Leon Trotsky
Based on Wikipedia: Leon Trotsky
In August 1940, a man walked into a study in Mexico City carrying an ice axe concealed under his raincoat. He had spent months gaining the trust of the household, posing as a devoted follower. His target was a sixty-year-old exile who had once commanded armies, shaped revolutions, and stood beside Lenin as an architect of the Soviet state. Twenty-four hours later, Leon Trotsky was dead, his skull crushed by an assassin sent halfway around the world by Joseph Stalin.
The murder was the final act of one of the twentieth century's great political vendettas. But it was also something more: the violent end of an ideological struggle that had torn apart the Russian revolutionary movement and shaped the course of world history.
A Farmer's Son Becomes a Revolutionary
Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879, in a small village in what is now Ukraine. His parents were Jewish farmers—prosperous but illiterate. This was unusual. Most Russian Jews of that era lived in cities and towns, working as merchants, craftsmen, or scholars. The Bronsteins worked the land.
The family didn't speak Yiddish, the common language of Eastern European Jews. Instead, they used a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian. Young Lev grew up disconnected from traditional Jewish culture, which may help explain why he later saw himself primarily through the lens of class rather than ethnicity.
At eight years old, Trotsky's father sent him to Odessa for schooling. The choice of city mattered enormously. Odessa wasn't like other Russian cities. It was a bustling port on the Black Sea, cosmopolitan and commercially minded, with ships arriving from Constantinople, Marseille, and Alexandria. Ideas circulated there as freely as goods. The young Trotsky absorbed this international atmosphere like a sponge.
He enrolled in a German-language Lutheran school—an odd choice for a Jewish boy, but the institution accepted students of all faiths. Trotsky excelled academically, particularly in mathematics and science. His teachers repeatedly disciplined him for reading unauthorized books during class. This combination of intellectual brilliance and rebellious independence would define his entire life.
The Making of a Marxist
When Trotsky first encountered Marxism as a teenager, he opposed it. He was initially drawn to a different revolutionary tradition called narodism—a distinctly Russian form of agrarian socialism that romanticized the peasantry and believed Russia could skip capitalism entirely by building on its traditional village communes.
His conversion came through an unlikely source: his future first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya. She was a committed Marxist, and their political arguments eventually convinced the seventeen-year-old Trotsky to abandon his narodnik beliefs. It's a pattern that would repeat throughout revolutionary history—intimate relationships serving as conduits for ideological transformation.
Trotsky briefly attended university to study engineering, and a colleague noted his exceptional mathematical talent. But academic life bored him. The pull of revolutionary activity proved irresistible. In early 1897, he dropped out to help organize workers in the port city of Nikolayev, writing leaflets, distributing pamphlets, and giving speeches under the pseudonym "Lvov."
The authorities were watching. In January 1898, police arrested over two hundred members of the union Trotsky had helped build. He spent the next two years shuttling between prisons, awaiting trial. It was during this imprisonment that he first learned of Vladimir Lenin and read Lenin's writings on Russian capitalism. By the time Trotsky emerged from prison, he considered himself a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
Siberia, Escape, and a New Name
Prison was followed by exile. Trotsky was sentenced to four years in Siberia, that vast frozen expanse where the tsars had sent dissidents for generations. Because he had married Aleksandra Sokolovskaya in prison—in a ceremony performed by a Jewish chaplain—the couple was exiled together. They had two daughters in Siberia: Zinaida in 1901 and Nina in 1902.
Exile, paradoxically, gave Trotsky time to think. He devoured books on history, philosophy, and economics. He deepened his understanding of Marx. He began writing for Iskra, meaning "The Spark," a revolutionary newspaper published in London. The name came from a line by the Decembrist poet: "From the spark shall spring the flame."
In the summer of 1902, Trotsky escaped from Siberia, hidden in a cart of hay. His wife urged him to go, promising to follow later with their daughters. She kept her word, eventually escaping herself. But the family would never truly reunite. Both daughters died young—Nina of tuberculosis in 1928, Zinaida by suicide in Berlin in 1933. Aleksandra herself disappeared during Stalin's purges and was murdered in 1938.
It was during his escape that Trotsky adopted the name by which history would know him. According to legend, he chose it from the name of a jailer at the Odessa prison where he had once been held. The symbolism, if intentional, is striking: taking on the identity of one's captor, transforming the mark of oppression into a revolutionary banner.
