Lev Davidovitch Bronstein was born on October 26th, 1879 (on the same day that, 38 years later, the October insurrection would triumph), in the Ukrainian village of Ianovka, in what was then the Russian empire.
Jewish and a son of peasants, he became a Marxist at the age of 19 and began organizing the workers in his region into a political-union organization called the “South Russian Workers’ Union”, linked to the Social-Democracy of the time.
Trotsky (who got his name from one of his imprisoners in 1902), experienced three long periods of exile outside of Russia (1902-1905, 1907-1917, and 1927-1940). He took part in the three revolutions in Russia (1905; February 1917 and October 1917) and was the president of the Petrograd Soviet twice (1905 and 1917). He worked as a correspondent in two wars: in the Balkans, in 1910, and during the First World War, in 1914. As a membership of the Revolutionary Military Committee during the 1917 October insurrection, he led the operations that brought the Bolsheviks to power.
After the triumph of the insurrection, he served as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and led the peace negotiations with Germany, in Brest-Litovsk in 1918. He formed and led the Red Army – whose forces reached five million men and women in 1920 – that defeated fourteen foreign armies during the Civil War that broke out after the revolution.
After 1921, he concerned himself with the economic issues facing the young workers’ state. Together with Lenin, he inspired the formation of the Third International and drafted its most important documents and declarations.
After Lenin’s death, he took up an unparalleled battle against the bureaucratization of the Soviet state and the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party under Stalinism. Banished from the USSR in 1927 for denouncing the new anti-proletarian direction of the Kremlin bureaucracy, Trotsky traveled the world for ten years seeking for asylum, until the Mexican government of Lázaro Cárdenas accepted his request in 1937.
He was murdered by a Stalinist agent in August 1940.
Trotsky was a man of action, but not of action without theory. For him, revolutionary praxis was inseparable from study and from intellectual work. By the age of 26, grounded in the experience of the 1905 revolution, he had formulated the theory of the Permanent Revolution. In this theory, he brilliantly predicted that, in backward and semi-feudal Russia, only the working class would be able to carry out the tasks that historically corresponded to the bourgeoisie. Twelve years later his forecasts became reality in a categorical way.
However, without a doubt, his most important theoretical work is The Revolution Betrayed (1936). In this work, Trotsky analyzes the process of bureaucratization of the USSR and the Bolshevik Party and forewarns that: either the working class of the USSR, under the leadership of a revolutionary Party, undertakes a political revolution to wipe out the parasitic bureaucracy from the soviets and the workers’ states or capitalism would be restored in Russia. Fifty years later, the restoration of capitalism in absolutely all states with planned economies dramatically confirmed Trotsky’s warning.
Trotsky produced a vast body of work spanning many themes. He wrote about literature, psychology, women’s oppression, moral and much more. He analyzed and left us valuable teachings on each of the revolutionary processes he witnessed: the German revolution of 1923, the Chinese revolution of 1923-1925, the Spanish revolution of 1931-1939 and the Second World War. He also left us two beautiful works of invaluable historical and literary significance: The History of the Russian Revolution and My Life, his autobiography.
This man, whose name is forever imprinted on the history of the 20th century, regarded as his greatest accomplishment neither the victory of October nor the formation of the Red Army nor the building of the Third International – rather, for him it was the fact of having fought for the continuity of the Marxist tradition through the foundation of the Fourth International in 1938.
Trotsky used to say that even if he hadn’t been present in October 1917 in Petrograd still Lenin would have assured the victory of the insurrection. The same thing for the Civil War and the 3rd International. But the building of the 4th International was a task that no one but him could accomplish, since Lenin had died.
Without the building of a new International, the Marxist and proletarian tradition would have been forever lost, as a result of the degeneration of the 3rd International. The difficult conditions under which the 4th International was built nonetheless made its formation all the more imperative. Stalinism had triumphed in the USSR and Nazism had taken the power in Germany. Forming a new International – capable of caring forward, whenever the conditions allowed, the struggle of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky himself – was imperative.
Trotsky was average height, with curly black hair, big eyes, a metallic voice and fast speech. When he was making a speech, his mannerisms and gestures were elegant and rich.
He worked with Lenin on the Editorial Board of Iskra, in London in 1902. After the 1903 divide between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, he moved away from Lenin politically for several years. But he was never a Menshevik. He had only a few close friends inside the Bolshevik Party, but with these, he kept close ties. Nevertheless, he kept his distance from the majority of the leaders. Even his relation with Lenin never was one of personal proximity.
He had four children from two marriages. All of them died before him, two at the hands of Stalinism.
He experienced the most absolute glory and the most terrible failure. Still, he never faced either experience from a personal point of view. For Trotsky, his fate was the fate of the struggling proletariat, his glories and failures were the glories and failures of the international working class. Therefore, his fate had an essentially political character.
After Ramón Mercader’s – GPU agent, the Stalinist political police – blow with an ice-pick fractured his skull, Trotsky fought against death for 22 hours before dying at 7:25pm on August 21st, 1940. The autopsy revealed a heart and brain “of uncommon size”, according to the medical report.
On August 27th, Trotsky’s body was cremated and the ashes deposited in a specially-built tomb at the back of his house in Coyoacán, Mexico. “Let the fire consume everything that decays!” Trotsky said before dying. A big white stone with the sickle and the hammer carved on bas-relief was put over his tomb.
In the hospital before losing for good his consciousness, Trotsky asked his secretary to write his last words:
“I am close to death from the blow of a political assassin…struck me down in my room. I struggled with him…we…entered…talk about French statistics…he struck me…Please say to our friends, I am sure…of the victory…of the Fourth International…Go forward.”
70 years after his assassination, Trotsky’s ideas live on in the struggle and in the organization of the international working class. Trotsky died. Long live Trotsky!
