by Jack Michael Pinkney
Both during and after his death Leon Trotsky has come under attack from both the bourgeoisie and Stalinists. In this article we examine some of the more common accusations against Trotsky and address them.
“Trotsky came from an aristocratic family”¹
Leon Trotsky was born Lev Bronstein in 1879 in the rural village of Yanovka (now known as Bereslavka), Ukraine. A working agricultural farm surrounded by steppe country. Trotsky’s father, David Bronstein, was a prosperous Jewish farmer who owned and operated a successful agricultural estate in the Ukrainian countryside. While the financially comfortable and owned land, you could hardly call them aristocrats. They lacked any kind of hereditary titles, political connections, or cultural pretensions associated with Russian aristocracy. Trotsky’s father was illiterate, not what one would associate with aristocracy. Trotsky’s mother, Anna Bronstein (née Zhivotovskaya, 1850- 1910), came from a somewhat more educated background but was still far from aristocratic. In the context of Tsarist Russia, they faced significant legal restrictions and social discrimination for being Jewish.
Leon Trotsky describes his childhood in Chapter 1 of his auto-biography “My Life”:
“My childhood was not one of hunger and cold. My family had already achieved a competence at the time of my birth. But it was the stern competence of people still rising from poverty and having no desire to stop half-way. Every muscle was strained, every thought set on work and savings. Such a domestic routine left but a modest place for the children. We knew no need, but neither did we know the generosities of life – its caresses. My childhood does not appear to me like a sunny meadow, as it does to the small minority; neither does it appear like a dark cave of hunger, violence and misery, as it does to the majority. Mine was the grayish childhood of a lower-middle-class family, spent in a village in an obscure corner where nature is wide, and manners, views and interests are pinched and narrow.”
At age eight, Trotsky was sent to Odessa for education, and enrolled in St. Paul’s Realschule, a Lutheran German-language school that admitted students of various faiths. This educational choice reflects his family’s pragmatic approach to advancement through education rather than aristocratic privilege.
When Trotsky moved to Nikolayev in 1896 to complete his schooling, Initially, Trotsky was a Narodnik who opposed Marxism but was converted to it by his future first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya.
He dropped out in early 1897 to help to organise the South Russian Workers’ Union in Nikolayev. Using the name “Lvov”, he wrote and printed leaflets, distributed revolutionary pamphlets, and popularised socialist ideas among industrial workers and students. In January 1898 over 200 union members, including Trotsky, were arrested. He spent the next two years in prison awaiting trial, first in Nikolayev, then Kherson, Odessa, and finally Moscow.
Trotsky’s “role as a Menshevik”²
Lenin and Trotsky first met in exile in London in 1902. Trotsky had escaped from Siberian exile and, following an invitation from Lenin, arrived at Lenin’s London flat in the early morning of October 1902. Lenin’s wife Nadezhda (“Krupskaya”) and Lenin himself greeted the young Bronstein warmly. According to Trotsky’s memoirs, Lenin was still in bed when Krupskaya ushered the newcomer into the room, exclaiming “Vladimir Ilyich, the ‘Pen’ has arrived!” (Trotsky’s revolutionary nickname was “Piero” or “Pero”). This informal dawn meeting inaugurated the political collaboration of a seasoned Bolshevik leader (Lenin) and a talented young socialist (Trotsky).
Split of the RSDLP
The factional split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was formalized at the 1903 Second Party Congress (Brussels–London). On key organizational and tactical questions, Lenin’s “Bolsheviks” and Martov’s “Mensheviks” disagreed sharply. The Bolsheviks advocated a tightly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries, whereas the Mensheviks favored a broad, mass party open to varying views. As one historian notes, “the Mensheviks, led by Martov, favoured a large, loosely organised democratic party… prepared to work with the liberals… and had scruples about the use of violence,” while “the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin… wanted a small, tightly organised, strictly disciplined party of full-time members”.
Lenin “had no time for democracy and no confidence in the masses”. These differences – over party membership rules, attitude toward the bourgeoisie, and revolutionary strategy (Lenin envisaged a proletarian-peasant dictatorship versus the Mensheviks’ two-stage revolution) – caused an irreparable rift. By the Congress’s end on 23 August 1903, Lenin’s group won a narrow majority on Iskra’s editorial board and party leadership, leading Martov’s supporters to be nicknamed “Mensheviks” (“minoritarians”). Lenin himself described the split as the emergence of a clear “majority” (Bolsheviks) and “minority” (Mensheviks) within the party.
Trotsky, then about 23 years old, initially sided with Martov’s Mensheviks after the 1903 Congress. He was uneasy with Lenin’s ultra-centralist approach. Contemporary accounts record Trotsky challenging Lenin at the 1903 Congress, famously declaring, “That’s dictatorship you’re advocating,” to which Lenin retorted, “There is no other way”. In private and later memoirs Trotsky maintained that his differences with Lenin at that time were tactical and organizational rather than principled Bolshevism vs Menshevism. In the 1920s Trotsky wrote that although he had opposed Lenin on many questions, he “was not a Menshevik” in the sense of belonging to that faction’s class line. Nonetheless, in 1903–04 he fought as part of the Menshevik camp, which then claimed to uphold a more open party and cooperation with liberal elements in the coming bourgeois stage of revolution.
Trotsky’s Withdrawal from the Mensheviks (1904)
Although Anti-Trotskyists will overstate Trotsky’s alignment with the Mensheviks, Trotsky’s association with the Mensheviks lasted about a year and a half. By mid-1904 he had broken with the Menshevik leadership over policy issues. In particular, he objected to Menshevik overtures toward liberal bourgeois parties. Trotsky later recounted that he “broke organisationally and politically with what was to become Menshevism in the middle of 1904,” when the faction supported alliance with the liberal Zemstvo movement (notably in articles by Vera Zasulich and Pavel Axelrod). He added that on the key questions of class strategy and the role of classes in the revolution he “was never in agreement with Menshevism”. In practice, Trotsky formally declared himself “non factional” by late 1904 and ceased active collaboration with either the Bolsheviks or Mensheviks. (He would attempt to form a united party-centrist faction only after 1912.) This fact has not stopped anti-Trotksyists from claiming that Trotsky was a committed Menshevik until just before the revolution, which evidentially he was not.
