The Revolution Betrayed - Historical Background

Historical Background

Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (1879-1940), best known by the pseudonym Leon Trotsky, was one of the top leaders of the October Revolution of 1917 which brought a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (bolsheviks) (RSDLP) to power in Russia. Trotsky had long been one of the leading Marxist revolutionaries in Imperial Russia, sentenced to exile in a distant part of Siberia for his activities against the regime.

After a period of European exile, Trotsky returned to Russia during the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, where his electric oratory made him a leading figure in the St. Petersburg Soviet until his arrest in December of that year. Another escape to Western Europe followed. Over the next decade Trotsky moved from support of the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP to advocacy of unity of the warring factions in 1913 with the establishment of a formal organization called the Interdistrict Organization of United Social Democrats, commonly known as the "Mezhraiontsy."

The virtual collapse of the old regime during the latter part of World War I helped to motivate the Mezhraiontsy to make amends with their Bolshevik rivals, headed by V. I. Lenin, and early in 1917 Trotsky returned from exile in New York City by way of Canada to join forces as a member of the Bolshevik party's governing Central Committee. Trotsky was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the November 7, 1917 seizure of power from the Russian Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky, taking over as head of the Petrograd Soviet early in October and building that institution's Military-Revolutionary Committee into a revolutionary fighting force.

Following the successful overthrow of the Kerensky government, Trotsky was named the first People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR of Soviet Russia. In April 1918, Trotsky was named People's Commissar for War and the Navy, in which capacity he helped to construct the Red Army that would defend the new regime against forces seeking a restoration of monarchism in the Russian Civil War.

Lenin's retirement from active political life in the aftermath of a series of strokes in 1923 followed by his death in January 1924 ushered in an interregnum during which several leading candidates jockeyed for supremacy. Lenin's longtime associate and Communist International chief Grigory Zinoviev, Moscow party leader Lev Kamenev, nationalities expert and party organization secretary Joseph Stalin, and military leader Trotsky represented the leading contenders for party and state primacy. The eloquent Trotsky was identified by the three other leading contenders to the throne as a most serious political threat and a temporary alliance was formed by the trio against Trotsky.

Over the next several years Trotsky and his supporters were successively marginalized and isolated by the evolving Soviet leadership group, with Trotsky vilified as a political oppositionist and his supporters atomized by political and police pressure. This process was accentuated by successive exiles of Trotsky, first in 1928 to the remote city of Alma Ata in Soviet Central Asia followed the next year by Trotsky's physical expulsion from the Soviet Union to Turkey.

Although separated from his dwindling band of committed followers in the USSR, Trotsky continued to function as an opposition political leader from exile throughout the rest of his life. This ongoing political activity against the regime headed by Joseph Stalin led to ongoing political pressure by the Soviet government against a series of host countries in which Trotsky had sought exile.