After a four-year stay in Turkey and brief stops in France and Norway, Trotsky received asylum in Mexico in 1936. Sensing a threat to his power, the Soviet dictator expelled Trotsky from the Politburo and the Communist Party before exiling him to present-day Kazakhstan and banishing him from the country altogether in 1929. Trotsky became increasingly critical of Stalin’s totalitarian tactics, and his belief in a permanent global proletarian revolution ran counter to his rival’s thought that it was possible to have communism survive in the Soviet Union alone. Trotsky appeared to be Lenin’s natural successor, but he lost a power struggle to Stalin following the Soviet leader’s death in 1924. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, he plotted a coup of the provisional government with Lenin and formed the Red Army, which defeated the anti-Bolshevik White Army in the ensuing civil war. In between, the man born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein had escaped to London on a forged British passport, under the name Leon Trotsky, and met fellow revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. The czarist government had twice exiled him to Siberia for his Marxist beliefs. Trotsky, though, had been used to dangerous enemies since his early days as a student revolutionary in Russia. A 1936 anti-Trotsky Soviet propaganda poster.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |