One of the biggest issues that every new communist faces is Trotskyism or Leninism. While Trotsky himself, after the death of Lenin, attempted to position himself as the true inheritor of Lenin’s legacy and the most loyal Bolshevik, the fact of the matter is that Trotsky only joined the Bolsheviks on the eve of the October Revolution. Throughout his early political career, he was a middle-roader between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The fact of the matter is that Trotsky, throughout his whole career, was an opportunist, an anti-Bolshevik, and never very consistent in his ideology. Nowhere can this be seen better than through a quick study of Trotsky’s life.

Trotsky was born in 1879 as the fifth child of a somewhat affluent Jewish family in Tsarist Russia. During his early life, he joined the Narodniks, an adventurous socialist movement in Russia, rejecting his family’s objections to his radical politics and even moving to a gardener’s hut in a Narodnik commune for a brief period of his youth. However, in the late 1800s, Trotsky began to become consumed by Marxism. By the early 1900s, he had made several connections with communists all across Russia, including his first with Lenin. In 1902, at the invitation of Lenin, Trotsky began to contribute to Lenin’s newspaper Iskra. However, just because Trotsky and Lenin worked together on this newspaper doesn’t mean he was Lenin’s loyal follower!

At the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Party in 1903, when Lenin famously clashed with what would then become the Mensheviks over the creation of a disciplined vanguard, Trotsky sided with the opposition against Lenin! He voted against most of Lenin’s proposals, such as those for Iskra. Therefore, at the outset of the split between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks during this congress, Trotsky was firmly on the side of the Mensheviks. As Trotsky stated during the congress meeting, Lenin “…With the energy and talent peculiar to him, assumed the role of the party’s disorganizer.”

Trotsky would even claim that Lenin wanted to create a dictatorship, saying, “Lenin’s methods lead to this: the Party organization at first substitutes itself for the Party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee…. A proletariat capable of exercising its dictatorship over society will not tolerate any dictatorship over it.” In addition to this, Trotsky would call Lenin a Thermidorian reactionary, a socialist opportunist, and would describe Lenin’s attempts to create a disciplined vanguard party as a vulgar farce. Are these the words of the world’s greatest Leninist? I don’t think so!

In 1903, Trotsky and the Mensheviks would orchestrate a coup of the newspaper Iskra, with Trotsky quickly becoming the primary writer of anti-Bolshevik attacks in the new newspaper. Lenin and his faction were kicked out of Iskra! The very next year, in 1904, Trotsky published a book attacking Lenin called Our Political Tasks. In it, he described Lenin as “Evil-minded and morally repulsive suspiciousness, a shallow caricature of tragic Jacobinist intolerance, must be liquidated now at all costs, otherwise the Party is threatened with moral and theoretical decay.” As you can see, despite Trotskyists attempting to gloss over this history, Trotsky and Lenin had very ugly theoretical disputes on multiple occasions. One of the most uncomfortable for Trotskyists is Lenin’s response to Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution.

In 1905, Trotsky published his first early draft of the theory of Permanent Revolution. But to understand his theory, you have to understand the Marxist debates that were happening at the time. The basics of the Menshevik-Bolshevik split were simply that the Mensheviks believed in the orthodox Marxist idea that a socialist revolution within Russia—which was still a peasant-majority, semi-feudal economy—was impossible. Therefore, their plan was simply to support a capitalist bourgeois revolution and help the Russian bourgeoisie gain power. Lenin, on the other hand, proposed that a workers’ revolution was entirely possible in Russia, especially if led by the working class in alliance with the peasantry. Trotsky’s line would be somewhere in the middle of these two positions.

Trotsky’s line would be that the Russian revolution could only happen with the proletariat class, and that the peasants of Russia were not a revolutionary force whatsoever. Did Lenin agree with this assessment? No. Upon reading Trotsky’s first early draft of Permanent Revolution, Lenin replied: “This cannot be . . . This cannot be, because only a revolutionary dictatorship relying on the overwhelming majority of the people can be at all durable. . . The Russian proletariat, however, at present constitutes a minority of the population in Russia. It can become the great overwhelming majority only if it combines with the mass of semi-proletarians, semi-small proprietors, i.e., with the mass of the petty-bourgeois urban and rural poor. And such a composition of the social basis of the possible and desirable revolutionary-democratic dictatorship will, of course, find its reflection in the composition of the revolutionary government. With such a composition, the participation or even the predominance of the most diversified representatives of revolutionary democracy in such a government will be inevitable.”

Essentially, Lenin completely disagreed with Trotsky’s assertions, pointing out that Permanent Revolution would be tantamount to skipping the peasant movement and instead attempting a seizure of power without the much-needed support of a class that made up the majority of Russia’s population. In practice, this would have denied the Russian revolution its most dependable ally and set the Bolsheviks up for complete failure!

