army. He lost power, after Lenin’s death, toStalinand his faction, who
advocated ‘socialism in one country’, and because he opposed the central
authority and the ignoring of the Russian masses which Stalin took to even
greater lengths than had Lenin. Expelled from the party, he was exiled yet
again, this time permanently, in 1929, and ultimately murdered, supposedly on
Stalin’s orders, in 1940. He spent the last few years of his life in propaganda
against what he saw as the corruption of the revolution, even attempting, with
no real success, to create a rival international communist movement (the so-
called Fourth International). Trotsky perhaps remains theoretically the most
interesting character of the whole Russian revolutionary movement, but the
one whose ideas were least acceptable to orthodox communists on either side
of theiron curtain.
Trotskyism
BecauseTrotskyhad disagreed withLenin, and even more with the followers
ofStalin, in Russia after 1917, and was exiled and ultimately murdered by the
Stalinists, he has been a vitally emotive symbol for extreme left-wingMarxist
groups who wished to distance themselves from what they saw as the
discreditedstate capitalismof the ‘communist’ Soviet Union. In recent
years self-styled ‘Trotskyist’ political groups have proliferated on the left in
many Western countries. All that is meant by this appellation is that these
movements deny the acceptability of any non-revolutionary strategy, or of any
compromise with other parties. Two aspects of Trotsky’s thought particularly
appeal to these groups. First, Trotsky had a belief in what he called ‘permanent
revolution’. In fact this doctrine is usually misunderstood by these self-styled
groups, who tend to see it as a semi-anarchist call never to accept or support
authority at all, seeing it as similar to some of the elements in the Maoist
cultural revolution. All Trotsky meant by it was that, in contrast to the
Russian social democrats, he did not believe that there would have to be a
lengthy period ofbourgeoiscapitalist rule in Russia after the revolution
against semi-feudal Tsarist autocracy. Instead he felt the first, anti-Tsarist
revolution could immediately be followed by a full-scale revolution by the
urban proletariat against the new reformist bourgeois government. (In fact,
many would prefer to describe the second, October, revolution of 1917 as a
coup d’e ́tatorputschby theBolsheviks.) The second point is Trotsky’s
opposition to Lenin’s stress on the need for a highly disciplined and author-
itarian party organized on the principles ofdemocratic centralism. This, of
course, is highly attractive to far-left splinter groups in Western political
systems, because their major enemy is as likely to be an orthodox communist
party as a conservative party. Whether Trotsky would particularly have
approved of such groups is somewhat unclear. At the end of his life he was
Trotskyism