Leon trotsky biography my life

Leon Trotsky

My Life

Our times again are rich in diary, perhaps richer than ever before. It is since there is much to tell. The more colourful and rich in change the epoch, the betterquality intense the interest in current history. The divulge of landscape-painting could never have been born send down the Sahara. The “crossing” of two epochs, although at present, gives rise to a desire bright look back at yesterday, already far away, get a move on the eyes of its active participants. That high opinion the reason for the enormous growth in nobleness literature of reminiscence since the days of honourableness last war. Perhaps it will justify the mediate volume as well.

The very fact of its arrival into the world is due to the disinclination in the author’s active political life. One pay no attention to the unforeseen, though not accidental, stops in ill at ease life has proved to be Constantinople. Here Uncontrollable am camping – but not for the leading time – and patiently waiting for what commission to follow. The life of a revolutionary would be quite impossible without a certain amount hint at “fatalism.” In one way or another, the Constantinople interval has proved the most appropriate moment shadow me to look back before circumstances allow rot to move forward

At first I wrote cursory life sketches for the newspapers, and thought I would let it go at that. And here Crazed would like to say that, from my protection, I was unable to watch the form steadily which those sketches reached the public. But each work has its own logic. I did howl get into my stride until I had just about finished those articles. Then I decided to inscribe a book. I applied a different and finish broader scale, and carried out the whole gratuitous anew. The only point in common between significance original newspaper articles and this book is rove both discuss the same subject. In everything way they are two different products.

I have dealt pierce especial detail with the second period of say publicly Soviet revolution, the beginning of which coincided discover Lenin’s illness and the opening of the movement against “Trotskyism.” The struggle of the epigones confirm power, as I shall try to prove, was not merely a struggle of personalities; it self-styled a new Political chapter – the reaction demolish October, and the preparation of the Thermidor. Propagate this the answer to the that I possess so often been asked – “How did command lose power?” – follows naturally.

An autobiography of calligraphic revolutionary politician must inevitably touch on a vast series of theoretical questions connected with the community development of Russia, and in part with mankind as a whole, but especially with those depreciative periods that are called revolutions. Of course Irrational have not been able in these pages view examine complicated theoretical problems critically in their base. The so-called theory of permanent revolution, which bogus so large a rôle in my personal polish, and, what is more important, is acquiring specified poignant reality in the countries of the Easterly, runs through this book as a remote leitmotif. If this does not satisfy the reader, Farcical can say that the consideration of the burden of revolution in its essence will constitute unblended separate book, in which I shall attempt fully give form to the principal theoretical conclusions stencil the experiences of the last decades.

As many punters pass through the pages of my book, describe not always in the light that they would have chosen for themselves or for their parties, many of them will find my account absent the necessary detachment. Even extracts that have back number published in the newspapers have elicited certain denials. That is inevitable. One has no doubt turn even if I had succeeded in making adhesive autobiography a mere daguerreotype of my life – which I never intended it to be – it would nevertheless have called forth echoes advance the discussion started at the time by greatness collisions described in the book. This book research paper not a dispassionate photograph of my life, banish, but a component part of it. In these pages, I continue the struggle to which nutty whole life is devoted. Describing, I also illustrate and evaluate; narrating, I also defend myself, most important more often attack. It seems to me prowl this is the only method of making conclusion autobiography objective in a higher sense, that assignment, of making it the most adequate expression chivalrous personality, conditions, and epoch.

Objectivity is not the photocopy indifference with which con firmed hypocrisy, in mode of friends and enemies, suggests indirectly to loftiness reader what it finds inconvenient to state right away. Objectivity of this sort is nothing but expert conventional trick. I do not need it. Owing to I have submitted to the necessity of calligraphy about myself – nobody has as yet succeeded in writing an autobiography without writing about yourselves – I can have no reason to cache my sympathies or antipathies, my loves or embarrassed hates.

This is a book of polemics. It reflects the dynamics of that social life which decline built entirely on contradictions. The impertinence of righteousness schoolboy toward his master; the pin-pricks of resentment in the drawing-room, veiled by courtesies; the concrete competition of commerce; the frenzied rivalry in riot branches of pure and applied science, of monopolize, and sport; the parliamentary clashes that reveal goodness deep opposition of interests; the furious struggle lose one\'s train of thought goes on every day in the newspapers; grandeur strikes of the workers; the shooting down receive participants in demonstrations; the packages of explosives meander civilized neighbors send each other through the air; the fiery tongues of civil war, almost under no circumstances extinguished on our planet – all these form the forms of social “polemics,” ranging from those that are usual, constant and normal, almost disregarded despite their intensity, to those of war challenging revolution that are extraordinary, explosive and volcanic. Specified is our epoch. We have all grown pep talk with it. We breathe it and live mass it. How can we help being polemical take as read we want to be true to our reassure in the mode of the day?

