During the Republic's early days, Trotsky served as the People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs then the Founder and Commander of the Red Army by serving as the People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. As such, he was a major figure in the civil war victory.
 |
| Trotsky office where he was mudered. (Author's collection. copyright 2019) |
After Lenin’s death, Trotsky led the failed struggle of opposition against the rise of Joseph Stalin and his ever increasing bureaucracy. He was removed from the Politburo and the Central Committee, expelled from the Communist Party and finally, exiled. Despite this he continued to oppose Stalin's bureaucracy at the fourth Communist International (COMINTERN). Trotsky's actions put him on Stalin's bad side and set him on a global odyssey seeking political asylum, being repeatedly turned away by western government’s. Eventually, he ended up in Mexico City and agreed to acceptable terms with the government there about the scope of his political activities. Trotsky was a theorist and prolific writer, his ideas were the basis for a Marxist school of thought called Trotskyism and he was writing a "tell all" on Stalin. To say the least, this was not to Stalin's liking and he decided to act.
In 1940, Stalin sent a mole to assassinate Trotsky. By Stalin’s thinking, the world could never know the truth about him and the party’s activities - the only version of the truth was his and there could be no dissent. So, on the afternoon of August 20, 1940 in the Mexico City neighbourhood of Coyoacán, a trusted member of Trotsky’s inner-circle entered his house under the pretence of giving him a pen. Once alone with Trotsky in his office, Ramón Mercador hit Trotsky in the head with an ice axe. Trotsky died later in hospital and Mercador, the assassin, would spend 20 years in prison. Stalin went on to exterminate Trotsky's family left in Russia, including his children, and re-write Soviet history without a mention of one of its greatest architects.
 |
| Mexican authorities with ice axe (Author's collection) |
It would be decades before the world began to see the evil Stalin represented and even more decades before the world understood that communism was a failed experiment. Yet today, in the United States, the greatest democratic nation in the world, Politicians are openly calling for the violation of that nation's constitution in order to place their constituents in mortal danger, while they try to re-create this experiment. Lev Trotsky's story should prove as a cautionary tale to these would-be courtiers to the ruinous and rapacious exercise that is communism.
 |
| Leon Trotsky's internment, Mexico City. (Author's Collection, copyright 2019) |
No comments:
Post a Comment