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On November 7 of 1917 the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin took power
in Russia. In this program we are going to talk about one of Lenin’s most
controversial comrades, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s real name was Leiba Bronstein
and, being a Just how and why Leiba Bronstein, the son of a wealthy landowner, went on to become a revolutionary leader, is still a mystery. In his memoirs Trotsky wrote he was influenced by the suffering of the working people, but I don’t think this holds any water because you can hardly find any other revolutionary who would care less about the ordinary people, and even despise them the way Trotsky did always seeing the proletarians as just extra players in the revolutionary drama he was so eager to run… Well, that’s the only thing he could do though and only started tending to rabbits when he was already an old man… Ironically, Trotsky was born in Ukraine on November 7, 1879. Meaning that by the time of the 1917 revolution he was 38 years old. After Leiba finished a religious Jewish school, his father sent him to Odessa to be educated. Always eager to be the best, the boy was learning hard always ready to argue just about anything, even things he did not understand a thing about. Joining the revolutionary movement early on, Leiba Bronstein was exiled to Siberia. Obtaining a forged passport in the name of Leon Trotsky four years later, he escaped and in 1902 made his way to Europe joining the Russian political emigres working there. Turning out articles on just about any subject that came his way, Leiba Bronstein, now Leon Trotsky, quickly established himself as one of the best emigre publicists around. Forgetting about his wife and two kids waiting for him in Russia, Trotsky bird-dogged the young and beautiful Natasha Sedova who eventually became his wife for the rest of their life. In November 1917 Vladimir Lenin appointed Trotsky the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The first thing Trotsky did in his new capacity was to announce that Russia was pulling out of the war hoping that the German army would immediately breakup and the whole of Europe would be engulfed in a revolutionary fire. Instead, the disciplined Germans marched on Petrograd. The embattled Bolshevik government was forced to immediately accept the terms of the Brest-Litovsk treaty that resulted in the Russians surrendering the Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic provinces, the Caucasus and Poland. Relieved of his diplomatic post, Trotsky still believed in the upcoming global revolution proposing either to formant a worker’s uprising in Britain or sending Bolshevik troops to Persia and India. To harness Trotsky’s bubbling energy, Vladimir Lenin appointed him Commissar of War and the leader of the fledgling Red Army. The Red Army had to be established quickly and Leon Trotsky was exactly the man Lenin needed to make it happening. Trotsky inspected the troops fighting out front always carrying with him heaps of gold and silver watches and cigarette holders which he generously handed out to the more distinguished Red Army soldiers and officers instead of orders and medals. And, in a simple but effective publicity stunt, Trotsky, as if running out of gifts at the very last moment, would give out his wristwatch or revolver which the shortsighted People’s Commissar had never really learned to use properly. Ruthless and unforgiving, Trotsky meted out harsh punishment for even minor breaches of discipline, never thinking twice to use the word “execution” in his orders where it appeared even more often than the world “revolution”… And, of course, Trotsky made even shorter shrift of his enemies… After Lenin’s death in 1924 there were two people vying for the country’s
top job – Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky. In 1925 Stalin arranged for Trotsky
to be removed from power and eventually forced him out of the country.
Banished and politically incapacitated as he was, however, Leon Trotsky
still stood his sworn enemy in very good stead. From then on, every blunder
Stalin made could easily be blamed down on Trotsky’s intrigues. All of
Trotsky’s relatives were executed while he himself eventually found refuge
in Mexico where he immediately fell prey to a real manhunt opened
against him by the outstanding painter David Alfaro Siqueiros who proved
that villainy and genius are not necessarily two things that never go together…
The author of numerous frescoes that graced cities in both Americas, Siqueiros
never hesitated a moment to kill an enemy of the revolution. In the early
hours of May 24, 1940 Siqueiros and 20 other armed men arrived at Trotsky’s
house and, disarming the sleepy bodyguards, pelted the exile’s bedroom
with automatic gunfire. Happily for Trotsky, neither he, nor his wife or
grandson were hurt. Three months later, Ramon Mercader, who, acting under
orders from Josef Stalin, had worked himself into Trotsky’s favor, slammed
an ice pick into his head. Stalin not only killed Trotsky and all his relatives
but also did a pretty good job virtually wiping the man’s name off the
people’s memory. You can’t cheat history, though, and we now know everything
or, almost everything about the life and work of one the makers of the
1917 Bolshevik revolution…
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very
prominent member of the Bolshevik party, he is credited for making the
Red Army happening…