Well, if Trotsky is Lenin’s true inheritor, he must have changed his views afterward, especially after Lenin pointed out the issues with his idea, right? Nope. Trotsky would even go so far as to call Lenin’s slogans of the peasant-worker alliance “algebraic,” saying, “But Lenin’s old formula did not settle in advance the problem of what the reciprocal relations would be between the proletariat and the peasantry within the revolutionary bloc. In other words, the formula deliberately retained a certain algebraic quality, which had to make way for more precise arithmetical quantities in the process of historical experience.” But to deny this, as Trotsky does, is to deny Leninism itself!

In 1905, Trotsky returned to Russia after exile, finding the country in the middle of turmoil as the Bloody Sunday massacre had ignited the Russian working classes. He quickly joined a Menshevik group in St. Petersburg and put forward the idea that the time was now to impose a workers’ government. To this, Lenin humorously declared, “Trotskyism: ‘No Tsar, but a workers’ government.’ This surely is wrong. There is a petty bourgeoisie; it cannot be ignored.” As you can see, Trotsky had an awful habit of adventurism and opportunism. In 1905, Lenin laid out the Bolshevik line for the revolution, stating that the working class, in alliance with the peasantry, would implement a liberal capitalist revolution in Russia and then overtake it to implement a socialist revolution and a workers’ state. In all of this, the working class—and not the bourgeoisie of Russia—would be in the driver’s seat because Lenin believed that if the workers’ movement was strong enough, they could overtake the bourgeoisie. The Mensheviks, however, rejected this entirely. They believed that the Russian bourgeoisie should be the drivers of the Russian revolution and that the communists should simply help them gain power.

In 1905, striking workers in Saint Petersburg, in a revolutionary fervor, created a soviet (workers’ council), with Trotsky and the Mensheviks coming to play a leading role. To Lenin, the Soviet was a perfect opportunity to take down the Tsarist government, as he saw it as a fighting organization. Trotsky, as head of the Soviet, however, would toe the Menshevik line, which meant dampening the revolutionary enthusiasm of the workers. Trotsky regularly called off general strikes to allow the Menshevik line—that the Russian bourgeoisie should helm the revolution—to prevail. As the head of the Soviet, Trotsky remained a firm Menshevik with no desire to overthrow the Tsar or bring the socialist revolution to its completion. Finally, when it looked like the Soviet was going to be crushed, Trotsky called for preparing an armed uprising, but by then, it was too late. The Soviet was crushed by Tsarist troops. In another disastrous move, when the Bolsheviks in the Soviet finally commandeered it for all-out open fighting with Tsarist troops, Trotsky and the Mensheviks actually ended up letting Tsarist troops into St. Petersburg, which crushed the Bolshevik rebellion. The leaders of the Soviet were ultimately tried, and Trotsky escaped to Finland in 1907.

Around this time, Trotsky began to finalize his ideas of Permanent Revolution. He drew inspiration from an address delivered by Marx and Engels. However, Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, Lenin’s Permanent Revolution, and Marx and Engels’ Permanent Revolution were all different ideas. For Marx and Engels, Permanent Revolution meant that “While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible and with the achievement at most of the above demand, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been displaced from domination, until the proletariat has conquered state power… Their (i.e., the German workers’ –Ed.) battle-cry must be: the permanent revolution.” For Lenin, Permanent Revolution also meant something similar to Marx and Engels. Lenin also called his theory “Continuous Revolution” to distinguish it from Trotsky’s. As Lenin wrote, “From the democratic revolution we shall at once, according to the degree of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass over to the socialist revolution. We stand for continuous revolution.” Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, however, was entirely different, as it meant:

The revolution could only happen with the industrial proletariat (the peasantry was a temporary ally for the revolution but not a permanent one).

The working class of Russia cannot establish socialism because the peasants will immediately reject it and begin fighting against it. Therefore, the only way to establish socialism is if workers’ revolutions win in Western Europe: “Left to its own resources, the working class of Russia will inevitably be crushed by the counterrevolution the moment the peasantry turns its back on it. It will have no alternative but to link the fate of its political rule and, hence, the fate of the whole Russian revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in Europe.”

Therefore, socialism couldn’t be built in Russia unless the Russian working class used its state power to expand the revolution to Western Europe.

Lenin himself opposed Trotsky’s “absurdly ‘left’ theory of ‘permanent revolution,’” as he would call it. Lenin even criticized Trotsky’s assertions, stating, “Trotsky . . . repeats his ‘original’ theory of 1905 and refuses to stop and think why, for ten whole years, life passed by this beautiful theory. Trotsky’s original theory takes from the Bolsheviks their call for a decisive revolutionary struggle and for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, and from the Mensheviks it takes the ‘repudiation’ of the role of the peasantry. . . . Trotsky is in fact helping the liberal labor politicians in Russia who by the ‘repudiation’ of the role of the peasantry mean refusal to arouse the peasants to revolution.”

