Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky, the well known mass murderer was a Jew born on a farm in the Ukraine. As a student he lived in Odessa & became a revolutionary. Later there was exile to Turkey, France, Spain & New York. He returned for the #1905 Russian Revolution but missed the February Revolution in 1917. That caused him to go back to foment a Marxist uprising, to take power, resulting in the October Revolution. It was in fact a Bolshevik coup d'état that succeeded in making what might have become a democracy into a murderous Tyranny. His followers believe in #Trotskyism

Trotsky is wrong about what he did in #New York or #Claude Dansey of #MI6 aka the #Secret Intelligence Service is. He was an electrician at the Fox Film Studios or a revolutionary writer, an occupation no more reprehensible than that of bootlegger.

His flat, at 1522 Vyse Avenue in The Bronx, New York was luxurious [ by Russian standards ] having electric lights, a phone, service lift & gas range; he does not mention a refrigerator. TROTSKY LEAVES NEW YORK TO COMPLETE THE REVOLUTION says he did have one. So does #The Strange History of the East Villages Most Famous Street. The flat, in a working class district, The Bronx cost $18 a month. The chauffeur was the servant of a friendly doctor. The children were much more impressed by him than the medical man.

He wrote #My Life, which was put on line by Marxists at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/

It is easy to read him as evil or, at the very least arrogant. Pictured in 1921.

Hostile Sources:-
There are plenty out there & with good reason. The one at #Leon Trotsky On Zionism And Russia, about turning Russia into a desert populated by white negroes is fraudulent. The single source is a right wing Latvian(?) liar making the ugly reality look worse. Other sources are:-
http://volokh.com/2009/11/05/the-evil-of-leon-trotsky-revisited/ - hostile
http://antimatrix.org/Convert/Books/ZioNazi_Quotes/Leon_Trotsky.html - hostile. Is it honest?
http://jewishracism.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/ron-paul-quotes-leon-trotsky-to-declare.html hostile.
The BBC aka the Marxist Fan Club tells us about their heroes, Lenin & Trotsky

Wikiquotes gives sayings from T at Leon Trotsky. The quotes about him are generally hostile but more revealing.

We are told that The Word Racist Was Invented By Trotsky. He used the word in History of the Russian Revolution in 1930.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

FASCISM
What It Is and How To Fight It
Was written by Leo T.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky

The military situation soon tested Trotsky's managerial and organization-building skills. In May–June 1918, the Czechoslovak Legions en route from European Russia to Vladivostok rose against the Soviet government. This left the Bolsheviks with the loss of most of the country's territory, an increasingly, now well-organized resistance by Russian anti-Communist forces (usually referred to as the White Army after their best-known component) and widespread defection by the military experts whom Trotsky relied on.

Trotsky and the government responded with a full-fledged mobilization, which increased the size of the Red Army from fewer than 300,000 in May 1918 to one million in October, and an introduction of political commissars into the army. The latter had the task of ensuring the loyalty of military experts (mostly former officers in the imperial army) and co-signing their orders. Trotsky regarded the organization of the Red Army as built on the ideas of the October Revolution. As he later wrote in his autobiography:^[52]

An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals that we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear. And yet armies are not built on fear. The Tsar's army fell to pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. In his attempt to save it by restoring the death-penalty, Kerensky only finished it. Upon the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. These facts demand no explanation for any one who has even the slightest knowledge of the language of history. The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement.

My Life by Leon Trotsky - his autobiography

Foreword
Preface to the Norwegian Edition ( (1935)
I. Yanovka
Born on a farm in the Ukraine to a family of Jews rising from poverty to "very rich" by hard work, economy & competence. They had crops, cattle & pigs. Sheep were a failure. His father bought over 250 acres while leasing more than 400. The Reds didn't like the father [ rich ]. Nor did Russian because he was Trotter's father. Where did the money come from? An uncle was a brewer [ Chapter III ]. Another uncle was an engineer [ Chapter IV ], who owned a plant in Odessa [ Chapter VII ]. So brains, initiative & hard work presumably. Corrupt collusion with other Jews? Very possibly but T gives no indication of it.

II. Our Neighbors and My First School
They drank tea out of saucers. In 1887 Jews were limited to 10% in the Gymnasium [ grammar school ] & Realschule [ ordinary school - no ancient languages - more mathematics, natural sciences & modern languages ]

III. Odessa: My Family and My School
Peasants were flogged using the knout; in this case circa 1888.

IV. Books and Early Conflicts
Sent to Odessa to study in1888. Read voraciously. Expelled.

V. Country and Town
Country life was coarser but he understood farming. Towns were more refined & contradictory. A peasant was bullied regarding a cow that strayed. A nasty policeman demanded peasants' passports then arrested them. Trotters protested. They went to the synagogue as a matter of habit, no more. There were racial tensions in school.

He believed in the supremacy of the general over the particular. He had a hatred of Tyranny, of oppression, exploitation, corruption etc. He gave up on #Rationalism in favour of #Dialectics, which seems to be finding truth by who shouts louder and longer.

VI. The Break
Trotters was a fan of #Jeremy Bentham but not of #John Stuart Mill. In other words he was impressed by utilitarianism, that is the #greatest happiness of the greatest number rather than Mill's conception of #Liberty, which justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. Bentham favoured Utilitarianism, legal positivism & liberalism, which is for #Liberty and equality so Bentham and Trotters were more in favour of control rather than freedom.

VII. My First Revolutionary Organization
Workers were becoming disgruntled; revolutionaries were doing better.

VIII. My First Prisons
He took a kindly view of #Freemasonry saying that it was an attempt to carry on the morals of earlier generations.

IX. My First Exile
Exiled to Ust-Kut on the River Lena in Siberia where cold was deadly & midges dreadful. There T met #Felix Dzerzhinsky , who was not much of a poet. #Populism was an intelligenzia's view of peasant collectives. It was over come by the "sharp knife of #Marxism". He was against Anarchists. He decided that #Rationalism was no good, that #Dialectics were the way to go

X. My First Escape
Escaped by horse & cart from Verkholensk at 20 versts [ kilometres ] an hour with the Iliad and a passport in the name of Trotsky. At Samara he joined #Iskra

XI. An Immigrant for the First Time
Arrived in London. Met Lenin & Mrs L. i.e. Vladimir Ilyich and Nadyezhda Konstantinova. T & mates studied Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia & Das Kapital. Lenin pleased by attention to his book. T met Vera Zasulich, Julius Martov [ Jew ] & Blumenfeld.

XII. The Party Congress and the Split
He met Comrade Lenin [ dominant ], Mrs Lenin & others including Dmitri Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin's brother, Georgi Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich [ influential ], Pavel Axelrod (Pinchas Borutsch) Julius Martov (Ilija Cederbaum) & Aleksandr Potresov in London circa 1903 & got heavily involved in #Iskra [ the Spark that lit the fire that consumed Russia ]. Lenin wrote a rather good letter about T; it was analytical. L was not stupid. Iskra moved to Geneva for a while. The Congress happened in Brussels. Differences came to a head, leading to the split between Bolshevik & Menshevik. T chaired the meeting where it boiled over. L didn't want it. Nor did T. The Congress included Ulyanov, L's brother. T broke with L.

XIII. The Return to Russia
Natives were getting restless. In 1904, there was a major strike in southern Russia. 23 January 1905 was #Bloody Sunday. T went on the run in Russia. Later he was in Finland. A Congress was held in Geneva

XIV. The Year 1905
Bolsheviks & Mensheviks split. T broke with Lenin. The peasants were getting restless. He went from Finland back to Russia, to St Petersburg. The Constitutional Manifesto [ aka the October Manifesto ] was announced by the Czar on 17 October 1905. T was writing for Nachalo [ The Beginning ], a great success like the Neue Rheinische Zeitung; its circulation soared from 30,000 to 500,000, Russian Gazette & Novaya Zhizn [ New Life ]. People were desperate to get Nachalo. He wrote for Izvestia [ The News ] as well. He hardened into a career revolutionary, one sure of his opinions. 1905 served as training for 1917. The St Petersburg Soviet were arrested en masse on 3 December 1905. They repudiated the Czar's debts. The French responded by lending Nicholas 750 thousand Francs.

XV. Trial, Exile, Escape
The second time in prison was much easier, a time for intensive study, writing Russia and the Revolution. The Duma was dissolved by the Tsar; it failed to amuse. The trial of the Soviet Workers Delegates opened on 19 September 1906. They wanted to discredit Sergei Witte by exposing his Liberalism. They got enforced settlement in exile, not hard labour or administrative exile [ softer ]. Flogging had been abolished.

He got prison uniform but kept his boots with a fine passport and gold in one heel. The destination was Obdorsk inside the Arctic Circle 1500 versts from the railhead and 800 from the telegraph. The men guarding them were very sympathetic. T escaped by deer sledge that made 9 km/hour i.e. 6 mph going west. Then it was a train back to St Petersburg and the wife. Then they hid in Finland. The 1905 Revolution was tapering off into failure.

XVI. My Second Foreign Exile: German Socialism
The party Congress of 1907 tool place in London in a Socialist church. Was Christianity really Christian or enemy? T met Maxim Gorky there. Also Rosa Luxemburg, she was keen on #PermaRev too.

The leading Marxists in Vienna were educated but stupid, incapable of applying Marx's methods. They were chauvinists with vile attitudes toward women. T was arrogant in his attitudes.

T read Marx & Engels' correspondence, deciding that there was a nobility of spirit in them. He met Franz Mehring & Karl Liebknecht in Berlin. K hated Rosa Luxemburg.

XVII. Preparing for a New Revolution
XVIII. The Beginning or The War
XIX. Paris and Zimmerwald

XX. My Expulsion From France
Kicked out.

XXI. Through Spain
The French said give Trotters hassle so he went to prison.

My Life By Trotsky - Chapter XXII New York
QUOTE
Here I was in New York, city of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city in the world, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.