Convergence of Lenin and Trotsky before 1917
After 1905 both men moved toward a more radical stance, but maintained differences on organization and strategy until 1917. By World War I, both opposed the Kaiser’s war (Lenin at Zimmerwald 1915, Trotsky as editor of Nashe Slovo). The decisive reconciliation came in 1917. After the February Revolution, Trotsky returned from exile to Petrograd and quickly encountered Lenin again. Trotsky later wrote that at their first meeting (around 5–6 May 1917) he told Lenin that “nothing separated me from his April Theses and from the entire course followed by the Party since his arrival”. In other words, Trotsky now shared Lenin’s program of transferring power to the soviets. He noted thereafter that he and Lenin “had one and the same policy” and even began speaking of a united “Bolshevik-Internationalists” faction, reflecting their practical merger. From spring 1917 on, Lenin and Trotsky were essentially politically aligned, collaborating to build the Bolshevik majority that would seize power in October.
Trotsky’s Leadership of the Red Army
After the October Revolution the Bolshevik government moved quickly to create a regular military force. By decree on 28 January 1918 (15 January Old Style) the Sovnarkom established the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. Lenin personally oversaw this decree – the official protocols record that Lenin reviewed and amended the draft before approval.
The decree placed the army under the Soviet government (the Council of People’s Commissars) and the Commissariat of Military Affairs. Nikolai Krylenko was named Supreme Commander-in-Chief, and Bolshevik officers Aleksandr Shlyapnikov, Nikolai Podvoisky and Pavel Dybenko were initially appointed as people’s commissars of the army and navy.
In the spring of 1918 military command was reorganized. Following the unpopular peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, the Sovnarkom accepted Trotsky’s resignation as Foreign Commissar on 13 March 1918 and appointed him People’s Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs (effectively War Commissar). The old post of Commander-in-Chief was abolished, leaving Trotsky with direct command of the Red Army. Thus “Trotsky [was] appointed People’s Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs, replacing Podvoisky,” and “the post of commander-in-chief was abolished, giving Trotsky full control of the Red Army”. Most of the previous military leaders (including Krylenko and Podvoisky) resigned in protest, unwilling to accept Trotsky’s appointment.
Under Trotsky’s leadership the Red Army was rapidly expanded and disciplined. Key decrees formalized this transformation: for example, on 29 May 1918 the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decreed an end to voluntary recruitment and instituted general mobilization of all workers and poorest peasants. Trotsky also introduced political commissars and harsh discipline to ensure the loyalty of conscripted soldiers and former Tsarist officers.
Trotsky’s appointment as People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs in March 1918 and his subsequent leadership of the Revolutionary Military Council placed him at the helm of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921). His elevation to this critical position resulted from the following factors:
Revolutionary credentials: Trotsky had demonstrated his organizational abilities as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee, which had planned and executed the October Revolution.
Wartime necessity: With the Bolshevik regime facing existential threats from White forces and foreign intervention, Trotsky’s energy, determination, and administrative skills made him the natural choice for military leadership.
Lenin’s trust: Despite their earlier differences, Lenin had come to value Trotsky’s abilities and loyalty, declaring that “there is no better Bolshevik”.
Trotsky’s innovations in building the Red Army included:
Integration of tsarist officers (military specialists) under the supervision of political commissars to provide professional expertise while ensuring political reliability Institution of discipline through the restoration of saluting, uniform insignia, and strict hierarchy—measures opposed by some Bolshevik purists;
Mobile leadership through the famous armoured train that covered over 100,000 miles during the civil war, allowing Trotsky to personally direct operations on multiple fronts;
Inspirational leadership and effective propaganda to maintain morale among troops and civilians.
Trotsky transformed a ragtag collection of Red Guards and partisan detachments into a five-million-strong regular army that defeated fourteen foreign interventionist forces and their White allies. His leadership style combined ruthless determination with revolutionary idealism, as exemplified in his famous order: “Let the deserters know that they are betraying their own families: their fathers, mothers, sisters, wives, and children. I give warning that I will show no mercy to deserters”.
Organizing the Russian Revolution³
“Permanent Revolution”
Trotsky defined permanent revolution as a workers’ revolution that “makes no compromise” with bourgeois rule and carries socialist measures immediately onward, linking the fate of the revolution to international struggle. In practice, he argued, the Russian working class — allied with poor peasants — would overthrow the autocracy and then advance beyond democratic reforms toward socialism. In Trotsky’s words, only a “dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry” could accomplish Russia’s tasks and then push the revolution “to the complete victory” and spark world revolution\. This built on Marx and Engels’ earlier phrase (1850) that revolution must continue until all bourgeois classes are overthrown.
The theory took shape during the 1905 Revolution and its aftermath. Trotsky was involved in the Petrograd Soviet (workers’ council) and, jailed after 1905, wrote Results and Prospects (1906) where he first sketched the idea. He observed that the bourgeoisie in Russia was too weak and tied to the old order to lead land reform or genuine democracy. Debating Mensheviks and Narodniks, Trotsky insisted the working class must assume power along with the peasantry. While Plekhanov and the Mensheviks expected the liberal bourgeoisie to carry out the revolution, and Lenin initially posited a “democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry,” Trotsky objected that Lenin’s formula was vague on who held power. Trotsky concluded that in Russia the proletariat would inevitably carry revolutionary tasks to their end, initiating socialist measures once in power. As Trotsky later wrote, under workers’ rule “matter could not rest” at agrarian reform — the proletariat would be “compelled to encroach even more deeply upon the relationships of private property” and take the path of socialism.
Trotsky’s perspective resonated with events in 1917. After the February Revolution, Lenin returned with his April Theses calling for no interim bourgeois government. Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and became a leader (chairman of the Petrograd Soviet). The October Revolution effectively realized a form of permanent revolution: the Bolshevik seizure of power went far beyond a classical bourgeois revolution, immediately addressing workers’ and soldiers’ demands (peace, land, factories) and instituting Soviet power across Russia. Trotsky’s later writings argue that October vindicated his thesis: the Soviet government began solving “not only democratic but socialistic tasks” and staked the future on world revolution.
Lenin never publicly embraced the phrase “permanent revolution,” and he was initially critical of Trotsky’s formulation. In 1914 Lenin disparaged Trotsky’s earlier theory as an “absurdly left permanent revolution theory”. However, Lenin’s practice in 1917 — urging workers to ally with poor peasants and seize power — closely paralleled Trotsky’s outline. By the October victory, Lenin and Trotsky agreed that the proletariat must take the leading role; Lenin’s April work “On Cooperation” (1923) even asserted that the USSR had “all that is necessary and sufficient” to build socialism internally. In other words, Lenin adapted Bolshevik strategy in line with many elements of Trotsky’s analysis, though without using his terminology. (As Trotsky noted, after 1924 Stalin and others exploited Trotsky’s phrasing to attack him, even though in 1917 they all supported proletarian power over the bourgeoisie.)