Another issue with Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution was that it completely contradicted Lenin’s conceptions of imperialism, which saw that, because of an imperialist world system and economy, the contradictions inherent in it would cause proletarian revolution to break out in the weakest links of world imperialism. This meant that proletarian revolution would inevitably take place in a few single countries in the weakest spots of global capitalism.

As Lenin himself stated, “As a separate slogan, however [says Lenin] the slogan United States of the World would hardly be a correct one, first because it merges with Socialism, second, because it may wrongly be interpreted to mean that the victory of Socialism in a single country is impossible; it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to others. . . . Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of Socialism is possible first in a few or even in one single capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organized its own Socialist production, would rise against the rest of the capitalist world, attract to itself the oppressed classes of other countries, raise revolts among them against the capitalists; and in the event of necessity come out even with armed force against the exploiting classes and their states.”

Trotsky’s theories would therefore become idealist and even self-defeating, as he believed that without a revolution in Europe, Russia could not have a revolution. It all hinged on Trotsky’s flawed analysis of the revolutionary potential of the peasant classes: “Left to its own forces, the working class of Russia will inevitably be crushed by the counter-revolution the moment the peasantry will turn away from it.” For Trotsky, the Soviet Union’s building of socialism was impossible on its own.

In 1907, Trotsky moved to Berlin and immediately made connections not with the left-wing social democrats like Rosa Luxemburg, but with the right-wing ones. While in Germany, he continued to publish harsh attacks against the Bolsheviks. In 1910, within the Russian Communists, a group of Bolsheviks formed a nationalist faction called the Vperyod group. Lenin intensely criticized it, and one of the leaders of the Vperyod group was, of course, our good friend Trotsky. Trotsky, in fact, throughout his whole life, was infamous for factionalism and breaking party lines, as Lenin declared: “Trotsky, however, has never had any ‘physiognomy’ at all; the only thing he does have is a habit of changing sides, of skipping from the liberals to the Marxists and back again, of mouthing scraps of catchwords and bombastic parrot phrases.”

In addition, in 1910, a tendency known as liquidationism led to some very ugly clashes within the Russian communists. Liquidationism essentially meant downplaying the working-class struggle. The Bolsheviks were deeply opposed to it, while the Mensheviks favored it. Alongside the Mensheviks pushing for liquidationism was none other than Trotsky.

During this time, Trotsky also began mass expulsions of Bolsheviks from the central committee of the Social Democrats, stating, “Lenin’s circle, which wants to place itself above the Party, will find itself outside it.” Lenin, during this episode, even went so far as to compare Trotsky to Judas. I guess that would make Lenin Jesus—which I support!

In 1912, when the Bolsheviks, who were still part of the Russian Social Democratic Party alongside the Mensheviks, attempted to move for more independence, Trotsky immediately created a bloc within the Social Democrats to crush this growing movement. As Lenin commented on Trotsky’s actions: “Trotsky’s resolution… expresses the very aim of the Golos group—to destroy the central bodies so detested by the liquidators, and with them, the Party as an organization.”

The most seditious bloc created by Trotsky in 1912 against the party came in the form of the August Bloc, in which he combined all the major elements in the Social Democratic movement against the Bolsheviks. The August Bloc attempted to stifle all revolutionary potential within the working-class movements in the State Duma, instead opting for as much reformist politics as possible. Throughout the 1910s, it is obvious that Trotsky was a factional wrecker to the Bolsheviks—a bane of their existence, a Menshevik, an opportunist, and a damn counter-revolutionary. Trotskyist factionalism didn’t just stop with his death, as even his modern-day followers continue his legacy of wrecking party unity. As Harpal Brar put it: “Each of the milliard Trotskyist organizations claims to be the official Fourth International and describes every other Trotskyist organization as a fake—a hilarious phenomenon reminiscent of The Life of Brian.”

Where was Stalin, the supposed “fake Bolshevik” who ruined Lenin’s legacy, during this time? Of course, the “fake Bolshevik” Stalin was right next to Lenin in all of these plans, even being elected head of the Central Committee. On Trotsky’s tendency to support factions within the Bolsheviks, Lenin declared: “Therefore, to attribute our splits to the influence of the intelligentsia, to the immaturity of the proletariat, etc., is a childishly naive repetition of liberal fairy tales.”

In 1913, when discussing the right for nations to secede and the right to self-determination, Lenin called out Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky’s reactionary views, stating: “In her anxiety not to ‘assist’ the nationalistic bourgeoisie of Poland, Rosa Luxemburg, by her denial of the right to secession in the programme of the Russian Marxists, is in fact assisting the Great Russian Black Hundreds.”

