Quotes About Trotsky

There was more than a little truth in Trotsky's angry accusation of April 1912, after he had suffered the theft of the title of his journal [ Pravda ], that Lenin nourished himself on discord and chaos. But so did all revolutionary politicians, for revolutionary changes issue from profound crises. The bloody trenches of World War I created an enormous new revolutionary constituency, and only those leaders who knew how to exploit it would be prepared for the struggles that lay ahead.

Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary.

The whole history of the radical past, from Trotsky on, warned that my individual truth would have little effect on the attitude of the left. Confronted by such a truth, the left would seek first to ignore and then to discredit it, because it was damaging to the progressive cause.

It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse...

Trotsky, in whose writings we find very many valuable observations on Stalin as an individual, took the position that he was important not in his own right but only as a personification of the Thermidorean bureaucracy. As he summed up his view in The Revolution Betrayed, "Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.

During a few years of unpeaceful factional coexistence there were efforts, sponsored by Trotsky among others, toward unification. The split became formal and irrevocable in 1912 when Lenin called an all-Bolshevik meeting in Prague, where his faction constituted itself the "Russian Social Democratic Workers' party (Bolshevik).

Trotsky contended that Lenin was more of a Jacobin than a Marxist and made his often-quoted prediction that "these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization is substituted for the party, the Central Committee is substituted for the party organization, and finally the 'dictator' is substituted for the Central Committee.

Not he but Trotsky had risen to the heights of glory as Lenin's right-hand man in the Revolution and the Civil War.

It has been suggested, by Trotsky for one, that Djugashvili began his activities as a Menshevik and aligned himself with the Bolsheviks only on the eve of 1905, after much hesitation.[

In the closing period of the World War, according to Trotsky, it took Lenin a full year to secure agreement to his proposal to change the official name of the party from "Social Democratic" to "Communist" as a means of making an organizational break with Social Democratic Marxism on an international scale.[67

In the wake of this action by the congress, some thirty of the opposition leaders, headed by Trotsky, were exiled to remote parts of the country in early 1928, Trotsky's place of exile being Alma-Ata, near the Chinese border.

Lenin had no monopoly upon heroic leadership of the Bolshevik cause during the revolutionary period. Many others rendered exceptional service in saving the Revolution and constructing the new Soviet order. It is particularly noteworthy that Trotsky rose to great heights as the organizer of the Red Army and chief manager of its operations on the far-flung fronts of the Civil War.

The Tenth Congress was a political setback for Trotsky. He came out a loser in the trade union controversy, and the NEP was implicitly a repudiation of the line that he had publicly been taking in economic policy.

Around 1921, however, their relationship began to show signs of strain. One contributing factor was Lenin's victory at the Tenth Congress and the resulting resolution of the intra-party conflict that had alienated him from Trotsky. These developments cleared the way for a renewal of Lenin's close ties with the man whom Stalin saw as his own arch-enemy; and rapprochement between Lenin and Trotsky could not fail to stir resentment in Stalin.

This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle. But I think that from the point of view of preventing a split, and from the point of view of what I have written above about the relation between Stalin and Trotsky, this is no trifle, or it is a trifle that may take on decisive significance.

In 1926, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev belatedly joined in what was called the "united opposition." A rearguard action by two crippled factions, it was doomed to the debacle that overtook it in late 1927 when Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, along with large numbers of their followers, were expelled from the party.

In 1917 there was not a single Bolshevik who considered possible the realization of a socialist society in a single country, and least of all in Russia.

There were people who got me very involved in politics. But then there was also a book. It was a trilogy, a biography of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher, which made a very deep impression on me and gave me a love of political biography for the rest of my life.

they set to work turning Russia upside down, they had decided it was time to blow up Russia's international relations, in preparation for the world revolution both Lenin and Trotsky were counting on.

In fact, it was Lenin and Trotsky who set up the totalitarian apparatus Stalin would use to impose his one-man rule—and they knew exactly what it would be used to do.

We have trodden underfoot the principles of Democracy for the sake of the loftier principles of Social Revolution," Trotsky said. "We are against oppression, but we will not yield our power without a ruthless struggle.

The Leon Trotsky wing of the university hates capitalism with a vengeance. According to this faction, capitalism does nothing good; it only broadens the gap between rich and poor and results in the exploitation of people for the sake of money.

Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person.

already done." Molotov bitingly asked Zinoviev if he and Kamenev had been "brave in October 1917?" Zinoviev reminded them that not just Trotsky but Bukharin had opposed Brest-Litovsk in 1918, to