Leon Trotsky

The eternal revolutionary.

"A sledgehammer breaks glass but forges steel."

—Leon Trotsky.

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. Before the Revolution he mostly hung about in exile in Siberia, part of a political group known as the Mensheviks, who opposed Lenin and his theories that a revolution could be forced (this went against traditional Marxist ideology). After the February Revolution Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and became Lenin's second-in-command.

Trotsky was one of the leaders of the Russian 1917 October Revolution, head of the Military Revolutionary Committee and planned the strategic takeover of Petrograd. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the 1917–1922 Russian Civil War and Kronstadt rebellion. He was also among the first members of the Politburo.

After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power, expelled from the Communist Party, deported from the Soviet Union and assassinated on Stalin's orders. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, Trotsky also opposed Stalin's non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s.

As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico, by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent. Trotsky's ideas thus form the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who was never rehabilitated by the government of Mikhail Gorbachev (though the ban on his books was finally lifted in 1989).

He wrote many political and theoretical books, including an autobiography (My Life), a history of the Revolution, several anti-fascist pamphlets and a whole bunch of military writings.

Trotsky is a figure of great debate in the annuals of history, who did both impressive and abhorrent things. Please practice the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement.

Leon Trotsky provides examples of the following tropes:

• A Father to His Men - Subverted, and played straight. Despite his successful campaigns against the main enemies of the new Communist State ( the Germans and the Whites...), and breaking a draw against their secondary ones(mainly the Western Allies), Trotsky reinstated and used the death penalty on deserters liberally, kidnapped troops and held the families of his commanding officers hostage. Played straight when he used his Cool Train to visit the battalions and distribute cigarettes, boots and chocolate to the troops.
• Arch Enemy - Lenin (who became a Friendly Enemy, then his ally) and of course, Josef Stalin.
  • Stalin and Trotsky were enemies almost from the very beginning. Indeed, the failure of the Red Army to take Warsaw in 1920 was largely due to Stalin's refusal to obey Trotsky's orders.
  • There were a few times he actually did support some of Stalin's measures and decisions, even if he never liked the man. For his part, Trotsky never considered Stalin his Arch Enemy, mostly because he was convinced that Stalin was just the front man of a corrupt bureaucratic clique that really ran the Soviet Union (not to mention he more or less agreed with a lot of what they were up to, and gullibly bought the propaganda of how good life was there). In part, this was his fanatical Marxism thinking, as he could not believe that one man could ever be so important in the direction of nations, more than great social and economic forces or powerful secretive groups; and in part, he just seriously, fatally underestimated Stalin, his ambition, ability and ruthless drive for revenge. It was only towards the end, after Stalin had had his children and many close allies murdered, that he begun- and only really begun- to see the horrible mistake he had made.
• Badass Bookworm / Badass Jew - Even before his command of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War, Trotsky was elected as head of the Petrograd Soviet (arguably the largest and most important political body in Russia) at the age of 26, Russia being hostile to those of a Jewish background. He also planned the OctoberRevolution and Lenin himself said the revolution would not have happened without Trotsky's help.
• Badass Goatee
• Cassandra Truth - He was one of the very few politicians who openly attacked fascism and Nazism from the very beginning (very few people were critical of these ideologies at least until the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia). Though his actual criticism of these movements leaves something to be desired - he basically saw them as "capitalism in decay".
• The Chessmaster - he planned the October Revolution.
• Cool Train - given to him by Lenin to assist in the Civil War, it had (among other things) a printing press, library, rooms of cigarettes and a garage for his...
• Cool Car - a vintage, armoured Rolls Royce. In newly Communist Russia...
  • Since it had two machine guns, it also counts as a Weaponized Car.
• Cunning Linguist - he spoke fluent Russian, Ukranian, French and German. He also knew some Hebrew, Italian and English.
• Day of the Jackboot : Instrumental in planning the original one with the overthrow of the Provisional Republic.
• Defeat Means Friendship: With Ivar Smilga, another Bolshevik leader. Smilga opposed Trotsky's plans during the war with Poland. Smilga's plan failed, but Trotsky refused to use this opportunity against him. They became friends, which was unfortunate for Smilga, since Stalin had him executed him because of this during the Great Purge.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty
• Dying Moment of Awesome / Defiant to the End- after avoiding Stalin's spies for many years (while they picked off his children one by one) he managed to raise the alarm and throw books at his assassin. Doesn't sound that impressive, but at this point he had an ice axe sticking out of the back of his head. He lived for 24 hours afterwards.
• Enemy Mine - He convinced (he was quite charismatic and an excellent orator) and/or forced (usually by taking their families hostage) many tsarist officers to train and lead the newly formed Red Army. It worked.
• Escape Artist - In tsarist Russia, he was arrested for revolutionary activity and sent to a Siberian prison - twice. He managed to escape both times (first time while after two and a half years, second time while en route).
• Foreshadowing - "Lenin's method leads to this: the party organisation substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally a single 'Dictator' substitutes himself for the Central Committee." (no prizes for guessing who the "Dictator" is)
