Trotsky in love. Whatever his initial motivations, Bronstein’s revolutionary career began under appropriately romantic auspices. He was introduced by school friends into a radical discussion group conducted by a self-educated Czech gardener named Franz Shvigovsky. Though the group’s subversive activities were limited to tea drinking and talk, Shvigovsky was regarded as a dangerous conspirator by the czarist police, and therefore had immense prestige in the eyes of the students.
Read More:http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/trotsky-offered-asylum-mexico ---In the spring of 1935 the Norwegian government agreed to let the Trotsky household move near Oslo. It was there that he wrote The Revolution Betrayed, in which he again contrasted the ideals of 1917 with the tyranny Stalin had created. He was now formally condemned to death in Moscow and Soviet pressure prevailed on the Norwegian regime to put him under house arrest in 1936. In December that year the Mexican government offered Trotsky refuge and protection, which he gratefully accepted. He and Natalya sailed from Norway aboard an oil tanker and arrived in Mexico in January 1937.---
One member of the group was a young woman, several years older than Bronstein, named Alexandra Sokolovskaya. Alexandra, who later became Bronstein’s first wife, was a Marxist. Bronstein, like his mentor Shvigovsky, thought of himself as a Narodnik, a socialist-populist of the old-fashioned, idealistic, warmhearted Russian sort. “A curse upon all Marxists, and upon those who want to bring dryness and hardness into all relations of life,” he exclaimed in a defiant New Year’s toast, addressed with adolescent boorishness to Alexandra herself. She walked out of the room, and a few months later he became a convert to Marxism.
Read More:http://www.principiadialectica.co.uk/blog/?p=372 Image: Wiki---His book about the aborted 1905 Revolution is probably his best work, written at that time. No doubt in 1905 he was a romantic figure, sent to Siberia for his part in the Revolution. Lenin always referred to him as Pero – ‘feather’ or ‘pen’ in Russian. In later years he showed he could handle the sword of the state to put down rebellions. He even introduced the Roman decimation system in the Red Army, in order to keep discipline and enforce obedience. He also introduced the militarisation of labour, as against the free movement of labour. Marx and Engels would have been appalled by such harsh reality, but probably they would not have been surprised by the Soviet ‘new economic policy.’ Trotsky also proclaimed, ‘those who do not work shall not eat’, a phrase that Saint Paul once said – strangely, it is a phrase that seems to fit all times. The Nazis also enforced that awful phrase. Zizek the Christian polygraph sees nothing wrong with it; neither does Alain Badiou, the (still) French Maoist in 2009. These two will never realise philosophy with such rubbish. As for Trotsky, he probably cut a romantic figure before 1917, when he played chess with Lenin, Stalin and all the other professional revolutionaries. But then things got sticky when the Czarist regime fell.---
The incident illustrates the basic dichotomy in Trotsky’s nature. There were to be occasions in his career as an adult revolutionary when the marxist zealot or windy theorizer would seem, in fact to have forgotten his native humanity, not to mention his common sense. In 1919 Trotsky proposed conscripting workers to lay the basis for a Socialist economy in Russia, and in what a few years later would have seemed a typical example of Stalinist cynicism, denounced the “wretched and miserable liberal prejudice” that forced labor was always unproductive.
More often perhaps, Trotsky’s Marxism would serve as a focusing lens to the somewhat diffuse ardor of his temperament, magnifying both his virtues and his faults to a heroic intensity, ultimately enabling him to personify better than any other figure in modern history the twentieth-century myth of revolution.
Read More:http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/serv-d15.shtml ---This story of the transformation of Leiba into Lëva reinforces a central theme of Service’s argument: that Trotsky was ashamed of his Jewish origins and even sought to downplay them in his autobiography (one of the examples of its “serious inaccuracies”). So Service would have his readers believe that he has uncovered the real story whereby little “Leiba Bronstein” —the son of the “plucky Jew” David Bronstein—became Lyova Bronstein, and, somewhat later, Lev Trotsky. An interesting story, but is there any truth in it? ---
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