A lesson learned from TROTSKY, by Robert Service

 Cling to your ideas in defiance of reality at your own peril. 

Most of the time, I find great new books when browsing my local bookstores, much to the chagrin of my monthly budget. But every now and then, I randomly stumble across a gem, as was the case with Robert Service’s 2009 Trotsky biography, which I happened to find in good condition for $2 at a local garage sale. I’ve read up a lot in my life on the infamous Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and somewhat less on his ideological predecessor Vladimir Lenin, but until now I knew tragically little about the Communist Revolution’s third-most famous member Leon Trotsky, the most prominent Soviet founder whom Stalin murdered in an effort to claim the revolution for his own. Trotsky’s an unlikable historical figure who still suffered a tragic fall in the classic Greek sense of the word, a man who so desperately wanted to believe in the revolution he led that he was blind to the real-world horrors he had unleashed on the world. 

Trotsky was born in 1879 to a prosperous Jewish family in Tsarist Russia, one who had managed to build stable lives amidst the repression and stagnation of that old corrupt monarchy. Seeing the repression that prosperous farmers such as his father meted out on poor peasant families, Trotsky became convinced that the world’s ruling powers circa 1900 were rotten to the core, and he was a part of the young generation that was inspired by the old theories of the German thinker Karl Marx, who argued that one day the workers of the world would inevitably overthrow their capitalist overlords and bring about a newer and better world. Service doesn’t spend too much time on the theories of Marx—which ranged from brilliant analysis of the role social class played in History, to deeply flawed arguments about the inevitability of a global workers’ revolution—but he does call out the arrogance of Trotsky and his Russian Communist thinkers, who believed they could skip entire stages of historical development and force a Communist revolution on a conservative monarchist country that lagged hopelessly behind other major global powers in industrial and social development. 

It was with that in mind that Trotsky and the Russian Communists took advantage of the disruption of World War I, and overthrew a Russian government in chaos as the war spiraled out of control in 1917. Trotsky and his comrade Vladimir Lenin believed deeply they knew what was best for the people of Russia, and that the national government needed to take control and manage every aspect of the Russian economy. This was where the glow of their October Revolution started to run into practical difficulties, as the atheist Communist leaders faced serious resistance imposing their ideas on an orthodox Russian people who had lived and practiced the same systems of belief for centuries. This was when Trotsky and the Communists embraced concepts that would poison all the promise of their revolution—if the ordinary workers of Russia could not see the superiority of their new Communist ideas, then those ideas had to be forced on them. Lenin and Trotsky embraced the concept of “revolutionary Terror,” where democratic institutions were suppressed in Russia and political opponents were brutally imprisoned and forced into exile. Trotsky himself never batted an eye at the extreme casualties of the Russian Civil War, calmly asserting that any amount of death and destruction must be embraced if it meant the greater good of society. 

For the rest of his life, Trotsky asserted that he had a kinder, gentler vision of Communist rule compared to what the Soviet Union ultimately ended up with under Stalin. That was based largely on his dubious assertion that he could have won over the Soviet people to Communist ideals—he never could quite hide his contempt for the concepts of democracy and open dissent. One admirable component of Trotsky was he did lack Stalin’s open lust for power, and brutal determination to destroy all those who stood in his way. This proved to his detriment when he battled with Stalin over who would rule the Soviet Union after Lenin’s incapacitation and death in the early 1920’s. Believing Stalin to be a dumb hick, Trotsky never understood what he was up against, and futilely waited for outside forces to rescue him as Stalin forced him into exile and eventually became obsessed with eliminating Trotsky and all those close to him. The struggle ended with Stalin having a KGB asset brutally assassinate Trotsky in 1940 while he tried to lead an anti-Stalin Communist movement in Mexico. 

Throughout his travails, Trotsky clung to his idealized notions of what Communism and the Soviet Union represented, and in the process ignored the brutal realities crashing down upon the world. He lamented Stalin eliminating his friends and family, while failing to connect it with the brutal precedent he and Lenin had set with their executions of the Tsar’s family during the Russian Civil War. He argued to his dying day that the Russian Revolution had been a great advance for the global cause of workers, while failing to acknowledge that his own conviction that the entire world would join in on the revolution had not only come to pass, but had in fact generated a brutal backlash that had helped to fuel the rise of regimes like Nazi Germany. Far from acknowledging his own flaws and errors, Trotsky waited for the world to join him until an ice pick entered his head. 

And this is the ultimate lesson to take away from the life of Trotsky, of the dangers of clinging to beliefs and ideologies even as it becomes ever more apparent that they cannot change the face of reality. We live in a world now where everyone is certain of everything, and determined to explain all the world’s contradictions through conspiracies rather than accept that any of us might have been wrong in some of our basic assumptions. We must work to avoid the historical tragedies that afflicted Trotsky and his generation by being willing to challenge our own beliefs and ideologies.