London and the Editors of Revolution
Trotsky made his way to London, where the emigré editors of Iskra had gathered. The newspaper's editorial board represented the cream of Russian Marxist thought: Georgi Plekhanov, the "father of Russian Marxism"; Julius Martov, brilliant and principled; and Vladimir Lenin, already developing the organizational theories that would prove so consequential.
The twenty-three-year-old Trotsky impressed them all. Writing under the pen name "Pero"—Russian for "quill" or "pen"—he quickly became one of the paper's leading contributors. Lenin was particularly taken with the young man's abilities. In March 1903, Lenin proposed that Trotsky be added to the editorial board:
We very much need a seventh member, both as a convenience in voting (six being an even number) and as an addition to our forces. 'Pero' has been contributing to every issue for several months now; he works, in general, most energetically for the Iskra; he gives lectures (in which he has been very successful). [...] Unquestionably a man of rare abilities, he has conviction and energy, and he will go much farther.
Lenin's assessment proved prophetic, though not in the way he imagined. Trotsky would indeed go far—but often in direct opposition to Lenin himself.
It was also in London that Trotsky met Natalia Sedova, an art student and fellow revolutionary. She became his companion in 1902, his wife in 1903, and remained with him until his death. They had two sons, Lev and Sergei, both of whom would be killed by Stalin's regime before their parents died.
The Great Schism
In August 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party held its Second Congress in London. What happened there would shape the course of the twentieth century.
The delegates who supported Iskra expected to unite around a common program. Instead, they split—and the split proved permanent. The immediate issue seemed almost trivially organizational: how strictly should party membership be defined? Lenin wanted a tight, disciplined party of professional revolutionaries. Martov favored a broader, more inclusive organization that would welcome sympathizers.
Trotsky sided with Martov. He found Lenin's vision of the party too authoritarian, too willing to substitute the judgment of a small leadership for the will of the working class itself. When the votes were counted on various issues, Lenin's faction won some key divisions, leading them to call themselves "Bolsheviks"—from the Russian word for "majority." Martov's supporters became "Mensheviks," or "minority," even though on the original membership question they had actually prevailed.
The labels stuck, giving Lenin's faction a permanent rhetorical advantage. In revolutionary politics, as in so much else, naming matters.
Trotsky's break with the Mensheviks came the following year, in 1904. He disagreed with their insistence on allying with Russian liberals and their refusal to seek reconciliation with the Bolsheviks. From that point until 1917, Trotsky described himself as a "non-factional social democrat," attempting to bridge the divide between the two camps. This position earned him enemies on both sides. Lenin, in moments of anger, called him "Judas," "scoundrel," and "swine."
Years later, Trotsky admitted he had been wrong to oppose Lenin on party organization. It was a rare concession. Trotsky was not a man given to admitting mistakes.
1905: The Dress Rehearsal
The revolution of 1905 began with a massacre. On Sunday, January 9th, a priest named Father Georgi Gapon led a peaceful procession of workers to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. They carried icons and portraits of the Tsar. They wanted to present a petition asking for better working conditions.
The Palace Guard opened fire. Hundreds died. The event became known as Bloody Sunday, and it ignited a revolutionary conflagration across the Russian Empire.
Trotsky rushed back to Russia, entering secretly through Kiev in February. For months he wrote for underground publications and worked to radicalize the Menshevik organization in Saint Petersburg. Then, in October, something remarkable happened: the workers of Saint Petersburg created their own representative body, elected from factories across the city. They called it a "soviet"—the Russian word simply means "council."
The Saint Petersburg Soviet was unprecedented. It wasn't a political party with a fixed ideology. It was a direct expression of working-class self-organization, with delegates chosen by their fellow workers. Over the following weeks, soviets sprang up in cities across Russia.
Trotsky joined the Saint Petersburg Soviet under yet another pseudonym, "Yanovsky," derived from his birthplace. The body's initial chairman was a lawyer named Khrustalyev-Nosar, chosen as a compromise figure. But it was Trotsky who did much of the practical work. When Khrustalyev-Nosar was arrested on November 26th, Trotsky became chairman.
His tenure lasted only about two weeks before the government crushed the Soviet and arrested its leaders. But the experience proved formative. Trotsky had seen what workers could accomplish when they organized themselves. He had watched a new form of democratic institution emerge spontaneously from below. Twelve years later, when soviets reappeared across Russia, he would be ready.