After Lenin’s death, Stalin and Bukharin turned sharply against Trotsky’s internationalist outlook. Stalin introduced “socialism in one country” (SIOC) — the idea that the USSR could build socialism alone — as party doctrine by 1925. Trotsky flatly rejected this. He called SIOC an “unhistoric,” sterile notion (never grounded by Stalin) that rested on Russia’s resources rather than on world revolution. Trotsky argued the Soviets’ gains were safe only if workers revolutions succeeded elsewhere: “the part can conquer only together with the whole”. In his 1936 Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky mocked SIOC as implying the revolution was “wholly completed” and that internal contradictions would simply wither away. He emphasized that this idea contradicted Marxist tradition, which saw socialist construction ultimately as an international project (Lenin himself had said socialism could begin in one country, but final victory required revolutions elsewhere). Trotsky’s own position was that building socialism in the USSR was possible only in concert with advancing revolutions abroad; otherwise Russia risked isolation and restoration.
“Trotsky was recruited by the United States when he lived in New York”⁴
Leon Trotsky arrived clandestinely in New York on January 13–14, 1917. He brought his wife and two small sons and settled in a modest three-bedroom Bronx apartment at 1522 Vyse Avenue near Crotona Park. By day Trotsky worked out of the basement office of Novy Mir (New World), a small radical Russian-language weekly at 77 St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan. (He “helped edit” Novy Mir and contributed dozens of articles on the war and revolution.) He also wrote commentary for the Yiddish Forward and gave frequent lectures to immigrant socialist groups (over 30 public speeches by early March). Trotsky immersed himself in New York’s multiethnic left: he befriended fellow exiles like Nikolai Bukharin and others, met American socialists (including Eugene Debs, as Trotsky recounts), and even joined the editorial board of Novy Mir alongside Bukharin and others. New York’s vibrant media took notice – Trotsky’s arrival (as “Jewish editor of Jewish journals”) made front-page news and Novy Mir soon became “the centre of interest of the New York press… telephone-calls from socialist organizations never stopped”.
Throughout February–March 1917 Trotsky followed the news of the Russian February Revolution. He and his family prepared to leave, especially once the Czar fell. Trotsky’s memoir reports that by mid-March “we were anxious to leave by the first boat” and he rushed through formalities (visiting consulates). He finally departed New York on March 27, 1917 aboard the Norwegian liner Kristianiafjord, bound for Russia. (Trotsky’s ship was famously stopped by the British at Halifax on April 1, detained for a month, then released.)
Indeed, Trotsky wrote against American war mobilization (as a neutral country) while in New York, reflecting his staunch internationalist socialism rather than any alignment with U.S. policy.
There is no evidence in U.S. archives that Trotsky was in contact with American intelligence in 1917. The United States had not even entered World War I until April 1917, and its nascent surveillance apparatus was focused mostly on domestic German American networks. American authorities took no special action to recruit or monitor Trotsky. By contrast, British intelligence closely tracked him. MI5 (the British domestic security service) had agents in New York monitoring Trotsky’s movements; for example, a March 22, 1917 MI5 telegram to London notes “the main leader is Trotsky… carrying out revolutionary propaganda here”. British naval officers ultimately detained Trotsky when his ship stopped in Halifax, Canada, because Britain feared Bolshevik agitation. As historian Daniel Francis summarizes, “the British… had been keeping their eye on Trotsky in New York” and “all his papers were in order” when he left. (Francis notes that Canadian officials likewise recorded Trotsky as “a citizen of an allied country” with valid documents.
None of this suggests any U.S. involvement. Indeed, Trotsky’s own account makes clear he held a Russian (Tsarist) passport, not an American one. As one intelligence historian notes, Trotsky “was a citizen of a country with which Britain and Canada were allies. All his papers were in order” – contradicting later conspiratorial claims that he traveled on a U.S. passport arranged by Wilson. U.S. officials were preoccupied with other matters; no declassified State Department or Justice Department files show Trotsky engaging U.S. intelligence. In fact, a 2008 CIA history of Soviet intelligence bluntly observes that “neither Trotsky nor any of his leading followers maintained any intelligence establishment” – implying he was in no way a U.S.-trained or -tasked agent.
Trotsky wrote scathingly of U.S. patriotism and mobilization (e.g. noting socialists “sang in tune with the pacifists” preparing for war). This ideological profile conflicts with any notion of him acting as a U.S. asset. In short, while Allied (especially British) intelligence watched him, no credible record ties Trotsky to any American intelligence service in early 1917.
As Alexander Reznik notes, accusations that Trotsky served “on behalf of hostile governments including the U.S.” did not surface until the 1990s. Trotsky’s accusations of working for the governments and organizations hostile to the Soviets, in particular on the Gestapo, were based on confessions knocked out of his like-minded people during cruel interrogations. Trotsky himself in 1936-1938 publicly expressed his readiness to defend himself at the trial if it was allowed in the USSR. In 1937, an open counter-process was organized in Mexico City under the chairmanship of the philosopher John Dewey, who found Trotsky not guilty of all charges in the USSR. Neither the NKVD nor its heirs up to the FSB provided evidence.
A notable culprit is Antony C. Sutton’s 1974 book Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, which asserted (without evidence) that President Wilson issued Trotsky an American passport to speed his passage to Russia. This has been widely discredited: contemporary British and Canadian reports explicitly record that Trotsky used a valid Russian passport. Another strain of the myth comes from 1918-era forgeries like the so called Sisson Documents, which falsely claimed Lenin and Trotsky were German-paid agents. Although historian George F. Kennan debunked the Sisson forgeries in 1956, vestiges of anti-communist lore persisted. Some internet and fringe publications have misinterpreted these older fabrications or cited anonymous “intelligence reports” to insinuate U.S. collusion. For example, one conspiracy blog quotes Lincoln Steffens (an American journalist) out of context to imply Wilson’s involvement. In reality, both primary evidence and reputable historians show no such scheme ever existed.
Trotsky’s “petty bourgeois following”⁵
Another smear is that Trotskyism is a narrow petty-bourgeois clique of New York writers, and gave rise to neoconservatism.
Trotsky’s followers from 1917–1940 included thousands of workers, Red Army officers and labour organizers – and his movement was truly international. Trotsky’s Left Opposition in the 1920s drew heavily on the Soviet working class and military, not just intellectuals. Trotsky himself boasted in 1927 that the Opposition “embrace[d] hundreds of thousands of old rank-and-file worker Bolsheviks, bound up with the broad masses of the proletariat… [with] the sympathy of many thousands of working-class Communists”. In practice, Trotskyist cells existed in factories, shops and barracks. (Indeed, Stalin’s own 1936–37 show trials accused top Red Army leaders of forming a “Trotskyist” conspiracy – a fabricated charge, but one that reveals Stalin’s fear that Trotsky’s ideas had penetrated military ranks.) Similarly, in the interwar years Trotskyists were active in trade unions and strikes in Europe and the Americas. Party archives and memoirs record Trotskyists organizing miners in Britain, dockworkers in France, railroaders in India, and staff in Latin American labor federations. For example, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) – a Trotskyist formation – explicitly set out to aid strikes and factory committees.
