1. Leon Trotsky was a central figure in the 1905 Revolution, October Revolution of 1917, Russian Civil War, and establishment of the Soviet Union, from which he was exiled in 1929 before his assassination in 1940.
197 Facts About Leon Trotsky
1. 2.
Leon Trotsky was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia, but in 1902 escaped to London, where he met Lenin and wrote for the party paper Iskra.
3.
Leon Trotsky initially sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks in the party's 1903 schism, but declared himself non-factional in 1904.
4.
Leon Trotsky was again exiled to Siberia, but escaped in 1907 and lived in Europe and the US After the February Revolution of 1917, Trotsky returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks.
5.
Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and from the party in 1927, internally exiled to Alma Ata in 1928, and deported in 1929.
6.
Leon Trotsky lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937.
7.
In exile, Leon Trotsky wrote polemics against Stalinism, advocating proletarian internationalism against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country.
8.
Leon Trotsky was the fifth child of David Leontyevich Bronstein and Anna Lvovna.
9.
Leon Trotsky's father had lived in Poltava and later moved to Yanovka, as it had a large Jewish community.
10.
North has compared the speculation on Leon Trotsky's given name to the undue emphasis given to his having a Jewish surname.
11.
When Leon Trotsky was eight years old, his father sent him to Odessa to be educated.
12.
Leon Trotsky was enrolled in a Lutheran German-language school which became Russified during his years in Odessa as a result of the Imperial government's policy of Russification.
13.
Leon Trotsky became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896 after moving to the harbor town of Nikolayev on the Black Sea.
14.
Leon Trotsky briefly attended Odessa University where he studied engineering and mathematics.
15.
Leon Trotsky dropped out of university in early 1897 to help organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev.
16.
Leon Trotsky was held for the next two years in prison awaiting trial, first in Nikolayev, then Kherson, then Odessa, and finally in Moscow.
17.
In Siberia, Leon Trotsky read numerous books on history, philosophy, economics, sociology, and the works of Karl Marx with an intent on solidifying his own political stance.
18.
Leon Trotsky became aware of the differences within the party, which had been decimated by arrests in 1898 and 1899.
19.
Leon Trotsky quickly sided with the Iskra position and began writing for the paper.
20.
Until this point, Trotsky had used his birth name: Lev Bronstein.
21.
Leon Trotsky changed his surname to "Trotsky", the name he would use for the rest of his life.
22.
Under the pen name Pero, Leon Trotsky soon became one of the paper's leading writers.
23.
In late 1902, Leon Trotsky met Natalia Sedova, who soon became his companion.
24.
Leon Trotsky never used the name "Sedov" either privately or publicly.
25.
Leon Trotsky left the Mensheviks in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
26.
From 1904 until 1917, Leon Trotsky described himself as a "non-factional social democrat".
27.
Leon Trotsky tried to reconcile different groups within the party, which resulted in many clashes with Lenin and other prominent party members.
28.
Leon Trotsky later maintained that he had been wrong in opposing Lenin on the issue of the party.
29.
Amid the resulting confusion, Leon Trotsky returned from Finland to Saint Petersburg on 15 October 1905.
30.
On that day, Leon Trotsky spoke before the Saint Petersburg Soviet Council of Workers Deputies, which was meeting at the Technological Institute in the city.
31.
Leon Trotsky co-founded, together with Parvus and Julius Martov and other Mensheviks, "Nachalo", which proved to be a very successful newspaper in the revolutionary atmosphere of Saint Petersburg in 1905.
32.
Leon Trotsky was a lawyer that stood above the political factions contained in the Soviet.
33.
Leon Trotsky joined the Soviet under the name "Yanovsky" and was elected vice-chairman.
34.
Leon Trotsky did much of the actual work at the Soviet and, after Khrustalev-Nosar's arrest on 26 November 1905, was elected its chairman.
35.
In Vienna, Leon Trotsky became close to Adolph Joffe, his friend for the next 20 years, who introduced him to psychoanalysis.
36.
Leon Trotsky approached the Russian Central Committee to seek financial backing for the newspaper throughout 1909.
37.
When various Bolshevik and Menshevik factions tried to re-unite at the January 1910 RSDLP Central Committee meeting in Paris over Lenin's objections, Leon Trotsky's Pravda was made a party-financed 'central organ'.
38.
