this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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ok, yeah that's a little short sighted of him. he was a general during the russian civil war and his use of an armored train during said war led to some decisive victories over the whites. but i kinda get why he is seen negatively, i dont think he deserved to be killed over that though.
Even Marxist Leninists (who side on the stalin side of the stalin-trotsky controversy) praise the actions of trotsky during the civil war.
Otherwise he wasn't all that. His politics were very suspect, especially his hatred and dismissal of the peasant class (that is my most major disagreement with him).
His critique of "socialism in one country" also becomes nonsense when you take into context the state of the USSR at the time. It was in no shape or form ready for a war with any nearby power (shown in the massive losses in the polish soviet war and the winter war, and those were mostly due to disorganization and unstable doctrines), its industry was in a shameful state, its population mostly illiterate, mostly cut off from the rest of the world, and there were saboteurs breaking everything left and right. Permanent revolution was not truly possible in any way. Socialism in one country also wasn't a dismissal of internationalism like trotsky makes it seem. The Stalin era USSR took massive efforts to aid the spanish civil war and fund anti fascist resistance all over europe. Any further action would weaken the USSR to a point where it likely could not have fought off the Nazi invasion.
There is also the fact that Nazis peddled Trotsky's ideology for the purpose of destablization during the Great Patriotic War. Of course that is not attributing trotskyism to any kind of fascism, that would be petty, but pointing out that it was mostly harmful to the Soviet Union.
Trotsky was also previously an anti-boleshevik from the menshevik camp, and, if I remember correctly, never changed the majority of his opinions from that time.
He was also no "inheritor of the soviet union", to think that one such as Lenin would try to divinely bestow leaders upon the socialist democracy he created is against his every ideal. That and the legitimacy of "Lenin's will" is called into great question, due to the suspicious circumstances from which it arose.
These are a few critiques off the top of my head, I need to read further on the subject to say anything else.
He wasn't menshevik per se, he was always in the "mediator" camp between mesheviks and bolsheviks, but in practice it looked like the political opportunism to position himself in the limelight and trying to work as the tip of the scales, though that didn't really worked because mensheviks weren't really much interested in real reconcilliation and bolsheviks didn't trusted Trotsky. He did got plenty limelight in the communist inteligentsia circles due to that though. Lenin constantly criticised him for this shaky and unprincipled position which proven how Trotsky either failed to understand the situation, or did but still decided to sit on the fence.