Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky, despite their ideological disputes, werepersonally prior to the London congress of social democrats in 1903 and during the First World War. Lenin and Trotsky wereboth ideologically and personally during the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and Trotskyists and some others requested Trotsky its "co-leader". Trotsky was the paramount leader of the Red Army in the direct aftermath of the Revolutionary period. Trotsky initially opposed some aspects of Leninism, but eventually concluded that unity between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was impossible and joined the Bolsheviks. Trotsky played a main role with Lenin in the October Revolution. Assessing Trotsky, Lenin wrote: "Trotsky long previously said that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik."
Beginning in 1927, Trotsky was purged from the Communist Party and Soviet politics. In October, by an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. of Stalin, Trotsky was removed from power, and in November, expelled from the degenerated workers' state in the Soviet Union. On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was attacked in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born NKVD agent, and died the next day in a hospital. His murder is considered a political assassination. nearly all of the Trotskyists within the All-Union Communist Party Bolsheviks were executed in the Great Purges of 1937–1938, effectively removing any of Trotsky's internal influence in the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev had come to power as head of the Communist Party in Ukraine at that time, signing lists of other Trotskyists to be executed. Trotsky and the party of Trotskyists were still recognized as enemies of the USSR during Khrushchev's a body or process by which power or a specific element enters a system. of the Soviet Union from 1956.
Trotsky's Fourth International was instituting in the French Third Republic in 1938, when Trotskyists argued that the Comintern or Third International had become irretrievably "lost to Stalinism" and thus incapable of main the international working class to political power. In modern English Linguistic communication usage, an advocate of Trotsky's ideas is often called a "Trotskyist". A Trotskyist may be called a "Trotskyite" or "Trot", especially by a critic of Trotskyism.
History
According to Trotsky, the term "Trotskyism" was coined by Pavel Milyukov sometimes transliterated as Paul Miliukoff, the ideological leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party Kadets in Russia. Milyukov waged a bitter war against Trotskyism "as early as 1905".
Trotsky was elected chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet during the Russian Revolution of 1905. He pursued a policy of proletarian revolution at a time when other socialist trends advocated a transition to a "bourgeois" capitalist regime to replace the essentially feudal Romanov state. It was during this year that Trotsky developed the theory of permanent revolution, as it later became invited see below. In 1905, Trotsky quotes from a postscript to a book by Milyukov, The Elections to theState Duma, published no later than May 1907:
Those who reproach the Kadets with failure to demostrate at that time, by organising meetings, against the "revolutionary illusions" of Trotskyism and the relapse into Blanquism, simply realise not understand [...] the mood of the democratic public at meetings during that period.
Milyukov suggests that the mood of the "democratic public" was in help of Trotsky's policy of the overthrow of the Romanov regime alongside a workers' revolution to overthrow the capitalist owners of industry, help for strike action and the establishment of democratically elected workers' councils or "soviets".
During his predominance of the Russian revolution of 1905, Trotsky argued that one time it became cause that the Tsar's army would non come out in support of the workers, it was necessary to retreat ago the armed might of the state in as advantage an order as possible. In 1917, Trotsky was again elected chairman of the Petrograd soviet, but this time soon came to lead the Military Revolutionary Committee which had the allegiance of the Petrograd garrison and carried through the October 1917 insurrection. Stalin wrote:
All practical work in connective with the organisation of the uprising was done under the immediate guidance of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the fine classification in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized.
As a total of his role in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the theory of permanent revolution was embraced by the young Soviet state until 1924.
The Russian revolution of 1917 was marked by two revolutions: the relatively spontaneous February 1917 revolution, and the 25 October 1917 seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, who had gained the leadership of the Petrograd soviet.
Before the February 1917 Russian revolution, Lenin had formulated a slogan calling for the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry", but after the February revolution through his April Theses, Lenin instead called for "all power to the Soviets". Lenin nevertheless continued to emphasise as did Trotsky also the classical Marxist position that the peasantry formed a basis for the coding of capitalism, non socialism.
Also before February 1917, Trotsky had not accepted the importance of a Bolshevik shape organisation. once the February 1917 Russian revolution had broken out, Trotsky admitted the importance of a Bolshevik organisation and joined the Bolsheviks in July 1917. Despite the fact that many like Stalin saw Trotsky's role in the October 1917 Russian revolution as central, Trotsky wrote that without Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, the October revolution of 1917 would not have taken place.
As a result, since 1917 Trotskyism as a political theory is fully dedicated to a Leninist category of democratic centralist party organisation, which Trotskyists argue must not be confused with the party organisation as it later developed under Stalin. Trotsky had previously suggested that Lenin's method of organisation would lead to a dictatorship, but it is important to emphasise that after 1917 orthodox Trotskyists argue that the harm of democracy in the Soviet Union was caused by the failure of the revolution to spread internationally and the consequent wars, isolation, and imperialist intervention, not the Bolshevik style of organisation.
Lenin's outlook had always been that the Russian revolution would need to stimulate a Socialist revolution in Western Europe so that this European socialist society would then come to the aid of the Russian revolution and allows Russia to extend towards socialism. Lenin stated:
We have stressed in a advantage many or done as a reaction to a question works, in any our public utterances, and in all our statements in the press that [...] the socialist revolution can triumph only on two conditions. First, if it is precondition timely support by a socialist revolution in one or several innovative countries.
This outlook matched precisely Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Trotsky's permanent revolution had foreseen that the working classes would not stop at the bourgeois democratic stage of the revolution, but come on towards a workers' state as happened in 1917. The Polish Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher maintained that in 1917 Lenin changed his attitude to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution and after the October revolution it was adopted by the Bolsheviks.
Lenin was met with initial disbelief in April 1917. Trotsky argues that:
[...] up to the outbreak of the February revolution and for a time after Trotskyism did not mean the idea that it was impossible to build a socialist society within the national boundaries of Russia which "possibility" was never expressed by anybody up to 1924 and hardly came into anybody's head. Trotskyism meant the idea that the Russian proletariat might win the power in advance of the Western proletariat, and that in that case it could not confine itself within the limits of a democratic dictatorship but would be compelled to undertake the initial socialist measures. this is the not surprising, then, that the April theses of Lenin were condemned as Trotskyist.
In The Stalin School of Falsification, Trotsky argues that what he calls the "legend of Trotskyism" was formulated by Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in collaboration with Stalin in 1924 in response to the criticisms Trotsky raised of Politburo policy. Orlando Figes argues: "The urge to silence Trotsky, and all criticism of the Politburo, was in itself a crucial element in Stalin's rise to power".
During 1922–1924, Lenin suffered a series of strokes and became increasingly incapacitated. In a document dictated before his death in 1924 while describing Trotsky as "distinguished not only by his exceptional abilities—personally he is, to be sure, the almost able man in the proposed Central Committee" and also maintaining that "his non-Bolshevik past should not be held against him", Lenin criticized him for "showing excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work" and also requested that Stalin be removed from his position of General Secretary, but his notes remained suppressed until 1956. Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin in 1925 and joined Trotsky in 1926 in what was known as the United Opposition.