the extent to which the formal law courts are only part of the adjudication and
decision-making system.
Trotsky
Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) changed his name from Lev Davidovich Bronstein
after escaping from exile in Siberia in 1902. He, along withLenin, was one of
the great leaders of the Russian revolutionary forces both before and after the
1917 Revolution. Also like Lenin, he was a revolutionary before he was a
Marxist. Trotsky was arrested and exiled when only 19, for trying to foment
revolution among industrial workers, though his own family was relatively
prosperous. On his escape he fled to London where he met and worked with
Lenin and rapidly became a leading member, especially as a propagandist, of
the then more or less united All-Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
(RSDLP), most of which was similarly in exile. During the period from the
turn of the century to 1917 the RSDLP was badly split between factions with
very different interpretations of howsocialismcould be achieved in Russia.
One wing, later to be known asMensheviks, took a version of Marxism
which required Russia to go through a full industrial revolution of acapitalist
nature, and thus felt that, even if a revolution set up a democracy, a lengthy
period of co-operation with liberalbourgeoisparties would be necessary. The
other wing, Lenin’sBolsheviks, argued instead that an alliance between what
there was of an industrial proletariat and the peasantry could force the pace of
industrial transformation, making it unnecessary to endure the transition phase
of liberal capitalism. Trotsky, however, could never quite make up his mind
about this split, floated back and forth in the endless congresses of the exiles,
and thus created ill will and suspicion on both sides. He returned to Russia
briefly in 1905 to help the abortive revolution of that year, and he was back in
Russia much earlier in 1917 than Lenin, playing a vital role in organizing the
extreme communist opposition to the original moderate government.
His own analysis was, in fact, even more revolutionary than Lenin’s, when
he worked it out, because he denied that the support of the peasantry was
needed, and argued for what he called ‘permanent revolution’. This was a
strategy in which the first revolution, to overthrow the autocratic Tsarist
regime, should be immediately followed by a purely proletarian revolution,
and one which should be ‘exported’ to all Western countries, as he believed
that underdeveloped Russia could not long sustain a socialist society. Though
he co-operated ultimately with Lenin, he was always unhappy with the latter’s
stress of the leadership of the party. He held a variety of vital posts in the
Bolshevik government set up in October 1917, the most important of which
was the creation and running of the Red Army with which he successfully,
though brutally, won the civil war against the traditionalist ‘White’ Russian
Trotsky