the USSR as a union of union republics. Also in 1922, Lenin proposed Trotsky to become one of the four deputies of the Presnarkom; all members of the Politburo vote for the resolution proposed by Lenin - all except Trotsky himself, who is dissatisfied with such an insignificant, in his opinion, appointment.
After his temporary return to work in 1922, Lenin was amazed by the stormy process of building the state apparatus that unfolded in connection with the end of the Civil War: during Lenin's illness, the Council of People's Commissars managed to form 120 new commissions, while, according to Lenin's calculations, 16 should have been enough. Lenin wrote a programmatic article "How We Can Reorganize the Rabkrin", in which he tries to make this body a counterbalance to the growing bureaucracy. According to Richard Pipes,
The failure of attempts to export the revolution meant that it became necessary to create a stable state and professional bureaucracy to govern this state. Such a task required people of a completely different type than the professional revolutionary, who spent most of his conscious life underground. ... Lenin's associates were unable to lead a normally functioning state, to deal with heaps of all kinds of writing, to issue instructions to party cells scattered throughout the country, to appoint officials lower level- all this seemed unbearably boring to them. Stalin was the only major Bolshevik who had both a taste and a talent for such a routine. This was the decisive factor in his ascent to the top of power. ... The Soviet bureaucracy has grown to such an incredible scale, because under communism, everything, without exception, in which two or more people participated, had to take place under the leadership of party bodies. The entire economy of the country, formerly mainly in private hands, was now managed from a single center; the same was the case with all social institutions, with all cultural associations, with the clergy, with everything down to the smallest cells of society, because, being experienced revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks perfectly understood that the most harmless organizations at first glance can serve as a screen for political activity. This meant the creation of a gigantic bureaucratic machine.
In the words of the researcher Mikhail Voslensky, "when you read Lenin's last works, you clearly see how the leader on the brink of the grave rushes about in front of this unexpected problem"; as Lenin himself put it, “our worst internal enemy is the bureaucrat. This is a communist who sits in a responsible (and then irresponsible) Soviet post and who is universally respected as a conscientious person. "
In his 1922 work "On the question of nationalities or" autonomization "" Lenin extremely sharply criticizes both the growth of the bureaucratic apparatus and the "great-power" plan of "autonomization" promoted by Stalin (the inclusion of the former national outskirts of the Russian Empire into the RSFSR as autonomous republics instead of the USSR draft): "... this whole idea of" autonomization "was fundamentally wrong and untimely. They say that the unity of the apparatus was required. But where did these assurances come from? previous issues of his diary, borrowed by us from tsarism and only slightly smeared with Soviet myrrh ... to tell the truth ... [the apparatus] is actually completely alien to us and is a bourgeois and tsarist mess. ... justify ourselves, it will turn out to be an empty piece of paper, incapable of protecting Russian aliens from the invasion of that truly Russian person, a Great Russian chauvinist, in essence, a tyrant and rapist, which is a typical Russian bureaucrat. There is no doubt that an insignificant percentage of Soviet and Sovietized workers will drown in this sea of chauvinistic Great Russian trash like a fly in milk ... have we taken measures with sufficient care to really protect the foreigners from the truly Russian Derzhimorda? I think that we did not take these measures ... "
Since 1922, in parallel with the strengthening of Stalin's influence as the head of the "technical" apparatus, his influence also increased as the secretary of Lenin, who was gradually withdrawing from affairs. According to Richard Pipes, in this respect it was much more convenient for Lenin to deal with Stalin than with the headstrong explosive Trotsky: “When Lenin, having lost the ability to deal with state affairs, lived in Gorki, Stalin visited him more often than anyone else. As for Trotsky, at the end of 1922 he asked how to get to Gorki - apparently, he had never been there. Trotsky constantly bombarded Lenin with lengthy memoranda, in which he explained how much was going at random in Soviet Russia and how to correct the mistakes made. Lenin often scribbled on these memoranda the resolution “To the Archives,” which meant that no action should be taken on Trotsky's conclusions and proposals. Stalin, on the other hand, sent him only short notes containing point-by-point proposals on how best to implement the decisions taken by Lenin, never challenging these decisions themselves. " Trotsky himself in his autobiographical work "My Life" admits on this occasion: "there is no doubt that for current affairs it was in many cases more convenient for Lenin to rely on Stalin, Zinoviev or Kamenev than on me ... I had my own views, his methods of work, his techniques ... he understood too well that I was not fit for assignments. "
After the second stroke that happened to Lenin on December 16, 1922, the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin "troika" from January 1923 finally formalized the mechanism of its work. One of Stalin's secretaries, Boris Bazhanov, describes him as follows:
The Politburo is the central authority. It solves all the most important issues of governing the country (and the world revolution). ... But the order of the day for the Politburo meeting ... is approved by the troika. On the eve of the Politburo meeting, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin meet, first more often at Zinoviev's apartment, then usually in Stalin's office in the Central Committee. Officially - to approve the Politburo agenda. No charter or regulations provide for the approval of the agenda. ... this meeting of the troika is a real meeting of the secret government, deciding, or rather, pre-deciding all the main issues. Formally, the troika decides whether to raise the issue at a Politburo meeting or give it a different direction. In fact, the members of the troika are agreeing on how this issue should be resolved at tomorrow's Politburo meeting, they are considering a decision, even distributing roles among themselves when discussing the issue at tomorrow's meeting ... in a close circle; discussed frankly, between each other (there is nothing to be ashamed of each other) and between the true holders of power. Actually, this is the real government.
As Trotsky himself later argued, in December 1922 - January 1923, their positions with Lenin again approached on issues of monopoly of foreign trade, the national-administrative structure of the USSR (the draft of the "union republics" against the project of "autonomization of the RSFSR") and the fight against the strengthening of the bureaucracy. Lenin's plan "to combat the bureaucracy" consisted of expanding the Central Committee several times, strengthening the control body - the Workers 'and Peasants' Inspection (Rabkrin), and setting up a Central Committee commission to combat bureaucracy. The measures proposed by Lenin were formally implemented by the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin "troika" - the Central Committee was expanded from 27 to 40 people (instead of the 50-100 proposed by Lenin), and various control bodies (Rabkrin, Central Control Commission, etc.) no success in the fight against the bureaucracy have not reached. Following the results of the XII Congress of the RCP (b), held in April 1923, the Rabkrin was united with the Central Control Commission, headed by Stalin's supporter Kuibyshev. According to Lenin's proposals, workers were indeed brought into the Rabkrin "from the machine tool", but they constituted only a third of the members of this control body.
1923 year. Lenin's withdrawal from business. The beginning of an active struggle for power [edit]
Boris Bazhanov. Memoirs of Stalin's Former Secretary
First, the mechanism of power ... Things begin to change with the end of the civil war. A real party apparatus is being created and is rapidly beginning to grow. Here the centrally uniting activity in the matter of administration, which is carried out by the Politburo in the center, begins to be taken over in the regions by the regional and territorial Bureau of the Central Committee, in the provinces of the Bureau of the provincial committees. And in the provincial committees, the secretary comes to the fore - he begins to become the master of his province instead of the chairman of the governorate executive committee and various authorized representatives of the center ... The Politburo is elected by the Central Committee. Have the majority of the Central Committee in your hands and you will choose the Politburo as you please. Put your gubernia committee secretaries everywhere, and the majority of the congress and the Central Committee are yours. ... since January 1926, after the congress, Stalin has been reaping the fruits of his many years of work - his Central Committee, his Politburo - and becomes the leader ...
On March 10, 1923, Lenin suffered a third stroke, and he finally retired. The Bolshevik leader is unable to deliver the traditional Political Report at the XII Congress of the RCP (b) held in April. The Politburo hesitated for a while who should act instead of Lenin. The main contenders for power prefer to maneuver. Stalin offers Trotsky, but Trotsky refuses and offers to read the report to Stalin himself, but he also refuses. As a result, the Politburo instructs Zinoviev to read the report as chairman of the Comintern.
Beginning in 1922, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, subordinate to Stalin, began to bypass the principle of electing the secretaries of lower party committees at the local level, “recommending” them under the pretext of fighting “local interests”. During 1923, Stalin further strengthened his power, expanding the powers of the Central Committee's Accounting and Distribution Department (Uchrepred), which is part of the Central Committee Secretariat. After the XII Congress, the Constituent Distribution Department, previously engaged in appointments within the party committees of different levels, also began to be in charge of movements in almost all government bodies, from industry to the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.
In the second half of 1923, the dying Lenin was already completely incapable of conducting any political activity. At this time, the NEP regime entered its first crisis. The Bolshevik Party is literally shaken by the "workers' opposition", which in fact continued to exist, despite its harsh condemnation by Lenin at the XI Congress of the RCP (b). The material situation of workers in big cities, primarily in Petrograd and Moscow, is still worse than before 1914, since the summer of 1923 strikes began in the country. Discontent also penetrates the Bolshevik Party, which remained the only place where in the early 1920s it was possible to somehow express one's opinion. Opposition workers accuse the party leadership of "bureaucratic degeneration", their demands often balance on the brink of anarcho-syndicalism and "intelligentsia" proposals such as the forced transfer of party intellectuals to the bench in order to combat their "separation from the masses." The peasants also declare their dissatisfaction: as of October 1923, prices for manufactured goods amounted to 276% of the 1913 level, while for food products - only 89%. Illustrating the situation on the chart, Trotsky calls this phenomenon "price scissors."
In July 1923, the majority of the Central Committee, controlled by the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin Troika, formed a commission to check the state of affairs in the army under the pretext of aggravating the revolutionary situation in Germany. The commission was made up of Stalin's supporters and in the fall of 1923 made the predictable conclusion that the army was "collapsed" and Trotsky "did not pay enough attention to the activities of the Revolutionary Military Council." These conclusions then did not entail any consequences, except for the angry rebuke of Trotsky himself.