Of the legends that have sprung up about me, the greater number have to do with my life in New York. In Norway, which I only touched in passing, the resourceful journalists had me working as a codfish cleaner. In New York, where I stayed for two months, the newspapers had me engaged in any number of occupations, each more fantastic than the one before. If all the adventures that the newspapers ascribed to me were banded together in a book, they would make a far more entertaining biography than the one I am writing here.

But I must disappoint my American readers. My only profession in New York was that of a revolutionary socialist. This was before the war for “liberty” and “democracy,” and in those days mine was a profession no more reprehensible than that of a bootlegger. I wrote articles, edited a newspaper, and addressed labor meetings. I was up to my neck in work, and consequently I did not feel at all like a stranger. In one of the New York libraries I studied the economic history of the United States assiduously. The figures showing the growth of American exports during the war astounded me; they were, in fact, a complete revelation. And it was those same figures that not only predetermined America’s intervention in the war, but the decisive part that the United States would play in the world after the war, as well. I wrote several articles about this at the time, and gave several lectures. Since that time the problem of “America versus Europe” has been one of my chief interests. And even now I am studying the question with the utmost care, hoping to devote a separate book to it. If one is to understand the future destiny of humanity, this is the most important of all subjects.

The day after I arrived in New York I wrote in the Russian paper, the Novy Mir (The New World): “I left a Europe wallowing in blood, but I left with a profound faith in a coming revolution. And it was with no democratic ‘illusions’ that I stepped on the soil of this old-enough New World.” Ten days later I addressed the international meeting of welcome as follows: “It is a fact of supreme importance that the economic life of Europe is being blasted to its very foundations, whereas America is increasing in wealth. As I look enviously at New York – I who still think of myself as a European – I ask myself: ‘Will Europe be able to stand it? Will it not sink into nothing but a cemetery? And will the economic and cultural centres of gravity not shift to America?’” And despite the success of what is called “European stabilization,” this question is just as pertinent to-day.
I lectured in Russian and German in various sections of New York, Philadelphia and other nearby cities. My English was even worse than it is to-day, so that I never even thought of making public addresses in English. And yet I have often come across references to my speeches in English in New York. Only the other day an editor of a Constantinople paper described one of those mythical public appearances which he witnessed as a student in America. I confess that I didn’t have the courage to tell him that he was the dupe of his own imagination. But alas! with even greater assurance, he repeated these same recollections of his in his paper.

We rented an apartment in a workers’ district, and furnished it on the installment plan. That apartment, at eighteen dollars a month, was equipped with all sorts of conveniences that we Europeans were quite unused to: electric lights, gas cooking-range, bath, telephone, automatic service-elevator, and even a chute for the garbage. These things completely won the boys over to New York. For a time the telephone was their main interest; we had not had this mysterious instrument either in Vienna or Paris.

The janitor of the house was a negro. My wife paid him three months’ rent in advance, but he gave her no receipt because the landlord had taken the receipt-book away the day before, to verify the accounts. When we moved into the house two days later, we discovered that the Negro had absconded with the rent of several of the tenants. Besides the money, we had intrusted to him the storage of some of our belongings. The whole incident upset us; it was such a bad beginning. But we found our property after all, and when we opened the wooden box that contained our crockery, we were surprised to find our money hidden away in it, carefully wrapped up in paper. The janitor had taken the money of the tenants who had already received their receipts; he did not mind robbing the landlord, but he was considerate enough not to rob the tenants. A delicate fellow, indeed. My wife and I were deeply touched by his consideration, and we always think of him gratefully. This little incident took on a symptomatic significance for me – it seemed as if a corner of the veil that concealed the “black” problem in the United States had lifted.
During those months [ 1917 ] America was busily getting ready for war. As ever, the greatest help came from the pacifists. Their vulgar speeches about the advantages of peace as opposed to war invariably ended in a promise to support war if it became “necessary.” This was the spirit of the Bryan campaign. The socialists sang in tune with the pacifists. It is a well-known axiom that pacifists think of war as an enemy only in time of peace. After the Germans came out for unrestricted submarine warfare, mountains of military supplies blocked the railways and filled all the eastern stations and ports. Prices instantly soared, and I saw thousands of women – mothers, in the wealthiest city of the world – come out into the streets, upset the stalls, and break into shops. What will it be like in the rest of the world after the war? I asked myself.

On February 3 came the long-awaited break in diplomatic relations with Germany. The volume of the chauvinistic music was increasing daily. The tenor of the pacifists and the falsetto of the socialists did not disrupt the general harmony. But I had seen the same thing in Europe, and the mobilization of American patriotism was simply a repetition of what I had seen before. I noted the stages of the process in my Russian paper, and meditated on the stupidity of men who were so slow to learn their lessons.........
Bukharin was one of the first people I met in New York; he had been deported from Scandinavia only a short time before. He had known us in the Vienna days, and welcomed us with the childish exuberance characteristic of him. Although it was late, and we were very tired, Bukharin insisted on dragging us off to the Public Library the very first day. That was the beginning of a close association that warmed – on Bukharin’s part – into an attachment for me that grew steadily more intense until 1923, when it suddenly changed to an opposite sentiment.

Bukharin’s nature is such that he must always attach himself to some one. He becomes, in such circumstances, nothing more than a medium for someone else’s actions and speeches. You must always keep your eyes on him, or else he will succumb quite imperceptibly to the influence of some one directly opposed to you, as other people fall under an automobile. And then he will deride his former idol with that same boundless enthusiasm with which he has just been lauding him to the skies. I never took Bukharin too seriously, and I left him to himself, which really means, to others. After the death of Lenin, he became Zinoviev’s medium, and then Stalin’s. At the very moment that these lines are being written, Bukharin is passing through still another crisis, and other fluids, as yet not known to me, are filtering through him.............

My first contact with these men was enough to call forth their candid hatred of me. My feelings toward them, though probably less intense, were likewise not especially sympathetic. We belonged to different worlds. To me they seemed the rottenest part of that world with which I was and still am at war...........

I joined the editorial board of the Novy Mir at the very outset. The staff included, besides Bukharin and myself, Volodarsky, who later was killed by the Socialist-Revolutionists in Petrograd, and Chudnovsky, who later was wounded outside Petrograd, and eventually was killed in the Ukraine. The paper was the headquarters for internationalist revolutionary propaganda. In all of the national federations of the Socialist party, there were members who spoke Russian, and many of the Russian federation spoke English. In this way the ideas of the Novy Mir found their way out into the wider circles of American workers. The mandarins of official Socialism grew alarmed. Intrigues waxed hot against the European immigrant who, it was said, had set foot on American soil only the day before, did not understand the psychology of the American, and was trying to foist his fantastic methods on American workers. The struggle grew bitter. In the Russian federation the “tried and trusted” Babbitts were promptly shouldered aside. In the German federation old Schlueter, the editor-in-chief of the Volkszeitung [ New Yorker Volkszeitung? ], and a comrade in arms of Hiliquit’s, was more and more yielding his influence to the young editor Lore, who shared our views. The Letts were with us to a man. The Finnish federation gravitated toward us. We were penetrating by degrees into the powerful Jewish federation, with its fourteen-story palace from which two hundred thousand copies of the Forward were daily disgorged – a newspaper with the stale odor of sentimentally philistine socialism, always ready for the most perfidious betrayals.

Among the American workers, the connections and influence of the Socialist party as a whole, and of our revolutionary wing in particular, were less effective. The English organ of the party, The Call, was edited in a spirit of innocuous pacifist neutrality. We decided to begin by establishing a militant Marxist weekly. The preparations for it were in full swing – when the Russian revolution intervened l

After the mysterious silence of the cables for two or three days, came the first confused reports of the uprising in Petrograd. The cosmopolitan working-class in New York was all excited. Men hoped and were afraid to hope. The American press was in a state of utter bewilderment. Journalists, interviewers, reporters, came from all sides to the offices of the Novy Mir. For a time our paper was the centre of interest of the New York press. Telephone-calls from the Socialist newspaper offices and organizations never stopped.
““A cablegram has arrived saying that Petrograd has appointed a Guchkov-Miliukoff ministry. What does it mean?”

“That to-morrow there will be a ministry of Miliukoff and Kerensky.”
“Is that so? And what next?”

“Next? We shall be the next.”

“Oho!”

This sort of thing was repeated dozens of times. Almost every one I talked with took my words as a joke. At a special meeting of “worthy and most worthy” Russian Social Democrats I read a paper in which I argued that the proletariat party inevitably would assume power in the second stage of the Russian revolution. This produced about the same sort of impression as a stone thrown into a puddle alive with pompous and phlegmatic frogs. Dr. Ingermann did not hesitate to explain that I was ignorant of the four first rules of political arithmetic, and that it was not worth while wasting five minutes to refute my nonsensical dreams.

The working-masses took the prospects of revolution quite differently. Meetings, extraordinary for their size and enthusiasm, were held all over New York. Everywhere, the news that the red flag was flying over the Winter Palace brought an excited cheer.
Not only the Russian immigrants, but their children, who knew hardly any Russian, came to these meetings to breathe in the reflected joy of the revolution.