With the outbreak of World War I, Trotsky put forward one of the strangest ideas he ever had: that national liberation was now useless, and Europe should combine into a single state called the United States of Europe. Lenin, of course, completely rejected this assertion, arguing that the United States of Europe didn’t help socialism and implied that socialist revolution could only occur in the highly developed economies of Europe. During the course of World War I, Trotsky proposed several ideas that Lenin disagreed with. Firstly, he proposed a slogan of peace for World War I, but Lenin was adamant that the right decision was to turn the war into a civil war. His second slogan, “neither victory nor defeat,” once again came under fire from Lenin, who declared it akin to “defense of the fatherland.” Ultimately, to Lenin, it did not matter which side won World War I; their job was to turn Russia’s war into a civil war.

In early 1917, Trotsky was deported to America. Arriving in New York, he immediately began working on a newspaper with a few Bolsheviks and, as always, formed a bloc within the newspaper. In response, Lenin was furious: “Trotsky arrived, and this scoundrel at once ganged up with the Right wing of Novy Mir against the Left Zimmerwaldists!! That’s it!! That’s Trotsky for you!! Always true to himself—twists, swindles, poses as a Left, helps the Right, so long as he can.”

In 1917, after exile, Lenin returned to Russia and issued his April Theses. The contents of the April Theses are not too important here, but when Trotsky and his faction began pushing their Permanent Revolution nonsense—claiming that socialism could not be built in Russia—Lenin snapped back: “Comrade Rykov (part of the Trotsky bloc) says that Socialism must first come from other countries with greater industrial development. But this is not so. It is hard to tell who will begin and who will end. This is not Marxism, but a parody of Marxism.” That same year, after the February Revolution, Trotsky joined the Interboroughites, a centrist group that only joined the Bolsheviks in late 1917. Trotsky finally became a Bolshevik after a lifetime of anti-Bolshevik opposition and opportunism.

As Olgin noted: “Out of a period of thirty-three years, he was connected with the Bolsheviks for only six years. Even during that time, he had a great number of violent disagreements with them. In fact, there was hardly a Leninist policy to which he wholeheartedly agreed.”

How did Trotsky end up in the Bolsheviks if he was such a staunch opponent and critic of Leninism for almost his entire political career? Ultimately, it was because Trotsky ran out of ways to oppose the Leninists. He was forced multiple times to admit that his left opposition was wrong and that the Leninist analysis was correct. However, even though Trotsky was temporarily able to hide his splits with the party and suppress these theoretical disputes for a while, they eventually came bubbling up to the surface once again.

Just because Trotsky became part of the Bolsheviks didn’t mean he followed Lenin loyally. For example, when it came time for the new Russian government to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany, Trotsky, as the chief negotiator and Commissar for Foreign Affairs, refused to accept what he called a humiliating treaty, clashing heavily with Lenin over signing it. As Lenin wrote: “If you are unable to adapt yourself, if you are not inclined to crawl on your belly in the mud, you are not a revolutionary but a chatterbox; and I propose this, not because I like it, but because we have no other road, because history has not been kind enough to bring the revolution to maturity everywhere simultaneously.” Trotsky’s hesitancy on the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and refusal to listen to Lenin’s orders led to Russia accepting the treaty on worse terms than if they had agreed to it initially.

During the NEP, when the Soviet Union was relaxing its War Communism measures, Trotsky forced a debate on making trade unions state enterprises—something the Bolshevik Party could not address at such a vital time. When he didn’t get his way, he walked out of the 10th Party Congress meeting in 1921, going outside and starting a small group of supporters to fight the Central Committee. Lenin, during this humiliating episode of party factionalism, was forced to pass a resolution forbidding the formation of factions within the party.

With Lenin’s health in severe decline, effectively removing him from politics, Trotsky stepped up his factionalism. He called for the utmost party democracy, which, in effect, “stripped of its Trotskyite verbiage, meant the right to form factional groupings.” A group of 46 followers of Trotsky also issued a manifesto—known as the Statement of 46—to the same effect. Trotsky also began claiming that, as an old Bolshevik, he observed that the new party members were causing a degeneration within the party—a ridiculous statement and complete projection on his part.

Trotskyism, in the later years of his time in the party, ultimately became a source of opposition and counter-revolution for all the classes that had opposed the dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky even admitted that partial membership of his bloc had been made up of “the tail end of all sorts of dissatisfied, ill-equipped, and even chagrined careerists.” Even one of the greatest Trotskyist historians, Isaac Deutscher, admitted about Trotsky’s counter-revolutionary base that Trotsky “automatically attracted the spurious sympathy of many who had hitherto hated him. As he made his appearance in the streets of Moscow [in the spring of 1924], he was spontaneously applauded by crowds in which idealist communists rubbed shoulders with Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and the new bourgeoisie of the NEP—by all those indeed who, for diverse reasons, hoped for a change.”