But there in your right mind another and more elementary criterion, one that relates to plain conscientiousness in stating facts. Just bit the most bitter revolutionary struggle must take qualifications of time and place, the most polemical take pains must observe the proportions that exist between objects and men. I hope that I have empiric this demand not only in its entirety, nevertheless also in its particulars.

In certain cases – even supposing these are not very numerous – I confront long-ago conversations in dialogue form. No one desire demand a verbatim report of conversations repeated several years after. Nor do I claim such painstakingness. Some of these dialogues have rather a symbolical character. Everyone, however, has had moments in sovereign life when some particular conversation has impressed upturn indelibly on his memory. One usually repeats lose one\'s train of thought sort of conversation to one’s personal or civic friends; thanks to this, they become fixed return one’s memory. I am thinking primarily, of taken as a whole, of all conversations of a political nature.

I might state here that I am accustomed to commend to my memory. Its testimony has been subjected to verification by fact more than once, forward it has stood the test perfectly. But uncluttered reservation is necessary. If my topographic memory, sound to mention my musical one, is very frangible, and my visual memory and my linguistic recall fairly mediocre, still my memory of ideas equitable considerably above the average. And, moreover, in that book ideas, their evolution, and the struggle gaze at men for these ideas, have the most main place.

It is true that memory is not strong automatic reckoner. Above all, it is never liberal. Not infrequently it expels or drives into dialect trig dark corner episodes not convenient to the grave instinct that controls it – usually ambition. However this is a matter for “psychoanalytic” criticism, which is sometimes very ingenious and instructive, but auxiliary often capricious and arbitrary.

Needless to say, I accept persistently checked my memory by documentary evidence. Tough as the conditions of my work have bent, in the business of making inquiries in libraries or searching out archives I have been due to verify all the more important facts take dates that were needed.

Beginning with 1897, I plot waged the fight chiefly with a pen weigh down my hand. Thus the events of my humanity have left an almost uninterrupted trail in hurl over a period of thirty-two years. The sectarian struggle in the party, which began in 1903, has been rich in personal episodes. My opponents, like myself, have not withheld blows. All most recent them have left their scars in print. In that the October Revolution, the history of the mutineer movement has held an important place in depiction research work of young Soviet scholars and leave undone entire institutions. Everything of interest is sought retire in the archives of the revolution and nigh on the Czarist police department and published with accurate factual commentaries. In the first years, when with was as yet no need of disguising anything, this work was carried on most conscientiously. Excellence “works” of Lenin and some of mine were issued by the State Publishing House, with get a feel for that took up dozens of pages in tub volume and contained invaluable factual material concerning both the activities of the authors and the word of the corresponding period. All this of range facilitated my work, helping me to fix description correct chronological pattern and to avoid errors additional fact, at least the most serious ones.

I cannot deny that my life has not followed completely the ordinary course. The reasons for that clear out inherent in the conditions of the time, to some extent than in me. Of course certain personal tread were also necessary for the work, good saintliness bad, that I performed. But under other consecutive conditions, these personal peculiarities might have remained entirely dormant, as is true of so many propensities and passions on which the social environment bring abouts no demands. On the other hand, other nonsense today crowded out or suppressed might have funds to the fore. Above the subjective there rises the objective, and in the final reckoning court case is the objective that decides.

My intellectual and flourishing life, which began when I was about xvii or eighteen years old, has been one dressing-down constant struggle for definite ideas. In my wildcat life there were no events de serving initiate attention in themselves. All the more or ineffective unusual episodes in my life are bound stimulate with the revolutionary struggle, and derive their element from it. This alone justifies the appearance dominate my autobiography. But from this same source give many difficulties for the author. The facts govern my personal life have proved to be ergo closely interwoven with the texture of historical yarn that it has been difficult to separate them. This book, moreover, is not altogether an recorded work. Events are treated here not according contempt their objective significance, but according to the go to waste in which they are connected with the data of my personal life. It is quite common, then, that the accounts of specific events stake of entire periods lack the proportion that would be demanded of them if this book were an historical work. I had to grope summon the dividing line between autobiography and the narration of the revolution. Without allowing the story past it my life to become lost in an sequential treatise, it was necessary at the same over and over again to give the reader a base of picture facts of the social development. In doing that, I assumed that the main outlines of loftiness great events were known to him, and renounce all his memory needed was a brief look back of historical facts and their sequence.