On September 23, 1923, the "troika" began a decisive offensive against Trotsky, proposing at the plenum of the Central Committee to expand the composition of the Revolutionary Military Council, while it was proposed to expand it exclusively by Trotsky's opponents. The proposal quickly turned into a scandal: Trotsky, perfectly understanding what was happening, proposed to the Central Committee to send him "as a simple soldier in the impending German revolution." The floor was taken by Zinoviev, who mockingly proposed to send both him and Stalin to Germany as a "soldier of the revolution", and demanded from the Central Committee "not to risk the two precious lives of their beloved leaders." After the statement from the place of the Leningrad representative Komarov - "I do not understand one thing why Comrade Trotsky is wandering around like that", Trotsky finally lost his temper and left the meeting, unsuccessfully trying to slam the door at last. The plenum of the Central Committee sends a delegation after Trotsky with a proposal to return to the meeting, but Trotsky refuses to return. The direct witness of this demarche by Trotsky, the secretary of the Politburo B. Bazhanov, describes this scene as follows:
It was a break. The silence of the historical moment reigned in the hall. But Trotsky, full of indignation, decided to slam the door as he left for great effect.
The meeting took place in the Throne Room of the Royal Palace. The door of the hall is huge, iron and massive. To open it, Trotsky pulled it with all his might. The door swam slowly and solemnly. At that moment, one should have realized that there are doors that cannot be slammed. But Trotsky, in his excitement, did not notice this and tried his best to slap her. To close, the door swam just as slowly and solemnly. The idea was this: the great leader of the revolution broke with his insidious minions and, to emphasize the gap, leaving them, slams the door in their hearts. And it turned out like this: an extremely annoyed man with a goatee flounders on the doorknob in an unbearable struggle with a heavy and stupid door. It didn't work out well.
On October 8, 1923, Trotsky wrote a letter on economic issues to the Central Committee. Noting the imminent economic crisis, he calls the current position in the party "secretarial hierarchy", sharply criticizes the "party bureaucracy", which he blames for the crisis. Coming down on Molotov, Trotsky launches into arguments about "soulless party bureaucrats who with their stony backs stifle every manifestation of free initiative and creativity of the working masses", to which Molotov replies: "Not everyone is a genius, Comrade Trotsky." Already on October 15, 1923, Trotsky's note was supplemented by a louder "Statement 46" signed by 46 prominent Bolsheviks with pre-revolutionary party experience.
On October 19, the majority of the Central Committee will organize a counter-statement “Reply of the Politburo members to the letter from Comrade Trotsky ", in which he was accused of organizing the" letter of 46 ", factional activities and striving for a personal dictatorship. As Boris Bazhanov points out, during this period Trotsky demonstratively removed himself from both the majority of the Central Committee and the opposition:
... Trotsky was silent, did not take part in the discussion and did not answer all the accusations. At meetings of the Politburo, he read French novels, and when any member of the Politburo addressed him, he pretended to be extremely surprised by this. ... The point was that the opposition in the fall of 1923 (the so-called first opposition) was not Trotskyist at all. ... Generally speaking, Trotsky was, so to speak, "more to the left" than the Central Committee, that is, he was a more consistent communist. Meanwhile, the Central Committee glued him to the "Right" opposition. This right-wing opposition represented something like a failed ideological Thermidor, a completely spontaneous reaction, which developed spontaneously within the party, without a program, without leaders. ... Trotsky quickly figured out the essence of the right-wing opposition. But then his position became very difficult. If he had been an unprincipled opportunist, becoming the head of the opposition and adopting its rightist course, he, as it soon became clear, had every chance of winning a majority in the party and winning. But this meant a course to the right, Thermidor, the elimination of communism. Trotsky was a fanatical and one hundred percent communist. He could not take this path. But he could not openly declare that he was against this opposition — he would have lost his weight in the party — both among the followers of the Central Committee who attacked him and among the opposition, and would have remained an isolated general without an army. He chose to remain silent and ambiguous. The tragedy was that the opposition, which arose spontaneously, had neither leaders nor programs, had to accept Trotsky, whom they imposed as a leader. This soon ensured her swift defeat.
Stalin I.V. About the discussion, about Raphael, about the articles of Preobrazhensky and Sapronov, and about Trotsky's letter. December 15, 1923
How does Sapronov think to treat the shortcomings of our internal party life? His cure is as simple as the diagnosis. “To reconsider our officers,” to remove the current workers from their posts — that is Sapronov's means. ... In the ranks of the opposition there are such as Beloborodov, whose "democracy" has remained in the memory of the Rostov workers to this day; Rosengolts, from whose "democracy" our water and railroad workers were not happy; Pyatakov, from whose "democracy" the whole Donbass did not shout, but howled; Alsky, whose "democracy" is known to everyone; Bull, from whose "democracy" Khorezm still howls. Does Sapronov think that if the current “party pedants” are replaced by the above-named “respected comrades”, democracy within the party will triumph? May I be allowed to doubt this somewhat.
In December 1923, Trotsky nevertheless intervened in what was happening. On December 11, 1923, he published in Pravda a series of four articles, The New Deal, with a sharp protest against bureaucratization. Drawing attention to his broad support among the student youth, Trotsky declares that "the youth - the most faithful barometer of the party - reacts most sharply to party bureaucracy." On December 24, the head of the Political Directorate of the Revolutionary Military Council (PUR), VA Antonov-Ovseenko, issues a circular PUR No. 200, in which he proposes to his subordinates to change the political training in the army in the spirit of the provisions of the "New Deal". In response to the Politburo's demand to cancel the circular, Antonov-Ovseenko hints that the army is protesting against the "vile recall of the Soviet Karnot." According to the memoirs of GZ Besedovsky, during the first two weeks of 1924, Moscow was "waiting for a coup." In his letter to the Central Committee, Antonov-Ovseenko promised in plain text that the "silencers" "would call on the presumptuous leaders to order," which the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee defined as "a threat to the Central Committee."
However, the "troika" Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin by mid-January 1924 manages to crush the "workers' opposition" on the whole, and an offensive against Trotsky's supporters in the army also begins. Zinoviev accuses Trotsky of preparing a "Bonapartist" military coup and even demands his arrest. On January 17, Antonov-Ovseenko was dismissed and replaced by AS Bubnov, circular PUR No. 200 was canceled. On January 11, 1924, the deputy of the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, Sklyansky E.M., was dismissed, who died a year later under unexplained circumstances. His place is taken by Mikhail Frunze, who replaced a number of Trotsky's supporters in the army and died a year and a half later.
Trotsky himself behaves ambiguously during these acute events. Since 1922, Trotsky vehemently accused the majority of the Central Committee of "bureaucratic degeneration" and "movement towards Thermidor." However, at the same time, Trotsky was well aware that the proposed military coup through the violent dispersal of the Central Committee and its re-election through the convocation of the Extraordinary Congress would be precisely the "Bonapartist Thermidor." Trotsky actually withdraws from the events, taking no part in them in any way under the pretext of illness. On December 14, 1923, the Politburo of the Central Committee grants Trotsky sick leave with treatment in Sukhumi, where he leaves on January 16.
The Troika is also making a series of successful "undermines" under Trotsky's main post - the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council. During 1923, it replaces the commanders of the military districts with its supporters, the plenum of the Central Committee on January 16, 1924 forms a commission selected from Stalin's supporters to examine the situation in the Red Army on January 18, 1924. The XIII Party Conference accuses Trotsky of organizing factional activity, defines "Trotskyism" as "petty-bourgeois deviation ”, Trotsky's supporters Ioffe, Krestinsky and Rakovsky were sent as ambassadors to China, Germany and England, respectively. During this period, Stalin was skeptical about the accusations voiced by Trotsky of the usurpation of power by the bureaucratic apparatus: “For Trotsky, talking about democracy is just a maneuver,” “Who will offend you, Titus Titich? You yourself will offend everyone. " One of the key decisions of the XIII Party Conference is the decision on the mass recruitment of up to 100 thousand workers into the party "from the machine" and a ban on the admission of "persons of non-proletarian origin" to the party.
In the midst of these preparations, on January 21, 1924, Lenin dies.
Struggle for power within the CPSU (b) after Lenin's death [edit]
1924 year. Removal of Trotsky from the post of the pre-military council [edit]
The news of Lenin's death on January 21, 1924, found Trotsky the next day, on his way to a health trip to Sukhum, he did not appear at the funeral. According to Trotsky, he was deceived about the date of the funeral.
At the funeral itself, Stalin spoke only fourth, uttering a loud "oath" that designated a claim to the role of one of Lenin's possible successors. [Source not specified 68 days]
One of the questions that the ruling "troika" Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin faced immediately after Lenin's death was the question of who would take his place in the increasingly decorative post of Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. None of the members of the "triumvirate" dares to nominate himself in this capacity, since this would immediately arouse the claims of the other two "triumvirs". As a result, the majority of the Politburo of the Central Committee controlled by the "troika" promotes the appointment of the secondary and harmless Rykov A.I. to this position.
Trotsky is left only powerless to watch what is happening. In February 1924, the commission organized by the troika recognized the "collapse" in the army, and, under the pretext of strengthening its leadership of the masses, introduced many of Trotsky's opponents, including Voroshilov, into the army tops. During 1924, Trotsky gradually loses control of the army. Commanding Western front Tukhachevsky was transferred to the post of assistant chief of staff of the Red Army in Moscow. Muralov N.I. was removed from the Moscow military district, Frunze M.S. was appointed deputy of the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, the head of the political department, Antonov-Ovseenko, was removed in January. In the spring of 1924, A. S. Bubnov, who replaced him, discovers that the theme "Comrade Trotsky is the leader of the Red Army" is still stubbornly preserved in the political training program for the Red Army soldiers. The embittered Stalin demands classes on this topic to remove, identify and punish the author of the wording, also replacing it with "The Revolutionary Military Council - the leader of the Red Army."
In May 1924, Trotsky was subjected to a real persecution at the XIII Congress of the RCP (b), the first after Lenin's death. Rykov condemns Trotsky's "attacks" on the apparatus, equating them with attacks on the party itself, and also rejects Trotsky's call to "look up to the youth" as a "faithful barometer of the party." Zinoviev finally defines his claim to leadership in the ruling triumvirate by speaking at the Congress with a Political Report, which only Lenin did before his illness. The second "triumvir", Kamenev, becomes the chairman of this congress. The congress sharply condemned "Trotskyism", demanding that Trotsky renounce his factional activity and admit his mistakes. Trotsky, in his reply, acknowledged the correctness of the majority of the Central Committee and the majority of the party, but flatly refused to admit mistakes.