Lev Kamenev, Leon Trotsky's brother-in-law, was added to the editorial board from the Bolsheviks, but the unification attempts failed in August 1910.
39.
Leon Trotsky continued publishing Pravda for another two years until it finally folded in April 1912.
40.
Leon Trotsky was so upset by what he saw as a usurpation of his newspaper's name that in April 1913, he wrote a letter to Nikolay Chkheidze, a Menshevik leader, bitterly denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
41.
In Vienna, Leon Trotsky continuously published articles in radical Russian and Ukrainian newspapers, such as Kievskaya Mysl, under a variety of pseudonyms, often using "Antid Oto", a name chosen at random from an Italian dictionary, with Leon Trotsky joking that "wanted to inject the Marxist antidote into the legitimate newspapers".
42.
Leon Trotsky became a close friend of Christian Rakovsky, later a leading Soviet politician and Trotsky's ally in the Soviet Communist Party.
43.
On 3 August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, in which Austria-Hungary fought against the Russian Empire, Leon Trotsky was forced to flee Vienna for neutral Switzerland to avoid arrest as a Russian emigre.
44.
In Switzerland, Leon Trotsky briefly worked within the Swiss Socialist Party, prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution.
45.
Leon Trotsky wrote a book opposing the war, The War and the International, and the pro-war position taken by the European social democratic parties, primarily the German party.
46.
Leon Trotsky attended the Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in September 1915 and advocated a middle course between those who, like Martov, would stay within the Second International at any cost and those who, like Lenin, would break with the Second International and form a Third International.
47.
In September 1916, Leon Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his anti-war activities.
48.
Leon Trotsky arrived in New York City on 13 January 1917.
49.
Leon Trotsky stayed for over two months at 1522 Vyse Avenue in The Bronx.
50.
Leon Trotsky was living in New York City when the February Revolution of 1917 led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II.
51.
Leon Trotsky left New York onboard SS Kristianiafjord on 27 March 1917, but his ship was stopped by the Royal Navy at Halifax, Nova Scotia.
52.
Leon Trotsky was arrested and detained for a month at the Amherst Internment Camp in Nova Scotia.
53.
Morris subsequently forbade Leon Trotsky from making any more public speeches, leading to 530 prisoners protesting and signing a petition against Morris' decision.
54.
Leon Trotsky temporarily joined the Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in Petrograd, and became one of its leaders.
55.
Leon Trotsky was released 40 days later in the aftermath of the failed counter-revolutionary uprising by Lavr Kornilov.
56.
Leon Trotsky sided with Lenin against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev when the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed staging an armed uprising, and he led the efforts to overthrow the Russian Provisional Government headed by socialist Aleksandr Kerensky.
57.
Leon Trotsky was an outspoken advocate for a predominantly Bolshevik government and was reluctant to recall Mensheviks as partners after their voluntary withdrawal from the Congress of the Soviets.
58.
Leon Trotsky overshadowed Zinoviev, who had been Lenin's top lieutenant over the previous decade.
59.
On 23 November 1917, Leon Trotsky revealed the secret treaty arrangements which had been made between the Tsarist government, Britain and France, causing them considerable embarrassment.
60.
In preparation for peace talks with the representatives of the Imperial German government and the representatives of the other Central Powers leading up to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Leon Trotsky appointed his old friend Joffe to represent the Bolsheviks.
61.
Therefore, Leon Trotsky replaced Joffe as the leader of the Soviet delegation during the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk from 22 December 1917 to 10 February 1918.
62.
Leon Trotsky agreed with the Left Communists that ultimately a pan-European Soviet revolution would solve all problems, but until then the Bolsheviks had to stay in power.
63.
Leon Trotsky argued that any German ultimatum should be refused, and that this might well lead to an uprising in Germany, or at least inspire German soldiers to disobey their officers since any German offensive would be a naked land grab for territories.
64.
Privately, in correspondence with Count Otto von Czernin, Leon Trotsky had expressed his willigness to relent to peace terms upon the resumption of a German offensive although with moral dissent.
65.
Since Leon Trotsky was so closely associated with the policy previously followed by the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk, he resigned from his position as Commissar for Foreign Affairs to remove a potential obstacle to the new policy.
66.
The post of commander-in-chief was abolished, and Leon Trotsky gained full control of the Red Army, responsible only to the Communist Party leadership, whose Left Socialist Revolutionary allies had left the government over the controversial treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
67.
