He vanished and, it is believed, was shot in October Kirov was gunned down in December Likely, Stalin himself was responsible for the assassination. The murder gave him the pretext for systematically and publicly purging the Communist Party. Old Bolsheviks, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, stood accused of conspiring against the Soviet government.
Following their death sentences, several successor trials ensued through Trotsky knew that a combination of torture, threats to family members, and promises of freedom, if confessions were given, allowed the travesties to occur. The violence swept away both supporters and opponents of Stalin and Stalinism. Radek and Rakovsky, former allies of Trotsky who later submitted to Stalin, were killed. Others were murdered in labor camps, the infamous Gulags, or in prisons.
The secret police put him to death in January In this period, the Soviet Union was perhaps the most dangerous place in the world for independent-thinking Marxists, an astounding thing to say, given the records of the fascist regimes. From the Show Trials, ever more outlandish tales about Trotsky were spun. The stories relayed by the accused placed him at the center of a massive, worldwide anti-Soviet conspiracy. Turning his calls for an anti-Stalin revolution against him, Vyshinsky pilloried Trotsky, the inveterate adversary of fascism, as the master fascist, as the string-puller and puppet-master.
Yet Trotsky fought back vigorously. Its aim was to provide a revolutionary alternative to the Moscow-led Third or Communist International Comintern. This Fourth International would bolster radical, anti-Stalinist working-class parties and unions around the world. When it came to repudiating the preposterous charges raised in the Show Trials, he received considerable help. Similar organizations were founded elsewhere.
Only one of the members, Alfred Rosmer, a syndicalist and early supporter of the October Revolution, could be described as a Trotsky supporter. Traveling to the Mexican capital, the Commission held thirteen sessions in April Trotsky, speaking in his quite imperfect English, responded to every accusation leveled by the Stalinists.
He cast a powerful impression on those present, including the liberal Dewey, no admirer of his politics. In September , the Commission issued its findings, clearing Trotsky of all the charges.
The following years were dark, awful times for Trotsky, Natalia, and their inner circle. Losing two sons and innumerable comrades and friends to Stalin did not break his spirit, but the losses threw a shadow over everything he had done.
With the Japanese in China, Hitler moving into Austria, and threatening Czechoslovakia, and Mussolini dreaming of a Roman Empire in the Mediterranean, the prospect of a new world war soon overtook him. Following the Munich Agreement of September , Trotsky expected the Soviet government to seek an agreement with Hitler. Whatever anti-Nazi sentiments issued from the Kremlin, Trotsky thought, were not worth the paper they were written on.
In the aftermath of the Show Trials, he believed an even more important reason would drive Stalin to come to an agreement with Berlin: survival. The Stalin regime was too despotic and unpopular to weather the storm of total war. According to Trotsky, a settlement with Nazi Germany might secure some stability for the dictatorship.
When Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, his German counterpart, signed a Non-Aggression Pact between the two nations on August 23, , Trotsky was scarcely surprised. In a steady stream of articles and interviews, he condemned the role of the Soviet Union, a state that, at least in its rhetoric, had sided with the colonized against imperialism. The betrayal of the principles of Red October had reached a new level of treachery.
Perhaps Stalin, Trotsky surmised, now seemed content with partitioning Eastern Europe with the German fascists. The Soviet attack on Finland in November , the beginning of the Winter War , made him wonder how far Stalin was willing to go to create a sphere of interest for himself.
While he again damned Soviet aggression, Trotsky, at the same time, despised Marshal Mannerheim, the right-wing Finnish leader rallying his people. This was a huge dilemma for Trotsky. How could one support social revolution in areas under Soviet control without giving any ground on his anti-Stalinism?
An even bigger problem posed itself. Trotsky had no doubt Hitler would do so at the earliest opportunity. His answer was absolutely unequivocal. Socialists and workers everywhere must rally to the defense of the Soviet Union. The achievements of the Bolshevik Revolution had to be defended. This position, which alienated many of his adherents, coexisted with another claim — the new world war would mean the end of the Stalin regime.
Trotsky predicted that the workers and peasants of the USSR, their revolutionary energies revitalized, would put an end to the Stalinist bureaucracy. The revolution he outlined in The Revolution Betrayed would itself form part of a gigantic wave of revolutionism engulfing the Axis powers and the capitalist democracies.
Like Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini would meet the severe justice of the proletariat. In this crushing context of setback, isolation and low political activity, the crystallisation of a bureaucratic caste became possible.
The bureaucracy formally defended the revolution, but increasingly it put its own comforts and privileges before the interests of the international revolution. Like in any period of setback for the working class, even some revolutionaries turned away in despair from the genuine democratic and working-class methods of Marxism. They were joined by ambitious middle-class careerists, and malcontent, incompetent officials looking for promotion.
In , Lenin called for the removal of Stalin from the post of general secretary. But his death in prevented him leading that struggle. In sync, the Third International increasingly became a tool of Russian foreign policy for the Stalinist bureaucracy. There was an organised terror campaign against any remnant of the October revolution, over the course of two decades, until Trotsky was finally murdered by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in And it did.
Thousands of workers supported it. The tragedy of the Spanish revolution, , proved the warning correct. The failed revolution in Germany in , and subsequent mistakes, paving the way to fascism in The betrayal of the British general strike, when workers could have taken power, in The bloody massacre of the Chinese revolution, , at the hands of the capitalist and landlord Kuomintang party.
Stalin had instructed Communists to join it, and allow Kuomintang forces to enter Shanghai in April — setting them up to be massacred at the hands of pro-capitalist military leader Chiang Kai-shek. The list goes on. Many other struggles broke out with the Communist Party and Soviet state as Stalin manoeuvred against any possible opposition to his strengthened totalitarian regime. But by the end of , the dominant Stalinist faction had decisively defeated the Left Opposition, imprisoning or exiling its leaders.
Not only did they refuse to collaborate in any way, they continued their protests in the camps! During the next decade, he was expelled from a series of countries because of his radicalism, living in Switzerland, Paris, Spain and New York City before returning to Russia at the outbreak of the revolution in In , he became war commissioner and set about building up the Red Army, which succeeded in defeating anti-Communist opposition in the Russian Civil War.
In the early s, Trotsky seemed the heir apparent of Lenin, but he lost out in the struggle of succession after Lenin fell ill in He also criticized the new regime for suppressing democracy in the Communist Party and for failing to develop adequate economic planning. In response, Stalin and his supporters launched a propaganda counterattack against Trotsky.
In , he was removed from his post in the war commissariat. One year later, he was expelled from the Politburo and in from the Communist Party. He was received by the government of Turkey and settled on the island of Prinkipo, where he worked on finishing his autobiography and history of the Russian Revolution. After four years in Turkey, Trotsky lived in France and then Norway and in was granted asylum in Mexico.
He survived a machine-gun attack on his home but on August 20, , fell prey to a Spanish Communist, Ramon Mercader, who fatally wounded him with an ice-ax. He died from his wounds the next day.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! He intentionally chose to release it on January 11, , a Saturday, so as to limit its immediate effects on the stock market. It was on this date that, on behalf of the U. Government, Terry announced On January 11, , Joran van der Sloot, a longtime suspect in the unsolved disappearance of American teen Natalee Holloway in Aruba, pleads guilty to the murder of year-old Stephany Flores, in Lima, Peru.
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