Zinoviev G. Ye., Speaking at two consecutive congresses of the RCP (b) with a political report, actually claims to be the main successor of Lenin. Although this is less and less consistent with the real balance of power within the ruling "troika" Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin, Stalin prefers to remain on the sidelines for the time being. Zinoviev's ambitions only lead to the fact that the main target for the supporters of the still dangerous Trotsky becomes Zinoviev himself, and not Stalin. Stalin prefers to maneuver in case Trotsky somehow miraculously manages to win. At this stage, Stalin positions himself as a "moderate", and even restrains Zinoviev's especially "bloodthirsty" demands (for example, in January 1924, Zinoviev demanded the arrest of Trotsky, as allegedly preparing a "Bonopartist" military coup). Bazhanov B.G. testifies:
The members of the troika enter in three or four minutes one after the other - they, apparently, conferred about something before the entrance. Zinoviev enters first, he does not look in the direction of Trotsky, and Trotsky also pretends not to see him and examines the papers. Stalin comes in third. He goes straight to Trotsky and shakes his hand with a sweeping sweeping gesture. I clearly sense the falsity and lies of this gesture; Stalin is an ardent enemy of Trotsky and cannot stand him. I remember Lenin: "Do not believe Stalin: he will make a rotten compromise and deceive."
Meanwhile, Stalin, starting in 1922, methodically assigns his supporters to all key posts in the party. Special attention he pays to the secretaries of provincial and district party committees, since they form delegations to party congresses, and congresses have the right to re-elect the party leadership.
The "bomb" left by Lenin before his death, the so-called "Testament of Lenin", did not interfere with the "troika" in the least. The text proposed to remove Stalin from the post of general secretary, as a "rude" man who "concentrated immense power in his hands." For Stalin, such "compromising evidence" was a heavy blow. At the same time, the ambiguity of the "Testament" was also in the fact that "compromising evidence" fell on the heads of all the main contenders in the struggle for power. Lenin recalled their position to Kamenev and Zinoviev in October 1917; Trotsky accused Trotsky of "being overly enthusiastic about the purely administrative side of the matter," clearly referring to the discussion about trade unions. Lenin called Bukharin a "most valuable theoretician" and "favorite of the party", but at the same time he threw down "compromising evidence" on him, declaring that "his theoretical views can very with great doubt be classified as completely Marxist, for there is something scholastic in him ( he never studied and, I think, never fully understood dialectics) ”.
On May 1, 1924, at an extraordinary plenum of the Central Committee, a "testament" was read out. Zinoviev and Kamenev, considering Stalin harmless, suggest that he not be removed from the post of General Secretary. The majority controlled by the "troika" re-elect Stalin as general secretary, Trotsky can only play "with energetic facial expressions his extreme contempt for all this comedy." In addition, the plenum decides not to disclose the letter.
In February-August 1924, Stalin organized the so-called "Leninist draft" - a massive recruitment of 230 thousand workers into the party, even exceeding the figure of 100 thousand people adopted at the XIII party conference. The number of the RCP (b) has grown by one and a half times, qualitatively and dramatically changing the mood of the minds. "Lenin's call" caused a massive psychosis throughout the country; In just a few months, up to 300 thousand applications for membership in the party were submitted.
The demand to carry out the so-called "enslavement" of the party began to sound widely, starting with the appearance of the "workers' opposition" in late 1920 - early 1921, but in practice it began to be massively implemented in 1924. At a time when the Communist Party began to be shaken by especially fierce ideological discussions, the party included huge masses of uneducated people who often understood the meaning of these discussions only superficially, but perfectly understood their privileges over non-party people, and looked at the party "like a pie with a filling." These people clearly saw that the huge non-partisan majority of the population of Russia was completely deprived of rights before the dictatorship of the Communist Party, and was crushed by the terror of the GPU, so that the loud calls of the opposition for "democracy" in the internal party life they perceived as a farce.
During the Civil War, membership in the Communist Party often meant only a good chance of being shot or in a noose, with the result that the party was often replenished with young fanatics or adventurers of all kinds. Beginning at least in 1920, a massive influx of careerists into the party became obvious for the Bolshevik leadership, which began as the war drew to a close. To some extent, the regular mobilization of communists to the front is becoming a deterrent; in particular, 300 people were mobilized to suppress the Kronstadt uprising directly from the X Congress of the RCP (b). In the second half of 1921, the Central Committee organized the first mass purge of the party from the "attached" careerists and "petty-bourgeois elements"; according to various estimates, the size of the party as a result of the purge has decreased by a third, or even halved.
The implementation of the "Leninist call", thus, turned the policy pursued earlier by 180 °, turning the party from an "elite" into a mass one. At the same time, mass recruits opened the floodgates for the careerists, contemptuously characterized by Trotsky as "petty-bourgeois elements." The "recruits" of 1924, choosing between the main contenders who were clinging to each other's throats in the struggle for power, increasingly chose Stalin's side, since the distribution of appointments, rations, apartments and various privileges ultimately depended on him, as the head of the party apparatus. ... Stalin's behavior in the 1920s is strikingly different from the image of the "bloodthirsty dictator" with which he went down in history. Stalin receives and listens attentively to all comers, puffing on his pipe amiably, in sharp contrast to the arrogant, arrogant Trotsky.
In this environment, Trotsky became less and less in demand. As Isaac Deutscher notes, if during the Civil War, the stormy energy and theatrical spectacular gestures of Trotsky were quite appropriate, with the onset of peace they already began to give off hysterics. If in 1917 Trotsky gathered in the Petrograd circus "Modern" whole crowds of workers and soldiers who listened to his bright speeches as a revelation, then already in 1923 he was able to ignite with his sermons only young fanatics. The time of fanatics and ideologists has passed, the time has come for organizers who looked at Marxist phraseology only as a convenient tool. In the words of MS Voslensky, the meaning of the struggle for power in the 1920s - 1930s was that "communists by conviction were replaced by communists by name." Illustrating the reigning mood of the minds, Politburo Secretary B.G.Bazhanov gives the following example:
… At the very first time of my secretary service at the Politburo, my ear caught the ironic meaning of the term “educated Marxist”. It turned out that when the word "educated Marxist" was said, one had to understand: "fool and idle talker."
Sometimes it was clearer. People's Commissar of Finance Sokolnikov, who is carrying out the duty reform, submits for the approval of the Politburo the appointment of Professor Yurovsky as a member of the Narkomfin collegium and head of the currency department. Yurovsky is not a communist, the Politburo does not know him. Someone from the Politburo asks: "I hope he is not a Marxist?" - “What are you, what are you,” Sokolnikov hurries to reply, “the currency board, there you should not talk your tongue, but be able to do business”. The Politburo approves Yurovsky without objection.
During 1924, Trotsky gradually loses control over the army, where the troika introduces a number of his opponents. Trotsky, who is losing real power, can only appeal to his authority as a leader of the revolution and the Civil War, using his oratorical and journalistic abilities. But until the fall of 1924, Trotsky was waiting for an opportune moment.
Trotsky's passivity leads to the fact that already from June 1924, the ruling "troika", in the absence of a common enemy, began to fall apart. On June 17, Stalin, speaking at the course of the secretaries of the district party committees under the Central Committee of the RCP (b), attacks Zinoviev and Kamenev, "finding fault" with the clause "NEP Russia" instead of "NEP Russia" in Lenin's quote "from NEP Russia will be socialist Russia." In an atmosphere of fierce ideological battles reigning at that time, such a reservation would mean an admission that Russia is ruled not by the Communists, but by the Nepmen; the very fact of such a reservation was characterized by Stalin as a "distortion of Leninism." Carried away, Stalin attacked the doctrine of "party dictatorship" proclaimed by Zinoviev at the XII Congress, calling it "nonsense", since the Marxist theory defined "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and not "the dictatorship of the party." In response, Zinoviev organized a meeting of the Central Committee, which condemned Stalin's thesis about the "dictatorship of the party" as "erroneous."
At the same time, Zinoviev and Kamenev are increasing pressure on Trotsky, demanding that he be expelled from the party, but they do not collect the majority of the Central Committee. At this time, Stalin, maneuvering between the two groups, protests against the expulsion of Trotsky from the party.
Seeing that the "troika" actually split, Trotsky decides to go on the offensive. In October 1924 he published the article "The Lessons of October", which was included in the third volume of Trotsky's collected works as a preface. In this article, Trotsky recalled his role as the organizer of the October Revolution, and in the form of "compromising evidence" reminds readers that Zinoviev and Kamenev were generally against the action, and Stalin did not play any role in him. The article provoked the so-called "literary discussion", in which the "troika" attacked Trotsky with counter "compromising evidence", recalling his non-Bolshevik past and mutual abuse with Lenin before the revolution.
Stalin contemptuously characterizes Trotsky's attempts to recall his merits as "Arabian tales" and declares that "talk about Trotsky's special role is a legend spread by helpful 'party gossips'."
1925 year. The split of the “troika”. Stalin vs. Zinoviev and Kamenev [edit]
Kamenev L.B., speech at the XIV Congress of the CPSU (b), December 1925
... I have repeatedly said this to Comrade Stalin personally, precisely because I have repeatedly told a group of Leninist comrades, I repeat this at the Congress: I have come to the conviction that Comrade. Stalin cannot fulfill the role of the unifier of the Bolshevik headquarters. (Voices from the audience: "Wrong!", "Nonsense!" , "Stalin!"
Evdokimov from his seat: “Long live the Russian Communist Party. Hooray! Hooray!" The delegates stand up and shout "Hurray!" Noise. Stormy, long-lasting applause)
Evdokimov from his seat: “Long live the Central Committee of our party! Hooray! (The delegates shout “Hurray!”). The party is above all! That's right ”(applause and shouts of“ Hurray! ”) Voices from the seats:“ Long live comrade. Stalin !!! " (Loud, prolonged applause, shouts of "Hurray!" Noise.)