Deutscher draws attention to the fact that Leon Trotsky preferred to exchange hostages and prisoners rather than execute them.
68.
In dealing with deserters, Leon Trotsky appealed to them politically, arousing them with the ideas of the Revolution.
69.
In December 1918, Leon Trotsky ordered detachments of additional barrier troops be raised for attachment to each infantry formation.
70.
Leon Trotsky became chairman of the newly formed Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and retained overall control of the military.
71.
Nevertheless, Leon Trotsky eventually established a working relationship with the often prickly Vatsetis.
72.
Leon Trotsky appointed former imperial general Pavel Pavlovich Sytin to command the Southern Front, but in early October 1918 Stalin refused to accept him and so he was recalled from the front.
73.
Leon Trotsky's plan was rejected, and he was much criticized for various alleged shortcomings in his leadership style, much of it of a personal nature.
74.
Leon Trotsky was temporarily sent to the Southern Front, while Smilga informally coordinated the work in Moscow.
75.
Leon Trotsky argued that Petrograd needed to be defended, at least in part to prevent Estonia and Finland from intervening.
76.
Leon Trotsky did not believe that the Red Army would find much support in Poland proper.
77.
Back in Moscow, Leon Trotsky again argued for a peace treaty, and this time prevailed.
78.
Leon Trotsky believed that in a workers' state, the state should control the unions, with workers being treated as "soldiers of labor" under strict discipline.
79.
Lenin's view won out at the 10th Congress in 1921, and several of Leon Trotsky's supporters, including Nikolay Krestinsky, lost their leadership positions.
80.
Leon Trotsky justified the action by presenting evidence that the rebellion had foreign backing, though this claim has been contested by several historians.
81.
Leon Trotsky's role has been the subject of criticism, with anarchists such as Emma Goldman accusing him of betraying the revolution's democratic ideals.
82.
Leon Trotsky was an ideologist and practitioner of the Red Terror.
83.
Leon Trotsky despised "bourgeois democracy"; he believed that spinelessness and soft-heartedness would destroy the revolution, and that the suppression of the propertied classes and political opponents would clear the historical arena for socialism.
84.
Leon Trotsky was the initiator of concentration camps, compulsory "labour camps", and the militarization of labour, and the state takeover of trade unions.
85.
Leon Trotsky was implicated in many practices which would become standard in the Stalin era, including summary executions.
86.
Leon Trotsky had three strokes between 25 May 1922 and 9 March 1923, which caused paralysis, loss of speech and finally death on 21 January 1924.
87.
Much of the Bolshevik elite wanted 'normality,' while Leon Trotsky was personally and politically personified as representing a turbulent revolutionary period that they would much rather leave behind.
88.
In late 1922, Leon Trotsky secured an alliance with Lenin against Stalin and the emerging Soviet bureaucracy.
89.
In March 1923, days before his third stroke, Lenin asked Leon Trotsky to denounce Stalin and his so-called "Great-Russian nationalistic campaign" at the XIIth Party Congress.
90.
At the XIIth Party Congress in April 1923 just after Lenin's final stroke, Leon Trotsky did not raise the issue.
91.
The delegates, most of whom were unaware of the divisions within the Politburo, gave Leon Trotsky a standing ovation.
92.
On 8 October 1923 Leon Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, attributing these difficulties to lack of intra-Party democracy.
93.
The troika used his letter as an excuse to launch a campaign against Leon Trotsky, accusing him of factionalism, setting "the youth against the fundamental generation of old revolutionary Bolsheviks" and other sins.
94.
Leon Trotsky defended his position in a series of seven letters which were collected as The New Course in January 1924.
95.
Yet in October 1924, Leon Trotsky published Lessons of October, a summary of the events of the 1917 revolution.
96.
Leon Trotsky described Zinoviev and Kamenev's opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, something they would have preferred left unmentioned.
97.
Leon Trotsky was again sick and unable to respond while his opponents mobilised all their resources to denounce him.
98.
Leon Trotsky kept his Politburo seat, but was effectively put on probation.
99.
Leon Trotsky wrote in My Life that he "was taking a rest from politics" and "naturally plunged into the new line of work up to my ears".
100.
Leon Trotsky would deliver a tribute to Lenin in his 1925 short book, "Lenin".
101.
Leon Trotsky resigned from his two technical positions and focused on his work in the Concessions Committee.
102.
