Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

TROTSKY (BRONSTEIN), LEV (LEON) DAVIDOVICH (26 October 1897–21 August 1940). The founder of the Red Army and the man often credited with being the architect of its victory in the “Russian” Civil Wars, L. D. Trotsky was born into the family of a relatively prosperous (but largely illiterate), Jewish (but secularized, and almost entirely Russified) farmer at Ianovka, near Elizavetgrad, in Kherson guberniia. As a pupil at the St. Paul Realschule in Odessa, he was initially attracted to revolutionary Populism but subsequently, during his final year of schooling at Nikolaev, he joined a social-democratic group and became involved with the South Russian Workers’ Union. He was arrested and imprisoned on 16 January 1898 and then, in 1900, exiled to eastern Siberia for four years, but escaped on 21 August 1902 and fled abroad (using a false passport bearing the name of a former jailer in Odessa, which then became his own). He settled in London and began writing for the social democrats’ main newspaper, Iskra (“The Spark”), earning a lofty reputation (and the nickname, “The Pen”) for the quality of his work.

Following the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1903, Trotsky adopted a position midway between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, supporting the views of Iu. O. Martov on party membership but accepting (to some degree) V. I. Lenin’s call for greater party discipline. At this time, he was also developing (with Alexander Helphand, known as Parvus) the notion of “permanent revolution”: according to Trotsky, because the Russian bourgeoisie was so weak, the workers’ party should hold on to power after a revolution in that country, in alliance with the peasantry, and should not, having made the revolution, hand power over to the bourgeoisie. He predicted that the peasants’ attraction to private property would naturally, sooner or later, alienate them from a socialist government, but argued that the Russian revolution would be saved by inspiring workers’ revolutions elsewhere in Europe, thereby providing it with allies across an integrated continent.

The outbreak of the revolution of 1905 found Trotsky in Geneva. He returned to St. Petersburg, via Kiev, in February of that year, and after several weeks as deputy chairman, on 26 November 1905 was elected chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet. Trotsky and most members of the Soviet were arrested and imprisoned by the tsarist authorities on 3 December 1905. The following year, on 3 November 1906, he was again exiled to Siberia (this time for life), but again managed to escape (on 7 February 1907) and made his way to Europe. He settled in Vienna and worked for the reuniting of the RSDLP through his prodigious journalism and other writings, being elected to the party Central Committee in January 1910. From September 1912, he worked as a war correspondent for the Ukrainian newspaper Kievskaia mysl′ (“Ukrainian Thought”), covering the two Balkan Wars. After the outbreak of the First World War, as an enemy national, he fled Vienna for Switzerland and then (from 19 November 1914) settled in Paris, where from January 1915 he edited the internationalist Nashe slovo (“Our Word”) and supported Lenin’s (defeatist) stance on the war. Consequently, in September 1916 he was obliged to leave France and went, via Spain, to the United States, settling in New York from 13 January 1917. There, alongside N. I. Bukharin and A. M. Kollontai, he edited the newspaper Novyi mir (“New Life”) and contributed articles to the Yiddish Der Forverts (“Forwards”). He returned to Russia following the February Revolution (being briefly detained, en route, at Halifax and Amherst, Nova Scotia, by the British authorities), arriving in Petrograd on 24 April 1917.