Chairman: “Comrades, please calm down. Comrade Kamenev will now finish his speech. " Kamenev: “I began this part of my speech with the words: we are against the theory of one-man command, we are against creating a leader! With these words I conclude my speech. "
The "war of compromising evidence" started by Trotsky fell upon him, damaging his authority much more than the "triumvirs" who had united for a while. At the plenum of the Central Committee in January 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded that Trotsky be expelled from the party. Stalin, continuing to maneuver, proposes not only not to exclude Trotsky, but even to leave him in the Central Committee and the Politburo, finally taking away from him only the key posts of the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs and the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council. Frunze became the new People's Commissar for Military Affairs, and Voroshilov became his deputy.
According to Trotsky himself, he even accepted his "overthrow" with relief, since this to some extent deflected accusations of preparing a "Bonapartist" military coup. Trotsky asks the Central Committee to direct him to economic activities, since with the end of the Civil War, it becomes more and more important. The plenum of the Central Committee appoints Trotsky to a number of secondary posts: chairman of the Main Committee for Concessions (Glavkontsessky), chairman of a special meeting at the Supreme Council of National Economy on product quality, chairman of the Electrotechnical Committee.
After such a blow to Trotsky, the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin “troika” finally disintegrated, the supporters of Zinoviev and Kamenev form the so-called “new opposition”. The main pretext for the split is the doctrine of "building socialism in a single country" developed by Stalin.
As the researcher N.V. Volsky-Valentinov points out, the impossibility of "building socialism in a single country" was obvious to Lenin until at least 1922. The need for a "world revolution" was clear to both Trotsky or Zinoviev and Kamenev, and to Stalin, who, back in April 1924, argued that
Overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie and establishing the rule of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean ensuring the complete victory of socialism. The main task of socialism - the organization of socialist production - still lies ahead. Is it possible to solve this problem, is it possible to achieve the final victory of socialism in one country, without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No impossible. The efforts of one country are enough to overthrow the bourgeoisie - the history of our revolution tells us about this. For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially a peasant one like Russia, are no longer enough; for this, the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are needed. Therefore, the development and support of the revolution in other countries is an essential task of the victorious revolution. Therefore, the revolution of the victorious country must see itself not as a self-sufficient quantity, but as an aid, as a means for accelerating the victory of the proletariat in other countries.
However, the "literary discussion" in the fall of 1924 prompted Stalin to strengthen his position in the struggle for power, beginning to position himself as a theoretician of communist ideology, in opposition to Trotsky and Zinoviev. After "a thorough analysis of Lenin's works," Stalin, already on December 17, 1924, opposed the idea of the spread of the revolution to the West ("permanent revolution") promoted by Trotsky. The new doctrine was finally formalized at the XIV Party Conference on April 27-29, 1925.
The Stalinist ideological innovation directly contradicted Engels, who asserted that "The communist revolution will not only be national, but will take place simultaneously in all civilized countries ... It is a world revolution and will therefore have a world arena," first World War I, and then Civil. However, it was met with hostility by Zinoviev. Zinoviev himself developed the doctrines of "Trotskyism" as a "petty-bourgeois trend hostile to Leninism" and "social fascism" (a label attached to European social democracy), and Stalin's claim to the role of a major theoretician Zinoviev was extremely irritating.
The resolution of the XIV Party Conference still assumed a compromise between Stalin and Zinoviev, however, during 1925, violent antagonism was brewing. On September 4, the "platform of four" Zinoviev-Kamenev-Krupskaya-Sokolnikov was formed. At the XIV Congress of the RCP (b) in December 1925, Zinoviev declared that the Stalinist doctrine "smacks of national narrow-mindedness."
According to Stalin's secretary B. G. Bazhanov, by 1925 Stalin had already, in general terms, completed the process of placing his supporters in the key positions of secretaries of provincial party committees:
To be in power, one had to have a majority in the Central Committee. But the Central Committee is elected by the party congress. To elect your own Central Committee, you had to have your majority at the congress. And for this it was necessary to have the majority of delegations to the congress from the provincial, regional and regional party organizations. Meanwhile, these delegations are not so much chosen as selected by the leaders of the local party apparatus - the secretary of the provincial committee and his closest associates. To pick up and place your people in secretaries and the main workers of the provincial committees, and in this way you will have a majority at the congress. It is this selection that Stalin and Molotov have been systematically engaged in for several years. It does not go smoothly and simply everywhere. For example, the path of the Central Committee of Ukraine, which has several provincial committees, is difficult and difficult. You have to combine, displace, move, then put on the Central Committee of Ukraine as the first secretary of Kaganovich to put things in order in the apparatus, then move, promote and remove obstinate Ukrainian workers. But in 1925, the main thing in this seating of people was done.
Stalin's main rivals also placed their supporters in key positions. Trotsky limited himself to the advancement of his supporters, who by 1925 were already mostly displaced within the army (Sklyansky, Gamarnik, Tukhachevsky, Antonov-Ovseenko, etc.), Zinoviev planted his "clan" in Petrograd and in the Comintern, Bukharin actually controlled the newspaper " Pravda "and the Institute of Red Professors, while Kamenev did not engage in such activities at all, and, in the words of BG Bazhanov," sat in Moscow by inertia. " Stalin, on the other hand, having headed the party apparatus, was able to promote his appointees on a special scale.
On October 31, 1925, M. V. Frunze dies on the operating table, replacing Trotsky at the posts of the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs and the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council. This death still seems suspicious to a number of researchers. Trotsky's supporters blame Stalin for this death. Boris Pilnyak plays with this version in 1926 in his book "The Tale of the Unquenched Moon". On the other hand, BG Bazhanov, who was Stalin's secretary at the time of these events, finds Frunze's activities in 1924-1925 extremely suspicious. So, Frunze achieved the reorganization of the army, the abolition of the commissars' political control that annoyed the commanders of units and associations, and placed the military in a number of key positions in the army. At the same time, Frunze himself was not perceived by his contemporaries as a Stalinist, although he was personally nominated by Stalin. All these circumstances aroused strong suspicions in Bazhanov that Frunze was supposedly playing his own game, and was preparing a military coup, both anti-Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist. According to Bazhanov, exactly the same suspicions arose among one of Stalin's close associates, LZ Mekhlis, and, apparently, among Stalin himself too.
Throughout 1925, Stalin “undermined” Zinoviev. With the help of Molotov, he manages to win over the head of the Moscow party organization, Zinoviev's appointee N.A.Uglanov, to his side, and one of Stalin's closest supporters L.M.
By December, the situation is especially aggravated: the Leningrad and Moscow party organizations exchange accusations against each other, Zinoviev accuses the Moscow organization of "liquidationist disbelief in the victory of socialism", and Stalin of "half-Trotskyism." The Leningrad party organization headed by Zinoviev is trying to publish opposition literature, which the Stalinist majority characterizes as the organization of factional activity.
At the XIV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) it was discovered that only the Leningrad delegation came out on the side of Zinoviev with "monolithic unity", but Stalin pushed against it all the other delegations, who also acted in the same "monolithic unity". Zinoviev-Kamenev's hopes for the support of the Moscow and Ukrainian delegations were not justified. The defeat of the "new opposition" was complete: Zinoviev was losing his key posts as head of the Leningrad Soviet and the Comintern, and Kamenev was losing his post as head of Moscow.
Trotsky at this time completely ignores politics, headlong into work in the "technocratic" positions given to him.
I diligently visited numerous laboratories, attended the experiments with great interest, listened to the explanations of the best scientists, studied chemistry and hydrodynamics textbooks in my free hours and felt like half administrator, half student ... a trip to the Dnieper, where extensive preparatory work was carried out for the future hydroelectric station. Two boatmen lowered me between the rapids along the whirlpools on a fishing boat, along the old path Zaporozhye Cossacks... It was, of course, purely sporting interest. But I was deeply interested in the Dnieper enterprise, both from an economic point of view, and from a technical one. In order to insure the hydroelectric station against miscalculations, I organized an American examination, later supplemented by a German one. I tried to connect my new work not only with the current tasks of the economy, but also with the main problems of socialism. In the struggle against the stupid national approach to economic issues ("independence" through self-sufficient isolation), I put forward the problem of developing a system of comparative coefficients of our economy and the world. This problem stemmed from the need for correct orientation in the world market, which, in turn, was supposed to serve the tasks of import, export and concession policy. By its very essence, the problem of comparative coefficients, arising from the recognition of the dominance of world productive forces over national ones, meant a campaign against the reactionary theory of socialism in a particular country.
However, Trotsky's activities in these posts did not bring any significant results, since these posts themselves were secondary and insignificant. According to Boris Bazhanov, “These appointments were both provocative and comical ... Trotsky was not well suited for these fraudulent operations - therefore, probably, he was appointed there. He was even less suitable for monitoring the quality of products of Soviet factories. A brilliant orator and polemicist, a tribune of difficult turning points, he was ridiculous as an observer of the quality of Soviet pants and nails. However, he made an attempt to conscientiously fulfill this task also assigned to him by the Party; created a commission of specialists, traveled with it to a number of factories and presented the results of the study to the Supreme Council of National Economy; its conclusion, of course, did not have any consequences ”.
Since his defeat in January, throughout 1925, Trotsky did not engage in any noticeable political activity, and did not even speak at the XIV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), gloatingly observing from the sidelines the defeat of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Nevertheless, it was in 1925 that Trotsky strengthened his position as an ideologist by publishing in Pravda a series of programmatic articles “Towards Socialism or Capitalism?”, Developing the ideas of his supporters Preobrazhensky, Pyatakov and Smirnov. Trotsky's articles relied primarily on Preobrazhensky's work, The Law of Socialist Primary Accumulation, which was also published in 1925.
In all these works, Trotsky and his supporters put forward the ideological doctrine of the so-called "overindustrialization". One of the most fundamental contradictions between orthodox Marxism of the 19th century and its real incarnation was evident already from 1917 - the revolution won in peasant Russia, while Marx and Engels clearly believed during their lifetime that this would happen in industrial Western Europe. Trotsky proposes to eliminate this contradiction by embarking on a forced industrialization at the expense of the countryside. BG Bazhanov commented on it this way: "a purely Bolshevik approach: in order to do something, you need to rob someone."