The United Opposition was repeatedly threatened with sanctions by the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party, and Leon Trotsky had to agree to tactical retreats, mostly to preserve his alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev.
103.
Leon Trotsky wanted the Communist Party to complete an orthodox proletarian revolution and have clear class independence from the KMT.
104.
Leon Trotsky gave the eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the Soviet diplomat Adolph Joffe, in November 1927.
105.
Leon Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata, Kazakhstan on 31 January 1928.
106.
Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union to Turkey in February 1929, accompanied by his wife Natalia Sedova and their eldest son, Lev.
107.
In 1931, Leon Trotsky wrote a letter to a friend entitled "What is Fascism" in which he attempted to define fascism and asserted that the Communist International was wrong to describe the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera as "fascist" because it was not a mass movement arising from a base in the lower classes.
108.
In 1932, Leon Trotsky entered via a port into the fascist Kingdom of Italy on his way to a socialist conference in Denmark.
109.
Leon Trotsky wanted by no means that the alliance became a fusion, and he was afraid of the right gaining much power inside the bloc.
110.
In July 1933, Leon Trotsky was offered asylum in France by Prime Minister Edouard Daladier.
111.
Leon Trotsky accepted the offer, but he was forbidden to live in Paris and soon found himself under the surveillance of the French police.
112.
Accordingly, the French authorities instructed Leon Trotsky to move to a residence in the tiny village of Barbizon under the strict surveillance of the French police, where Leon Trotsky found his contact with the outside world to be even worse than during his exile in Turkey.
113.
In May 1935, soon after the French government had agreed to the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union government, Leon Trotsky was officially told that he was no longer welcome in France.
114.
Leon Trotsky was hospitalized for a few weeks at the nearby Oslo Community Hospital, from 19 September 1935.
115.
Leon Trotsky demanded a complete and open enquiry into Moscow's accusations.
116.
Leon Trotsky categorically refused the conditions, and Leon Trotsky was then told that he and his wife would soon be moved to another residence.
117.
When later living in Mexico, Leon Trotsky was utterly scathing about the treatment he received during his 108 days at Hurum, and accused the Norwegian government of trying to prevent him from publicly voicing his strong opposition to the Moscow Trials and other show trials, saying:.
118.
Leon Trotsky's final move was a few blocks away to a residence on Avenida Viena in April 1939, following a break with Rivera.
119.
Leon Trotsky wrote prolifically while in exile, penning several key works, including his History of the Russian Revolution and The Revolution Betrayed, a critique of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.
120.
Leon Trotsky argued that the Soviet state had become a "degenerated workers' state" controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy, which would eventually either be overthrown via a political revolution establishing a workers' democracy, or degenerate into a capitalist class.
121.
The court found every defendant guilty, in absentia, including Leon Trotsky, sentencing them to death.
122.
For fear of splitting the communist movement, Leon Trotsky initially opposed the idea of establishing parallel communist parties or a parallel international communist organization that would compete with the Third International.
123.
Towards the end of 1939, Leon Trotsky agreed to go to the United States to appear as a witness before the Dies Committee of the House of Representatives, a forerunner of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
124.
Leon Trotsky intended to use the forum to expose the NKVD's activities against him and his followers.
125.
Leon Trotsky made it clear that he intended to argue against the suppression of the American Communist Party and to use the committee as a platform for a call to transform World War II into a world revolution.
126.
On hearing about it, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union immediately accused Leon Trotsky of being in the pay of the oil magnates and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
127.
On 27 February 1940, Leon Trotsky wrote a document known as "Leon Trotsky's Testament", in which he expressed his final thoughts and feelings for posterity.
128.
Leon Trotsky was suffering from high blood pressure, and feared that he would suffer a cerebral haemorrhage.
129.
Leon Trotsky would reiterate his "unshaken faith in a communist future".
130.
Leon Trotsky underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives.
131.
On 24 May 1940, Leon Trotsky survived a raid on his villa by armed assassins led by the NKVD agent Iosif Grigulevich and Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.
132.
On 20 August 1940, Leon Trotsky was attacked in his study by Spanish-born NKVD agent Ramon Mercader, who used an ice axe as a weapon.
133.
Leon Trotsky was then taken to a hospital and operated on, surviving for more than a day, yet ultimately dying at the age of 60 on 21 August 1940 from blood loss and shock.
134.
The moment Leon Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head.
135.