At home they saw me only in abrupt flashes. They had a complex life of their own there. My wife was building a nest, and the children had new friends. The closest was the chauffeur of Dr. M. The doctor’s wife took my wife and the boys out driving, and was very kind to them. But she was a mere mortal, whereas the chauffeur was a magician, a titan, a superman! With a wave of his hand, he made the machine obey his slightest command. To sit beside him was the supreme delight. When they went into a tea-room, the boys would anxiously demand of their mother, “Why doesn’t the chauffeur come in?”
Children have an amazing capacity for adapting themselves to new surroundings. In Vienna we had lived for the most part in the workers’ districts, and my boys mastered the Viennese dialect to perfection, besides speaking Russian and German. Dr. Alfred Adler observed with great satisfaction that they spoke the dialect like the good old Viennese cabmen. In the school in Zurich the boys had to switch to the Zurich dialect, which was the language in use in the lower grades, German being studied as a foreign language. In Paris the boys changed abruptly to French, and within a few months had mastered it. Many times I envied them their ease in French conversation. Although they spent, in all, less than a month in Spain and on the Spanish boat, it was long enough for them to pick up the most useful words and expressions. And then in New York, they went to an American school for two months and acquired a rough-and-ready command of English. After the February revolution, they went to school in Petrograd. But school life there was disorganized, and foreign languages vanished from their memory even more quickly than they had been acquired. But they spoke Russian like foreigners. We were often surprised to notice that they would build up a Russian sentence as if it were an exact translation from the French – and yet they could not form the sentence in French. Thus the story of our foreign wanderings was written on the brains of the children as indelibly as if they were palimpsests.

When I telephoned my wife from the newspaper office that Petrograd was in the midst of revolution, the younger boy was in bed with diphtheria. He was nine years old, but he realized definitely – and had for a long time – that revolution meant an amnesty, a return to Russia and a thousand other blessings. He jumped to his feet and danced on the bed in honor of the revolution. It was a sign of his recovery.

We were anxious to leave by the first boat. I rushed from consulate to consulate for papers and visas. On the eve of our departure the doctor allowed the convalescent boy to go out for a walk. My wife let him go for half an hour, and began to pack. How many times she had gone through that same operation? But there was no sign of the boy. I was at the office. Three anxious hours; then came a telephone-call to my wife. First, an unfamiliar masculine voice, and then Seryozha’s voice:

“I am here.” “Here” meant a police station at the other end of New York. The boy had taken advantage of his first walk to settle a question that had been worrying him for a long time:

Was there really a First Street? (We lived on 164th Street, if I am not mistaken.) But he had lost his way, had begun to make inquiries, and was taken to the police station. Fortunately he remembered our telephone number.

When my wife arrived at the station an hour later with our older son, she was greeted gaily, like a long-awaited guest. Seryozha was playing checkers with the policemen, and his face was quite red. To hide his embarrassment over an excess of official attention, he was diligently chewing some black American cud with his new friends. He still remembers the telephone number of our New York apartment.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that I learned much about New York. I plunged into the affairs of American Socialism too quickly, and I was straightway up to my neck in work for it. The Russian revolution came so soon that I only managed to catch the general life-rhythm of the monster known as New York. I was leaving for Europe, with the feeling of a man who has had only a peep into the foundry in which the fate of man is to be forged. My only consolation was the thought that I might return. Even now I have not given up that hope.
UNQUOTE
Believe him or believe him not. Read for yourself. Think for yourself. Decide for yourself.

XXIII. In A Concentration Camp
XXIV. In Petrograd
XXV. Concerning Slanderers
XXVI. From July to October
XXVII. The Deciding Night
XXVIII. “Trotskyism"in 1917

XXIX. In Power
XXX. In Moscow
XXXI. Negotiations at Brest-Litovsk
XXXII. Peace
XXXIII. A Month at Sviyazhsh

XXXIV. The Train
The train of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council was a mobile command post from 7 August 1918 . T converted a mob of Comrade-deserters into enthusiasts. Later he would turn a disorganised mob into a fighting force using experienced fighters, an energetic propaganda campaign etc. He also had a supply of boots and other useful things. The telegraph was important for resupply. He built an army while under fire. He had sensible views on men's motivations.

Had conferences with all local bosses to get a true picture of needs then used the telegraph. Commanders were prone to 'treason' - White or Red - or Green or Black? The train even had a wireless picking up signals from the Eiffel tower & 12 other places.

The train was famed; its arrival affected morale. Trotters does not mention that he was prone to have people shot but see Trotsky’s War Train or
Trotsky Terrorism and Communism (Chapter 4)
QUOTE
If it is a question of seeking formal contradictions, then obviously we must do so on the side of the White Terror, which is the weapon of classes which consider themselves “Christian,” patronize idealist philosophy, and are firmly convinced that the individuality (their own) is an end-in-itself. As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the “sacredness of human life.” We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.
UNQUOTE

XXXV. The Defense of Petrograd
There were 16 armies on various fronts. Holding Petrograd, ex St Petersburg was a desperation move. It meant mobilising everyone and everything. He succeeded.

XXXVI. The Military Opposition
Stalin was cunning, good at fomenting hate.

XXXVII. Disagreements Over War Strategy

XXXVIII. The Transition to the New Economic Policy, and My Relations With Lenin
T & Lenin usually agreed on matters of importance. When T did not he said so clearly. The epigones, second raters like Joe Stalin, Zinoviev or Kamenev kept quiet.

XXXIX. Lenin’s Illness
XL. The Conspiracy of the Epigones
XLI. Lenin’s Death and the Shift of Power
XLII. The Last Period of Struggle Within the Party
XLIII. The Exile
XLIV. The Deportation
XLV. The Planet Without a Visa

Leon Trotsky ex Wiki
Leon Trotsky^[a]; born Lev Davidovich Bronstein;^[b] 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940) was a Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founding leader of the Red Army.
Trotsky initially supported the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the 1917 October Revolution, and eventually became a leader within the Communist Party. He was, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, , Sokolnikov and Bubnov, one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution.^[2] During the early days of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army with the title of People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1923).

After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and against the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was removed from power (October 1927), expelled from the Communist Party (November 1927), and finally exiled from the Soviet Union (February 1929). As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. On Stalin's orders, he was assassinated in Mexico in August 1940 by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born Soviet agent.^[[3]

Trotsky's ideas formed the basis of #Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that opposes the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who were not rehabilitated by the government under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. In the late 1980s, his books were released for publication in the Soviet Union.

The outbreak of World War I caused a sudden realignment within the RSDLP and other European social democratic parties over the issues of war, revolution, pacifism and internationalism. Within the RSDLP, Lenin, Trotsky and Martov advocated various internationalist anti-war positions, while Plekhanov and other social democrats (both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) supported the Russian government to some extent. In Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked within the Swiss Socialist Party, prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution. He wrote a book opposing the war, The War and the International,^[46] and the pro-war position taken by the European social democratic parties, primarily the German party. As a war correspondent for the Kievskaya Mysl, Trotsky moved to France on 19 November 1914. In January 1915 in Paris, he began editing (at first with Martov, who soon resigned as the paper moved to the left) Nashe Slovo ("Our Word"), an internationalist socialist newspaper. He adopted the slogan of "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered." Lenin advocated Russia's defeat in the war and demanded a complete break with the Second International.
Trotsky attended the Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in September 1915 and advocated a middle course between those who, like Martov, would stay within the Second International at any cost and those who, like Lenin, would break with the Second International and form a Third International. The conference adopted the middle line proposed by Trotsky. At first opposed, in the end Lenin voted for Trotsky's resolution to avoid a split among anti-war socialists.^[47]

On 31 March Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his anti-war activities. Spanish authorities did not want him and deported him to the United States on 25 December 1916. He arrived in New York City on 13 January 1917. He stayed for nearly three months at 1522 Vise Avenue in The Bronx. In New York he wrote articles for the local Russian language socialist newspaper, Navy Mir, and the Yiddish-language daily, Der Forgets (The Jewish Daily Forward), in translation. He also made speeches to Russian émigrés. He was officially earning some $15 a week.^{[citation
needed]}

The outbreak of World War I caused a sudden realignment within the RSPB and other European social democratic parties over the issues of war, revolution, pacifism and internationalism. Within the RSPB, Lenin, Trotsky and Matron advocated various internationalist anti-war positions, while Plekhanov and other social democrats (both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) supported the Russian government to some extent. In Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked within the Swiss Socialist Party, prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution. He wrote a book opposing the war, The War and the International,^[46] and the pro-war position taken by the European social democratic parties, primarily the German party. As a war correspondent for the Kiev kaya Mysl, Trotsky moved to France on 19 November 1914. In January 1915 in Paris, he began editing (at first with Martov, who soon resigned as the paper moved to the left) Nashe Slovo ("Our Word"), an internationalist socialist newspaper. He adopted the slogan of "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered." Lenin advocated Russia's defeat in the war and demanded a complete break with the Second International.

Trotsky attended the Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in September 1915 and advocated a middle course between those who, like Martov, would stay within the Second International at any cost and those who, like Lenin, would break with the Second International and form a Third International. The conference adopted the middle line proposed by Trotsky. At first opposed, in the end Lenin voted for Trotsky's resolution to avoid a split among anti-war socialists.^[47]

On 31 March Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his anti-war activities. Spanish authorities did not want him and deported him to the United States on 25 December 1916. He arrived in New York City on 13 January 1917. He stayed for nearly three months at 1522 Vyse Avenue in The Bronx. In New York he wrote articles for the local Russian language socialist newspaper, Novy Mir, and the Yiddish-language daily, Der Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), in translation. He also made speeches to Russian émigrés. He was officially earning some $15 a week.^{[citation
needed]}

The outbreak of World War I caused a sudden realignment within the RSDLP and other European social democratic parties over the issues of war, revolution, pacifism and internationalism. Within the RSDLP, Lenin, Trotsky and Martov advocated various internationalist anti-war positions, while Plekhanov and other social democrats (both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) supported the Russian government to some extent. In Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked within the Swiss Socialist Party, prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution. He wrote a book opposing the war, The War and the International,^[46] and the pro-war position taken by the European social democratic parties, primarily the German party. As a war correspondent for the Kievskaya Mysl, Trotsky moved to France on 19 November 1914. In January 1915 in Paris, he began editing (at first with Martov, who soon resigned as the paper moved to the left) Nashe Slovo ("Our Word"), an internationalist socialist newspaper. He adopted the slogan of "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered." Lenin advocated Russia's defeat in the war and demanded a complete break with the Second International.
Trotsky attended the Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in September 1915 and advocated a middle course between those who, like Martov, would stay within the Second International at any cost and those who, like Lenin, would break with the Second International and form a Third International. The conference adopted the middle line proposed by Trotsky. At first opposed, in the end Lenin voted for Trotsky's resolution to avoid a split among anti-war socialists.^[47]

On 31 March Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his anti-war activities. Spanish authorities did not want him and deported him to the United States on 25 December 1916. He arrived in New York City on 13 January 1917. He stayed for nearly three months at 1522 Vyse Avenue in The Bronx. In New York he wrote articles for the local Russian language socialist newspaper, Novy Mir, and the Yiddish-language daily, Der Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), in translation. He also made speeches to Russian émigrés. He was officially earning some $15 a week.