The “New York Intellectuals” Narrative
Some Cold War–era histories spotlighted a handful of American Jewish writers (often called the “New York Intellectuals”) as the face of Trotskyism. This ignores Trotskyism’s broader reality. Scholars like Irving Howe note that these New York figures (Howe, Kristol, Podhoretz, etc.) were indeed largely second-generation immigrants from working- or lower-middle-class backgrounds. However, their flirtation with Marxism was brief and atypical. Howe writes that their radicalism in the 1930s “was not a deeply grounded experience” – it lacked any roots in a genuine mass movement. He stresses that they remained a tiny minority: “their best hours were spent on the margin, in opposition,” and they made little lasting contribution to socialist politics.
By contrast, Trotskyism as a global movement was far larger and more varied. At the 1938 founding of the Fourth International, delegates came from eleven countries (U.S., France, Britain, Germany, Soviet Union, Italy, Latin America, Poland, Belgium, Holland, Greece) and dozens more were pledged worldwide (Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, Australia, Spain, etc.). Trotsky proudly announced that “the banner of the Fourth International… is… planted on every continent… and in virtually every important country”. This international reach – from Asian anti-colonial militants to European workers to Latin American unionists – is conveniently omitted by the narrow “New York” narrative. In reality, Trotskyism had real working-class and global presence beyond the Ivy League.
Trotskyism as a precursor to Neo-conservatism
Neoconservatism grew out of Cold War liberal circles, not from Soviet exiles. It first solidified in the late 1960s/’70s among former Democrats alarmed by the USSR and 1960s radicalism. A few of these intellectuals had passed through Marxist (including Trotskyist) groups in the 1930s, but only briefly. As historian Andrew Hartman observes, future neocons (e.g. Kristol, Daniel Bell) “flirted with Trotskyism in the 1930s,” but these episodes were just passing youth experiences. By the late 1960s they had turned toward mainstream liberalism (Kristol even voted Democratic in 1968) and then to a hawkish conservatism after 1968. Their writings (on welfare, culture, anti-communism, etc.) reflected Cold War liberalism and ethical realism, not Marxism. Importantly, major neocon leaders like Kristol and Podhoretz have themselves rejected any tight linkage to Trotskyism. Indeed, political analysts emphasize that no direct ideological continuity can be traced. As noted above, Bill King argued that the “Trotskyist neocon” trope “adds nothing” to understanding neocon origins. In sum, neoconservatism and Trotskyism are separate traditions: their overlap is limited to a few individuals’ biographies, not a shared program or organizational lineage.
“Trotsky is a Fascist asset”⁶
Trotsky’s own writings and speeches make it perfectly clear he viewed Nazi Germany and Italian fascism as mortal enemies of the working class and of socialism. He wrote Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, among other works, analyzing the fascist movements in Italy and Germany. His critics (for example, Stalinists or later neo-Stalinists) often ignored this record. But even sympathetic historians note Trotsky’s anti fascist stance: e.g. an editor of his collected writings emphasizes that Trotsky analyzed fascism during its rise, building a coherent Marxist critique.
He called for a united front of workers’ parties against Hitler and sharply criticized Communist Party leaders who refused to fight Nazism. He predicted Hitler’s aggressive war: in 1939 he warned that, with Stalin collaborating, the Soviet Union risked war with Germany unless the Red Army was rebuilt.
The claim that Trotsky was ever a “Nazi agent” originates in Stalinist propaganda – especially the fabricated cases of, once again, the Moscow Show Trials. During the Great Purge Stalin’s regime concocted wild conspiracies, accusing Trotsky and other Old Bolsheviks of colluding with foreign powers (including Nazi Germany) to overthrow the USSR. Pravda and other Soviet organs openly labelled Trotsky and his followers as fascist spies. For example, Pravda on July 21, 1937, proclaimed that Trotsky and his son Sedov were leading an “international spy organization, directed by the German Gestapo, Japanese, Italian and other intelligence services”. It depicted “all this Trotskyist scum… united” under Trotsky’s leadership as agents of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s secret police. These accusations were entirely political fabrications, made without any real evidence.
In fact, the Soviet secret police themselves found no proof of Trotsky–fascist collusion. NKVD interrogators and investigators repeatedly discovered that alleged links were baseless. As documented in accounts of the trials, even Stalin’s own security chief Genrikh Yagoda found “no link between Trotsky and Zinoviev” in the so-called case, only to be rebuked by Stalin. Trotsky’s accusers relied on coerced confessions and absurd “evidence.” A revealing example from the First Moscow Trial (1936) was the charge that Trotsky had met conspirators at Copenhagen’s Hotel Bristol in 1932 – a hotel which, as a Danish newspaper later noted, had been demolished in 1917, 15 years before the alleged meeting.
Trotsky’s only presence in fascist Italy was a brief, involuntary stopover. In November 1932 he sailed from Turkey to Copenhagen to address Danish Social Democrats. His ship docked at Naples for about an hour; Trotsky was under Italian police supe. He did not meet Mussolini or Nazi officials, and Italy’s interest was purely diplomatic (the USSR and Italy still had a non-aggression pact into 1930s). In Copenhagen he spoke from a radio broadcast and then returned to exile in Turkey; historians note “there was no evidence of any alliance with Nazi Germany or the Empire of Japan, as the Soviet government claimed” during these years.
The motivation behind the Trotsky-as-Nazi myth is political. Stalin’s regime needed a scapegoat and saw in Trotsky a foil: he had been Lenin’s comrade and heir-apparent in the revolution, and many Bolshevik veterans remained loyal to him. Portraying Trotsky as a “fascist” or “Nazi spy” justified his exclusion (and eventual assassination) from the communist movement. Soviet propaganda deliberately used Nazi-style anti-Semitic and conspiratorial imagery. Contemporary observers noted that the Stalinist campaign against Trotsky “was reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitic theories,” transforming “Trotskyism” into a “demonic apparition” in the eyes of Soviet propaganda.