  • There's also this, written before WW 2 and when Hitler was highly popular not just with fascists, but also many people in the West: "Hitler indicates only one way out of the over-population of Europe, primarily of Germany, and that is the East. (...) The Nazis are against assimilation but not against annexation. They prefer the extermination of the conquered “inferior” peoples to their Germanization. For the time being, fortunately, this is only a matter of hypothetical conquests."
• Gentleman and a Scholar / Wicked Cultured (depending on your point of view) - As the man himself said: "Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people."
• Hell-Bent for Leather - his private troops were kitted out in matching red and black leather outfits during the Civil War.
• Historical Hero Upgrade - Perhaps the poster boy for the trope.
  • Ironically, he also got a Historical Villain Upgrade during Stalin's rule, when he was depicted as a traitor, Nazi spy etc.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen - from the commander of the Red Army to a lonely exile hunted across the globe by Stalin's agents.
• I Have Many Names - his real one was Lev Bronstein.
• Insufferable Genius: A brilliant writer and extraordinary thinker, Trotsky attracted a lot of admirers and followers who wanted to learn from the great man, particularly following his exile. He then proceeded to alienate or lose just as many of them within the span of a few years because he was also dogmatic, narrow minded, and insisted that all human knowledge could and should be understood on Marxist-Leninst-Trostkyist terms, causing him to misinterpret or dismiss any writer, philosopher, scholar or thinker that contradicted his beliefs. And even as a teenager, many associates and friends noted that he hated being proven wrong, and had a style of debating that involved a lot of underhanded and dishonest tactics, like attacking the character of his opponent instead of addressing the issues.
• I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure / I Have Your Wife - Trotsky often had the families of the higher-ranked army members kidnapped and held hostage so they didn't disobey his orders. If they did, they were killed.
• Knight Templar: He is a textbook example of this trope. A highly intelligent theorist and great military leader, Trotsky was so consumed by his own interpretation of how to build a communist society that he dismissed almost any thinker who disagreed with him, and was willing to use extremely authoritarian and cruel methods to achieve this goal.
• Nerd Glasses
• Nice Hat - He sometimes wore a one of these. Unsurprisingly, they began to fall out of favor after he was exiled, and were last used in the Winter War.
• The Political Officer - The ur-example.
• Rousing Speech - He was known as a brilliant orator. This helped him a lot during the war, particularly when he rallied deserters during the defense of Petrograd.
• Out-Gambitted - by Stalin, beginning with the late invite to Lenin's funeral.
• The Exile - After Stalin took power, Trotsky was exiled first to Kazakhstan (then part of the USSR), then to Turkey, France, Norway and finally Mexico.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilised
• Too Dumb to Live: Literally. Nobody in his household or amongst his associates trusted Ramon Mercader except for Mercaedr's girlfriend....and Trotsky himself, which is how he got close enough to kill him. Mercader wasn't an isolated case and Trotsky never appreciated just how deeply his organization was penetrated by the NKVD, including trusted allies of close family members (it is speculated one such mole may have killed one of his sons, though there would have been strategic reasons against it, despite much circumstantial evidence). A throwback, more or less, to his time as a revolutionary, when neither he nor the other socialist subversives realised how much their groups had been infiltrated by the Tsarist state, though Lenin was a bigger victim back then.
  • More generally, Trostky seriously underestimated Stalin and wrote him off as a boring, crude, dull bureaucrat and political nonentity who, he assumed, was a puppet of a conspiracy of much more capable and intelligent Bolshevik Rightists. He never for a moment understood Stalin as a brilliant, calculating, visionary megalomaniac with an insatiable bloodthirst and a pathological need to get even with his enemies, with Trotsky at the top of the list.
• We ARE Struggling Together! - Most famously with Stalin, but this was a problem for the Bolsheviks and especially the Red Army loooooonnnng before the succession crisis came around.
• We Have Reserves - Had his own crack troops fire on any Red Army soldiers (the majority of whom were conscripts, kidnapped from their villages) who tried to run from battle.
  • This is something of a case of Values Dissonance. Sadly, summary execution was used during World War I, and the vast majority of the soldiers were involved were conscripts, too. Of course, you could argue that it was rather hypocritical of Trotsky to use these methods when he also advocated "progressive" ideals, and rallied unceasingly against the first world war.
• What Could Have Been - Though Trotsky was just as extreme in his methods as Stalin, a major debate amongst historians today is how different the USSR and the eventual Cold War would have been under Trotsky.
• Unperson - After his exile, Stalin had Trotsky written out of the USSR's history texts. When Trotsky couldn't be deleted completely, he was replaced with CHEKA founder Felix Dzerzhinsky or Stalin himself.
• Unreliable Narrator - In his (otherwise rather well-written, if biased) history of the Ocotber revolution, he skips over some of the, erm, questionable stuff he did during the civil war. He also paints Stalin as a rather dim, crude and inconsequential bureaucrat. While it's tempting to say he did this only to belittle his rival, it's also quite likely that he really did grossly underestimate Stalin (see Too Dumb To Live, above).

In fiction:

• The Assassination of Trotsky, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Richard Burton as Trotsky
• Appears in some of the works of Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist
• The idealistic pig Snowball from Animal Farm is based on Trotsky, as is Emmanuel Goldstein in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• The Trotsky
• Appears briefly in an animated scene in the 2011 documentary film Marx Reloaded
• The 2002 film Frida about the life of Frida Kahlo features Geoffrey Rush as Trotsky.