Why was Trotsky kicked out of the Bolsheviks? By January 1925, Trotsky was on thin ice with the rest of the party. He was removed from his council position and given a stern warning for his constant factionalism. However, this warning didn’t stop Trotsky. Finding the most opportunist elements within the Bolsheviks, Trotsky allied with party members Zinoviev and Kamenev, both of whom were defeatists who believed that socialism could not be built in the USSR. Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had previously been stark opponents of Trotsky, joined in the alliance. This bloc, called the New Opposition, began organizing demonstrations at factories—a disgusting violation of both party discipline and a dangerous act in the young Soviet Union. Eventually, this led to the members of the New Opposition apologizing to the party in 1926. However, their public apology and denunciation of factionalism turned out to be a farce, as the New Opposition had been secretly creating an illegal party without the Bolsheviks’ knowledge.

This illegal underground party had its own members, newspapers, etc. In the late 1920s, after being discovered by the party, this led to the complete expulsion of the opposition bloc, including Trotsky, from important positions in the party. Finally, in October 1927, after multiple attempts of promising they were not forming factions—only to form factions and subvert the Soviet system in general—Trotsky and his opposition bloc were kicked out of the Bolshevik Party. The opposition bloc was never that popular anyway, with the Bolsheviks’ ideas receiving 724,000 votes to Trotsky’s paltry 4,000 in the last meeting before he was kicked to the curb! Lmao!

Not done with factionalism, Trotsky, while still in Russia, organized protests the very next month, which were quickly shut down by counter-protesters who supported the Bolsheviks. For all of this counter-revolutionary behavior, Trotsky was deported first to Kazakhstan and then out of the Soviet Union entirely in 1929. The Bolsheviks had ultimately been too kind to him, even allowing former members of his faction to rejoin the party.

Ever since, the Trotsky split has been described through the lens of personal politics, such as Stalin’s rudeness or a personal dispute between the two leaders. However, fundamentally, the Trotsky split was due to Trotskyism being counter-revolutionary and opposed to Leninism itself, with many of Trotsky’s actions coming into contention with his fellow Bolsheviks long before Stalin was even in power. Ultimately, Trotsky’s fight, as you can see, was never with Stalin—it was with Leninism and Bolshevism itself.

After being kicked out of the country, Trotsky became a harbinger of doom for the USSR and the infant socialist experiment. As Harpal Brar noted, “His statements between 1923 and 1940 were to deny all possibility of building socialism in the USSR and thus to undermine the confidence of the Soviet proletariat in building a new society by its own efforts if the world revolution failed to come to its rescue.” When socialism in one country repeatedly proved itself to be perfectly viable, Trotsky often ignored that his doom predictions turned out to be completely wrong!

Trotsky’s first prediction of the inevitable failure of the USSR came during the NEP period, where he claimed that the NEP—a policy created by Lenin—was leading to the creation of counter-revolutionary tendencies among the peasantry, which would restore capitalism. This once again showed his completely undialectical views on the revolutionary potential of the peasants. However, when the USSR finally ditched the free-market NEP for the Five-Year Plans and began building socialism, Trotsky did a complete 180 on his positions. Instead, he now called for a return to a more controlled NEP with a slow transition to socialism, saying, “The regulation of the market itself must depend upon the tendencies that are brought about through its medium.”

Trotsky, who had previously supported collectivization under the NEP and the complete elimination of the kulak class, now supported the kulaks and opposed collectivization when the USSR began implementing it. He called for an end to the Five-Year Plans! Hypocrisy! As Stalin rightfully pointed out, Trotskyists had now joined the right bloc against the USSR, calling for the dismantling of socialism and the return of collective farms to private capitalism.

Trotsky’s ideas even found fans among the biggest enemies of socialism, like Joseph Goebbels, who said, “What Trotsky is saying about the Soviet state. It is no longer a Socialist State but a state dominated by a parasitic bureaucracy, living on the Russian people.”

This also flew directly in the face of Lenin’s own plans for the NEP. Despite the Trotskyites’ attempts to declare that socialism without world revolution was impossible to build in the USSR, Lenin, in a speech to the Moscow Soviet in 1922, had declared of the NEP:

“We have brought socialism into everyday life and must here see how matters stand. That is the task of our day, the task of our epoch. Permit me to conclude by expressing confidence that difficult as this task may be, new as it may be compared with our previous task and numerous as the difficulties may be that it entails, we shall all—not in a day, BUT IN A FEW YEARS—all of us together fulfill it whatever the cost so that NEP Russia will become socialist Russia.”

After being kicked out, Trotsky also began openly calling for the overthrow of the Soviet government, hoping it would magically create the “true” socialist government. By the 1930s, all of Trotsky’s predictions had failed. The USSR was as strong as ever, and its socialist economy under the Five-Year Plans was a wonder for all the world to see! Trotsky’s predictions didn’t come true whatsoever.

