A further crisis followed in the autumn of 1919, at the height of the advances of the White forces of Generals A. I. Denikin (which had almost reached Tula and looked set to attack Moscow) and N. N. Iudenich (which had reached the outskirts of Petrograd), when Trotsky persuaded Lenin that Petrograd could not be abandoned (as that would encourage the intervention of Finland and Estonia) and went personally to the city to rally Red forces (for which he won the Order of the Red Banner on 31 December 1919). Equally controversially, in July 1920 he was opposed to pursuing the Red advance during the Soviet–Polish War onto Polish territory, arguing that the Red Army was exhausted and that an invasion would merely stiffen Polish resistance—and he was proved right.
During the civil-war period, Trotsky also became a member of the Politbiuro (from March 1919) a candidate (August 1920–June 1921) and then a full member (July 1921–November 1922) of the Executive Committee of the Komintern, and was briefly People’s Commissar for Food Supply (July 1921).
As the civil wars wound down and the health of his closest ally, Lenin, declined, Trotsky and his supporters in the Left Opposition (who opposed the moderation of the New Economic Policy era and demanded a greater emphasis on rapid industrialization and international revolution) found themselves increasingly outmaneuvered by their enemies within the party leadership, notably the Old Bolsheviks Stalin, L. B. Kamenev, and G. E. Zinov′ev. Trotsky, in particular, made himself unpopular (in the party and at large) through his post–civil-war advocacy of Labor Armies and his denigration of the role of trade unions in the Soviet state, as well as his haughty and dismissive attitude to those he considered to be his intellectual inferiors—–that is, almost everyone. Moreover, although he had been encouraged by the ailing Lenin to put himself forward as leader and to quash Stalin, Trotsky declined (apparently fearing disunity of the party and in the belief that a Jewish leader would ignite an anti-Semitic, reactionary wave in Russia). Consequently, on 26 January 1925, he was replaced as People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and head of the Revvoensovet of the USSR by M. V. Frunze and was subsequently expelled from the Politbiuro (23 October 1926) and the Central Committee (23 October 1927). Meanwhile, he served (largely nominally) as chairman of the Main Concessions Committee of the USSR (May 1925–17 November 1927), member of the Presidium of VSNKh (May 1925–August 1926), and member of the Electro-Technical Directorate of VSNKH (from 1925).
Trotsky’s reconciliation with Kamenev and Zinov′ev to oppose Stalin (the so-called United Opposition) in 1926 was easily contained by Stalin at the 15th Party Congress in 1927. Charged with factionalism, all leading members of the opposition were expelled from the party, including Trotsky (14 November 1927). The last of these events took place a week after Stalin had organized a display of “popular anger” at the opposition during a demonstration to mark the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, during which stones were thrown at Trotsky by the crowd. To stifle any lingering influence he may have had, he was then banished to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan on 17 January 1928, and forcibly exiled from the USSR on 16 January 1929.
After periods in Turkey (to 24 July 1933), France (to 18 July 1935), and Norway (to December 1936), Trotsky settled in Mexico from 9 January 1937, at the behest of the radical artist Diego Rivera. There, he rallied opposition to Stalin through the Fourth International, at the same time explicitly challenging the legitimacy of the Moscow-dominated Komintern, and wrote a series of major works, including The Revolution Betrayed (1937), in which he argued that the Soviet union had become a bureaucratized, degenerated workers’ state. (He had already published a monumental and enduringly influential History of the Russian Revolution in 1931–1933 and an autobiography, My Life, in 1930.) Reacting to his appeals, in many countries during the 1930s Trotskyist parties split from the Communists, notably the Socialist Workers’ Party in the United States and, in Spain, POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), which was suppressed by Stalin’s supporters during the Spanish Civil War. At the same time, Trotsky was made the central figure of hate in Stalin’s Russia, while his part in the Bolsheviks’ victory during the revolution and civil wars was erased from the history books. (The town of Gatchina, which—to his intense irritation—had been renamed Trotsk in his honor in 1923, had reverted to its previous name in 1929.)
During the first great show trial in 1936 (“The Trial of the 16” or “The Trial of the Trotskyite–Zinov′evite Terrorist Center”), Trotsky was condemned to death in absentia, as the éminence grise behind the absurd charges of espionage and sabotage laid against the defendants. Trotsky’s guards and supporters subsequently thwarted several attempts to assassinate him, but his Mexican entourage was eventually penetrated by Ramón Mercader, an agent of the NKVD, who on 20 August 1940 attacked him with an ice pick as Trotsky was working at his desk. His blood soaked the manuscript of the book on which he was working: a biography of Stalin. He died in hospital in Mexico City the following day.
Trotsky was to become a hero of the anti-Stalinist Left in the West during the second half of the 20th century, his ruthlessness, arrogance, arbitrariness, and dictatorial nature being largely forgotten by his acolytes. He was the subject of innumerable academic studies and many fictional accounts (notably Joseph Losey’s 1972 feature film, The Assassination of Trotsky, in which he was played by Richard Burton). His last home, a fortified villa in Coyoacán, Mexico City, where Trotsky is buried, is preserved as a quiet and dignified museum in his memory. Yet in Russia, the Gorbachev regime never got around to rehabilitating him, although his image was allowed to appear on a postage stamp in 1987, while his son (Sergei Sedov, killed by the NKVD in 1937) was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988, and (from 1989) his books began to be republished and became once again available in Russian libraries.
TROTSKY’S TRAIN. The mobile command and propaganda center that L. D. Trotsky referred to merely as “the train” (formally known as “The Train of the Chairman of the Revvoensovet of the Republic”) was first formed at Moscow, on 7 August 1918. It initially consisted of 2 armored engines and 12 wagons, and was immediately dispatched for Sviiazhsk, on the Volga Front, with a unit of Latvian Riflemen on board. In the course of the civil wars, the train made 36 such visits to the various Red fronts and traveled at least 75,000 miles.
By late 1919, the configuration of Trotsky’s train had evolved to embrace two separate echelons that included several armored wagons (with turrets and embrasures for machine guns and cannon), flatbed trucks to transport armored cars and other vehicles (including Trotsky’s own command car, a Rolls-Royce that had been commandeered from the tsar’s garage), a telegraph station, a radio station, an electricity-generating wagon, a printing house (with presses), a library, a secretariat wagon, a kitchen, a bathhouse wagon, and even a special wagon for transporting a collapsible small aircraft. Also on board were a special guard unit of some 100 elite troops (mostly Latvians), who dressed in special red uniforms and hats of Red Army style (the budenovka), as well as cooks and other staff, mechanics, technicians, political agitators, and secretaries. By 21 January 1921, there were 407 people attached to the institution of “the train,” doing 80 different jobs.