Trotsky proposes to pay the main attention to the development, first of all, of the military industry, and heavy industry, the production of the means of production. Such views are beginning to overlap with the platform of Zinoviev and Kamenev. By 1925, the material standard of living of workers in large industrial cities was still below the level of 1913. In this regard, in large cities, primarily in Leningrad and Moscow, dissatisfaction with the "NEP" regime was growing more and more; such discontent was personified in the images of "Nepman" and "kulak". Zinoviev and Kamenev, as heads of the Leningrad and Moscow party organizations, became the conductors of such discontent.
The doctrine of "super-industrialization", which the Trotsky group and the Zinoviev-Kamenev group are simultaneously arriving at, gives them a convenient pretext to attack Stalin. Not wishing to give his competitors a trump card in their hands, Stalin as a "counterweight" turns to the future bloc of "rightists" - Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky. Bukharin puts forward a rival ideological doctrine of "the growing of the peasant into socialism," and harshly criticizes the doctrine of "overindustrialization", accusing Trotsky's supporters of planting "internal colonialism" and plundering the countryside.
1926-1927 years. "United opposition" against the Stalin-Bukharin bloc [edit]
By the beginning of 1926, the political platforms of the Trotsky group and the Zinoviev-Kamenev group were converging on the basis of the unity of views on the question of the possibility of "building socialism in one country" and "super-industrialization". In April-July 1926, the “old” (“Trotskyist”) and “new” (Zinoviev-Kamenev) oppositions unite (the “Trotskyite-Zinoviev bloc”), which was clearly indicated at the plenums of the Central Committee held in April and July. The block is also adjoined by Trotsky A. Ioffe, V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, E. A. Preobrazhensky, N. N. Krestinsky, K. B. Radek, A. G. Beloborodov, I. T. Smilga. and others, from the side of Zinoviev - Sokolnikov G. Ya., Lashevich. The oppositionists are also joined by Lenin's widow, Krupskaya N.K., and fragments of the defeated "workers' opposition", primarily A.G. Shlyapnikov.
By 1926, the main opposition had already completely lost real power. Trotsky lost the posts of People's Commissar of Military Affairs and the Pre-Revolutionary Council, Zinoviev - Chairman of the Leningrad Soviet Executive Committee and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, Kamenev - Head of the Moscow Party Organization, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense. Although they still retain membership in the Central Committee, and even membership in the Politburo, at all plenums of the Central Committee, meetings of the Politburo and at all party congresses, they are already in the minority. In the absence of any power, the opposition can only move their struggle with Stalin into the realm of pure ideology in the hope of winning over the party majority to their side. The opposition fiercely accuses the General Secretary of “bureaucratic degeneration of the party”, “movement towards Thermidor”, unwillingness to carry out “overindustrialization” and sabotage of the construction of the “international socialist system”.
As noted by the direct witness of these processes, BG Bazhanov, by 1926 Stalin had already completed the process of placing his supporters in all key posts in the party, and “continued this hype with the opposition only in order to reveal his hidden enemies”.
A fierce ideological struggle is taking place against the backdrop of new and new mass recruiting of workers "from the bench" organized by Stalin. In 1923 the party numbered 386 thousand people, in 1924 - 735 thousand people, in 1927 - 1 236 thousand, in 1930 - 1 971 thousand, in 1934 - 2 809 thousand people. If in 1917 the number of people with higher education in the Bolshevik party was 32% completed and 22% incomplete, as a result of the so-called "labor" the number of people with higher education by 1927 fell to 1%, 27% of party members did not even have an initial education. The level of education, which was already low among the Bolsheviks in comparison with other revolutionary parties, is sharply falling. Researcher Maslov N.N. indicates that during the period 1920-1929, the number of the working class, due to the restoration of industry to the pre-war level, increased fivefold, primarily due to the declassed peasant youth. In 1927-1929, every seventh worker could not read and write.
In such conditions, the fierce discussions raging at the top are becoming more and more incomprehensible to the party lower classes, during which the opposing sides masked their thirst for power, “hammering” each other with complex ideological doctrines, or accusations of “deviating from Ilyich's behests”. As noted by the researcher Rogovin V.Z., the unification of the still very recently hostile groups of Trotsky and the group of Zinoviev-Kamenev in fact led only to their mutual discrediting. Back in 1924, Zinoviev fiercely attacked Trotsky, developing the doctrine of "Trotskyism" as "a petty-bourgeois trend hostile to Leninism." In 1926, he chose to block with the same Trotsky. As Kirov SM later noted, “Nowhere was Trotskyism so defeated ... as in Leningrad [led by Zinoviev] ... then suddenly the famous fraternization between Zinoviev and Trotsky took place. This step seemed absolutely magical to the Leningrad organization. " In a private conversation with Trotsky, Zinoviev honestly admits that the doctrine of "Trotskyism" was entirely invented by him in order to fight for power.
In the eyes of the "working" uneducated majority, such, in the words of BG Bazhanov, "volt-face" only led to an ever-increasing loss of both the Zinovievs and Trotskys of their authority. Stalin, meanwhile, uses the "compromising evidence" of his own opponents, now accusing the author of "Trotskyism" itself, Zinoviev, of "Trotskyism", since he formed a bloc with Trotsky. During the "literary discussion" of 1924, Trotsky "recalled" Zinoviev and Kamenev their position in October 1917; now Stalin is happy to "intercept" these slogans. Lenin's widow, NK Krupskaya, at the XIV Congress of the CPSU (b) unsuccessfully tries to appeal to "party democracy", reminding the delegates that Lenin himself at the "Stockholm" congress was in the minority, but no one listened to her anymore. Stalin counters Krupskaya's speech with a statement: “What, in fact, distinguishes Comrade Krupskaya from any other responsible comrade? don't you think that the interests of individual comrades should be placed above the interests of the party and its unity? Don't the comrades from the opposition know that for us, for the Bolsheviks, formal democracy is an empty shell, but the real interests of the party are everything? "
More and more often, Trotsky begins to reproach him with his nationality, and more and more often they start submitting notes from places to presidiums with statements like "Trotsky rejects the possibility of building socialism in one country, because because of his nationality he does not believe in the strength of the Russian people." "Trotsky could not be a communist, that his very nationality indicates that he needs speculation." In 1927, Trotsky attacks such notes, calling them "Black Hundreds": "the devil knows what, they ask, with what" means "the opposition is conducting its" work "." Here, too, Stalin positions himself as a "moderate", making an ambiguous statement that "we are fighting against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev not because they are Jews, but because they are oppositionists."
In an effort to find a counterbalance to the ideological innovations of the opposition, Stalin united with the group Bukharin NI - Rykov AI - Tomsk MP, whose views were later condemned as a "right deviation". However, at this stage, one of the main party theorists, Bukharin, was still useful to Stalin. Bukharin fiercely attacks the "left" oppositionists, accusing them of the doctrine of "overindustrialization" of building "internal colonialism" and undermining the "bond" between town and country. From the point of view of the "rightists", one of the sins of "Trotskyism" was excessive reliance only on the workers and neglect of the peasantry. At this stage, Stalin still positions himself as a "moderate" centrist, restraining the radicalism of both the left and right wing of the party. On the one hand, Stalin confronts the left with their demand for a continuation of the grueling "world revolution" and no less grueling industrialization. On the other hand, Stalin also "pulls back" the overly carried away Bukharin, condemning his famous slogan to the peasants "Get rich!" As "not ours."
Maneuvering between his opponents, Stalin continues to restrain their especially "bloodthirsty" statements, which at this stage sound much more bellicose than those of Stalin himself. Trotsky in 1927 describes the Stalinist role of the "peacemaker" as follows:
At all the cells, specially trained speakers pose the question of the opposition in such a way that the worker gets up, most often along the side, and says: "Why are you messing with them, isn't it time to shoot them?" Then the speaker, with a modestly hypocritical expression, objects: "Comrades, there is no need to rush." ... all this in order to arouse a furious reaction from deceived listeners, from raw young party members with whom you artificially fill the party ranks, and then to be able to say: "Look, we would be ready to endure, but the masses are demanding."
In January 1924, Stalin restrained Zinoviev, who demanded that Trotsky be arrested for the alleged preparation of a "Bonapartist" military coup; in July and December, Zinoviev demanded that Trotsky be expelled from the party. In December 1925, Stalin defends Bukharin from the attacks of Zinoviev. In 1926-1927 Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky quite definitely "run ahead" of Stalin, demanding repressions. So, Bukharin in November 1926 declares that
Comrade Zinoviev said ... how well Ilyich dealt with the opposition, not excluding everyone when he had only two votes out of all at a professional meeting. Ilyich understood the matter: well, exclude everyone when you have two voices (Laughter). But then, when you have everyone, and you have two voices against yourself, and these two voices shout about Thermidor, then you can even think about it. (Shouts "Right."
Tomsky in November 1927 expressed himself even more definitely:
The opposition very widely spreads rumors about repressions, about expected prisons, about Solovki, etc. We will tell nervous people to this: “If you don’t calm down even now when we removed you from the party, then now we say: drop it, we’ll just we will politely ask you to sit down, because it is uncomfortable for you to stand. If you now try to enter factories and plants, then we will say “sit down, please” (Stormy applause), for, comrades, in the atmosphere of the dictatorship of the proletariat there can be two or four parties, but only on one condition: one party will be in power and everyone else is in jail. " (Applause).
Rykov spoke in the same spirit, at the 15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in December 1927, he remarked that "there is no guarantee that the population of prisons will not have to increase somewhat in the near future." A broom was sent to the delegates from Stalingrad as a gift. Rykov personally handed it to Stalin with the words: "I am handing over the broom to Comrade Stalin, let him sweep our enemies with it."
The majority organized by Stalin is increasingly pushing the opposition out of the legal field, depriving them of the opportunity to conduct discussions at plenums, congresses, and in the press. In July 1926, Lashevich, a Zinovievite, organized an illegal opposition meeting in a forest near Moscow, for which Zinoviev was removed from the Politburo as "leading factional activity." The intensity of passions leads to the fact that during the joint July plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, right in the conference room, FE Dzerzhinsky has a heart attack, on July 20 he dies.
In the fall of 1926, the opposition tried to organize agitation at the "grassroots" party cells, which was accompanied by well-organized obstructions, and the expulsion of opposition supporters from the party "for factional activity." Trotsky fiercely attacks Stalin, declaring that "ideological squalor has been replaced by apparatus omnipotence", and "a caste has been created at the top that has broken away from the masses."