Another one of Trotsky’s bad predictions was that World War II would be the death knell of the Soviet government—that its leaders would lose their ability to govern during the war, fall to the Nazis, and that a capitalist revolution would occur in Russia. None of these things ever happened.

Ultimately, history showed that the Stalin line was the correct one: “The war could not have been won without the intensive industrialization of Russia, and of her eastern provinces in particular. Nor could it have been won without the collectivization of large numbers of farms. The muzhik of 1930, who had never handled a tractor or any other machine, would have been of little use in modern war. Collectivized farming, with its machine-tractor stations, had been the peasants’ preparatory school for mechanized warfare. The rapid raising of the average standard of education had also enabled the Red Army to draw on a considerable reserve of intelligent officers and men. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us—so Stalin had spoken exactly ten years before Hitler set out to conquer Russia. His words, when they were recalled now, could not but impress people as a prophecy brilliantly fulfilled, as a most timely call to action. And, indeed, a few years’ delay in the modernization of Russia might have made all the difference between victory and defeat.”

Trotsky’s predictions about the USSR wouldn’t be the only awful ones he had. With every step of the Chinese Revolution, Trotsky would oppose it. He would call the Chinese Soviets “red army bandits.” When the Chinese were temporarily forced to retreat, he would end up declaring the revolution done for and claim that Stalin had ruined it. Within China, Trotsky’s undialectical views on the peasantry would once again haunt his poor analysis. While the peasants of China were essentially the leading force of its revolution, in 1920, about two decades before Mao Zedong and the CPC would lead the peasants to victory, Trotsky would proclaim:

“Numerically, the Chinese peasantry constitutes an even more overwhelming mass than the Russian peasants; but crushed in the vice of world contradictions upon the solution of which in one way or another its fate depends, the Chinese peasantry is even less capable than the Russian of playing a leading role. It is no accident that there has not yet appeared a single Chinese Marxist who could define the role of the Chinese peasantry in the revolution, and therefore no attempt has been made to elaborate this problem in the Marxist way.”

While Trotsky could not predict the failure of his own ideas, his inability to see the power of the peasants within China led him to disastrous conclusions. Later on, Trotsky would again engage in the same type of counter-revolutionary critique of the Chinese Revolution as it grew stronger. Still, none of his predictions for China came true.

This would be proven wholly incorrect through the scientific laboratory that is history and practice. Trotsky believed that what was occurring in China wasn’t a revolution but an attempt by Chinese capitalists to protect their interests!

While the Chinese Communists were building an alliance with the Kuomintang to free their country from colonialism, Trotsky would propose leaving both their vital alliance with the Kuomintang and breaking their alliance with the Chinese national bourgeoisie. Instead, during this time, Trotsky would advocate organizing Soviets to take power.

That’s not how revolution has worked historically, however. First, nationalist liberations have happened, in which nationalist capitalists of countries formed alliances with communists. After overthrowing colonialism, the communists struggled against their national bourgeoisie and won. Trotsky wanted to skip that first step of national liberation. Ultimately, by calling for Soviets to be formed so early on in the Chinese revolution—when the communists weren’t even done decolonizing their country—Trotsky:

“Wanted to skip the historically necessary stage of the revolution and proceed forthwith to Soviets as the dictatorship of the proletariat. That would have been the task of such organs? They would have been a government directed against the national government. They would have aroused the peasants against them because the peasants would have seen in the attempt to disrupt the revolutionary Kuomintang, which they still trusted, an attempt to interfere with the agrarian revolution. They would not have been able to build a Soviet army because the overwhelming majority of the peasants and a large section of the workers believed in Chiang Kai-shek, who at that time was a revolutionary. They would not have been able to undermine Chiang Kai-shek’s army because that army was engaged in a victorious revolution. They would not have strengthened the Communist Party because the Communist Party would have isolated itself from the revolutionary masses. As to the Communists coming into power in a considerable part of China, they succeeded in doing so just because they did not pose in the eyes of the masses as disrupters of the national revolution but showed to the masses from their own experiences that Chiang Kai-shek was a traitor. The slogan of Soviets sounds revolutionary, but under given conditions its use when impossible to realize would have been an act of counter-revolution. It would have crippled the revolution.” (Harpal Brar)

When the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party broke with each other, Trotsky, of course, did a complete 180, going from advocating a break with the alliance to telling the Chinese communists to work to form an alliance with the Kuomintang! Trotsky genuinely could not understand a revolution going from petite-bourgeoisie capitalist to proletarian, which is what happened in Russia with the revolutions of 1905 (petit bourgeois) and 1917 (proletarian). He instead called for the creation of Soviets when the Chinese hadn’t even completed their revolution of 1905—skipping entire steps!

By 1929, Trotsky was saying that the Communist Party of China was doomed to fail and that China no longer had a revolutionary situation. Two decades later, of course, the Chinese revolution would win.