Felix Dzerzhinsky ex Wiki
Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (Russian: Фе́ликс Эдму́ндович Дзержи́нский; Polish: Feliks Dzierżyński [ˈfɛlʲiks dʑerˈʐɨɲskʲi]; 11 September [O.S. 30 August] 1877 – 20 July 1926), nicknamed Iron Felix, was a Soviet statesman of Polish descent and a prominent member of revolutionary movements. His party pseudonyms were Yatsek, Yakub, Pereplyotchik (meaning "bookbinder"), Franek, Astronom, Yuzef and Domanski.

He was a member of several revolutionary committees such as the Polish Revkom as well as several Russian and Soviet official positions. Dzerzhinsky is best known for establishing and developing the Soviet secret police forces, serving as their director from 1917 to 1926. Later he was a member of the Soviet government heading several commissariats, while being the chief of the Soviet secret police. The Cheka soon became notorious for mass summary executions, performed especially during the Red Terror and the Russian Civil War.

Jeremy Bentham ex Wiki
Jeremy Bentham (/ˈbɛnθəm/; 15 February 1748 [O.S. 4 February 1747]^[1] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern #Utilitarianism [ Utilitarianism, legal positivism liberalism ]

Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong" [ i.e. pleasure minus pain ].^[4]^[5] He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of #Welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts.^[6] He called for the abolition of slavery, the abolition of the death penalty, and the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children.^[7] He has also become known in recent years as an early advocate of animal rights.^[8] Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights, calling them "nonsense upon stilts".^[9]

Bentham's students included his secretary and collaborator James Mill, the latter's son, John Stuart Mill, the legal philosopher John Austin, as well as Robert Owen, one of the founders of utopian socialism.

On his death in 1832, Bentham left instructions for his body to be first dissected, and then to be permanently preserved as an "auto-icon" (or self-image), which would be his memorial. This was done, and the auto-icon is now on public display at University College London. Because of his arguments in favour of the general availability of education, he has been described as the "spiritual founder" of UCL. However, he played only a limited direct part in its foundation.

Bloody Sunday ex Wiki
'Bloody Sunday or Red Sunday^[1] (Russian: Крова́вое воскресе́нье; IPA: [krɐˈvavəɪ vəskrʲɪˈsʲenʲjɪ]) is the name given to the events of Sunday, 22 January [O.S. 9 January] 1905 in St Petersburg, Russia, when unarmed demonstrators led by Father Georgy Gapon were fired upon by soldiers of the Imperial Guard as they marched towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

Bloody Sunday caused grave consequences for the Tsarist autocracy governing Imperial Russia: the events in St. Petersburg provoked public outrage and a series of massive strikes that spread quickly throughout the industrial centres of the Russian Empire. The massacre on Bloody Sunday is considered to be the start of the active phase of the #1905 Russian Revolution. In addition to beginning the 1905 Revolution, historians such as Lionel Kochan in his book Russia in Revolution 1890-1918 view the events of Bloody Sunday to be one of the key events which led to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

1905 Russian Revolution ex Wiki
The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire, some of which was directed at the government. It included worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies. It led to Constitutional Reform including the establishment of the State Duma, the multi-party system, and the Russian Constitution of 1906.

Causes
According to Sidney Harcave, author of The Russian Revolution of 1905, four problems in Russian society contributed to the revolution. Newly emancipated peasants earned too little, and were not allowed to sell or mortgage their allotted land. Ethnic minorities resented the government because of its "Russification", discrimination and repression, both social and formal, such as banning them from voting and serving in the Guard or Navy and limited attendance in schools. A nascent industrial working class resented the government for doing too little to protect them, banning strikes and labor unions. Finally, the educated class fomented and spread radical ideas after a relaxing of discipline in universities allowed a new consciousness to grow among students.

Taken individually, these issues may not have affected the course of Russian history, but together they created the conditions for a potential revolution.^[1] "At the turn of the century, discontent with the Tsar’s dictatorship was manifested not only through the growth of political parties dedicated to the overthrow of the monarchy but also through industrial strikes for better wages and working conditions, protests and riots among peasants, university demonstrations, and the assassination of government officials, often done by Socialist Revolutionaries."^[2]

The government finally recognized these problems, albeit in a shortsighted and narrow-minded way. The minister of interior Plehve stated in 1903 that, after the agrarian problem, the most serious ones plaguing the country were those of the Jews, the schools, and the workers, in that order.^[3] Because the Russian economy was tied to European finances, the Western money markets contraction in 1899–1900 plunged Russian industry into a deep and prolonged crisis which outlasted the dip in European industrial production. This setback aggravated social unrest during the five years preceding the revolution of 1905.

John Stuart Mill ex Wiki
John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist, feminist, and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory and political economy. He has been called "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century."^[5] Mill's conception of #Liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control.^[6]

Mill was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by his predecessor Jeremy Bentham, and contributed significantly to the theory of the scientific method.^[7]

A member of the Liberal Party, he was the first Member of Parliament to call for women's suffrage.

Marxism ex Wiki
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis, that analyzes class relations and societal conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and a dialectical view of social transformation. It originates from the mid-to-late 19th century works of German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Marxist methodology originally used a method of economic and sociopolitical inquiry known as historical materialism to analyze and critique the development of capitalism and the role of class struggle in systemic economic change. According to Marxist perspective, class conflict within capitalism arises due to intensifying contradictions between the highly productive mechanized and socialized production performed by the proletariat, and the private ownership and appropriation of the surplus product (profit) by a small minority of private owners called the bourgeoisie. As the contradiction becomes apparent to the proletariat through the alienation of labor, social unrest between the two antagonistic classes will intensify, until it culminates in social revolution. The eventual long-term outcome of this revolution would be the establishment of socialism – a socioeconomic system based on social ownership of the means of production, distribution based on one's contribution, and production organized directly for use. As the productive forces and technology continued to advance, Marx hypothesized that socialism would eventually give way to a communist stage of social development, which would be a classless, stateless, humane society erected on common ownership and the principle of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".

Marxism has since developed into different branches and schools of thought, and there is now no single definitive Marxist theory.^[1] Different Marxian schools place a greater emphasis on certain aspects of classical Marxism while de-emphasizing or rejecting other aspects, and sometimes combine Marxist analysis with non-Marxian concepts; as a result, they might reach contradictory conclusions from one another.^[2]

Marxist analyses and methodologies have influenced multiple political ideologies and social movements, and Marxist understandings of history and society have been adopted by some academics in the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology,^[3] media studies,^[4] political science, theater, history, sociology, art history and theory, cultural studies, education, economics, geography, literary criticism, aesthetics, critical psychology, and philosophy.

Populism ex Wiki
Populism is a political ideology which holds that the virtuous citizens are being mistreated by a small circle of elites, who can be overthrown if the people recognize the danger and work together. The elites are depicted as trampling in illegitimate fashion upon the rights, values, and voice of the legitimate people.^[1]

Populist movements are found in many democratic nations. Cas Mudde says, "Many observers have noted that populism is inherent to representative democracy; after all, do populists not juxtapose 'the pure people' against 'the corrupt elite'?"

Utilitarianism ex Wiki
Utilitarianism is a theory in normative ethics holding that the best moral action is the one that maximizes utility. Utility is defined in various ways, but is usually related to the well-being of sentient entities. Originally, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism, defined utility as the aggregate pleasure after deducting suffering of all involved in any action. John Stuart Mill expanded this concept of utility to include not only the quantity, but quality of pleasure, while focusing on rules, instead of individual moral actions. Others have rejected that pleasure has positive value and have advocated negative utilitarianism, which defines utility only in terms of suffering. As opposed to this hedonistic view, some define utility with relation to preference satisfaction whereas others believe that a range of values can be included in its definition.

Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. This view can be contrasted or combined with virtue ethics which holds virtue as a moral good. Some believe that one's intentions are also ethically important. Utilitarianism is distinctly different from other forms of consequentialism such as egoism as it considers all interests equally. Proponents of utilitarianism have been split about whether individual acts should conform to utility (act utilitarianism) or whether agents should conform to ethical rules (rule utilitarianism)). Utilitarians additionally remain split about whether utility should be calculated as an aggregate (total utilitarianism) or an average (average utilitarianism).

Historically, hedonism can be tracedd back to Aristippus and Epicurus, who viewed happiness as the only good. Bentham is, however, credited with founding utilitarianism when he wrote An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Since Bentham, prominent utilitarians have included John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, R. M. Hare and Peter Singer. The philosophy has been applied to modern issues including the suffering of non-human animals. Specifically, utilitarianism has been applied to the ethics of raising animals for food.

