The Weakest Defence of Leon Trotsky I can muster

 

Daily Mail 1925, Trotsky returns to work in the Communist Party

 

I don't care for Leon Trotsky, I don't agree with his ideas, I don't care for his writing, and the anecdotes of him as a person leave me unmoved. I certainly don't approve of his tenure in government*. Nevertheless, Leon Trotsky is blessed in that many of his critics are some of the worst people around and their arguments are just awful. This includes the antisemites who peddled anti-Jewish conspiracies, but I'm mainly talking about his most vocal critics, the Stalinists and their offspring. 

While he was still alive, Trotsky and his apostles were libelled heavily in the Moscow affiliated press and this legacy has evolved to the present where Leon Trotsky the man might as well be a fictional character, a mythological dragon that must be slain by the virtuous Knight on his quest to saving the Kingdom from calamity.

People just make up any bad thing about him. My stance is why bother? Leon Trotsky the real person had plenty of evidence for his condemnation, but I'm in danger of wandering from my point. I'm not particularly interested in defending Trotsky, his open defenders are just as bad as his Stalinist accusers. Unfortunately, The false staining of Trotsky sets a precedent, if they can get away with making up crimes and accusations with Trotsky who is both comparatively well-known, well-documented and in some small circles well liked, then the many other revolutionaries of the period who weren't so fortunate have no chance of being taken as they were.

An artists impression of the "Merciless retribution" Trotsky ordered in Astrakhan and elsewhere.

 

Outsiders are often puzzled by the sheer volume of hatred thrown Trotsky's way, how could one man deserve a brutal murder and decades of teeth-gnashing? For Stalin and his offspring, Trotsky became a sort of Anti-Christ figure, he opposed the correct teachings (usually scoffing over utopian idealistic world revolution) and the correct leader (Stalin and occasionally Lenin when the accuser has read a few approved histories of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and as such he became the number 1 enemy. In the 1930s, Trotsky was denounced as a spy for the Nazi party and the small cluster of Trot parties were publicly denounced as "Trostky-Fascists". This line would be used in 1937 in Spain to justify the fratricidal campaign of extermination against the P.O.U.M. who were neither Fascist collaborators nor even Trotskyists, Trotsky had little to do with that party and what few followers in Spain he did have belonged to much smaller groups such as the Bolshevik-Leninists. 

The witchhunt against the POUMists was carried out in order to show that both inside and outside Russia the friends of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, etc. were a gang of counterrevolutionaries, agents of fascism, enemies of the people, and traitors to the fatherland, who had to be shot in whatever country or region. And also in order that the suspicious should put aside their objections. It was not Stalin’s personal phobia that caused the extermination of the old guard – the case of Spain proved it. Here, in a democratic country, ruled by a Popular Front, here too they were being unmasked and executed as traitors. I grasped the political ‘motive’ easily. What I didn’t imagine – I was not long in finding out – was the criminal lengths to which the GPU’s henchmen were capable of going in the struggle against the men of the ideological opposition.

How the NKVD framed the POUM.

And the sad truth is that the false accusations instead of weakening as our access to sources improves, it seems to have got worse. I now see self-declared "Marxist-Leninist Revolutionaries" and "Maoist Cadre" repeat total fables that even the gutter red press didn't stoop to. Many seem to have genuinely convinced themselves that the arch-traitor Trotsky moved to Mexico City as some kind of evil plan to corrupt and destroy the USSR. 

So, I'll address that in the hopes I can to puncture a few of these balloons of ignorance. Lenin as we know died in 1924, his health had been deteriorating for several years prior to that, which meant leadership of the Communist party and the Nation(s) of the Soviet Union increasingly fell to the collective leadership of its highest positions. Alas, they all hated each other, differences of opinion and personality quickly grew into factional disputes and struggles, with Trotsky eventually losing out to Stalin. Before Stalin's anointment as the personification of socialism, Trotsky spent several years increasingly on the outs. In 1925, he was manoeuvred out of his position at the People's Commissariat for War, ending his military career and cutting off access to the powerful military establishment. Shortly after, he was given three comparatively minor chairmanships for the Concessions Committee and both the electro-technical and scientific-technical board. In his autobiography, Trotsky puts a brave face on this time, claiming he was taking a break from politics and that he threw himself into his new work.

It didn't work out for him, in that same book he accuses Stalin and Molotov of actively sabotaging his new positions and by 1926 Trotsky is trying to take back power by allying with Zinoviev and Kamenev. Well, according to Trotsky, they crawled back to him after opposing him earlier. Did I mention that I'm not a fan of Trotsky's writing or character? This marriage of convenience also collapses, with Stalin gaining even more ground, Trotsky blames this partially on a high temperature, I struggle to give Trotsky the benefit of the doubt in his own words, but I have also made the mistake of giving a presentation while burning up, and he did take a trip to Berlin for treatment so while I won't go so far as to call Trotsky's warm brow his opponents "most steadfast ally" it certainly wouldn't have helped. 

To cut the story short, Trotsky survived both his temperature and his political defeat in 1927, his punishment initially was internal exile in Almaty in Qazaqstan. But not for long, on the 31st of January 1928 he was kicked out of the Soviet Union and his time wandering the globe began. His allies Zinoviev, Kamenev etc and his followers who remained in the country would in time experience the full weight of the repressive machinery that they had built. By the time of the great purges 1936-38, most of them would be executed. Trotsky would not be too far behind. On the 20th of August 1940, Operation Duck was successfully completed, the Spanish NKVD agent Ramon Mercader beat Trotsky to death with an ice axe, which is different from an ice pick which is commonly credited as the murder weapon.

The Ice Axe in question

 Its poetic that Trotsky's face was eaten by a Leopard he fed and nurtured. Trotsky was more than willing to send secret policemen and firing squads against his own Trotsky-Fascists. But, that's often not what's happening when you see a meme celebrating making "his ears burn". The sad truth is while there are differences between Trotskyism and Stalinism and Leninism and Maoism, there isn't that much water between them. To all them the Soviet Union with its secret police, political courts, dictatorship of officials and expansionism are vehicles for revolutionary transformation. Both Trotsky and Stalin were involved in the invasion and occupation of Ukraine, both were heavily involved in the failed invasion of Poland, Stalin's actions in particular are often seen as key to their defeat in that war. There's lots of hot air about World Revolution vs Socialism in One Country but the actual differences between these two doctrines is rarely brought up and often I get the impression the two sides don't even know what their own position is in depth. 

No tears for Trotsky, no need to lie about him either.

* It's usually at this point that Trotskyists start downplaying and belittling the Kronstadt Commune, even though I did not mention it. It's quite annoying to be on the receiving end of this pre-emptive revisionism, though I find bringing up the massacres in Astrakhan shut them up.