The apparatus gave a frenzied rebuff. The ideological struggle was replaced by administrative mechanics: phone calls from the party bureaucracy to meetings of workers' cells, a frenzied congestion of cars, the roar of honks, well-organized whistles and roars when oppositionists appeared on the podium. The ruling faction pressed on with the mechanical concentration of its forces and the threat of reprisals. Before the mass of the party had time to hear, understand and say anything, they were afraid of a split and catastrophe.
At the same time, the oppositionists Zinoviev, Peterson, Muralov and Trotsky in their letter to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the Presidium of the Central Control Commission, and the Executive Committee of the Comintern of September 6, 1927 admit that “in the past of our party, such means [disrupting meetings] were used by us at meetings convened by the bourgeois parties, as well as at meetings with the Mensheviks after the final split with them. Within our party, such methods should be most resolutely prohibited, because they interfere with the solution of party issues by party means. "
The gradual "squeezing" of the opposition out of the framework of "Soviet legality" leads to the fact that under the pretext of "violation of party discipline" Trotsky and Kamenev were expelled from the Politburo in October 1926. Also in the fall of 1926, Krupskaya N.K. departed from the opposition, declaring that "the opposition had gone too far." Nevertheless, Trotsky remains in the Central Committee, from time to time violently attacking Stalin at his plenums. On November 26, 1926, L.B. Kamenev was removed from Russia and sent to Italy as a plenipotentiary. One of the main "Zinovievites", Sokolnikov G. Ya. Back in January 16, 1926 was transferred from the post of People's Commissariat of Finance to the post of Deputy Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR.
The gradual "agony" of the opposition has been postponed for some time by the political crisis in China. At the end of 1926, the Stalin-Bukharin bloc insisted on holding The Communist Party China's moderate policy, and forging an alliance with the Kuomintang movement led by Chiang Kai Shi. This tactic was sharply different from the tactics of the Communists themselves in 1917, and ended in failure; in April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, fearing rivalry with the Chinese communists, dispersed them by force.
The political crisis in China was widely used by the opposition to criticize Stalin as "sabotaging the construction of the international socialist system." Trotsky described the Chinese events as "the apparent bankruptcy of Stalin's policies."
In June 1927, the main control body of the party, the Central Control Commission, is considering the cases of Zinoviev and Trotsky, but decides not to exclude them from the party. In July, Trotsky puts forward an ambiguous "Clemenceau thesis", which Stalin characterized on August 1 at the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission as a promise "to seize power by insurrection in case of war", the majority organized by Stalin condemns Trotsky for "conditional defencism" and the desire to "organize a second party ". At the same time, Stalin opposes the expulsion of Trotsky from the party, as a result, the plenum is limited to announcing a severe reprimand on Zinoviev and Trotsky.
In the fall of 1927, Stalin finally "squeezes" the left opposition out of the framework of "Soviet legality." In September, the opposition organizes illegal workers' gatherings in Moscow and Leningrad, which were attended by up to 20 thousand people. In a number of cities, speeches of oppositionists at meetings of party activists are interrupted by shouts and whistles; in Leningrad, during an opposition speech in the conference room, the light was turned off, at a meeting of the party activist of the Petrograd region, the opposition speaker was attacked, and the draft resolution proposed to him was tore up. A number of oppositionists receive appointments abroad, in particular, GI Safarov, who has never worked in trade, is "deported" to the Soviet trade mission in Turkey, but refused to leave. There are massive expulsions from the party of ordinary oppositionists, which by November 1927 reached at least 600 people; on August 26, a directive appears not to accept opposition candidates as members of the party.
For the printing of propaganda literature, an illegal printing house is organized on the model of pre-revolutionary underground activities.
On November 7, 1927, an opposition demonstration takes place on the anniversary of the October Revolution. The demonstration was organized under the leadership of Smilga and Preobrazhensky in Moscow near the former Paris Hotel at the corner of Okhotny Ryad and Tverskaya Street, and under the leadership of Zinoviev, Radek and Lashevich in Leningrad. Opposition demonstrations attacked the crowds, pelting them with "ice, potatoes and firewood", shouted slogans "beat the opposition", "down with the opposition Jews", etc. Smilga, Preobrazhensky, Grunstein, Yenukidze and others were dragged from the balcony by the crowd, and beaten, after the car with Trotsky, Kamenev and Muralov, several shots were fired, after which unknown persons attempted to pull them out of the car.
On November 11, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) requires the opposition to stop illegal meetings in private apartments (the so-called "bonds"), in some cases gathering several hundred people, and held, in particular, at the Technical School. A number of such meetings are accompanied by clashes with Stalin's supporters, in particular, according to Trotsky, in Kharkov it came to "revolver shots."
At the joint XIII Congress of the RCP (b) (May, 1924) of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, Trotsky demanded that the "Testament of Lenin" be read out, and, in accordance with it, that Stalin be removed from the post of General Secretary. Stalin is forced to actually read out the text of the Testament. At the XIII Congress of the RCP (b) (May, 1924), Stalin asked the plenum of the Central Committee to accept his resignation from the post of General Secretary, but the Central Committee controlled by Stalin himself did not accept the resignation.
The organization by the opposition of an illegal printing house and an illegal October demonstration becomes the reason for the expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky from the party on November 16, 1927. During these events, one of Trotsky's main supporters, the terminally ill Ioffe A.A., commits suicide.
Export Revolution Projects [edit]
Soviet-Polish War (January 1920 - March 1921) [edit]
Main article: Soviet-Polish War
A project to aid the Hungarian Soviet Republic [edit]
India campaign project [edit]
In power [edit]
"Red" propaganda poster, 1919
OSVAG poster "Peace and Freedom in the Council of Deputies." 1919
"White" poster "Lenin and Trotsky -" doctors "of sick Russia"
Awards [edit]
The period of Trotsky's occupation of the pre-Revolutionary Military Council and People's Commissariat for Military Affairs coincided with the formation of a new state, military and propaganda machine, one of the founders of which was Trotsky himself. An integral part of the propaganda system built by the Bolsheviks was the glorification of honored workers of the revolution, their election to the "honorary presidiums" of various congresses and meetings (from party congresses and ending with school meetings), receiving various kinds of honorary titles ("honorary miner", "honorary metallurgist "," Honorary Red Army soldier ", etc.), renaming cities, hanging portraits and publishing romanticized biographies.
One of the forms of glorification of the honored workers of the revolution in early Soviet propaganda was "leaderism", as such appeared before October 1917. Even ataman Kaledin in August 1917 called himself “the leader of the army”, and one of the obvious manifestations of “leaderism” was the pronounced cult of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, popular among the soldiers, which had spread at least since 1915. In Soviet propaganda, Lenin was usually called "the leader of the revolution", and Trotsky - "the leader of the Red Army." During the Civil War, two armored trains were named after Trotsky, No. 12 named after Trotsky and No. 89 named after Trotsky. These names were fairly common; the Red Army also included, for example, armored train No. 10 named after Rosa Luxemburg, No. 44 named after Volodarsky, or No. 41 "The Glorious Leader of the Red Army Yegorov."
At least since 1919, the election of "Lenin and Trotsky" to the so-called "honorary presidiums" has become a tradition. So, on November 4, 1923, Lenin, Trotsky and Rykov were elected to the honorary presidium of the Krasny Kauchuk plant. In August 1924 Rykov and Trotsky (mentioned in this order) were elected to the honorary presidium of the 1st All-Union Chess and Drafts Congress. In his memoirs, Trotsky mentions other examples: back in November 1919, the II All-Russian Congress of Muslim Communist Peoples of the East elected Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Stalin as its honorary members, in April 1920 the same composition was elected by the honorary presidium of the I All-Russian Congress of Chuvash Communist Sections.
The total number of such "honorary presidiums" defies any calculation, as well as the number of various kinds of honorary titles. Lenin was elected an "honorary Red Army soldier" in a total of about twenty different military units, the last time just before his death. Trotsky was also elected an "honorary Red Army soldier" and even an "honorary Komsomol member." In April 1923, a meeting of workers of the Glukhovsky factory named after Lenin decided to appoint Trotsky as an honorary spinner of the seventh grade, and the representative of this factory, Andreev, speaking at the XII Congress of the RCP (b), said that “And one more order I must tell you from our workers that The deadline for Comrade Trotsky's appearance at the factory is May 1, and we ask the Presidium to hand over to Comrade Trotsky, so that he would show up at our factory at least once during the whole revolution and say his weighty word to our workers. " Researchers Pykhalova and Denisov also point out that Trotsky in the 1920s was also listed as the honorary chief of the Kondrovskaya and Troitskaya paper mills in the Kaluga region. In 1922, the destroyer Lieutenant Ilyin was named in honor of Trotsky.
In 1923, as a sign of Trotsky's merits to Bolshevism during the struggle against the forces of Kerensky-Krasnov in 1917 and during the defense of Petrograd in 1919, the city of Gatchina was renamed into the city of Trotsk, and on November 5, 1923, the city council even elected Lenin as its "honorary chairmen" , Trotsky and Zinoviev.
In fact, by the end of the Civil War, the "cult of Trotsky" was formed as an honored leader of the revolution and the Civil War. Its peculiarity, in comparison with the later "cult of Stalin's personality", was that the "cult of Trotsky" existed in parallel with a number of other "cults" comparable in size: the cult of Lenin's personality, the cult of the "Leningrad leader" and the "leader of the Comintern" Zinoviev, cults of Krupskaya, Tomsky, Rykov, Kosior, Kalinin, cults of a number of military leaders of the Civil War (Tukhachevsky, Frunze, Voroshilov, Budyonny), etc., down to the smaller cult of the famous poet Demyan Bedny, in whose honor in 1925 he was named the city of Spassk. Researcher Sergei Firsov considers the Bolshevik cults of the leaders of the revolution to be an "inverted" version of the Christian cult of saints. According to Sergei Firsov, after Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927 and expelled from the USSR in 1929, the process of his "desacralization" began, which can be traced from biographical notes in the notes to editions of Lenin's collected works. In 1929, Trotsky is designated in them as "expelled from the USSR", in 1930, as a "social democrat", in 1935 his "social democracy" - "Trotskyism" is already characterized as "the vanguard of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie." Since 1938, Trotsky has been described as a universal antihero, the devil of the "bourgeois-fascist" hell, a demon of the world communist system.