Opponents of utilitarianism have criticized it for many reasons. Some have said that utilitarianism ignores justice while others contend that utilitarianism is impractical. Specific criticisms have included the mere addition paradox and the utility monster. Others have said that pleasure is not commensurable across people with varying identities and thus the idea of aggregating utility is impossible.

Welfarism ex Wiki
Welfarism is a form of consequentialism. Like all forms of consequentialism, welfarism is based on the premise that actions, policies, and/or rules should be evaluated on the basis of their consequences. Welfarism is the view that the morally significant consequences are impacts on human (or animal) welfare. There are many different understandings of human welfare, but the term "welfarism" is usually associated with the economic conception of welfare.^{[citation
needed]} Economists usually think of individual welfare in terms of utility functions, a perspective in which social welfare can be conceived as an aggregation of individual utilities or utility functions.

Welfarist views have been especially influential in the law and economics movement. Steven Shavell and Louis Kaplow have argued in an influential book, Fairness versus Welfare that welfare should be the exclusive criteria by which legal analysts evaluate legal policy choices.

Liberalism ex Wiki
Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of #Liberty and equality.^[1]^[2]^[3] Whereas classical liberalism emphasises the role of liberty, social liberalism stresses the importance of equality.^[4] Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally they support ideas and programmes such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free markets, civil rights, democratic societies, secular governments, gender equality and international cooperation.^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10]^[11]

Liberalism first became a distinct political movement during the Age of Enlightenment, when it became popular among philosophers and economists in the Western world. Liberalism rejected the prevailing social and political norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings. The 17th-century philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition. Locke argued that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property,^[12] while adding that governments must not violate these rights based on the social contract. Liberals opposed traditional conservatism and sought to replace absolutism in government with representative democracy and the rule of law.

Prominent revolutionaries in the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution used liberal philosophy to justify the armed overthrow of what they saw as tyrannical rule. Liberalism started to spread rapidly especially after the French Revolution. The 19th century saw liberal governments established in nations across Europe, South America, and North America.^[13] In this period, the dominant ideological opponent of classical liberalism was conservatism, but liberalism later survived major ideological challenges from new opponents, such as fascism and communism. During the 20th century, liberal ideas spread even further as liberal democracies found themselves on the winning side in both world wars. In Europe and North America, the establishment of social liberalism became a key component in the expansion of the welfare state.^[14]^[15] Today, liberal parties continue to wield power and influence throughout the world.

Dialectic ex Wiki
Dialectic or dialectics (Greek: διαλεκτική,, dialektikḗ), also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned arguments. The term was popularized by Plato's Socratic dialogues but the act itself has been central to European and Indian philosophy since ancient history.^{[clarification
needed]}

The term dialectic is not synonymous with the term debate. While in theory debaters are not necessarily emotionally invested in their point of view, in practice debaters frequently display an emotional commitment that may cloud rational judgment. Debates are won through a combination of persuading the opponent, proving one's argument correct, or proving the opponent's argument incorrect. Debates do not necessarily require promptly identifying a clear winner or loser; however clear winners are frequently determined by either a judge, jury, or by group consensus. The term dialectics is also not synonymous with the term rhetoric, a method or art of discourse that seeks to persuade, inform, or motivate an audience.^[1] Concepts, like "logos" or rational appeal, "pathos" or emotional appeal, and "ethos" or ethical appeal, are intentionally used by rhetoricians to persuade an audience.^[2]

The Sophists taught aretē (ἀρετή, quality, excellence) as the highest value, and the determinant of one's actions in life. The Sophists taught artistic quality in oratory (motivation via speech) as a manner of demonstrating one's aretē. Oratory was taught as an art form, used to please and to influence other people via excellent speech; nonetheless, the Sophists taught the pupil to seek aretē in all endeavours, not solely in oratory.^{[citation
needed]}

Socrates favoured truth as the highest value, proposing that it could be discovered through reason and logic in discussion: ergo, dialectic. Socrates valued rationality (appealing to logic, not emotion) as the proper means for persuasion, the discovery of truth, and the determinant for one's actions. To Socrates, truth, not aretē, was the greater good, and each person should, above all else, seek truth to guide one's life. Therefore, Socrates opposed the Sophists and their teaching of rhetoric as art and as emotional oratory requiring neither logic nor proof.^[3] Different forms of dialectical reasoning have emerged throughout history from the Indosphere (Greater India) and the West (Europe). These forms include the Socratic method, Hindu, Buddhist, Medieval, Hegelian dialectics, Marxist, Talmudic, and Neo-orthodoxy.

Iskra ex Wiki
Iskra (Russian: И́скра, IPA: [ˈiskrə], Spark) was a political newspaper of Russian socialist emigrants established as the official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). Initially, it was managed by Vladimir Lenin, moving as he moved. The first edition was published in Leipzig,^[1] Germany, on December 1, 1900. Other editions were published in Munich (1900–1902) and Geneva from 1903. When Lenin was in London (1902–1903) the newspaper was edited from a small office at 37a Clerkenwell Green, EC1,^[2] with Henry Quelch arranging the necessary printworks.^[3]

In 1903, following the split of the RSDLP, Lenin left the staff (after his initial proposal to reduce the editorial board to three - himself, Julius Martov and Georgi Plekhanov - was vehemently opposed), the newspaper fell under the control of the Mensheviks and was published by Plekhanov until 1905. The average circulation was 8,000.

Iskra's motto was "Из искры возгорится пламя" ("From a spark a fire will flare up") — a line from the reply Alexander Odoevsky wrote to the poem by Alexander Pushkin addressed to the anti-tsar Decembrists imprisoned in Siberia.

Some of the staff were later involved in the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917.

Initial staff members:

Vladimir Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov)

Dmitri Ilyich Ulyanov, his younger brother

Georgi Plekhanov

Vera Zasulich

Pavel Axelrod (Pinchas Borutsch)

Julius Martov (Ilija Cederbaum)

Aleksandr Potresov

Later:

Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein)

Printing: Blumenfeld.

One of the people who financed the paper was Savva Morozov

October Manifesto ex Wiki
The October Manifesto (Russian: Октябрьский манифест, Манифест 17 октября), officially The Manifesto on the Improvement of the State Order (Манифест об усовершенствовании государственного порядка), is a document that served as a precursor to the Russian Empire's first constitution, which would be adopted the next year. The Manifesto was issued by Emperor Nicholas II, under the influence of the Sergei Witte, on 30 October [O.S. 17 October] 1905 as a response to the #Russian Revolution of 1905. Nicholas strenuously resisted these ideas, but gave in after his first choice to head a military dictatorship. Grand Duke Nicholas, threatened to shoot himself in the head if the Tsar did not accept Witte's suggestion.^[1] Nicholas unwillingly agreed, and issued what became known as the October Manifesto, promising basic civil rights and an elected parliament called the Duma, without whose approval no laws were to be enacted in Russia in the future. According to his Memoirs Witte did not force the Tsar to sign the October Manifesto.^[2] which was proclaimed in all the churches.

Rationalism ex Wiki
In epistemology, rationalism is the view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge"^[1] or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification".^[2] More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".^[3]

In an old controversy, rationalism was opposed to empiricism, where the rationalists believed that reality has an intrinsically logical structure. Because of this, the rationalists argued that certain truths exist and that the intellect can directly grasp these truths. That is to say, rationalists asserted that certain rational principles exist in logic, mathematics, ethics, and metaphysics that are so fundamentally true that denying them causes one to fall into contradiction. The rationalists had such a high confidence in reason that empirical proof and physical evidence were regarded as unnecessary to ascertain certain truths – in other words, "there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience".^[4]

Different degrees of emphasis on this method or theory lead to a range of rationalist standpoints, from the moderate position "that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge" to the more extreme position that reason is "the unique path to knowledge".^[5] Given a pre-modern understanding of reason, rationalism is identical to philosophy, the Socratic life of inquiry, or the zetetic (skeptical) clear interpretation of authority (open to the underlying or essential cause of things as they appear to our sense of certainty). In recent decades, Leo Strauss sought to revive "Classical Political Rationalism" as a discipline that understands the task of reasoning, not as foundational, but as maieutic.

In politics, Rationalism, since the Enlightenment, historically emphasized a "politics of reason" centered upon rational choice, utilitarianism, secularism, and irreligion^[6] – the latter aspect's antitheism later ameliorated by utilitarian adoption of pluralistic rationalist methods practicable regardless of religious or irreligious ideology.^[7]^[8]

In this regard, the philosopher John Cottingham noted how rationalism, a methodology, became socially conflated with atheism, a worldview:

In the past, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, the term 'rationalist' was often used to refer to free thinkers of an anti-clerical and anti-religious outlook, and for a time the word acquired a distinctly pejorative force (thus in 1670 Sanderson spoke disparagingly of 'a mere rationalist, that is to say in plain English an atheist of the late edition...'). The use of the label 'rationalist' to characterize a world outlook which has no place for the supernatural is becoming less popular today; terms like 'humanist' or 'materialist' seem largely to have taken its place. But the old usage still survives.

Liberty ex Wiki
Liberty, in philosophy, involves free will as contrasted with determinism.^[1] In politics, liberty consists of the social and political freedoms to which all community members are entitled.^[2] In theology, liberty is freedom from the bondage of sin.^[3] Generally, liberty is distinctly differentiated from freedom in that freedom is primarily, if not exclusively, the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; whereas liberty concerns the absence of arbitrary restraints and takes into account the rights of all involved. As such, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others.

Freemasonry ex Wiki
Freemasonry or Masonry co consists of fraternal organisations that trace their origins to the local fraternities of stonemasons, which from the end of the fourteenth century regulated the qualifications of stonemasons and their interaction with authorities and clients. The degrees of freemasonry retain the three grades of medieval craft guilds, those of Apprentice, Journeyman or fellow (now called Fellowcraft), and Master Mason. These are the degrees offered by Craft (or Blue Lodge) Freemasonry. Members of these organisations are known as Freemasons or Masons. There are additional degrees, which vary with locality and jurisdiction, and are usually administered by different bodies than the craft degrees.