The Theory of Permanent Revolution
During his time in hiding in Finland in 1905, Trotsky developed what would become his most distinctive theoretical contribution: the theory of permanent revolution.
To understand why this mattered, you need to understand the orthodox Marxist view of historical development. Marx had argued that societies evolved through distinct stages: feudalism gave way to capitalism, which would eventually give way to socialism. Each stage was necessary; you couldn't skip ahead. For most Marxists, this meant that backward, largely feudal Russia would need to pass through a prolonged period of capitalist development before socialist revolution became possible.
Trotsky disagreed. He argued that in countries where capitalism had arrived late, the process could be telescoped. The Russian bourgeoisie—the capitalist class—was too weak and too dependent on foreign capital and the tsarist state to lead its own revolution, as the French bourgeoisie had done in 1789. This meant the working class would have to take the lead, even in a country where workers were still a minority of the population.
But here was the crucial point: a workers' revolution in Russia couldn't stop at merely establishing capitalism. Once in power, the working class would be compelled to push beyond capitalist limits, implementing socialist measures. And because Russia alone was too backward to sustain socialism, the revolution would have to spread to more advanced countries to survive.
This was the "permanent" aspect of the theory—not that revolution would continue forever, but that it couldn't be frozen at any intermediate stage. It had to keep moving forward, both within Russia and internationally, or it would be crushed.
The theory was controversial among Marxists, and Lenin initially rejected it. But events would vindicate Trotsky's analysis to a remarkable degree. When revolution finally came in 1917, it unfolded almost exactly as he had predicted—except for one crucial element. The revolution did not spread to Western Europe, and this failure would prove fatal.
Years of Wandering
After the defeat of the 1905 revolution, Trotsky was again arrested and exiled to Siberia. Again he escaped, this time making his way to Vienna, where he lived from 1907 to 1914. He edited a newspaper, wrote political analysis, and tried unsuccessfully to reunify the warring factions of Russian socialism.
When World War One broke out in 1914, Trotsky was living in Vienna—suddenly enemy territory for a Russian citizen. He fled to Switzerland, then France, then Spain, and finally to New York City, where he arrived in January 1917.
His time in New York was brief but memorable. Trotsky found work writing for a Russian-language socialist newspaper. His family rented an apartment in the Bronx with amenities that astonished them: electric lights, a gas stove, a telephone, and an elevator. "All for eighteen dollars a month," Trotsky marveled in his autobiography. For a revolutionary who had spent years in prisons and exile, the material comforts of American working-class life were a revelation.
He might have stayed longer, but history intervened. In February 1917, while Trotsky was in New York, the Romanov dynasty fell. Tsar Nicholas II, ruler of an empire spanning eleven time zones, abdicated his throne. A Provisional Government took power, promising democratic reforms and continued prosecution of the war against Germany.
Trotsky left for Russia immediately, but his journey was interrupted. British naval authorities detained him in Canada, holding him in a prisoner-of-war camp for nearly a month. Only after protests from the new Russian government was he released. He arrived in Petrograd—as Saint Petersburg had been renamed—in May 1917.
The Year of Decision
The Russia Trotsky found in May 1917 was a country in chaos. The Provisional Government controlled the formal apparatus of state, but its authority was contested by the soviets that had sprung up across the country. The Petrograd Soviet, in particular, wielded enormous influence. This awkward arrangement became known as "dual power."
Lenin had returned to Russia a month earlier, and he was already pushing the Bolsheviks in a radical direction. His "April Theses" called for opposition to the Provisional Government, an end to the war, and the transfer of all power to the soviets. Many Bolsheviks initially thought Lenin had lost his mind.
Trotsky agreed with Lenin completely. Within weeks of his arrival, he was working closely with the Bolshevik leadership, even though he had not yet formally joined the party. When he did join in July 1917, the longstanding rivalry between him and Lenin was buried. They had arrived at the same conclusions by different routes, and now they would work together to bring down the Provisional Government.
In September, Trotsky was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet—the same position he had held briefly in 1905. This time, he would hold it for years. And this time, the Soviet would not be crushed.