Trotsky’s advice to the Communists of Germany and Austria would be equally as bad, with him advocating for a united front with the social democrats at a time WHEN THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS WERE OPENLY ALLYING WITH FASCISTS! Ultimately, Trotsky took a Menshevik attitude towards the social democrats of Austria and Germany, believing them not to be natural allies of fascism when, in fact, they were.

When a united front between Communists and Social Democrats was created in France, the French Trotskyists would split from it to create their own faction, going against their own dogma for the sake of factionalism.

There is also substantial evidence that allegedly points toward Trotsky’s collaboration with the Japanese and Nazis during WWII to form a counter-bloc against the USSR. In June of 1937, the USSR was in dire straits. Investigations within the party had revealed a plot to overthrow the government, with many of those investigated openly admitting to being part of a Trotskyite plot. Likewise, within the Spanish Civil War, the Trotskyite faction would begin a counter-revolutionary May Days revolt. It was in all of this that, in June of that year, Trotsky would send a telegraph to the USSR’s Central Executive Committee reading:

“POLICY IS LEADING TO COMPLETE COLLAPSE INTERNAL AS WELL AS EXTERNAL STOP ONLY SALVATION IS RADICAL TURN TOWARD SOVIET DEMOCRACY BEGINNING WITH OPEN REVIEW OF THE LAST TRIALS STOP ALONG THIS ROAD I OFFER COMPLETE SUPPORT – TROTSKY”

This message, calling for an immediate counter-revolution, would be intercepted by the NKVD. During the Great Purges and trials, a Trotskyist plot was also revealed to the world through collaborators like Bukharin. Now, traditional historians have often discounted this plot as a complete show trial implanted into Bukharin through torture. However, there are some major issues with this hypothesis:

We don’t have any evidence that Bukharin was tortured. In fact, the foremost historical expert on Bukharin believes he wasn’t.

Frinovsky, the co-collaborator of Yezhov (the man who would be discovered to be a wrecker and who was heading the Great Purges wrongfully on purpose), admitted that while he had certainly tortured prisoners, Bukharin never received it.

There wasn’t a need to torture Bukharin because enough evidence had been gathered for him to not be able to plead anything but guilty—evidence gathered privately that was vitally secret due to security threats but shown to Bukharin.

Likewise, Jules Humbret Druz, a close friend of Bukharin, after having broken up as friends with him and moved to Switzerland in the late 1970s, openly admitted in his biography that Bukharin had planned to kill Stalin. Living far beyond the Soviet Union in safety years after Bukharin had been executed and the trials had been over, he had no reasons to lie!

Pierre Borue, a leading Trotskyist biographer who had access to his Harvard archives, would even come to the conclusion that Trotsky had formed a bloc before 1932 but assumed that it had dissolved afterward. But even the existence of a bloc before 1932 still corroborates Bukharin’s testimony that he formed an opposition bloc with Trotsky to subvert the Soviet government in a conspiracy. Likewise, in 1937, Japanese General Hajime Sugiyama revealed that he was in contact with an opposition bloc within the USSR. Whether it was Trotsky’s bloc or not, we cannot verify. Other evidence of the existence of an opposition bloc was found in the Czech archives, with a document from a Nazi German ambassador stating that Hitler was in contact with a high-ranking general to form an opposition.

In 1937, Trotsky was interviewed by the United States in his home in Mexico by the Dewey Commission to see if he was collaborating with Japan or Nazi Germany. However, there were several discrepancies in Trotsky’s answers. He lied several times.

For example, within the Dewey Commission, Trotsky vehemently denied ever having talked to anyone charged in the opposition trials in the USSR. However, “it is now clear that in 1932, he sent secret personal letters to former leading oppositionists Karl Radek, G. Sokolnikov, E. Preobrazhensky, and others (all charged as forming a Trotskyist group)” (Grover Furr).

Likewise, Soviet official E.S. Goltsman, a former Trotskyist, would also receive correspondence from Trotsky. Now, the contents of these letters have been lost to time, but the fact that they were even sent and Trotsky lied about sending them leaves some major questions! We know about these letters that have long since been purged because:

“Sedov’s (Trotsky’s first son) address book contained the exile addresses of Trotskyists in the USSR. Trotsky Papers 15741. The Exile Correspondence section of the Trotsky Papers contains copies of such letters.” (Grover Furr)

Another glaring lie in the Dewey Commission was that of the Bristol Hotel. We know from testimony that Goltsman, the former Trotskyist Soviet official, had met Sedov, Trotsky’s son, in 1932. However, Trotsky, within the Dewey Commission, claimed that the Bristol Hotel had burned down in 1917—something that was a blatant lie.

Ultimately, we do have very strong evidence of Trotsky forming a plot against the Soviet government before 1932. But it isn’t unreasonable to assume that this opposition bloc never stopped or dissolved, given all the second-hand accounts and discrepancies in Trotsky’s answers.