“Trotsky (and Trotskyists) were involved in anti-Communist activities”⁷
When the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was created by President Harry Truman in 1947 they inherited the records of various intelligence agencies. No contemporary records tie Trotsky to any U.S. intelligence agency (as noted in the rebuttal that Trotsky was an American asset). In fact, a CIA historical review notes that Trotsky’s assassination “was ordered by Stalin and carried out by the GPU, the secret police of the Stalinist regime”. Former American Stalinist Louis Budenz later testified that Stalin’s agents had infiltrated the United States and worked for years to prepare Trotsky’s murder. No mainstream source suggests any CIA involvement.
It is claimed that, in October 1939, Trotsky accepted an invitation to testify before the US House Un-American Activities Committee. It is claimed he acted “out of a desire to aid the red-baiters”, “had to postpone his appearance because of the State Department’s refusal to give him a visa,” and Trotsky “was about to give a deposition to a member of the HUAC staff when he was assassinated.”
The one and only source that is cited in support of this version of these events is the 1969 edition of the Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1939-40. But Trotsky, in these writings, completely refutes her misrepresentations. He explained in a statement issued in December 1939 that the Dies Committee had invited him to present testimony on the “History of Stalinism” and on the accusations against him presented to the Committee by Stalinist witnesses. American newspapers had published the false information that Trotsky would provide the Committee with documentary evidence on the activities of Mexican and Latin American Stalinists. Trotsky replied that he “never had … a single document concerning the activities of the Latin-American Communists” and would limit his testimony before the Committee to the topics stated in the invitation.
CIA declassified files similarly treat Trotsky and Trotskyists as objects of interest (espionage/propaganda), not as CIA assets. For instance, a CIA historical bulletin (published after 1977) discusses Trotskyist movements in Cold War terms – as targets of U.S. intelligence analysis – not as CIA-sponsored groups. (Trotskyist organizations like the Fourth International and Socialist Workers Party were monitored by the CIA during the Cold War, but there is no evidence the CIA funded or directed them.)
In post-Soviet years the myth resurfaces in certain ideological circles. Former Stalinist and hardline Communist authors have repeated it. For instance, Belgian Communist Ludo Martens (writing as “Pravda” in the 1990s) explicitly claimed Western intelligence backs Trotskyism. One online translation of Martens’ essay bluntly states: “After WWII, the USA – via the CIA – began to agitate in Europe…establishing ‘Socialist’ false-fronts…to indoctrinate [workers] with Trotskyite anti-Soviet ideology”
“Trotsky forged Lenin’s testament”⁸
Lenin’s Testament was a set of final political directives dictated by Vladimir Lenin in late 1922–early 1923, as his health was failing. In it Lenin assessed senior Bolsheviks (Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, etc.) and warned of the danger of a split between Stalin and Trotsky. Crucially, in a postscript dated 25 December 1922, Lenin wrote:
“Stalin is too coarse… I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post [General Secretary] and appointing another man … more tolerant, more polite… less capricious…”
He intended this testimony to be read at the next Party Congress. After Lenin’s death in January 1924, the document was kept secret and only leaked to delegates in 1924–26.
The contemporaneous records show Lenin himself dictated the Testament’s contents. Diary entries and secretary logs confirm Lenin’s active dictation during Dec 1922–Jan 1923. For example, the official Journal of Lenin’s Duty Secretaries notes:
“Lenin dictated his Letter to the Congress of the Party on December 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 1922 and January 4, 1923… The letter dictated on December 23 was forwarded to Stalin by the secretariat the same day.”
Multiple eyewitnesses corroborated Lenin’s authorship. His secretaries and wife recounted their roles. Volodicheva’s 1929 letter (above) and recorded diaries by Fotieva and others all consistently attribute those documents to Lenin. For example, the diary entry for 25 Dec 1922 explicitly annotates “Записано М.В.” (Recorded by M.V.) on Lenin’s words about Stalin’s “coarseness”. A separate note for 4 Jan 1923 is marked “Recorded L.F.” (Fotieva) on Lenin’s draft about moving Stalin. These original headings (authenticated in Soviet archives) match Lenin’s handwriting and signature, and the secretaries’ initials match their real names.
The accusation that Trotsky “forged” Lenin’s Testament appears to be a later invention, largely emerging from Stalinist or conspiratorial accounts. There is no indication of such a claim in the 1920s or early 1930s (when Stalin and Trotsky were openly contending). Instead, forgery allegations surfaced in the post-war period and beyond. For example, a mid-20th-century Stalinist pamphlet (reproduced in various communist publications) flatly asserts:
“The authors of this legend of the ‘Lenin Testament’ are – Trotsky, Fotieva, Zinoviev, Bukharin. They ‘inserted’ these texts into the political arena long before the real death of Lenin, when Lenin was no longer capable of writing, dictating or reading… They wrote these documents as a political weapon against Comrade Stalin.”
Similarly, in 1997 historian Valentin Sakharov (writing from a Russian Communist perspective) argued that the Testament consisted of two sets of documents: “1) Lenin’s authorship… easily proven… and 2) those of which Lenin’s authorship is not proven by any means.” He denies Lenin’s ownership of the key anti-Stalin passages, suggesting they were later insertions.
At the critical time (Dec 22–29, 1922 and Jan 4, 1923), Trotsky was not present at Lenin’s dacha, nor did he have exclusive access to Lenin. He later received the dictated notes like other top leaders. Trotsky’s own stance was to use Lenin’s words against Stalin, not to fabricate them. Indeed, historian Peter Kenez observes that Trotsky “could probably have removed Stalin with the use of Lenin’s testament but he acquiesced to the collective decision not to publish the document”.
“Trotsky violated Democratic Centralism by not accepting the ruling line and bringing party issues to the streets in 1927″⁹
“Democratic centralism” was codified by Lenin and the early Bolsheviks as a two part principle: free, open discussion followed by unified discipline once a decision was democratically reached. As Britannica notes, Lenin insisted at the 1921 Tenth Party Congress that a Communist party is not a debating society but a disciplined vanguard – allowing “free discussion” only until a vote is taken, after which the majority line “must constitute the current party ‘line’ and be binding upon all members”. The Tenth Congress adopted Lenin’s “On Party Unity” resolution, which banned all factions and even authorized expulsion of Central Committee members who continued factional work. At the same time, the Congress proclaimed that the era of open socialist construction required “broader democracy within the Party” than under Civil War conditions. Thus, formally, Bolshevik statutes (1921 onwards) declared strict post-vote discipline but also upheld vigorous intra-party discussion up to the point of decision.
