Leader
Leon Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein · 1879–1940
Portrait, 1924. Wikimedia Commons.
Trotsky was the orator of October and the builder of the army that won the civil war. He was also the regime’s most fluent defender of terror as policy, not as an accident of war.
Origin and religion
Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein to a Jewish farming family at Yanovka, Kherson governorate (today Ukraine).
Jewish family. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein.
Responsibilities
- Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (1917)
- People’s commissar for foreign affairs, then for war
- Organizer of the Red Army
He led the Soviet delegation’s political line into the Brest-Litovsk peace, then became war commissar. He restored the death penalty at the front, took hostages, and used blocking detachments. He was the political author of the assault on Kronstadt in March 1921. After Lenin’s death he lost the succession to Stalin, was expelled from the party, exiled in 1929, and murdered in Mexico in 1940 by an NKVD agent, Ramón Mercader.
The record
His book Terrorism and Communism (1920), written against the German socialist Karl Kautsky, is a primary source. He argues that a ruling revolutionary class will shoot, that the form of repression is a question of expediency, and that talk of the sacredness of human life is a lie while labor itself is bought and sold. He calls the Red Terror a weapon used against a class “doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish.” Later he denounced Stalin’s terror. He did not renounce his own.
What they said
Woe to all kulaks, woe to all speculators who withhold grain surpluses while the workers’ children are dying of hunger-typhus.
The question of the form of repression, or of its degree, of course, is not one of principle. It is a question of expediency.
As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.
The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish.
Others filed as Jewish
- Yakov Sverdlov — Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- Grigory Zinoviev — Party boss of Petrograd
- Lazar Kaganovich — Stalin’s principal party enforcer in the 1930s
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