The basic, local organisational unit of Freemasonry is the Lodge. The Lodges are usually supervised and governed at the regional level (usually coterminous with either a state, province, or national border) by a Grand Lodge or Grand Orient. There is no international, world-wide Grand Lodge that supervises all of Freemasonry; each Grand Lodge is independent, and they do not necessarily recognise each other as being legitimate.

Modern Freemasonry broadly consists of two main recognition groups. Regular Freemasonry insists that a volume of scripture is open in a working lodge, that every member profess belief in a Deity, that no women are admitted, and that the discussion of religion and politics is banned. Continental Freemasonry is now the general term for the "liberal" jurisdictions who have removed some, or all, of these restrictions.

Claude Dansey ex Wiki - see also #Colonel Z - The Secret Life of a Master of Spies
Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks^[1] Dansey (10 September 1876 in South Kensington – 11 June 1947 in Bath, Somerset), also known as #Colonel Z, Haywood, Uncle Claude, and codenamed Z, was the assistant chief of the Secret Intelligence Service known as ACSS, of the British intelligence agency commonly known as MI6, and a member of the London Controlling Section. He began his career in intelligence in 1900, and remained active until his death.

Colonel Z - The Secret Life of a Master of Spies
QUOTE
There was one group in New York, with headquarters at 63 West 107th Street, which was financed by the New York German newspaper Volkeszeitung, which in turn was known to be supported by funds from Germany. The leader of this group worked as an electrician at the Fox Film Studios and made no secret of his revolutionary zeal. He went by the name of Leon Trotsky. Even as Dansey was warning Van Deman about him and his comrades, Trotsky was obtaining a passport and visa from the Russian consulate and setting out from New York to board a ship for Russia from Halifax. The Canadians were warned and stopped him but the trusting Russian leader Kerensky cabled President Wilson and asked him to intervene. It was another of the presidential requests that could not be refused when Britain was wooing the United States, and the British Government reluctantly gave the word to the Canadians to let Trotsky go. At the same time General Ludendorff was passing Vladimir Ilyich Lenin from Switzerland through Germany to Russia.
UNQUOTE
See Lenin and the Sealed Train.

Secret Intelligence Service ex Wiki
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the British intelligence agency which supplies the British Government with foreign intelligence. The SIS Chief is held accountable to the Foreign Secretary.^[4] SIS is bound by the Intelligence Services Act 1994. SIS is frequently referred to by the name MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6), a name used as a flag of convenience during the First World War when it was known by many names.^[5] The existence of the SIS was not officially acknowledged until 1994.^[6][6]

In late 2010, the head of the SIS delivered what he said was the first public address by a serving chief of the agency in its then 101-year history. The remarks of Sir John Sawers primarily focused on the relationship between the need for secrecy and the goal of maintaining security within Britain. His remarks acknowledged the tensions caused by secrecy in an era of leaks and pressure for ever-greater disclosure.^[7] Since 1995, the SIS headquarters have been at Vauxhall Cross on the South Bank of the River Thames.

The Strange History of the East Village's Most Famous Street
As the German population thinned, other immigrants arrived, including Jews displaced by the pogroms in Europe, along with Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians. The area around St. Marks Place was firmly subsumed into the Lower East Side. In the winter of 1917, Leon Trotsky arrived on St. Marks Place, where he wrote for the Novy Mir ("New World"), headquartered at 77 St. Marks (and edited by fellow revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin) while living with his family across the street in an apartment at 80 St. Marks, above the space that later held a speakeasy and then a theater. Just a few years earlier, Socialist/Anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (famous for, among other things, attempting to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick) opened the progressive Modern School at No. 6; when it moved out, it was replaced by a Russian public bath.

He was not universally beloved.

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky was a Jew, communist subversive and hated by other communists. In common with Lenin and many others of that ilk, he was not in Russia when the revolution occurred. When the news got through to New York he hurried back to take over, to destroy the nascent democracy, to bring them the coup d'état which was Bolshevik Revolution and the murder of millions. Joe Stalin had him murdered in Mexico which evened the score slightly. #Trotsky aka David Bronstein was a sincere terrorist, saying &"We must turn Russia into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of.........".

Notice that Trotters went back to Russia with $10,000, around $1 million in today's money which almost certainly was given to him by Capitalist Swine - see Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, in particular Chapter II TROTSKY LEAVES NEW YORK TO COMPLETE THE REVOLUTION on the point. It was not enough to put a revolution on a sound financial footing but it helped in the early stages. It was influence buying, that is Wall Street wanting in. See e.g. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. He puts his view, his angle in his autobiography My Life It was put on line by Marxists at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/
PS Trotters even has his own fan club, the Fourth International. Given that fan is short for fanatic the expression is spot on.
PPS The Guardian tells us that the $10,000 was " subscribed by Socialists and Germans" - MI5 detained Trotsky on way to revolution in 1917. The point is confirmed at #Trotsky’s Tactical Ruthlessness

Leon Trotsky Biography - http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793#synopsis - http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793

Activist (1879–1940)

Communist Leon Trotsky helped ignite the Russian Revolution of 1917, and built the Red Army afterward. He was exiled and later assassinated by Soviet agents.

quotes

“The end may justify the means, as long as there is something that justifies the end.”

—Leon Trotsky

(TV-14; 4:32) Born in 1879, Leon Trotsky waged Russia's 1917 revolution alongside Vladimir Lenin. As commissar of war, he helped defeat forces opposed to Bolshevik control. He engaged in a power struggle against Joseph Stalin which led to his death.

Synopsis
Born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein on November 7, 1879, Leon Trotsky's revolutionary activity as a young man spurred his first of several ordered exiles to Siberia. He waged Russia's 1917 revolution alongside Vladimir Lenin. As commissar of war in the new Soviet government, he helped defeat forces opposed to Bolshevik control. As the Soviet government developed, he engaged in a power struggle against Joseph Stalin, which he lost, leading to his exile again and, eventually, his murder.

Early Life
Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in Yanovka, Ukraine—in the Russian Empire—on November 7, 1879. His parents, David and Anna Bronstein, were prosperous Jewish farmers. When he was 8 years old, Trotsky went to school in Odessa, then moved in 1896 to Nikolayev, Ukraine, for his final year in school. While there, he became enthralled with Marxism.

In 1897, Trotsky helped found the South Russian Workers' Union. He was arrested within a year and spent two years in prison before being tried, convicted and sent to Siberia for a four-year sentence. While in prison, he met and married Alexandra Lvovna, a co- revolutionary who had also been sentenced to Siberia. While there, they had two daughters.

In 1902, after serving only two years of his sentence, Leon Trotsky escaped exile, abandoning his wife and daughters. On forged papers, he changed his name to Leon Trotsky, a moniker he would use the rest of his life. He managed to make his way to London, England, where he joined the Socialist Democratic Party and met Vladimir Lenin. In 1903, Leon Trotsky married his second wife, Natalia Ivanovna. The couple had two sons.

Provisional Government and Soviet Leadership
During the early years of the Social Democratic Party, there were often disputes among the party's leadership over its form and strategy. Vladimir Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries who would lead a large contingent of non-party supporters. Julius Martov advocated for a larger, more democratic organization of supporters. Leon Trotsky tried to reconcile the two factions, resulting in numerous clashes with both groups' leaders. Many of the Social Democrats, including the ambitious Joseph Stalin, sided with Lenin. Trotsky's neutrality was seen as disloyal.

On January 22, 1905, unarmed demonstrators marching against the Russian Tsar were killed by the Imperial Guard. When word reached Leon Trotsky, he returned to Russia to support the uprisings. By the end of 1905, he had become a leader of the movement. In December, the rebellion was crushed, and Trotsky was arrested and once again sent to Siberia. At his trial, he put on a spirited defense and increased his popularity among the party's elite. In January 1907, Trotsky escaped prison and traveled to Europe, where he spent 10 years in exile in various cities, including Vienna, Zurich, Paris and New York, spending much of the time writing for Russian revolutionary journals, including Pravda, and advocating an anti-war policy.

After the overthrow of Russian Tsar Nicholas II, in February 1917, Trotsky set out for Russia from New York. However, Okhrana (the Tsar's secret police) persuaded British authorities to have him detained at Halifax, Canada. He was held there for a month, before the Russian provisional government demanded his release. After he arrived in Russia in May 1917, he quickly addressed some of the problems forming in post-revolutionary Russia. He disapproved of the provisional government because he felt it was ineffectual. The new prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, saw Trotsky as a major threat and had him arrested. While in jail, Trotsky was admitted to the Bolshevik Party and released soon after. He was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, a strong hold of dissent against the provisional government.

In November 1917, the provisional government was overthrown and the Soviet Council of People's Commissars was formed, with Vladimir Lenin elected chairman. Leon Trotsky’s first role in the new government was serving as commissar for foreign affairs and making peace with the Germans. Talks began in January 1918, and Germany had a long list of demands for territory and reparations. Trotsky wanted to wait out the German government, in hopes that it would be defeated by the Allies or suffer internal insurrection. However, Lenin felt that peace with Germany needed to be made so they could concentrate on building a communist government in Russia. Trotsky disagreed and resigned from this post.