The October Revolution—which actually took place in November by the Western calendar, because Russia still used the old Julian system—was Trotsky's operational masterpiece. While Lenin provided the strategic vision, Trotsky handled the practical planning. He created the Military Revolutionary Committee, nominally a defensive body to protect Petrograd from a German advance, and used it to coordinate the armed workers and soldiers who would seize power.
The revolution itself was almost anticlimactic. On the night of October 25th (November 7th), armed detachments occupied key buildings across the city: railway stations, telephone exchanges, the state bank, government offices. The cruiser Aurora, anchored in the Neva River, fired a blank shell to signal the assault on the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was meeting. By morning, the ministers had been arrested. Lenin announced to the Congress of Soviets that power had passed to them.
It was, as one historian noted, more a coup than a mass uprising—but a coup carried out in the name of institutions, the soviets, that genuinely represented millions of workers and soldiers. The Bolsheviks claimed they had simply given organizational form to what the masses already wanted.
Building the Red Army
The Bolsheviks had seized power. Keeping it would prove far harder.
Russia was still at war with Germany. The economy was in ruins. Within months, a civil war erupted as anti-Bolshevik forces—a loose coalition of monarchists, liberals, nationalists, and foreign interventionists known collectively as the "Whites"—attempted to overthrow the new regime.
Trotsky's first major assignment was ending the war with Germany. As People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs—the Soviet equivalent of a foreign minister—he led the delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early 1918. The terms were punishing: Russia lost vast territories, including Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Finland. Many Bolsheviks were outraged. Trotsky himself hated the treaty but argued it was necessary to buy time for the revolution to consolidate.
His next task would define his legend. In March 1918, Trotsky became People's Commissar for Military Affairs, charged with building an army from scratch to fight the civil war.
The old Imperial Army had essentially dissolved. Soldiers, sick of war and slaughter, had simply gone home. The Bolsheviks initially relied on volunteer Red Guard units—armed workers and revolutionary soldiers—but these proved inadequate against organized military forces. Trotsky concluded that the revolution needed a real army.
What he built was remarkable. The Red Army eventually numbered over five million soldiers. Trotsky controversially recruited thousands of former tsarist officers to provide professional expertise, assigning political commissars to watch over them and ensure their loyalty. He imposed strict discipline, including the death penalty for desertion and cowardice. He traveled constantly in an armored train, appearing at critical points along the vast fronts, delivering speeches that inspired desperate men to fight on.
The train became legendary. Equipped with printing presses, telegraph equipment, and a garage of automobiles, it served as Trotsky's mobile headquarters for nearly three years. He lived on it for weeks at a time, sleeping in a small cabin, working through the night, then appearing at dawn to address troops who moments before had been ready to break.
The civil war was brutal beyond description. Both sides committed atrocities. The Bolsheviks implemented what they called the "Red Terror"—a campaign of political repression that included mass executions of suspected enemies. Trotsky defended these measures as necessary for the revolution's survival. It is one of the most controversial aspects of his legacy.
The Whites were eventually defeated, crushed by a combination of Red Army military success, their own disunity, and their failure to offer the peasantry anything better than a return to the old order. By 1920, the main fighting was over. Trotsky had accomplished something extraordinary: he had built one of the largest armies in the world and led it to victory against enemies supported by multiple foreign powers.
The Kronstadt Tragedy
In March 1921, sailors at the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd rose in rebellion against Bolshevik rule. These were not White Army reactionaries. They were the same sailors who had been among the revolution's most fervent supporters in 1917. Their demands were for greater democracy, free elections to the soviets, freedom of speech and press for socialist parties, and an end to the economic policies that were causing famine across Russia.
Trotsky helped suppress the uprising. Red Army troops crossed the ice to storm the fortress. Thousands died. Many of those captured were executed.
The Kronstadt rebellion haunts Trotsky's memory. For anarchists and left-libertarians, it represents the moment the Russian Revolution turned definitively authoritarian. Trotsky defended the suppression as a tragic necessity, arguing that the sailors had become unwitting tools of counterrevolution. But even many of his sympathizers have found this justification unconvincing.
The episode illustrates a painful truth about revolutions: the same methods used to seize power often become tools of repression afterward. The question of where legitimate defense of the revolution ends and authoritarian betrayal begins has no easy answer. Trotsky spent the rest of his life grappling with it.
The Struggle Against Stalin
Lenin suffered his first stroke in May 1922. Over the following eighteen months, a series of additional strokes progressively incapacitated him. He died in January 1924.