In practice during the 1920s these rules were bent by the leadership. The 10th Congress had outlawed independent factions, treating even Trotsky’s early supporters (e.g. the Group of Democratic Centralists) as violations of unity. Nevertheless, internal debate persisted through trade-union and national question controversies. Trotsky’s The New Course (1923–24) illustrates how he sought to revive Leninist norms: warning that unchecked “bureaucratism” would detach leaders from the masses, “narrow their horizon… and weaken their revolutionary spirit”. He argued that an apparatus which “tighten[s] the reins… [or] procedures indicating a distrust of the Party” would only accelerate degeneration of the old Bolshevik cadre. In short, Trotsky embraced democratic centralism’s Leninist ideal (free debate to ensure the people’s line) and criticized any creeping “tendency to rely on the well-off peasant and the kulak” without empowering workers.
Throughout 1923–1925 Trotsky and others on the Left Opposition repeatedly used party congresses and published articles to argue for open discussion. At Lenin’s death in 1924 they lost influence and Stalin’s faction tightened control. By the mid-1920s Joseph Stalin had allied with Bukharin’s Right Opposition to marginalize Trotsky and Zinoviev. At the 14th Party Congress (Dec. 1925), Zinoviev led a “New Opposition” against Stalin’s policies, but it was decisively defeated. In this atmosphere, Stalin’s leadership increasingly ignored minority viewpoints. Trotsky’s camp summed up this shift by 1927: “The last few years have seen a systematic abolition of inner-party democracy – in violation of the whole tradition of the Bolshevik party, in violation of the direct decisions of a series of party congresses,” with party constitutions amended to “increase the rights at the top and diminish the rights of the branches at the bottom”. As Trotsky later testified, even the right of “each member of the party… to appeal its radical differences to the court of the whole party” had been “in actual fact annulled”.
In this context Trotsky joined forces with Zinoviev and Kamenev to form the United Opposition in late 1926. They produced a common Platform in January 1927, sharply criticizing the Stalin/Bukharin leadership’s economic and political course (calling for accelerated industrialization, defense against the kulaks, etc.). In their published Platform of the Joint Opposition, Trotsky and his co-thinkers deplored the leadership’s “departure from the fundamental Bolshevik course” in the countryside and demanded a return to Lenin’s program. Crucially, Trotsky insisted throughout that this fight be waged within the Party: he publicly declared that no split was intended, and that the Opposition aimed to “straighten out the deviation within the framework of a single party” by “inner party means”.
After the United Opposition circulated its Platform, Stalin refused to print it or allow discussion. Trotsky’s account shows he continually demanded the “restoration of Leninist norms” – free pre-congress debate and publication of the Opposition’s Platform for all to read. According to Trotsky’s foreword to the Platform, he and his allies asked the Party leadership to publish the document and permit open discussion as had been customary; instead “these demands were rejected and the circulation of the Platform proscribed as being ‘against the party’”. As a result, when Stalin convened the 15th Congress (Dec. 1927), he did so under terms that left no room for genuine intra-party democracy. Trotsky characterized Stalin’s Congress as a forced “witch-hunter’s jamboree” in which Opposition voices were silenced.
Formally, once the Party (under Stalin’s direction) had decided on a course, Trotsky refused to endorse it; but he never abandoned the Party or declared a separate party. In fact, Trotsky explicitly affirmed his loyalty to the USSR and to the Soviet system even as he criticized leadership policies. For example, Trotsky and Zinoviev declared their “unconditional defense of the Soviet Union” right before the Congress. At the same time he insisted on the Leninist principle that even serious differences of opinion be resolved internally. In The Russian Opposition (1927) Trotsky answered the charge that his faction threatened to break the workers’ alliance by flatly denying any intent to split: “The attempt to ascribe such views to the Opposition is the most unconscionable… We can and must straighten out the deviation within the framework of a single party”. In short, Trotsky saw himself as defending democratic centralism as Lenin conceived it — he fought from inside the Party to change policy — not as abandoning it.
The Stalinist accusation was that Trotsky held “illegal, anti-Party meetings” and distributed anti-party leaflets outside official channels. Indeed, some United Opposition activities (like clandestine pamphleteering and addressing workers’ demonstrations) violated the faction ban in the Party statute. But these were responses to the fact that all regular channels were closed. Trotsky and the Opposition repeatedly sought official hearings. In The Appeal to Party Members (Sept 1927) Trotsky recounts how Stalin’s Politburo banned the Opposition’s Platform and delayed any “discussion” until after delegates to the Congress were elected – a “trickery” that effectively shut off democratic debate. He writes that Trotsky’s supporters were forced to circulate their platform “by all the means at our disposal” precisely because the Party apparatus outlawed it. When Opposition militants mimeographed their platform, GPU secret police raided them, and those members were expelled. Trotsky pointed out that even Lenin had said at the 10th Congress: if serious differences existed, elections must proceed on the basis of open platforms and no one “has power to forbid” this.
In other words, the “street activity” grew out of Stalin’s machine closing the door on normal party democracy. Trotsky’s Appeal documents how a government-planted agent tried to frame the Opposition as conspirators (the bogus “Wrangel officer” rumor), which Trotsky exposed as a lie. The resulting atmosphere was one where loyal Bolsheviks like Trotsky were smeared as anti-party simply for printing their platform and speaking to workers. Thus, while the party leadership charged Trotsky with subverting discipline, Trotsky argued that their actions (gagging debate, using the secret police and arrest) were the real violations of Leninist norms.
By late 1927, Stalin and Bukharin’s faction had essentially inverted Lenin’s idea of democratic centralism. Official Party propaganda (as in the November 1927 Central Control Commission decision) claimed that Trotsky “arranged illegal meetings without participation of representatives of the Party” and organized “anti-Party demonstrations” with “bourgeois elements,” thus breaking party unity. But this view was not the neutral truth of party law – it was the ruling line’s self-justification. In practice, Stalin’s interpretation meant that any criticism of the Politburo was factional and outlawed. As Trotsky noted, the dictatorship of the party was being turned into a dictatorship over the party by the bureaucracy: “Our party must be looked at from the top down… [i]f we really acknowledged that, the Leninist party… no longer exists”. Under Stalin, even raising concerns was “treated as a violation of party discipline”.
“Trotsky was an MI6 agent”¹⁰
Declassified UK records show Trotsky was treated as a suspect revolutionary, not as a British agent. For example, MI5’s WWI-era files include a dossier on Leon Trotsky (file KV2/502) which documents MI5 surveillance of him in 1915–17. In 1917 MI5 arrested Trotsky (then en route to Russia) at Halifax, Nova Scotia, but an MI6 officer (Claude Dansey) intervened and argued that Trotsky’s accuser was likely an Okhrana provocateur.
Trotsky was released (to the annoyance of MI5) on the grounds that evidence against him was dubious. Nowhere in the British files is there any suggestion that Trotsky acted on MI6 orders; on the contrary, MI6’s record shows only interest in intercepting provocations and preparing to deal with the new Russian regime’s request for Trotsky’s release.