Leon Trotsky was regarded as an outstanding orator, preeminent theoretician, and organiser that, in the view of historian Michael Kort, "forged and directed the Red Army".
136.
Leon Trotsky served as one of the original Politburo members in Lenin's government.
137.
Service stated that Leon Trotsky gave the "minimum time to the Jewish question" and believed that "he ceased to be a Jew in any important sense because Marxism had burned out the fortuitous residues of his origins".
138.
Leon Trotsky argued that the Stalinist regime was an "ephemeral phenomenon" and Nimtz believed this had later been proven with the Soviet collapse after 1989.
139.
Leon Trotsky had a diverse and profound range of interests which exceeded that of other Bolshevik theoreticians such as Nikolai Bukharin.
140.
Leon Trotsky had a notable love for literature and had a particular fondness for French novels.
141.
Leon Trotsky retained a personal interest in science which stemmed from his youth when he studied engineering, mathematics, and physics at the New Russian University in Odessa.
142.
Leon Trotsky recognized the prominent role of Trotsky during the October revolution in the 1917 Pravda editorial.
143.
Leon Trotsky spoke several European languages "with a markedly Russian accent" and identified as a cosmopolitan and internationalist.
144.
Deutscher stated that Leon Trotsky wrote most of the Soviet's manifestos and resolutions, edited its Izvestia newspaper and composed the oath of loyalty for the Red Army.
145.
Leon Trotsky's failure seems to have been almost inevitable, considering his own qualities and the conditions of authoritarian rule by the Communist Party organization.
146.
Leon Trotsky lacked the political acumen to succeed against Stalin's machinations.
147.
Conversely, Volkongov stated that Leon Trotsky had the support of many party intellectuals but this was overshadowed by the huge apparatus which included the GPU and the party cadres who were at the disposal of Stalin.
148.
Leon Trotsky himself ascribed his political defeat to external, objective conditions rather than the individual qualities of Stalin.
149.
Leon Trotsky specifically argued that the failed series of international insurrections as seen in Bulgaria in 1923 and China in 1927 had diminished the prospect of world socialism and demoralised the Russian working class which in turn strengthened the growth of an internal, Soviet bureaucracy.
150.
Although, Daniels contended that Leon Trotsky would have in reality been no more prepared than other Bolshevik figures to risk war or the loss of trade opportunities despite his support for world revolution.
151.
Medvedev mentioned a number of public commendations such as "greetings in honour of comrades Lenin and Leon Trotsky were announced at many rallies and meetings, and portraits of Lenin and Leon Trotsky hung on the walls of many Soviet and party institutions".
152.
Leon Trotsky was generally viewed as Lenin's choice as a successor in 1923.
153.
Leon Trotsky had been nominated to be Lenin's deputy in 1922 and 1923 as well as expected to assume responsibility over the Council of National Economy or Gosplan.
154.
Lenin and Leon Trotsky were the only Soviet leaders elected honorary presidents of the Communist International.
155.
Leon Trotsky's supporters controlled the newly established Orgburo and the Party Secretariat before the appointment of Stalin as General Secretary.
156.
Leon Trotsky cited Lenin's testament which was critical of Stalin and the bureaucracy along with their shared position on foreign trade, party reform and the Georgian affair.
157.
Leon Trotsky explained his decision to decline the proposed position of Lenin's chief deputy due to concerns about his "Jewish origins" which could accentuate anti-semitic attitudes towards the Soviet Union.
158.
Leon Trotsky explained that this process would have begun after their alliance in 1923 with the formation of a commission to mitigate the growth of the state bureaucracy which in turn would have facilitated the conditions for his succession in the party.
159.
The foundation "International Friends of the Leon Trotsky Museum" has been organized to raise funds to improve the museum further.
160.
Shortly before his assassination, Leon Trotsky agreed to sell the bulk of the papers he still had to Harvard University.
161.
Leon Trotsky was never rehabilitated during the rule of the Soviet government, despite the de-Stalinization-era rehabilitation of most other Old Bolsheviks killed during the Great Purges.
162.
Leon Trotsky was rehabilitated on 16 June 2001 by the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.
163.
Leon Trotsky commented on the lack of a balanced view.
164.
For Western readers Leon Trotsky has always been one of the most enigmatic and powerful personalities of the Russian revolution, a Mephistophelian figure whose life ended in an appropriately dramatic way.
165.