The question of succession became urgent. No mechanism existed for choosing a new leader. The Bolshevik Party had always assumed collective leadership, with Lenin serving as first among equals. Now that Lenin was gone, ambitions that had been held in check came flooding to the surface.
Trotsky was the most prominent candidate. He had led the October Revolution alongside Lenin. He had built the Red Army. His intellect and oratorical gifts were unmatched. But he had liabilities as well. He had joined the Bolsheviks only in 1917, after years of opposing Lenin. He was seen as arrogant. And he was Jewish, in a country where antisemitism ran deep, even within the Communist Party.
His most formidable opponent was Joseph Stalin, who held the seemingly bureaucratic position of General Secretary of the Communist Party. It was a role most Bolsheviks considered dull administrative work. But Stalin understood something his rivals did not: whoever controlled party appointments controlled the party. While Trotsky gave speeches and wrote brilliant essays, Stalin quietly placed his loyalists in key positions throughout the country.
Lenin, from his sickbed, grew increasingly alarmed by Stalin's behavior. In his final political writings, later known as "Lenin's Testament," he warned that Stalin had concentrated too much power and should be removed from his position. He praised Trotsky as "the most capable man in the present Central Committee" while noting his tendency toward excessive self-confidence.
The testament was suppressed. Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky through a series of political alliances, first with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev against Trotsky, then turning on them as well. By 1926, Trotsky had been expelled from the Politburo. By 1927, he was expelled from the Communist Party entirely. In 1928, he was sent into internal exile at Alma-Ata in Soviet Central Asia. In 1929, he was deported from the Soviet Union altogether.
He would never return.
Socialism in One Country vs. Permanent Revolution
The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was personal, but it was also ideological. Two visions of socialism's future were at stake.
Trotsky held to his theory of permanent revolution. The Soviet Union, isolated and backward, could not build socialism on its own. The revolution had to spread internationally, or it would degenerate. The task of Soviet Communists was to support revolutionary movements worldwide while acknowledging the limitations of what could be achieved within one country.
Stalin countered with the theory of "socialism in one country." He argued that the Soviet Union could and would build socialism within its own borders, regardless of what happened elsewhere. This theory had enormous appeal to party members exhausted by years of war and hardship. It offered something concrete and achievable, rather than waiting indefinitely for world revolution.
The debate had practical consequences. Trotsky's Left Opposition called for faster industrialization, voluntary agricultural collectivization, and greater internal party democracy. They warned that the New Economic Policy—which had reintroduced limited market mechanisms to revive the shattered economy—was creating new class divisions that threatened the revolution's gains.
Stalin initially allied with the party's Right, led by Nikolai Bukharin, against the Left Opposition. Then, having defeated Trotsky and his allies, Stalin pivoted. He implemented industrialization and collectivization far more brutally than anything the Left Opposition had proposed, while also crushing all remaining internal party dissent.
From exile, Trotsky watched in horror as Stalin's policies produced catastrophe. Forced collectivization caused a famine that killed millions in Ukraine and elsewhere. The purges of the 1930s executed hundreds of thousands and sent millions more to the gulags. Virtually every leader of the October Revolution was killed or imprisoned. Even the history books were rewritten to erase Trotsky's role and paint him as a traitor who had always worked against the revolution.
The Exile's Odyssey
Trotsky's years of exile were a long diminuendo, the gradual silencing of a voice that had once moved millions.
From the Soviet Union, he went first to Turkey, living on the island of Prinkipo in the Sea of Marmara. Then to France, where the government granted him asylum but restricted his political activities. Then to Norway, where he was eventually placed under house arrest following pressure from the Soviet Union. Finally, in 1937, to Mexico, where the muralist Diego Rivera helped arrange his asylum.
Throughout these wanderings, Trotsky never stopped writing. His output was extraordinary: historical studies of the Russian Revolution, theoretical analyses of fascism, polemics against Stalin, autobiography. His book The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936, offered a systematic critique of what the Soviet Union had become. Trotsky argued that a bureaucratic caste had usurped power from the working class, transforming the Soviet Union into a "degenerated workers' state"—no longer genuinely socialist, but not yet capitalist either.
He maintained a network of supporters around the world, the various national sections of what would become the Fourth International, founded in 1938 as an alternative to Stalin's Communist International. These groups were always small, perpetually fractious, and subjected to infiltration by Soviet agents. But they kept alive a tradition of anti-Stalinist Marxism that would prove influential in the decades after Trotsky's death.