The MI6-agent charge first appears only in Stalinist propaganda – notably in the Moscow show trials of 1936–38, whose defendants were coerced into “confessing” wild conspiracies. In the 1938 Trial of the Twenty-One (the “Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites”), several accused former officials named Trotsky as the figure behind their alleged foreign spying. Christian Rakovsky, for example, was forced to testify that Trotsky had approved his joining British intelligence. The official charge-sheet of that trial even claims the defendants were “spying for British, French, Japanese, and German intelligence agencies” under Trotsky’s direction. These confessions were later characterized by historians as “fantastic” fabrications extracted under torture. In fact, almost every charge in the 1938 trial (aside from one poisoning case) is now regarded as baseless.
Modern historians uniformly treat the MI6-agent story as baseless slander. A 1937 “Dewey Commission” inquiry (chaired by philosopher John Dewey) dismissed the Moscow Trials’ evidence as fraudulent, and today scholars agree the purges’ spy-charges were invented. For instance, CIA historians note that Soviet intelligence’s overriding goal was “the destruction of Leon Trotsky” – indeed, Soviet agents were ordered to “kill the leader” – not to recruit him. No credible Western archive (British, American or otherwise) supports any deal between Trotsky and MI6. To the contrary, as historian Stephen Kotkin observes, the show-trials were a scripted “spectacle” based on tortured testimony, with all espionage accusations effectively “fabricated”.
“Trotsky was an agent of the Catholic Church”¹¹
The claim that Trotsky was a “Catholic Church agent” is unsupported by any credible evidence. In fact, the historical record shows Trotsky as a militant atheist and anti‐clerical communist, not a secret Papal ally. Stalin’s propaganda machine did smear Trotsky as a traitor and foreign agent, but it never identified him as serving the Vatican – on the contrary, Soviet sources repeatedly emphasize Trotsky’s hostility to religion. For example, a review of the 1928–41 anti‐religion campaign notes that accusations of priests “cooperating with Trotskyites” were entirely false, since Trotsky was an “energetic and militantly atheistic” leader. In short, nothing in Soviet archives or Stalinist press portrays Trotsky as pro‐Church; that idea appears only in later fringe disinformation.
Trotsky’s own writings make his views crystal‐clear. He insisted that organized religion must be regarded as a reactionary force in modern society. In a private letter from 1935, for instance, he explicitly rejected the notion of “supporting the church”: he said communists could defend Catholics’ democratic right to worship only in the context of resisting fascism, and stressed “there can be no question of supporting the church… we do not commit ourselves to religion and church”. In other words, Trotsky would defend basic civil liberties (including religious freedom) against fascist attack, but he was clear that this did not mean endorsing Christianity. Indeed, Trotsky actively participated in the Soviet anti‐church campaign. As one detailed account notes, “Top communist leaders…Leon Trotsky led a special group charged with seizing church valuables. He believed that, ultimately, Christianity would be overcome by new distractions”. Far from being a Catholic ally, Trotsky organized the confiscation of Church property and expected religion to wither under socialism.
Modern scholarship and journalism echo the conclusion that the “Catholic agent” story is a myth. Reputable historians of the Soviet era make no mention of any Vatican link to Trotsky – instead, they document Trotsky’s role in anti‐religious policies and his avowed atheism. For example, Catholic‐press histories of the Soviet “war on religion” highlight Trotsky’s persecution of churches. Likewise, commentators note that the Catholic Church officially denounced Bolshevism (Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris condemns atheistic communism), so it is implausible Trotsky could secretly serve it. In short, all reliable evidence – from Trotsky’s own speeches and correspondence to scholarly histories – flatly contradicts the claim. The story appears to originate in unsubstantiated conspiracy lore, not in any primary document or credible testimony. No serious historical source treats Trotsky as a Vatican agent; on the contrary, he is consistently portrayed as opposed to the Church.
The Moscow Trials and the Dewey Report¹²
Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin launched the Great Purge, using public show trials to eliminate real or imagined enemies. These trials were “colossal” propaganda spectacles in which leading Bolsheviks and former Party insiders were forced to confess to outrageous crimes. Defendants included the old-guard leaders Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and many others. They were accused under Article 58 of conspiring with foreign powers (Hitler’s Germany, Japan, etc.) to assassinate Stalin and topple Soviet socialism, to wreck industry, and to restore capitalism. In each trial the panel of judges (often chaired by military jurist Ulrikh) handed down guilty verdicts for all defendants, justifying massive purges of “wreckers” and “Trotskyites”.
In August 1936 (the “Trial of the Sixteen”), Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others were accused of heading a “Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center.” In January 1937 (the “Trial of the Seventeen”), Georgy Pyatakov, Karl Radek, and co-defendants were charged as leaders of an “Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center.” Finally in March 1938 (the “Trial of the Twenty-One”), Bukharin, Rykov, Genrikh Yagoda and others were convicted as members of an “Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites,” a conspiratorial group said to seek overthrow of the Soviet state. In all cases the regime claimed the goal was to “dismember the USSR,” assassinate the leadership, wreck the economy and “restore capitalism”. By these trials the Soviets executed or imprisoned most of the accused, effectively liquidating Stalin’s real or potential rivals.
Leon Trotsky had been exiled in 1929, but the trials repeatedly invoked him as the mastermind. Defendants “confessed” to acting on Trotsky’s orders – for example instructing Izvestia correspondent Fyodor Holtzman to deliver “terrorist” directives, or Air Force officer Pyatakov’s supposed secret flight to Oslo to meet Trotsky. Indictments even declared that Trotsky had been an agent of the Gestapo and British intelligence. Bukharin’s 1938 indictment explicitly claimed Trotsky’s contact with German police had been “proved” at prior trials, and that “Trotsky has been connected with the German intelligence service since 1921, and with the British Intelligence Service since 1926…”. In August 1936 and January 1937 Trotsky and his son Sedov were formally charged in absentia with grave crimes by these trials, without any chance to defend themselves. In short, Stalin’s regime portrayed Trotsky as the hidden leader of all “Trotskyite” plots – a diabolic figure supposedly coordinating terrorism, espionage, and wrecking from abroad.
In reality, the evidence was entirely fabricated. Investigations and later historians have documented the routine methods:
Forced confessions: Defendants were tortured or threatened until they admitted to the script. Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov reported that veteran Bolshevik Ivan Smirnov initially “only…deny[ed] it, I still deny it” to all charges, until after days of interrogation he “finally yielded” to absurd claims that Sedov had given him “directives for terror”. Sedov notes “there is not one word of truth” in these confessions. The Dewey Commission likewise found key confessions (e.g. Pyatakov’s) “worthless,” and showed that retractions of those proved-vague accounts effectively nullified the rest.