The last big piece of Trotskyist propaganda has been Lenin’s last testament. Lenin’s last testament, supposedly written by Lenin himself, declared that Stalin was rude and dictatorial and should have been removed from the central committee immediately. However, there are several inconsistencies with Lenin’s last testament that question its legitimacy and whether it was actually written by Lenin or not.

Firstly, Lenin loved Stalin. In 1922, when the letter was proposed, in the same year Lenin himself declared for the People’s Commissar of Nationalities: “I don’t think Comrade Preobrazhensky could suggest any better candidate than comrade Stalin.” In fact, the year the testament was released, it was Lenin himself who had pushed the Bolsheviks to elect Stalin as the General Secretary of the Central Committee.

In addition to that, something else that doesn’t make sense within the document is how much Lenin praises Trotsky, whereas, as I have shown all across this article, Lenin was not a big fan of the guy.

Even in 1922, the year the letter was supposedly written by Lenin, Lenin and Trotsky were heavily butting heads, with Trotsky refusing to be appointed to the Deputy of the Council of People’s Commissars. In fact, that same year, Lenin would have Stalin officially pass a resolution expressing severe disapproval of Trotsky for his refusal to listen to party commands! If the letter was genuinely Lenin’s, he must’ve had a complete 180 in the couple of months since that moment.

One of the latter struggles of the USSR, while Lenin was alive, was the issue of the Georgian nationalists. While the Bolshevik line was to simply have Georgia and its neighboring countries become one nation to overcome ethnic tensions, a minority of the Georgian communists refused and essentially went rogue in the party. This Georgian nationalist majority in the party would, of course, form a bloc with Trotsky. Lenin very heavily dismissed the Georgian nationalists and their attempts at subverting the party. It is then super odd that, in Lenin’s last testament, Lenin suddenly became very pro-Georgian nationalist after literally commanding the leaders of the movement just a year before to step down from the central committee!

It makes absolutely no sense why Lenin would change his position so fast unless the final testament was forged.

By the time Lenin’s last testament was written in December of 1922 and January of 1923, Lenin had suffered a series of strokes and was not doing well mentally or physically. During his final years, Lenin was also surrounded by actors like his wife, Krupskaya, who despised Stalin and was on the Trotsky side of the Georgian nationalist debate.

Krupskaya was the only source for Lenin from the inside out in his paralyzed late state and, therefore, chose the political information that came to Lenin. Even a Krupskaya biographer had to admit, “She may have influenced Lenin’s attitude towards Stalin, intentionally or otherwise.” Ultimately, it was Krupskaya who handed in the testament to the Bolsheviks in 1924, a couple of months after Lenin’s death. Stalin would present it to the Congress, and they would discuss it. Stalin, in light of the letter, even offered to step down as General Secretary and was voted in to stay, including by Trotsky himself. The very next year, again, Stalin offered to resign and once again wasn’t allowed to.

We can, therefore, conclude that Lenin’s last testament was ultimately very heavily biased by his wife Krupskaya, who either forged the letter completely or, as Lenin’s only ears and eyes into politics, heavily swayed the information he was getting in order to get her political lines met, such as the Georgian Nationalists’ demands.

In conclusion, Trotsky was a wrecker, an opportunist, a man without a consistent ideological line, a factionalist, and an anti-Leninist. Trotsky and his followers’ claims that he was the ‘True Bolshevik’ are immediately thrown into the trash bin with even the slightest cursory look at his career and ideological divides with Lenin himself. His entire movement consists of nothing but right-wing opportunists and wreckers of socialism with ultra-left language to hide it.

Sources:

⁠https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr10.htm⁠ ⁠https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/ci/publications/Leninism-or-Trotskyism-USA-1925.pdf⁠ ⁠https://www.marxists.org/archive/olgin/1935/trotskyism/index.htm⁠ ⁠https://redstarpublishers.org/BrarTrotLeninism.pdf⁠ (I am aware of Harpal Brar’s issues and do not condone him however this is a well written document) ⁠ https://library.gift/main/B66B6C49F1B1B5B402183EA67D61B063⁠ ⁠https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/01/18.htm⁠ ⁠https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr-index.htm⁠ ⁠https://espressostalinist.com/marxism-leninism-versus-revisionism/trotskyism/⁠ ⁠https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/11_19.htm⁠ ⁠https://espressostalinist.com/2015/08/01/revisionism-in-russia-trotsky-against-the-bolsheviks-part-one-to-1914/⁠ ⁠https://espressostalinist.com/2017/04/02/revisionism-in-russia-trotsky-against-the-bolsheviks-part-two-1914-1917/⁠ ⁠https://www.marxists.org/archive/bland/1991/x01/lenins-testament.pdf⁠