Personal tragedy accumulated. Both of his sons by Natalia Sedova were killed by Stalin's regime. Sergei, who had remained in the Soviet Union and tried to stay out of politics, was arrested and executed in 1937. Lev, who had followed his father into exile and served as his closest political collaborator, died mysteriously in a Paris hospital in 1938—almost certainly assassinated by Soviet agents. Trotsky's first wife Aleksandra and both daughters from that marriage were also killed in the purges.
In 1936, Stalin's show trials in Moscow sentenced Trotsky to death in absentia. The charges were absurd: that Trotsky had conspired with Nazi Germany and Japan against the Soviet Union, that he had plotted terrorist attacks and sabotage. The defendants, old revolutionaries who had known Trotsky for decades, confessed to fantastical crimes after torture and threats to their families. Most were immediately executed.
Trotsky convened a counter-trial—the Dewey Commission, headed by the American philosopher John Dewey—which examined the evidence and concluded that the Moscow trials were a frame-up. But by then, Stalin controlled the narrative. To millions of people around the world, Trotsky was a traitor and a fascist agent.
The Ice Axe
Stalin's agents tried repeatedly to kill Trotsky. In May 1940, a team led by the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros—yes, Mexican art circles had complex politics—attacked the house in Coyoacán where Trotsky lived with his wife. They sprayed the bedroom with machine gun fire. Miraculously, Trotsky and Natalia survived by rolling under their bed.
The successful assassin used subtler methods. Ramón Mercader was a Spanish communist whose mother was a Soviet agent. He cultivated a relationship with one of Trotsky's secretaries, posing as a Belgian businessman sympathetic to the cause. Over months, he gained access to the household.
On August 20, 1940, Mercader arrived at Trotsky's study, ostensibly to discuss an article he had written. He carried an ice axe concealed under his raincoat. When Trotsky bent over the manuscript, Mercader struck him in the head.
The blow did not kill immediately. Trotsky struggled with his assassin, biting his hand. Guards rushed in and began beating Mercader, but Trotsky—even dying—told them to let the man live, recognizing that he might have valuable information to reveal. Trotsky underwent emergency surgery but never recovered. He died the following day, August 21, 1940.
Mercader spent twenty years in a Mexican prison. Upon his release in 1960, he moved to Cuba and eventually to the Soviet Union, where he was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. He died in Cuba in 1978, having never expressed remorse.
Legacy
Trotsky's legacy remains fiercely contested. In the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors, he was either erased from history or portrayed as a villain. He was never officially rehabilitated, unlike most other purge victims.
In the Western left, Trotsky became a complex symbol. For some, he represented the road not taken—a more democratic, internationalist socialism that might have developed had Stalin not triumphed. His critique of Stalinism provided intellectual ammunition for generations of leftists who wanted to remain Marxists while condemning Soviet crimes. The various Trotskyist parties and movements, though always marginal, kept his ideas alive and trained activists who would later participate in civil rights movements, anti-war campaigns, and labor organizing.
For others, Trotsky's record in power undermines any claim to democratic credentials. He helped create the institutions of one-party rule. He defended the Red Terror. He crushed Kronstadt. The question of whether these actions were tragic necessities or signs of an authoritarian disposition inherent in Bolshevism itself remains unresolved.
As a military leader, his reputation stands high. Building a victorious army from the ruins of a collapsed empire, largely through force of personality and organizational genius, was an extraordinary achievement. As a writer, he produced some of the most vivid accounts of revolution ever written. His History of the Russian Revolution remains a masterpiece of committed historical writing.
Perhaps the most honest assessment is that Trotsky embodied the contradictions of his time. He was a democrat who helped build a dictatorship. He was an internationalist trapped in an age of nationalism. He was a man of extraordinary gifts who lost the political struggle that would shape the century. And he was a revolutionary who learned, too late, that revolutions devour their children.
On his deathbed, Trotsky's last recorded words were about the cause to which he had devoted his life: "I am sure of the victory of the Fourth International. Go forward!" The Fourth International never achieved the influence he hoped for. But his ideas—about permanent revolution, about bureaucratic degeneration, about the need to combine socialist commitment with democratic practice—continue to provoke, challenge, and inspire.
He would have wanted nothing less.