After the Bolsheviks took control of the Soviet government, Lenin ordered the formation of the Red Army and appointed Leon Trotsky its leader. The army's first orders were to neutralize the White Army (Socialist revolutionaries opposed to Bolshevik control) during the Russian Civil War. Trotsky proved to be an outstanding military leader, as he led the army of 3 million to victory. The task was difficult, as Trotsky directed a war effort that was at times on 16 different fronts. It also didn't help that some members of the Soviet leadership, including Lenin, became involved in military strategy, redirecting the Red Army's efforts and countermanding some of Trotsky's orders. In late 1920, the Bolsheviks finally won the Civil War, ensuring Bolshevik control of the Soviet government. After the White Army surrendered, Trotsky was elected a member of the Communist Party central committee. He was clearly positioned as the Soviet Union's number-two man, next to Lenin.

During the winter of 1920-21, as the Soviet government moved from war to peace-time operations, an increasingly acrimonious debate grew over the role of trade unions. Believing that the workers should have nothing to fear from the government, Leon Trotsky advocated the state control the trade unions. He reasoned that this would give officials a tighter control over labor and facilitate a greater integration between government and the proletariat. Lenin criticized Trotsky, accusing him of harassing the unions and abandoning his support for the proletariat. A breach between the two developed and other officials, including Joseph Stalin, took advantage, siding with Lenin to gain favor. As Trotsky dug in and refused to modify his position, the dissention grew and Lenin feared the conflict would splinter the party. At a meeting at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, the issue came to a head when several of Trotsky's supporters were replaced by Lenin's lieutenants. Trotsky finally dropped his opposition and, to show his allegiance to Lenin, ordered the suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion (an uprising of sailors and longshoremen protesting heavy-handed Bolshevik tactics). But the damage was done, and Trotsky had lost much of his political influence over the dispute.

By 1922, the pressures of revolution and injuries from an earlier assassination attempt had taken their toll on Vladimir Lenin. In May, he suffered his first stroke and questions arose over who would succeed him. Leon Trotsky had a stellar record as a military leader and administrator and seemed the obvious choice among the rank and file membership of the Communist Party. But he had offended many in the Politburo (the Communist Party's executive committee), and a group of Politburo members, led by Joseph Stalin, joined forces to oppose him. The previous month, Lenin had appointed Stalin to the new post of Central Committee General Secretary. Though not a significant post at the time, it gave Stalin control over all party-member appointments. He quickly consolidated his power and started lining up allies against Trotsky.

Between 1922 and 1924, Vladimir Lenin tried to counter some of Stalin's influence and support Trotsky on several occasions. However, a third stroke virtually silenced Lenin and Stalin was free to completely push Trotsky out of power. Lenin died on January 21, 1924, and Trotsky was isolated and alone, outmaneuvered by Stalin. From that point on, Trotsky was steadily pushed out of important roles on Soviet government and, eventually, pushed out of the country.

Between 1925 and 1928, Trotsky was gradually pushed from power and influence by Stalin and his allies, who discredited Trotsky's role in the Russian Revolution and his military record. In October 1927, Trotsky was expelled from the Central Committee and exiled the following January to the very remote Alma-Ata, located in present-day Kazakhstan. Apparently, that was not far enough for Stalin, so in February, 1929, Trotsky was banished entirely from the Soviet Union. Over the next seven years, he lived in Turkey, France and Norway, before arriving in Mexico City.

Trotsky continued to write and criticize Joseph Stalin and the Soviet government. During the 1930s, Stalin conducted political purges and named Trotsky, in absentia, a major conspirator and enemy of the people. In August 1936, 16 of Trotsky's allies were charged with aiding Trotsky in treason. All 16 were found guilty and executed. Stalin then set out to assassinate Trotsky. In 1937, Trotsky moved to Mexico, eventually settling in Mexico City, where he continued to criticize Soviet leadership.

Death and Legacy
In In the early months of 1940, Leon Trotsky's health was failing and he knew he was a marked man. In February, he wrote a testament expressing his final thoughts for posterity and forcibly denied Stalin's accusations. On August 20, 1940, Trotsky was sitting at his desk in his study in Mexico City. Ramon Mercader, an undercover agent for the Soviet Union's secret police, attacked Trotsky with a mountaineering ice ax, puncturing his skull. He was taken to the hospital, but died a day later, at the age of 60.

For decades, Leon Trotsky was discredited in the Soviet Union, the result of Stalin's hatred and his totalitarian control. However, 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet government, in 2001, Trotsky's reputation was officially "rehabilitated" by the Russian government. His legacy of being the most brilliant intellect of the Communist Revolution and his reputation as a tireless worker, rousing public speaker and decisive administrator was restored. Some historians believe if he had not subordinated himself to Lenin during the Bolshevik Revolution, the history of the Soviet Union might have been very different. However, Trotsky had allowed his intelligence and arrogance to antagonize those less able than himself, and in the end, alienated many around him, allowing deceitful men like Stalin to take advantage.

Fact Check

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Leon Trotsky Biography

Leon Trotsky - A Biography
Is fairly short, reading as honest.

My Life by Leon Trotsky
Includes chapters about his childhood, which may perfectly well be right. He says that his father became a rich farmer but does not tell us how he was able to start with the buying 250 acres and lease another 400; he was also a miller with a 10 horsepower steam engine. Getting richer by hard work, frugality and competence are all right. His start is a question. The local synagogue might have had the answers.
Foreword
Preface to the Norwegian Edition (1935)
I. Yanovka
II. Our Neighbors and My First School
III. Odessa: My Family and My School
IV. Books and Early Conflicts
V. Country and Town
VI. The Break
VII. My First Revolutionary Organization

Leon Trotsky On Zionism And Russia - Allegedly
QUOTE
"We must turn Russia into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of. The only difference is that this will be a left-wing tyranny, not a right-wing tyranny. It will be a red tyranny and not a white one.

We mean the word 'red' literally, because we shall shed such floods of blood as will make all the human losses suffered in the capitalist wars quake and pale by comparison. The biggest bankers across the ocean will work in the closest possible contact with us. If we win the revolution, we shall establish the power of Zionism up upon the wreckage of the revolution' s funeral, and we shall became a power before which the whole world will sink to its knees. We shall show what real power is. By means of terror and bloodbaths, we shall reduce the Russian intelligentsia to a state of complete stupefaction and idiocy and to an animal existence... At the moment, our young men in their leather jackets, who are the sons of watchmakers from Odessa, Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitsa, know how to hate everything Russian! What pleasure they take in physically destroying the Russian intelligentsia — officers, academics and writers!..."
UNQUOTE
Was Leon full of hate, a mass murderer? It reads that way but who wrote it? It is single sourced and not characteristic of Trotters so it is probably a malicious lie by Valdas Anelauskas, a Latvian or Lithuanian Right Wing liar.

What was he going to do for the peasant masses? What did he do to them?

Leon Trotsky ex Wiki`
QUOTE
Leon Trotsky (7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist.
He was one of the leaders of the Russian October Revolution, second only to Vladimir Lenin. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo.

After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, Trotsky also opposed Stalin's peace agreements with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico, by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of #Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who was never rehabilitated by the Gorbachev administration.
UNQUOTE
Still persona non grata. He really did get himself hated and murdered.

Trotsky, Partner In Revolution ex Haaretz
QUOTE
Leon Trotsky, partner in revolution Trotsky was always more worldly and reflective than Lenin, and warned early on that the Bolsheviks were on their way to dictatorship, yet to his ignominious end in 1940, he was unable to acknowledge the basic fault of the revolution he was instrumental in creating.

“Nothing great has been accomplished in history without fanaticism.” − Leon Trotsky.

In choosing that striking statement as the epigraph of his book, Joshua Rubenstein, author of a number of works on Soviet history, and northeastern regional director of Amnesty International U.S.A., immediately establishes a theme that dominates this succinct, densely packed political biography of Leon Trotsky. Published in Yale University Press’s “Jewish Lives” series, Rubenstein’s study focuses on the tragic paradox of Trotsky’s life: that even the combination of his keen intellectual grasp of politics and culture, catholic interests and tastes and sympathy for the persecuted and downtrodden failed to prevent this once anti-autocrat idealist from himself founding a despotic regime and becoming an enduring apologist for repression in the service of dogma.
UNQUOTE
Lord Acton told us that power corrupts; that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Trotters proves it.

A Jew with bottle.

Leon Trotsky Quoted
Some, a lot were fairly silly; others were blood thirsty quotes. They came to pass.

MI5 Captured Trotsky On His Way To Revolt In Russia
QUOTE
Leon Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army, was detained on the orders of MI5 in a move which could have prevented him from playing any part in the Russian revolution and its aftermath,............. Papers made available at the Public Record Office show how MI5, and the French and Spanish security services, monitored Trotsky's movement in the months leading to the revolution in February 1917 which overthrew the Tsarist regime.
The previous autumn Trotsky was expelled from France after his Paris paper, Nashe Slovo (Our Word) was suppressed on the grounds it was subversive and anti-war. He set off for Madrid, "surrounded by spies" who, he noted, regarded him as a "dangerous terrorist agitator". [ He "was" - "Editor" The so called "Guardian" wants its "Useful Idiots" to think "it" knows better. ]. In Madrid he was immediately arrested, jailed, and taken to Cadiz where he was told he was going to be put on a boat to Havana. But after angry protests, Trotsky was allowed to remain a few more days and sail, instead, to New York........

MI5 continued to monitor Trotsky's activities. In a telegram from New York to London, dated March 22, 1917, an MI5 agent warned: "An important movement has been started here among Socialists, with a view to getting back Revolutionary Socialists into Russia ... with [the] object of establishing a Republic and initiating Peace movement; also of promoting Socialistic Revolutions in other countries, including the United States". The "main leader", the telegram noted, "is Trotsky", who was planning to leave the US for Russia. A few days later, the MI5 agent dispatched a message to London saying Trotsky had set sail "with $10,000 subscribed by Socialists and Germans" on the way to Petrograd, now St Petersburg.