Order of the Red Banner in commemoration of services to the world proletarian revolution and the workers 'and peasants' army, and specifically for the defense of Petrograd, by the resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Council of Workers, Peasants, Cossack and Red Army Deputies of November 7, 1919 No.
In 1929 he was exiled on the Soviet ship "Ilyich" outside the USSR - to Turkey on the island of Buyukada or Prinkipo - the largest of the Princes' Islands in the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul. In 1932 he was deprived of Soviet citizenship. In 1933 he moved to France, in 1935 to Norway. Norway, fearing to worsen relations with the USSR, tried with all its might to get rid of the unwanted immigrant, confiscating all of Trotsky's works and placing him under house arrest, and Trotsky was also threatened to extradite him to the Soviet government. Unable to withstand the oppression, Trotsky emigrated to Mexico in 1936, where he lived in the house of the family of artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
In early August 1936, Trotsky finished work on the book Revolution Betrayed, in which he called what was happening in the Soviet Union "Stalin's Thermidor." Trotsky accused Stalin of Bonapartism.
Trotsky wrote that "the leaden bottom of the bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution", while he stated that "with the help of the petty bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy succeeded in tying the proletarian vanguard hand and foot and crushing the Bolshevik opposition"; real indignation aroused in him the strengthening of the family in the USSR, he wrote: “The revolution made a heroic attempt to destroy the so-called“ family hearth ”, that is, an archaic, musty and inert institution ... The place of the family ... was supposed to be taken by a complete system of social care and service ... ".
In 1938 he proclaimed the creation of the Fourth International, the heirs of which still exist.
In 1938, Trotsky's eldest son, Lev Sedov, died in a hospital in Paris after an operation.
Trotsky's Archive [edit]
During his exile from the USSR in 1929, Trotsky was able to take out his personal archive. This archive included copies of a number of documents signed by Trotsky during his time in power in the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, the Central Committee, the Comintern, a number of Lenin's notes addressed personally to Trotsky and not published anywhere else, as well as a number of valuable information for historians about the revolutionary movement before 1917, thousands letters received by Trotsky, and copies of letters sent to him, telephone and address books, etc. Based on his archives, Trotsky in his memoirs easily quotes a number of documents signed by him, including sometimes even secret ones. In total, the archive consisted of 28 boxes.
Stalin was unable to prevent Trotsky from taking out his archive (or he was allowed, which Stalin later called a big mistake in personal conversations, like the expulsion), but in the 30s the GPU agents repeatedly tried (sometimes successfully) to steal some of their fragments, and in March 1931, part of the documents were burned during a suspicious fire. In March 1940, Trotsky, badly in need of money and fearing that the archive would still fall into the hands of Stalin, sold most of his papers to Harvard University.
At the same time, a number of other documents related to Trotsky's activities are, according to the historian Yu.G. Felshtinsky, also in other places, in particular, in the archives of the President of the Russian Federation, in the archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, etc. ...
Murder [edit]
Main article: Operation Duck
In May 1940, an unsuccessful attempt was made on Trotsky's life. The attempt was led by a secret agent of the NKVD Grigulevich. The group of raiders was led by the Mexican artist and staunch Stalinist Siqueiros. Bursting into the room where Trotsky was, the assailants unintentionally shot all the cartridges and hastily disappeared. Trotsky, who managed to hide behind the bed with his wife and grandson, was not injured. According to Siqueiros, the failure was due to the fact that the members of his group were inexperienced and very worried.
Early in the morning on August 20, 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader, who had previously penetrated into Trotsky's entourage as a convinced of his adherent, came to Trotsky to show his manuscript. Trotsky sat down to read it, and at this time Mercader struck him on the head with an ice pick, which he carried under his cloak. The blow was delivered from behind and from above on the seated Trotsky. The wound reached 7 centimeters in depth, but Trotsky, after the wound he received, lived for almost another day and died on August 21. After cremation, he was buried in the courtyard of a house in Koyokan.
The Soviet government publicly denied any involvement in the murder. The killer was sentenced by a Mexican court to twenty years in prison; In 1960, Ramon Mercader, who was released from prison and arrived in the USSR, was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union with the Order of Lenin.
Protocol of the decision on the expulsion of Trotsky from the USSR
On deathbed
Trotsky's grave
Rehabilitation [edit]
Leon Trotsky was not officially rehabilitated by the Soviet regime. And even during the period of Perestroika and Glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev, on behalf of the CPSU, condemned the historical role of Trotsky.
At the request of the Memorial Research Center, L. D. Trotsky (Bronstein) was rehabilitated on May 21, 1992 by the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation (decree of the OS KOGPU dated December 31, 1927 on expulsion to Siberia for 3 years), and then rehabilitated on June 16, 2001 by the General Prosecutor's Office RF (decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated 01/10/1929 and the decree of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR dated 02/20/1932 on expulsion from the USSR, deprivation of citizenship with a ban on entry into the USSR). Rehabilitation certificates No. 13 / 2182-90, No. 13-2200-99 (Archives of the Memorial Research Center).
Memory [edit]
In 1923-1929. the city of Gatchina in the Leningrad region was called Trotsk.
In 1923-1929. the city of Chapaevsk in the Samara region was called Trotsk.
In 1921-1928. Nakhimov Avenue in Sevastopol was called Trotsky Street.
In 1923-1929. Shevchenko Square in Dnepropetrovsk was called Trotsky Square, 8 Marta Street was called Trotsky Street.
Central Moscow airfield. MV Frunze bore the name of Trotsky until 1925.
In 1926-1928. Ozemblovsky Street in Belgorod was called Trotsky Street.
Trotsky's descendants [edit]
All descendants of Trotsky:
From his first marriage with Alexandra Sokolovskaya (born 1872, shot 1938)
Nina Bronstein (married Nevelson) (born 1902, died of tuberculosis 1928)
Lev Nevelson (born December 3, 1921, disappeared without a trace)
Volina Nevelson (born 1925, disappeared without a trace)
Zinaida Volkova (born 1901, committed suicide 1933)
Alexandra Moglina (married to Bakhvalov) (1923-1989), was repressed, rehabilitated in 1956
Olga Bakhvalova (born 1958, lives in Moscow)
Vsevolod Volkov (aka Esteban Volkov Bronstein). His three daughters live in Mexico
Veronica Volkova (born 1954, Mexico City)
Nora Dolores Volkova (born March 27, 1955), emigrated to the USA
Patricia Volkov-Fernandez (born 1956)
Natalia Volkov-Fernandez (Patricia and Natalia are twins)
Lev Sedov (born 1906, died in 1938 after surgery, wife Anna Samoilovna Ryabukhina was shot on January 8, 1938)
Lev Lvovich Sedov (born 1926, disappeared without a trace in 1937)
Sergei Sedov (born 1908, shot in the USSR in 1937) + Henrietta Rubinstein
Julia Rubinstein (married Axelrod)
David Axelrod (born 1961, lives in Israel)
Notable descendants [edit]
During the struggle for power within the CPSU (b), all four of Trotsky's children from two marriages, as well as his first wife and sister, two nephews (sons of Olga's sister) and two sons-in-law (daughter's second husband Platon Volkov and sister's first husband Kamenev) were killed. Even the sister of his second wife, Natalya Sedova, was repressed.
Trotsky's daughter Nina Nevelson died of tuberculosis in 1928 during Trotsky's exile in Alma-Ata, and Trotsky himself was denied permission to visit her. The second daughter, Zinaida Volkova, also contracted tuberculosis and received permission from the Soviet authorities to go to Berlin for treatment. In January 1933, after Germany's demand to leave the country immediately, she committed suicide in a state of depression.
Trotsky's eldest son, Lev Sedov, an active Trotskyist and one of his father's closest assistants during his Alma-Ata exile and after his expulsion from the USSR, died after an operation in Paris in 1938 under suspicious circumstances. Trotsky dedicated the article “Lev Sedov. Son, friend, fighter ”, in which he actually blamed“ GPU poisoners ”for his death.
Trotsky's other son, Sergei Sedov, refused to take part in his father's political activities. According to Trotsky himself, Sergei "turned his back on politics at the age of 12." During the exile of his father, he visited him several times, during the exile he traveled with him to Odessa, but refused to leave the USSR.
On the night of March 3-4, 1935, Sergei Sedov was arrested on suspicion of having links with L.B. Kamenev's nephew, Boris Nikolayevich Rosenfeld. In May 1935, Trotsky managed to receive a message about the arrest of his son. Trotsky and Natalya Sedova tried to appeal to the international community, but to no avail, all their letters were ignored. The version of the investigation that Sedov and Rosenfeld were preparing for the assassination of Stalin was not confirmed, but Sedov himself was exiled to Krasnoyarsk for 5 years for "Trotskyist conversations" in July 1935 by a decision of an extrajudicial body - a Special Meeting under the NKVD of the USSR. By the time of the expulsion of his son from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk, Trotsky was already in a gradually increasing isolation from the news from the USSR, and in his diary he only noted that letters from his son had stopped, "obviously, and he was expelled from Moscow."
In September, Sergei Sedov was hired as a specialist engineer for gas generating units at the Krasnoyarsk Machine-Building Plant. Already in May-June 1936, Sergei Sedov was arrested on charges of so-called "sabotage" and an attempt to allegedly "poison the workers with generator gas." According to the research of the historian Dmitry Volkogonov, the pretext for the repression was the incident: the locksmith on duty B. Rogozov fell asleep, forgetting to turn off the gasifier tap, after which the shop was filled with gas. In the morning, the workers aired the room, the incident did not entail any consequences.
On October 29, 1937, Sergei Sedov was shot without pleading guilty or giving any evidence. The wife of Sergei Sedov, Henrietta Rubinstein, was sentenced to 20 years in the camps, the couple had a daughter, Julia (married Axelrod, born August 21, 1936, who emigrated to the United States in 1979, and to Israel in 2004). By the time of the execution of his son, Trotsky's isolation from the events in the USSR had become final: at least as far back as August 24, 1938, he did not know about what had happened, believing that Sergei Sedov "disappeared without a trace."
