Question by _vcky: Briefly describe the career of Trotsky?
Hey for a homework essay question we have been asked this,this particular part is only worth 4 marks and I have done all the bigger ones. However I am unsure what to include and what to omit as only four points are required. I would appreciate it if someone could concisely answer this or outline four points to include.
Thanks
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Answer by gee bee
Leon Trotsky ( born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein; 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army.
Trotsky was initially a supporter of the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the 1917 October Revolution, and eventually became a leader within the Party. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army as People’s Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–20). He was also among the first members of the Politburo.
After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power (1927), expelled from the Communist Party, and finally deported from the Soviet Union (1929). As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile in Mexico to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, in the late 1930s, Trotsky opposed Stalin’s non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler. He was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in Mexico, by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born Soviet agent in August 1940. (Most of his family members were also killed.)
Trotsky’s ideas were the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who were not rehabilitated by the government under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. In the late 1980s, his books were released for publication in the Soviet Union, and in 2001 he was finally rehabilitated.
Answer by Spellbound
Trotsky was a maverick, disagreeing with both Menshevik and Bolshevik factions and only joining Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October 1917.
Before and during the October Revolution Trotsky was the chairman of the the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. It was this organisation that, under Lenin’s direction, that staged the takeover of the state known as the October Revolution.
As the Revolution descended into Civil War, Trotsky was given the task of organising the Bolshevik Red Army to fight the anti-Bolshevik forces, the Whites and other groups hostile to the Bolshevik takeover – including the UK, USA, France and Japanese who took over ports around the country trying to force Russia back into WWI – and later to try to depose the new regime.
After the Civil War he was considered one of the front runners for the role of leading the country after the death of Lenin – but he fell foul of the master manipulator (who hated his popularity, his organisational skills and was wary that the army may be loyal to him – Stalin). He was the leader of the Left Opposition, and because of this Stalin had him exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929.
Trotsky wrote a number of books, articles and pamphlets decrying what had happened to the revolution and proposed alternative policies for the country – leading to the branch of communism known as Trotskyism. Stalin took action against him, and, in 1940, in Mexico, he was stabbed to death.
His birth name was Leiba, not Lev or Leon.
He took the name Trotsky from one of his gaolers.
He had four children, two each by his two wives: Nina and Zinaida by Aleksandra
and Lev and Sergei by his second wife – Natal’ia
See:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/trotsky_leon.shtml
For an in depth examination of his life, works and ideas see:
http://www.trotsky.net/
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