Where Did Trotsky Come From?

Trotsky's gifts—his brilliance as an orator, author, theoretician, and strategist—would prove decisive for the unfolding of what history calls the October Revolution, as well as the civil war to follow. However, his deficiencies at winning personal loyalty and building political alliances would eventually lead to his marginalization in the post-Lenin Soviet state, his exile, and eventual death. MH

Leon Trotsky

Born Lev Bronshtein in November 1879 in the village of Yanovka in the Ukraine, Leon Trotsky, the son of a prosperous Jewish farmer, became involved in politics from a young age. Arrested in 1898, Trotsky was exiled to Siberia, where he married and had two daughters, both of whom predeceased him. In 1902, he escaped exile using a forged passport bearing the name Trotsky, the name, he later claimed, of a prison guard he had met in Odessa. He made his way to London, where he made the acquaintance of  Vladimir Lenin and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Following the split of the RSDLP, Trotsky's loyalty floated between the two factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, often repudiating any party ties and holding a stance of non-allegiance. He opposed Lenin on many issues, a stance that was later held against him.

Following the outbreak of disturbances throughout Russia in 1905, Leon Trotsky arrived in St. Petersburg and there joined its council of workers, or "Soviet,"  becoming its chair until its forced break-up by tsarist troops in December. Trotsky, along with other leaders, was arrested and again sentenced to exile in Siberia, but en route he escaped and again made his way to London before settling in Vienna, where he founded and wrote a newspaper for Russia's workers, Pravda (Truth), earning the nickname "The Pen," (Пиро—Piro) for his writing. 

With the outbreak of war in 1914, Trotsky, as a Russian, was forced to leave Austria. He lived in Paris until, expelled for his anti-war writings, he emigrated to Spain and then New York, arriving in January 1917. During the two months he spent in America he found himself fascinated by the nation's dynamism, as it was distilled into its most concentrated form in New York City, although he was quite disappointed in the quality of the socialist leadership he observed firsthand. 

Trotsky Returns

After the February Revolution, Trotsky returned (with some difficulty, as he was arrested and roughly handled by the Royal Navy) to a "free" Russia and Petrograd (as St. Petersburg had been known since 1914) in May 1917 and became, in effect, Lenin's second-in-command for the Bolsheviks. Stalin had arrived in Petrograd at the end of the February Revolution, and Lenin followed in April. Now the three most influential Communists were together in Russia's capital plotting revolution. It would be Trotsky alone, however, who would plan and command the final ascendence of the Bolsheviks. “Insurrection,” he would say, “is not an art, it is an engine. Technical experts are required to start it, and they alone could stop it.”  

Leon Trotsky was the "technical expert" of Russia's October Revolution.

Source: Historyinanhour.com; The Technique of Revolution, Curzio Malaparte, 1931; Over the Top, November 2017