The agent ordered the ship to be detained when it stopped at Halifax in Canada. Trotsky was arrested with five Russian comrades. There he could have remained, had it not been for the intervention of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.
UNQUOTE
Errare human est. Deciding which source got it right leaves scope for getting it wrong.

Permanent Revolution
Trotters was a big fan of Permarev for reasons known unto him. To be fair it is being inflicted on us by the followers of Antonio Gramsci, the leading intellectual of the Italian communist party.

Killing Trotsky
Was Stalin's rather absurd top priority. He succeeded.
QUOTE
Though she had worked indirectly as a Stalinist agent for years via the directives of the Comintern, Caridad Mercader was formally indoctrinated into the NKVD by Leonid Eitingon who operated in Spain under the alias of General Kotov. Caridad had a long running affair with Eitingon, who not only recruited her, but her son Ramon as well. Eitingon trained Mercader in the ways of sabotage and Guerrilla warfare and in 1937, took him to Moscow for more specialized training in dissembling and assassination.

Eitingon was the mastermind behind the Trotsky assassination, directing it via the Soviet consulate in New York. To get close to Trotsky, it was decided that Mercader would have to become romantically involved with someone who had access to Trotsky's inner sanctum. The NKVD chose Sylvia Ageloff, a Brooklyn social worker, Trotskyite, and confidante of Trotsky himself. It was assumed that Ageloff would be attending a secret conference of Trotsky's Fourth International (about which the NKVD had been tipped off) in France in the summer of 1938. The NKVD used Ruby Weil, a wavering Trotskyite and acquaintance of Ageloff, to travel to Europe with Ageloff and set her up with Mercader via an agent by the name of Gertrude.....
UNQUOTE
This confirms Christopher Andrew in the Mitrokhin Archive at 112 et seq. The project manager was Iosif Grigulevich - see the next one

Iosif Grigulevich - Mitrokhin Archive 114 et seq. - Jew - the Wiki pretends he is not one by calling him a Crimean Karaite; therefore one of the tribe.
QUOTE
Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich (Иосиф Ромуальдович Григулевич) (May 5, 1913 – June 2, 1988) was one of the most remarkable Soviet illegal operatives (a spy acting without legitimate diplomatic cover) during the 1930s and 1940s, when he took a leading role in assassinating leftists who were not loyal to Joseph Stalin. Under a false identity as Teodoro B. Castro, a wealthy Costa Rican expatriate living in Rome, Grigulevich served as the ambassador of the Republic of Costa Rica to both Italy and Yugoslavia (1952–1954). His mission to assassinate Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito was aborted due to Stalin's death, after which Grigulevich settled in Moscow, where he worked as an expert on the history of Latin America and on the Roman Catholic Church. He was a member of Soviet Academy of Sciences, served as editor in chief of the magazine, Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost ("Social Sciences Today") and published many books and articles about Latin American subjects.
UNQUOTE
He was also tasked to kill Tito in Yugoslavia.

Trotsky’s Tactical Ruthlessness May Have Won The Bolsheviks Russia. But He Almost Missed The Uprising In A Canadian Jail
QUOTE
The deadliest war in all Canadian history had just ended, but for 4,000 unlucky Canadian soldiers, another war was just beginning.

As Russia descended into civil war between Bolsheviks and a loose coalition of anti-Communists, Canada, along with its other Great War allies, had promised troops to help patch up what was left of Imperial Russia.

In Victoria, B.C., when French-Canadian conscripts were told they were being shipped to Siberia, they mutinied. Within full view of citizens in the quiet B.C. capital, volunteer soldiers were brought up to whip the Quebecers with belts and march them onto waiting ships at the point of a bayonet.

A ruthless tactician headed the armies these men were being sent to fight. He drove millions of peasants into his ranks by force, held families hostage to ensure a soldier’s loyalty and even revived the Ancient Roman practice of decimation. If a unit retreated without orders, every tenth man was ordered killed.

The idea that human life was sacred, he would say later, was nothing more than “vegetarian-Quaker prattle.”

As the Canadian troops began their storm-battered sea voyage to Vladivostok, they could not have known the irony that this man, Leon Trotsky, had been safely locked away in Nova Scotia only a few months before...........

Worse still, the British suspected that Trotsky’s passage had been funded by the German enemy [ rather than Jews or Wall Street ].........

Amherst, though, was mostly filled with sailors from the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, a German ship sunk by the Royal Navy in the opening days of the war...........

Even among fellow revolutionaries, Trotsky would become legendary for his grating arrogance, and the trait clashed immediately with the rigid commander, who had directly addressed Trotsky as “dangerous to the Allies in general.”............

For the rest of his life, Trotsky would never forgive Canada, and vowed upon his departure that once in Russia, he would take action regarding the “outrageous treatment of Russian citizens by the Anglo-Canadian police.”

And yet, for all the injustice Trotsky claimed to have suffered at the hands of Canada, it was not long before he was enthusiastically condemning thousands of Russians to his own network of overcrowded concentration camps.

As Trotsky wrote in an August 1918 message to one of his military commanders, “root out the counter-revolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps — this is a necessary condition of success.”
UNQUOTE
He was a savage but you might not think so from reading his biography.

Politburo Decided On October Revolution
QUOTE
In the Communist seizure of power in Russia, the Jewish role was probably critical.

Two weeks prior to the Bolshevik "October Revolution" of 1917, Lenin convened a top secret meeting in St. Petersburg (Petrograd) at which the key leaders of the Bolshevik party's Central Committee made the fateful decision to seize power in a violent takeover. Of the twelve persons who took part in this decisive gathering, there were four Russians (including Lenin), one Georgian (Stalin), one Pole (Dzerzhinsky), and six Jews.⁹

To direct the takeover, a seven-man "Political Bureau" [ #Politburo ] ] was chosen. It consisted of two Russians (Lenin and Bubnov), one Georgian (Stalin), and four Jews (Trotsky, Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, and Kamenev).¹⁰ Meanwhile, the Petersburg (Petrograd) Soviet -- whose chairman was Trotsky -- established an 18-member "Military Revolutionary Committee" to actually carry out the seizure of power. It included eight (or nine) Russians, one Ukrainian, one Pole, one Caucasian, and six Jews.¹¹ Finally, to supervise the organization of the uprising, the Bolshevik Central Committee established a five-man "Revolutionary Military Center" as the Party's operations command. It consisted of one Russian (Bubnov), one Georgian (Stalin), one Pole (Dzerzhinsky), and two Jews (Sverdlov and Uritsky).
UNQUOTE
More Jews, more mass murder, more evil.

Trotskyism ex Wiki
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky identified himself as an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, and supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism, and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism, as they oppose the idea of Socialism in One Country. Trotskyists also criticize the bureaucracy that developed in the USSR under Stalin.

Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky were close both ideologically and personally during the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and some call Trotsky its "co-leader".^[1] However, Lenin criticized Trotsky's ideas and intra-Party political habits. Trotsky was the paramount leader of the Soviet Red Army in the direct aftermath of the Revolutionary period.

Trotsky originally opposed some aspects of Leninism. Later, he concluded that unity between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was impossible, and joined the Bolsheviks. Trotsky played a leading role with Lenin in the revolution. Assessing Trotsky, Lenin wrote, "Trotsky long ago said that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik."^[2]

Trotsky's Fourth International was established in France in 1938 when Trotskyists argued that the Comintern or Third International had become irretrievably "lost to Stalinism" and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power.^[3] In contemporary English language usage, an advocate of Trotsky's ideas is often called a "Trotskyist"; a Trotskyist can be called a "Trotskyite" or "Trot", especially by a critic of Trotskyism.^[4]

Trotsky Quoted

Trotters had something rather special about him; he even was hated by his own, not just reasonable people. Bloody thirsty quotes are all too likely to be have been sincere.

http://www.radioislam.org/zionism/ or Zionism and Russia or 236 others.
PREFACE

BY MEANS OF TERROR
Lev Davidovich Trotsky, whose real name was David Bronstein, said: "We must turn Russia into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of. The only difference is that this will be a left-wing tyranny, not a right-wing tyranny. It will be a red tyranny and not a white one.

"We mean the word 'red' literally, because we shall shed such floods of blood as will make all the human losses suffered in the capitalist wars quake and pale by comparison. The biggest bankers across the ocean will work in the closest possible contact with us. If we win the revolution, we shall establish the power of Zionism upon the wreckage of the revolution's funeral, and we shall became a power before which the whole world will sink to its knees. We shall show what real power is. By means of terror and bloodbaths, we shall reduce the Russian intelligentsia to a state of complete stupefaction and idiocy and to an animal existence... At the moment, our young men in their leather jackets, who are the sons of watchmakers from Odessa, Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitsa, know how to hate everything Russian! What pleasure they take in physically destroying the Russian intelligentsia - officers, academics and writers!..."

Taken from the "Memoirs" of Aron Simanovich, a jeweller at the court of the Tsar's Imperial Majesty.

From the newspaper "Russkoye slovo", No. 1

Permanent Revolution ex Wiki
Permanent revolution is a term within Marxist theory, established in usage by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by at least 1850 but which has since become most closely associated with Leon Trotsky. The use of the term by different theorists is not identical. Marx used it to describe the strategy of a revolutionary class to continue to pursue its class interests independently and without compromise, despite overtures for political alliances, and despite the political dominance of opposing sections of society.

Trotsky put forward his conception of 'permanent revolution' as an explanation of how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that had not achieved advanced capitalism. Part of his theory is the supposed impossibility of 'socialism in one country'. Trotsky's theory also argues, first, that the bourgeoisie in late-developing capitalist countries are incapable of developing the productive forces in such a manner as to achieve the sort of advanced capitalism which will fully develop an industrial proletariat. Second, that the proletariat can and must, therefore, seize social, economic, and political power, leading an alliance with the peasantry.

Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.

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Updated on 13/02/2024 12:14