Leon Trotsky

Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born on 7 November 1879 in Yanovka, a farm in the Kherson province of Ukraine, the fifth child of David Bronstein, a prosperous Jewish farmer. He grew up in the Ukrainian steppe, received a good provincial education in Odessa and Nikolaev, and was arrested for revolutionary activity at nineteen. He took the name 'Trotsky' from the head jailer of an Odessa prison, forged that name on his escape papers, and never changed it. He arrived in London in 1902 and presented himself at Lenin's door, where he was welcomed as 'the Pen' for his brilliant polemical gifts. At the Brussels-London congress of 1903 he sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin's demand for a centralised vanguard party, a disagreement that would shape the next fourteen years of his life. The 1905 Revolution transformed him overnight. He arrived in St Petersburg in October and was elected chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet at twenty-six, directing a general strike from the Technological Institute. His theory of 'permanent revolution' — that a bourgeois revolution in Russia would have to be immediately extended into socialist revolution, supported by revolt in the industrialised West — was worked out in the interstices of those frantic weeks. He was arrested in December 1905, tried publicly (using the dock as a platform), exiled to Siberia, and escaped after two months, writing up his account of the revolution from Vienna, where he settled and edited Pravda for several years. The outbreak of the First World War sent him first to Paris, then — expelled from France as a pacifist agitator — to New York, where he wrote for the Russian-language radical press and debated socialist strategy with emigre intellectuals. He was at sea, aboard the SS Kristianiafjord, when he heard of the February Revolution in 1917. Intercepted by British naval intelligence at Halifax and held for a month on suspicion of being a German agent, he finally reached Petrograd on 17 May. He immediately aligned himself with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, formally joining the party in July. When Lenin went into hiding after the July Days, Trotsky was arrested; his defiant public statement from prison made him a hero. Released in September, he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet for the second time in his life. He chaired the Military Revolutionary Committee that coordinated the October insurrection on 25–26 October, managing the operational takeover of the city while Lenin directed the political strategy. As Commissar for Foreign Affairs he led the tortured Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany and Austria-Hungary, employing his famous formula 'no war, no peace' — refusing to sign while refusing to continue fighting — until German resumption of hostilities forced Lenin's hand. His greatest administrative achievement was the Red Army. He built it from nothing between 1918 and 1920: recruiting former Tsarist officers as 'military specialists' under political commissars, instituting conscription, travelling the civil war fronts in his armoured train (the mobile headquarters that became a legend), and imposing a discipline brutal enough to hold an army together across 5,000 miles of front. The Red Army won. But in the succession struggle after Lenin's first stroke, Trotsky proved a poor politician against Stalin's machine. Lenin's testament endorsed Trotsky's superior abilities but the document was suppressed; the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev outmanoeuvred him at every turn, exploiting his late adherence to Bolshevism and his reputation for arrogance. Expelled from the Communist Party in November 1927, he was exiled first to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, then, in February 1929, to the Princes' Islands near Istanbul. He spent the next eleven years in a series of exiles — Turkey, France, Norway — writing the three-volume 'History of the Russian Revolution' (1932), his autobiography 'My Life' (1930), and a sustained theoretical attack on Stalinism. In January 1937 he arrived in Mexico, hosted by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. He settled in Coyoacán, in a fortified villa behind watchtowers and steel doors, surviving a May 1940 machine-gun raid by Stalinist commandos led by the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. On 20 August 1940 Ramón Mercader, a Spanish Communist who had penetrated Trotsky's circle under a false identity, drove an ice axe into the back of his skull in his study. Trotsky died the next morning, sixty years old.

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