Mexican passport of Natalia Sedova
Trotsky's own sister and the first wife of Kamenev LB - Olga - in 1935 was expelled from Moscow. Both of her children (Trotsky's nephews) were shot in 1938-1939, Olga Trotskaya herself was shot in 1941.
The grandson of Lev Trotsky (son of his eldest daughter Zinaida Volkova) - Vsevolod Platonovich Volkov (Seva, born March 7, 1926, Moscow) - later Mexican chemist and Trotskyist Esteban Volkov Bronstein. One of the four daughters of Vsevolod (great-grandchildren of L. D. Trotsky) - Nora D. Volkow (born March 27, 1956, Mexico City) - a famous American psychiatrist, professor at Brookhaven National Laboratory, since 2003 - director of the National Institute of Addiction as part of the National Institutes of Health (USA). Another daughter - Patricia Volkow-Fernández (born March 27, 1956, Mexico City) - Mexican doctor, author scientific research in the field of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. The eldest daughter - Veronica Volkow (born 1955, Mexico City) is a famous Mexican poet and art critic. The youngest daughter - Natalia Volkow (Natalia Volkow, or Natalia Volkow Fernández) - economist, deputy director for relations with educational institutions Mexican National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics.
As for Trotsky's great-great-grandchildren, they currently live in three different countries: Olga Bakhvalova's daughter in Moscow, Vsevolod Volkov's several grandchildren in Mexico City, and David Axelrod's three children in Israel.
Trotsky in culture [edit]
Two full-length feature films were shot about Trotsky: "The Assassination of Trotsky" (The Assassination of Trotsky, USA, 1972) with Richard Burton in starring and Trotsky (Russia, 1993) with Viktor Sergachev. The image of Trotsky is also present in the films Hostile Whirlwinds, In the Days of October, and Red Bells. Film 2. I saw the birth of a new world ”,“ Frida ”,“ Zina ”,“ Yesenin ”,“ Stolypin ”,“ Romanovs ”,“ Duels. A woman classified as "secret" "," Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno "," Passion for Chapay "and many others.
Trotsky became the prototype of the "leader of the opposition" in two novels by J. Orwell - Animal Farm (Snowball - Snowball) and 1984 (Goldstein).
See also [edit]
House-Museum of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City
Trotskyism
Trotsky and Lenin
Trotsky (film, 2009)
Notes [edit]
State power of the USSR. The highest authorities and management and their leaders. 1923-1991 / Comp. V.I. Ivkin. - M .: "Russian political encyclopedia", 1999
CENTRAL COMMITTEE of the CPSU, VKP (b), RCP (b), RSDLP (b): Historical and biographical reference book / Comp. Goryachev Yu.V. - M .: Publishing house "Parade", 2005.
1 2 Ivan Krivushin, "Krugosvet" encyclopedia
Plekhanov's pseudonym.
Figures of the USSR and the revolutionary movement in Russia. Encyclopedic Dictionary Pomegranate. Moscow: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1989. p. 720
1 2 Transcripts of the court of time. 23. Trotsky
1 2 Trotsky L. D. My life. M., 2001.S. 140
Figures of the USSR and the revolutionary movement in Russia. Encyclopedic Dictionary Pomegranate. Moscow: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1989. p. 721.
Lunacharsky A. Lev Davidovich Trotsky // Silhouettes: political portraits. M., 1991.S. 343
Trotsky L. D. My life. S. 156-159
Deutscher I. Armed prophet. M., 2006.S. 90
World Socialist Web Site - Russian Edition
Read online "Leon Trotsky. Revolutionary. 1879-1917" by Felshtinsky Yuri Georgievich - RuLIT.Net - Page 51. Retrieved April 27, 2013.
S. Tyutyukin, V. Shelokhaev. The strategy and tactics of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the revolution
Pseudology.org
Stalin I.V. October coup // Pravda. November 6, 1918.
Stalin I. V. Trotskyism Or Leninism?
L. Trotsky. Stalin's school of falsifications
Lantsov S. A. Terror and terrorists: Dictionary .. - SPb .: Publishing house of St. Petersburg. University, 2004 .-- 187 p.
Trotsky L. "Terrorism and Communism." P. 64. // Akim Arutyunov "Lenin's Dossier without retouching"
Semyon (Simon) Isaevich Lieberman. Building Lenin's Russia - Building Lenin's Russia
1 2 Boris Bazhanov. Memoirs of Stalin's Former Secretary
Russia in the 20th century: M. Geller, A. Nekrich
On the issue of nationalities or autonomization
CHAPTER 13. GPU. ESSENCE OF POWER
The mystery of Lenin's death. Death of Lenin. Lenin V.I.
CHAPTER 5. OBSERVATIONS OF THE SECRETARY OF THE POLITBURO
Stalin I.V. On the discussion, on Raphael, on the articles of Preobrazhensky and Sapronov, and on Trotsky's letter
http://kz44.narod.ru/kadry_1930_5.htm
Кандидат иÑторичеÑÐºÐ¸Ñ Ð½Ð°ÑƒÐº, доцент преподаватеÐ"ÑŒ
http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/coe21/publish/no5_ses/glava04.pdf p. 97
CHAPTER 4. STALIN'S ASSISTANT - SECRETARY OF THE POLITBURO
CHAPTER 7. I BECOME AN ANTI-COMMUNIST
Stalin I.V.On the results of the XIII Congress of the RCP (b): Report at the courses of the secretaries of the ukomov under the Central Committee of the RCP (b) June 17, 1924
Kamenev L.B. at the XIV Congress of the CPSU (b) - 1925
PowWeb. Archived from the original on April 3, 2013. Retrieved April 1, 2013.
(K. Marx, F. Engels, Works, vol. 4, p. 334)
Stalin's foreign policy doctrine. Chapter 1
CHAPTER 11. MEMBERS OF THE POLITBURO
CHAPTER 12. STALIN'S DECLINE
Smilga Ivar Tenisovich
Armored trains of the Red Army in 1918-1920
career advice | Stewart Cooper Coon Blog - About Aircraft and Aviation IL2U.ru
Altayskaya Pravda N 310-312 (24929 - 24931), Friday 05 November 2004
Book about Stalin. Stalin in the People's Commissariat
Gatchina
The mystery of the monuments to Lenin in Gatchina
Inverted religion: Soviet mythology and communist cult - Orthodoxia.org
Izvestia 09.11.1919.
Platonov OA History of the Russian people in the XX century. Volume 1
On the 9th of Thermidor on the French Republican calendar, the Jacobin radical government of Robespierre was overthrown
L. D. Trotsky. Revolution Betrayed: What Is The USSR And Where Is It Going?
Almost immediately after his death, a version appeared about the involvement of the NKVD in it. There is no documentary evidence for this. The version of the murder is denied by both the defector Walter Krivitsky (“I was an agent of Stalin”) and one of the leaders of the NKVD at that time P. A. Sudoplatov
MILITARY LITERATURE - [Biographies] - Heroes and antiheroes of the Fatherland
Encyclopedia for children. Russian history. XX century / chapters. ed. S. Ismailova - M: Avanta +, 1995 .-- S. 254.
M. S. Gorbachev. October and perestroika: the revolution continues. // Communist. 1987. No. 17. P.10-15.
V.V. Iofe. Understanding the Gulag. SIC "Memorial"
Library of the Independent Academy. Yu. B. Borev. Power-muzzles
You can read about the circumstances of this in Joseph Berger.
Leon Trotsky on IMDb
Isaac Deutscher: the prophet, his biographer and the watchtower
George Orwell: The Critical Heritage Book by Jeffrey Meyers; Routledge, 1997
Literature [edit]
Deutscher I. Trotsky. Armed prophet. 1879-1921 - M .: ZAO Tsentrpoligraf, 2006 .-- P. 527 .-- ISBN 5-9524-2147-4
Deutscher I. Trotsky. An unarmed prophet. 1921-1929 - M .: ZAO Tsentrpoligraf, 2006 .-- P. 495 .-- ISBN 5-9524-2155-5
Deutscher I. Trotsky. The exiled prophet. 1929-1940 - M .: ZAO Tsentrpoligraf, 2006 .-- S. 527 .-- ISBN 5-9524-2157-1
See also excerpts: "Trotsky in the October Revolution"; "Drama of Brest-Litovsk"
David King. Trotsky. Biography in photographic documents. - Yekaterinburg: "SV-96", 2000. - ISBN 5-89516-100-6
Paporov Yu. N. Trotsky. The murder of the "big entertainer". - St. Petersburg: Publishing House "Neva", 2005. - S. 384. - ISBN 5-7654-4399-0
Vadim Rogovin. "Was there an alternative?": "Trotskyism - a look through the years", "Power and the opposition", "Stalinist neo-ep", "1937", "Party of the executed", "World revolution and world war", "The end means the beginning" ...
Isaac Don Levine. The Mind of an Assassin, New York, New American Library / Signet Book, 1960.
Dave Renton. Trotsky, 2004.
Sirotkin, Vladlen G. Why did Trotsky lose to Stalin? M., Algorithm, 2004.
Leon Trotsky: the Man and His Work. Reminiscences and Appraisals, ed. Joseph Hansen. New York, Merit Publishers, 1969.
The Unknown Lenin, ed. Richard Pipes (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996).
Mikhail Stanchev, Georgy Chernyavsky. L. D. Trotsky, Bulgaria and the Bulgarians. Sofia, BAN, 2008.
Robert Service. Trotsky: A Biography (Harvard, Belknap Press, 2009).
Gergy Chernyavsky. Leon Trotsky. Moscow: Young Guard, 2010 (Life of Remarkable People, 1261).
Kembaev Zh. M. The idea of the "United States of Europe" in the political and legal views of V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky // Law and Politics. 2011. No. 9. P.1551-1557.
D. A. Volkogonov. Trotsky; "Demon of the Revolution". M .: Yauza, Eksmo, 2011.704 p., Series "10 leaders", 2000 copies, ISBN 978-5-699-52130-2
Stoleshnikov A. P., “There will be no rehabilitation! Anti-Archipelago ", 2005.