North was critical of the biographical literature on Leon Trotsky's legacy written by some historians such as Ian Thatcher, Geoffrey Swain and Robert Service.
166.
Leon Trotsky viewed these recent trends in historiography as "manifestations of the confluence of neo-Stalinist falsification and traditional Anglo-American anti-Communism".
167.
In 2018, John Kelly wrote that "almost 80 years after Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International, there are now Trotskyite organisations in 57 countries, including most of Western Europe and Latin America".
168.
In modern historiography, Leon Trotsky's legacy has evoked a range of conflicting and diverse interpretations.
169.
Leon Trotsky was viewed by contemporaries in the initial Soviet period and later historians as the hero of the revolution.
170.
The works of Leon Trotsky remained banned until the Gorbachev era.
171.
Scholarly consensus holds Leon Trotsky to have demonstrated remarkable leadership of the Red Army during the Civil War.
172.
Leon Trotsky had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his role in the Red Army such as organising the defence of Petrograd when other members of the Bolshevik leadership were prepared to abandon the former capital.
173.
Leon Trotsky had proposed the election of a new Soviet presidium with other socialist parties on the basis of proportional representation in September 1917.
174.
Rogovin argued that the Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, represented a "real alternative to Stalinism" and this served as the primary motive of Stalin's Great Terror campaign.
175.
Cherniaev considered Leon Trotsky to be partly responsible for the establishment of a one-party, authoritarian state and initiating several military practices such as summary executions which later became standard practice during the Stalinist era.
176.
Thatcher cited his defence of terror in his work, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, but acknowledged that Leon Trotsky was capable of leniency and had personally urged that White army deserters be treated with understanding.
177.
Leon Trotsky added that military tribunals and executions for desertions were a common feature of every war and not exclusive to the actions of the Red Army under Trotsky.
178.
Leon Trotsky had delivered a joint report to the April Plenum of the Central Committee in 1926 which proposed a program for national industrialization and the replacement of annual plans with five-year plans.
179.
Leon Trotsky's proposals were rejected by the Central Committee majority which was controlled by the troika and derided by Stalin at the time.
180.
Political scientist Baruch Knei-Paz argued that Leon Trotsky had done more than any other political figure to "show the historical and social roots of Stalinism" as a bureaucratic system.
181.
Leon Trotsky considered himself to be a "Bolshevik-Leninist", arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party.
182.
Leon Trotsky viewed himself as an advocate of orthodox Marxism.
183.
Leon Trotsky adhered to scientific socialism and viewed this as a conscious expression of historical processes.
184.
Leon Trotsky's politics differed in some aspects from those of Stalin or Mao Zedong, most importantly in his rejection of the theory of "socialism in one country" and his declaring of the need for an international "permanent revolution".
185.
In 1936, Leon Trotsky called for the restoration of the right of criticism in areas such as economic matters, the revitalization of trade unions and free elections of the Soviet parties.
186.
Leon Trotsky was an early proponent of economic planning since 1923 and favored an accelerated pace of industrialization.
187.
Leon Trotsky urged economic decentralisation between the state, oblast regions and factories to counter structural inefficiency and the problem of bureaucracy.
188.
Leon Trotsky rejected the Stalinist conception of industrialisation which favoured heavy industry.
189.
Leon Trotsky elaborated on the need of Soviet democracy for the industrialization period when questioned by the Dewey Commission in 1937:.
190.
Leon Trotsky was a central figure in the Comintern during its first four congresses.
191.
Leon Trotsky was a strong critic of the shifting Comintern policy position under Stalin which directed German Communists to treat social democrats as "social fascists".
192.
Leon Trotsky formulated a theory of fascism based on a dialectical interpretation of events to analyze the manifestation of Italian fascism and the early emergence of Nazi Germany from 1930 to 1933.
193.
In Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky examined aesthetic issues in relation to class and the Russian revolution.
194.
Leon Trotsky defended intellectual autonomy in regards to literary movements as well scientific theories such as Freudian psychoanalytic theory and Einstein's theory of relativity during the succession period.
195.
Leon Trotsky presented a critique of contemporary literary movements such as Futurism and emphasised a need of cultural autonomy for the development of a socialist culture.
196.
Leon Trotsky himself viewed the proletarian culture as "temporary and transitional" which would provide the foundations for a culture above classes.
197.
Leon Trotsky argued that the pre-conditions for artistic creativity were economic well-being and emancipation from material constraints.