Question by The Gladiator: What if Trotsky came into power, instead of Stalin? What would be different?
Under Trotsky you wouldn’t have had the paranoid purges you had under Stalin. So there’d be about 10 million less dead people. Im not certain about how much else would have been different.
Answers and Views:
Answer by stark z
You would have paranoid purges, it comes with the territory. The extent probably would have been different though. You never saw that episode of the Twilight Zone?
Answer by Dylan
I’m pretty sure that the Russians would have had a more adequate leader for World War 2.
Stalin’s purge of his own officers, as well as the purge of the army, and his trust in Hitler left Russia open to attack and in the end resulted in millions dead.
I wouldn’t think Trotsky would have been so naive when handling Nazis.
Read all the answers in the comments.
What do you think?
paul s says
Trotsky’s core difference with Stalin was that Trotsky wanted to export communism across the world via the red army – Stalin on the other hand wanted to secure the soviet union and have limited interaction with the rest of the world thanks in part to his terrible and humiliating experiences in 1921 when the red army (of which he was a general in) invaded Poland and got served up – he did not want a repeat of that disaster again.
Trotsky however was still game and had he and his supporters taken over he would certainly have began to try and take over Europe, first by supporting internal communist parties either though direct funding and sending agents to destabilise the target nation and if necessary even sending in the red army. all with aim of spreading Karl marx’s call for ‘international communism’
lots of things would have been different if Trotsky has taken over and and not just in Europe – for example the worlds largest communist party outside of the Soviet Union (by sheer number of members) prior to WW2 was actually the communist party of the United States, (thanks to all those Eastern European, Jewish and Southern Italian immigrants who flooded in from the 1880’s until WW2 and who were traditionally socialist/left wing in political views and voting habits)