Leon Davidovich Trotsky

Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was born from the experience of the 1905 Revolution and remained the theoretical axis defining his political identity through the 1930s. Its first formulation came in Results and Prospects (1906). Building on the backwardness and combined and uneven development of Russian capitalism, Trotsky argued that the Russian bourgeoisie, unlike its West European counterparts, was born too late and too weak to carry out even its own democratic revolution. The proletariat, though a minority, would have to lead the peasantry and seize power, and once in power could not confine itself to democratic tasks but would be compelled to take socialist measures encroaching on private property.

But the theory did not end there. For Trotsky, the 'permanence' of revolution was completed on the international plane. In a country like Russia, where the proletariat was a minority, building socialism was impossible without victorious proletarian revolutions in the advanced countries of Western Europe. The October Revolution was only the first act of world revolution; socialism would become possible only when the Western working class triumphed and came to Russia's aid: this was the fundamental divide between Trotsky and 'socialism in one country'.

In The Permanent Revolution (1930), published after his deportation, Trotsky restated the theory systematically and refuted Stalin's 'stage theory'. The defeat of the Chinese Revolution in 1927 (when the Comintern insisted on alliance with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang only for communists to be massacred in Shanghai) was presented as a tragic vindication of permanent revolution. From this followed the proposition that in colonial and semi-colonial countries, bourgeois nationalist forces could not carry the revolution to completion; the proletariat had to hold hegemony over the democratic and national-liberation struggle.

Permanent revolution became the core doctrine of Trotskyism and the theoretical foundation of the Fourth International (1938). It was later applied to the analysis of third-world revolutions (Cuba, Algeria) and remains, within the communist movement, the most consistent internationalist alternative to 'socialism in one country'.

From 1918 to 1920, Trotsky's train was the ghost of the Russian Civil War. A single armoured train carried a printing press, telegraph, wireless station, map room, library, and a personal guard. This mobile headquarters covered over 105,000 kilometres in two and a half years: more than two and a half times around the Earth.

Trotsky lived on that train. By day he wrote newspaper editorials; by night he arrived at some collapsing front and held summary court-martials. Wherever the train pulled in, morale surged and retreating units regrouped. He drafted 75,000 former tsarist officers into the Red Army and invented the political commissar system to watch over them.

The train was also revolutionary theatre: a red star on brown steel, a military band that played 'The Internationale' at every stop. After victory in 1920 the armoured train was retired, but the image never left him. When Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927, the myth of the armoured train made him a dangerous alternative.

In 1935 Trotsky received political asylum in Norway, living under official surveillance. After Justice Minister Trygve Lie granted permission, he and his wife stayed at Konrad Knudsen's house in Norderhov from 18 June 1935 to 2 September 1936. On 5 August 1936 members of the fascist Nasjonal Samling burgled the house targeting his archives, and on 2 September 1936 Lie ordered the couple moved to a farm in Hurum under de facto house arrest. After the Moscow trials began in September 1936, the government of Johan Nygaardsvold effectively interned him in Hurum, isolating him from the outside world and barring publication. Trotsky later charged that the Norwegian 'Socialist' government had tried to silence him.

At the first Moscow trial in August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 other Old Bolsheviks were sentenced to death (executed 25 August), and Trotsky too was sentenced to death in absentia. On 19 December 1936 he was deported aboard the Norwegian tanker Ruth, and on 9 January 1937 he arrived in Mexico, where President Lázaro Cárdenas granted him asylum. Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR, which limited direct pressure, and proximity to the United States eased contact with his American supporters. He settled in Coyoacán, first at the Blue House of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (January 1937 – April 1939) and then, from April 1939, at his own residence on Avenida Viena. In March 1937 the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky set up an international commission of inquiry chaired by the philosopher John Dewey; it held the charges against him to have been fabricated and published the verdict 'Not guilty'.

In his last years his material position worsened: he sold part of his archive to the Paris branch of the Amsterdam International Institute of Social History, and in 1940 handed the bulk of his papers to Harvard University to preserve them from NKVD agents. On 24 May 1940 he survived a raid on his Coyoacán villa by armed assassins led by NKVD agent Iosif Grigulevich and Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. His 14-year-old grandson Vsevolod 'Esteban' Volkov was shot in the foot, and bodyguard Robert Sheldon Harte disappeared with the attackers and was later found murdered. Afterward Trotsky wrote 'Stalin Seeks My Death' (8 June 1940), stating another attempt was certain.

On 20 August 1940 Ramón Mercader, an NKVD agent who had gained access to Trotsky's circle by posing as a sympathiser, struck him on the head with a mountaineering ice axe concealed under his coat while he was reading a manuscript. The operation was codenamed 'Utka' (Duck) within the NKVD. The blow penetrated some 7 cm into his brain but did not kill him instantly, and he died at about 7:25 p.m. on 21 August 1940 of blood loss and shock, aged 60. Witnesses said he spat on Mercader and struggled fiercely, breaking his hand. His bodyguards nearly beat the attacker to death, but Trotsky stopped them, saying the assassin should be made to answer questions.

Political responsibility and the aftermath are documented. The Soviet authorities publicly denied involvement in the killing, yet Mercader was convicted and served 20 years in Lecumberri Prison, and after his 1960 release he was awarded the Order of Lenin and the title Hero of the Soviet Union in Moscow. Pravda (24 August 1940) published the notice 'Death of a World Spy', denouncing Trotsky, and a group of six NKVD officers involved were decorated in 1941. By 27 August 1940 an estimated 300,000 people filed past the casket in Mexico City.

His family did not survive the 1930s. His first wife Aleksandra disappeared in 1935 during the Great Purge and was murdered by Soviet forces in 1938, and daughter Nina died of tuberculosis in 1928. Daughter Zinaida, also tubercular and depressed, followed her father into exile and committed suicide in Berlin in 1933. The elder son Lev Sedov, who ran the Bulletin of the Opposition for his father, died in Paris on 16 February 1938 following an operation, and the younger son Sergei Sedov predeceased his parents (1937).

His theoretical work did not stop in this period. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936) he called the USSR a 'degenerated workers' state', yet he argued consistently to the end that, despite the Stalinist bureaucracy's usurpation, the Soviet state remained a workers' state to be defended against external attack. He maintained that position even after the 1939 Soviet–German pact and the invasion of Finland, and in 1939–1940 he wrote on the Ukrainian question, advocating a 'single, free and independent workers' and peasants' Soviet Ukraine'.