Russian Life & People Digest
Question by First nameb J: What if trotsky took power over the soviet union after lenin?
Answers and Views:
Answer by Will
He could never have held onto it. He was much too great an idealist. essentially, he was impractical, theoretical, and incapable of making the hard realist choices of a leader.
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MarjaU says
1. Trotskiy would have been just as ruthless as Stalin. Consider how he responded to the Kronstadt Mutiny, and his measures during the Civil War.
2. Trotskiy was even more fond of central planning. Consider the creation of labor armies and his support of Preobrazhenskiy's economic ideas.
3. The Soviet Union couldn't afford outright war, but would probably try to subvert foreign communist parties and pressure them toward revolution – without always understanding the local conditions.
Soviet industry had been mostly destroyed by the Civil War. Coal mining wouldn't recover until the late twenties. Without coal, the factories couldn't run. Without factories, the army couldn't equip itself. At the end of the Civil War, the Red Army had 5 1/2 million personnel, but only something like 700,000 rifles for them. And it had more severe artillery shortages. A hypothetical coalition of the European border states – from Finland through Romania – would have been much stronger.
4. Trotskiy was ruthless, but it's hard to imagine him launching the same kinds of purges as Stalin. Stalin was paranoid.
So… who knows…?
ammianus says
Trotsky wanted to export the Bolshevik Revolution to the rest of Europe, by fomenting and supporting Communist rebellions in other countries – using the Red Army to help if necessary.
If Trotsky had succeeded Lenin, then WW2 could well have started a decade or so early,with an expansionist Communist Soviet Union,rather than an expansionist Nazi Germany, as the common enemy.