Fabricated evidence: The courts cited supposed letters and documents from Trotsky. For example, the prosecutor in 1936 introduced a 1932 letter in which Trotsky called for removing Stalin by “terrorism,” but that letter had actually been openly published by Trotsky in an Opposition bulletin – it was public, not secret evidence. In 1937 the prosecution quietly dropped that same letter and instead relied on accounts of other “Trotsky letters,” all of which were claimed to have been burned. As C.L.R. James observed: “the prosecution prefers confessions and burnt letters. The moment they attempt to base the charge upon material other than burnt letters they burn their fingers”. The Dewey Report concluded flatly that “the alleged letters in which Trotsky conveyed conspiratorial instructions… never existed; and that the testimony concerning them is sheer fabrication”.
False witnesses and alibis: Eyewitness testimony was equally rigged. Key witnesses were often co-defendants or acquaintances pressed into service, or outright invented. For instance, no hotel “Bristol” existed in 1932 Copenhagen (it had been torn down in 1917), yet Holtzman claimed to have met Sedov there. Fyodor Holtzman’s and Franz Berman’s presence in Copenhagen with Trotsky were flatly impossible – Trotsky was in Mexico by then. “Witness” Vladimir Romm was portrayed as a courier between Trotsky and the prisoners, but Trotsky had never heard of him. The Dewey Commission showed Romm was effectively “appointed” as a Trotskyist by the NKVD out of desperation. Likewise, Pyatakov’s story of a December 1935 flight to Oslo was disproved by Norwegian records: the airport confirmed “no foreign airplane landed … in December, 1935”. In every case, detectives found that no real network of Trotskyites or clandestine meetings could be shown to have existed, rendering the trial “confessions” as absurd fabrications.
Collectively, these methods produced nothing but a hollow pretense of justice: elaborate false narratives built entirely on coerced admissions and sham evidence. Even Marxist-oriented observers noted that “apparently normal juridical procedure” was combined with “the lack of any evidence against the accused other than their own nightmarishly unreal confessions”.
SOURCES
1. My Life, Leon Trotsky, 1930; LITTLE KNOWN ABOUT TROTSKY, V.I. Klushkin; Leon Trotsky, Jewish Virtual Library; Trotsky, David Renton, 1972; The Case of Leon Trotsky Session 1, Dr. John Dewey, 1937.
2. Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth, Max Eastman, 1925; Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party Second Congress, 1903; The Bolshevik-Menshevik Split, Richard Cavendish, 2003; Lenin Before October, Trotsky, 1924; My Life (Chapter 36), Trotsky, 1930; First Decrees of Sovet Power, Yuri Akhapkin, 1917.
3. The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, Trotsky, 1931; The Permanent Revolution, Trotsky, 1931; Disruption of Unity Under Cover of Outcries for Unity, Vladimir Lenin, 1914; On Cooperation, Lenin; 1923; The Revolution Betrayed (Appendix: Socialism in One Country), Trotsky, 1936; Socialism in One Country versus Permanent Revolution; И. В. Сталин, Вопросы ленинизма. М.–Л., 1926; Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1850; The Permanent Revolution (Introduction to the First Russian Edition, Trotsky, 1931).
4. Trotsky in New York, 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution, Kenneth D. Ackerman, 2003; My Life (Chapter 22), Trotsky, 1930; Trotsky’s Canadian Connections, Daniel Francis, 2014; MI5 detained Trotsky on way to revolution, Richard Norton Taylor, 2001; Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Anthony C. Sutton, 1981.
5. Platform of the Joint Opposition, Trotsky, 1927; Great Purge, John C. Dewdney, Encyclopaedia Britannica; The New York Intellectuals, Irving Howe, 1969; Founding Conference of the Fourth International (Foreward), 1938; Neoconservatism, Richard Dagger, Encyclopaedia Britannica; Neoconservatism, Jacob Heilbrunn, 2004.
6. FASCISM: What It Is and How To Fight It, Trotsky, 1944; On the War and the Soviet-Nazi Pact, Trotsky, 1939; 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror, Vadim Z. Rogovin, 1998; The “Bloc” of the Oppositions against Stalin in the USSR in 1932, Pierre Broué, 1980; Trotsky’s Struggle against Stalin, Jason Dawsey, 2018.
7. An “Exemplary Comrade”: The Socialist Workers Party’s 40-year-long cover-up of Stalinist spy Sylvia Callen, Eric London, 2018; Why Leon Trotsky agreed to testify before the Dies commission in 1939, 1999; Leon Trotsky – the Fascist, Adrian Chan-Wyles, 2017.
8. “Last Testament” Letters to the Congress, Vladimir Lenin, 1922; Journal of Lenin’s Duty Secretaries, 1922 – 23, Vladimir Lenin; Has Lenin’s will been replaced?, V.A. Sakharov, 2012; Falsificación de Testament de Lenin – THE COUNTERFEITING OF THE LENIN TESTAMENT, Antonio Dangelo, 2010.
9. Tenth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.), Vladimir Lenin, 1921; The New Course, Trotsky, 1923; Platform of the Joint Opposition, Leon Trotsky, 1927; The Russian Opposition, Trotsky, 1927; The Appeal to the Party Members, Trotsky, 1927; ‘The Expulsion of Trotzky and Zinoviev from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’ from International Press Correspondence. Vol. 7 No. 64. November 17, 1927; democratic centralism, Richard Dagger, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
10. Top Secret MI5 Files of First World War Go Online, National Archives; MI5 detained Trotsky on way to revolution, Richard Norton-Taylor, 2001; RUSSIAN PRISONER SAYS HE WAS SPY FOR BRITAIN STATES HE ACTED WITH TROTSKY’S APPROVAL, The Morning Bulletin, 1938; Leon Trotsky, Dupe of the NKVD, Rita T. Kronenbitter, 1994.
11. Leon Trotsky’s Writings On Britain, Trotsky, 1926; The Church Struggle Under Fascism, Trotsky, 1946; One Government’s War on Religion, Victor Gaetan, 2013.
12. The Moscow Trials, Hugo Dewar, 1962; Bukharin and his Trial, Nikolai Bukharin, 1938; Not Guilty: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, Dr. John Dewey, 1938; TROTSKY’S “CONTACT” WITH THE DEFENDANTS, Smirnov and Holtzman; The Second Moscow Trial, C.L.R. James, 1937; Political genocide in the USSR (1936-1940): The Moscow Trials and the Dewey Commission, Fred Williams, 2025; The Case of Leon Trotsky Thirteenth Session, Dr. John Dewey, 1937.