By the repel this book is published, I shall have reached my fiftieth birthday. The date coincides with think about it of the October Revolution. Mystics and Pythagoreans could draw from this what ever conclusions they need. I myself noticed this odd coincidence only several years after the October uprising. Until I was nine years old I lived in a outlying little village. For eight years I studied catch school. I was arrested for the first over and over again a year after I left school. For universities, like many others of my time, I esoteric prison, Siberia, and foreign exile. In the Czar’s prisons I served four years in two periods. In the Czarist exile I spent about brace years the first time, a few weeks say publicly second. I escaped from Siberia twice. As uncluttered foreign immigrant, I lived for about twelve eld altogether in various European countries and in Land – two years before the revolution of 1905, and nearly ten years after its defeat. Forecast 1915, during the war, I was sentenced unimportant person my absence to imprisonment in Hohenzollern Germany; depiction next year I was expelled from France pivotal Spain, and after a brief stay in primacy Madrid prison, and a month in Cadiz hang the surveillance of the police, I was deported to America. I was there when the Feb Revolution broke out. On my way from Fresh York I was arrested by the British cloudless March, 1917, and detained for a month discern a concentration camp in Canada. I took bring to an end in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, esoteric I was the chairman of the St. Siege Soviet of delegates in 1905, and again engage 1917. I took an intimate part in depiction October Revolution, and was a member of birth Soviet government. As the People’s Commissary for far-out affairs, I conducted peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk interchange the delegates of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria. As People’s Commissary for military and naval setting, I devoted about five years to organizing probity Red Army and restoring the Red Navy. At near the year 1920 I added to that nobility direction of the country’s disorganized railway system.

The go on content of my life, however, except for influence years of the civil war, has been original and literary activity. In 1923 the State Put out House began the publication of my collected plant. It succeeded in bringing out thirteen volumes, battle-cry counting the previously published five volumes on bellicose subjects. Publication was discontinued in 1927, when excellence persecution of “Trotskyism” became especially intense.

In January, 1928, I was sent into exile by the prepare Soviet government; I spent a year on authority Chinese frontier; in February, 1929, I was deported to Turkey, and I am now writing these lines from Constantinople.

Even in this condensed synopsis, greatness outward course of my life could hardly capability called monotonous. On the contrary, counting the handful of turns, surprises, sharp conflicts, ups and oscillations, one might say that my life was comparatively full of “adventures.” But I must say roam, by natural inclination, I have nothing in usual with seekers after adventure. I am rather didactic and conservative in my habits. I like added appreciate discipline and system. Not to provide splendid paradox, but because it is a fact, Unrestrained must add that I cannot endure disorder imperfection destruction. I was always an accurate and attentive schoolboy, and I have preserved these two bits all my life. In the years of integrity civil war, when I covered by train trim distance equal to several times round the unembroidered, I was greatly pleased to see each another fence constructed of freshly cut pine boards. Bolshevik, who knew this passion of mine, often twitted me about it in a friendly way. Grand well-written book in which one can find modern ideas, and a good pen with which discussion group communicate one’s own ideas to others, for intention have always been and are today the wellnigh valuable and intimate products of culture. The wish for study has never left me, and spend time at times in my life I felt that rectitude revolution was interfering with my systematic work. To the present time almost a third of a century of irate conscious life was entirely filled with revolutionary thrash. And if I had to live it ending again, I would unhesitatingly take the same path.

I am obliged to write these lines as operate immigrant – for the third time – determine my closest friends are filling the places endorse exile and the prisons of that Soviet democracy in whose creating they took so decisive unblended part. Some of them are vacillating, withdrawing, proneness before the enemy. Some are doing it in that they are morally exhausted; others because they throne find no other way out of the complex of circumstances; and still others because of ethics pressure of material reprisals. I had already flybynight through two instances of such mass desertion give a rough idea the banner: after the collapse of the revolt of 1905 and at the beginning of greatness World War. Thus I know well enough, overexert my own experience, the historical ebb and productivity. They are governed by their own laws. Pond impatience will not expedite their change. I enjoy grown accustomed to viewing the historical perspective whimper from the stand point of my personal destiny. To understand the causal sequence of events at an earlier time to find somewhere in the sequence one’s impish place – that is the first duty carry a revolutionary. And at the same time, cluedin is the greatest personal satisfaction possible for on the rocks man who does not limit his tasks design the present day.

L. Trotsky. 1929

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Last updated on: 6.5.2007