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Leon Trotsky Quotes
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Leon Trotsky was a Marxist revolutionary, theorist, and Soviet politician. Initially supporting the Menshevik Internationalists faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, he joined the Bolsheviks just before the 1917 October Revolution, immediately becoming a leader within the Communist Party. He would go on to become one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 to manage the Bolshevik Revolution. During the early days of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army, with the title of People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He became a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War .

After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and against the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was removed from power , expelled from the Communist Party , exiled to Alma–Ata , and exiled from the Soviet Union . As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued from exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born NKVD agent, passing away the next day in a hospital. Mercader, who attacked Trotsky with an ice axe, acted upon instruction from Stalin and was nearly beaten to death by Trotsky's bodyguards, with Mercader spending 20 years in a Mexican prison for murdering Trotsky. Stalin presented Mercader with an Order of Lenin in absentia.

Trotsky's ideas formed the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that opposes the theories of Stalinism. He was written out of the history books under Stalin, and was one of the few Soviet political figures who was not rehabilitated by the government under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. It was not until the late 1980s that his books were released for publication in the Soviet Union, which dissolved a short time later.

✵ 26. October 1879 – 21. August 1940
Leon Trotsky photo
Leon Trotsky: 106 quotes127 likes

Leon Trotsky Quotes

“In not more than a month's time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine… will be ready for our enemies… that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head.”

Leon Trotsky

As quoted in The Cheka : Lenin's Political Police (1981) by George Leggett, p. 54

“In order that the social crisis may bring about the proletarian revolution, it is necessary that, besides other conditions, a decisive shift of the petty bourgeois classes occurs in the direction of the proletariat. This gives the proletariat a chance to put itself at the head of the nation as its leader.”

Leon Trotsky

Source: Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1944), Ch. 3

“It was as the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.”

Leon Trotsky book My Life

Source: My Life (1930), Ch. 40

“Despite the unquestionable greatness of the Anglo-Saxon genius, it is impossible not to see that the laws of revolutions are least understood precisely in the Anglo-Saxon countries.”

Leon Trotsky

The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938)

“During my youth I rather leaned toward the prognosis that the Jews of different countries would be assimilated and that the Jewish question would thus disappear, as it were, automatically. The historical development of the last quarter of a century has  not confirmed this view. Decaying capitalism has everywhere swung over to an intensified nationalism, one aspect of which is anti-Semitism. The Jewish question has loomed largest in the most highly developed capitalist country of Europe, Germany. […]
The Jews of different countries have created their press and developed the Yiddish language as an instrument adapted to modern culture. One must therefore reckon with the fact that the Jewish nation will maintain itself for an entire epoch to come. […]
We must bear in mind that the Jewish people will exist a long time. The nation cannot normally exist without common territory. Zionism springs from this very idea. But the facts of every passing day demonstrate to us that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine acquires a more and more  tragic and more and more menacing character. I do not at all believe that the  Jewish question can be resolved within the framework of rotting capitalism and under the control of British imperialism. […]
Socialism will open the possibility of great migrations on the basis of the most developed technique and culture. It goes without saying that what is here involved is not compulsory displacements, that is, the creation of new ghettos for certain nationalities, but displacements freely consented to, or rather demanded, by certain nationalities or parts of nationalities. The dispersed Jews who would want to be reassembled in the same community will find a sufficiently extensive and rich spot under the sun. The same possibility will be opened for the Arabs, as for all other scattered nations. National topography will become a part of  the planned economy. This is the great historic perspective as I see it. To work for international Socialism means to work also for the solution of the Jewish question.”

Leon Trotsky

Excerpts of Trotsky’s interview with Jewish Telegraphic Agency (18 January 1937); as quoted in Trotsky and the Jews (1972) by Joseph Nedava, p. 204

“The proletariat can only achieve power by relying upon a national upsurge an national enthusiasm. The proletariat will enter the government as the revolutionary representative of the nation, as the recognized national leader in the struggle against absolutism and feudal barbarism. In taking power, however, it will popes a new epoch, an en epoch of revolutionary legislation, of positive policy, and in this connection it cannot at all be sure of retaining the role of the recognized expressor of the will of the nation.”

Leon Trotsky book Results and Prospects

Results and Prospects (1905)

“During war all institutions and organs of the State and of public opinion become, directly or indirectly, weapons of warfare. This is particularly true of the Press. No government carrying on a serious war will allow publications to exist on its territory which, openly or indirectly support the enemy.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 3

“During his illness, Lenin repeatedly addressed letters and proposals to the leading bodies and congresses of the party. It must be definitely stated that all these letters and suggestions were invariably delivered to their destination and they were all brought to the knowledge of the delegates to the Twelfth and Thirteenth Congresses, and have invariably exercised their influence on the decisions of the party. If all of these letters have not been published, it is because their author did not intend them to be published. Comrade Lenin has not left any “Testament”; the character of his relations to the party, and the character of the party itself, preclude the possibility of such a “Testament.” The bourgeois and Menshevik press generally understand under the designation of “Testament” one of Comrade Lenin’s letters (which is so much altered as to be almost unrecognizable) in which he gives the party some organizational advice. The Thirteenth Party Congress devoted the greatest attention to this and to the other letters, and drew the appropriate conclusions. All talk with regard to a concealed or mutilated “Testament” is nothing but a despicable lie, directed against the real will of Comrade Lenin and against the interests of the party created by him.”

Leon Trotsky

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/07/lenin.htm,Letter on Max Eastman's Book, July 1, 1925

“In these pages, I continue the struggle to which my whole life is devoted. Describing, I also characterize and evaluate; narrating, I also defend myself, and more often attack. It seems to me that this is the only method of making an autobiography objective in a higher sense, that is, of making it the most adequate expression of personality, conditions, and epoch.
Objectivity is not the pretended indifference with which confirmed hypocrisy, in speaking of friends and enemies, suggests indirectly to the reader what it finds inconvenient to state directly. Objectivity of this sort is nothing but a conventional trick. I do not need it. Since I have submitted to the necessity of writing about myself — nobody has as yet succeeded in writing an autobiography without writing about himself — I can have no reason to hide my sympathies or antipathies, my loves or my hates.”

Leon Trotsky book My Life

Foreword
My Life (1930)

“The German soldiers, that is, the workers and peasants, will in the majority of cases have far more sympathy for the vanquished peoples than for their own ruling caste. The necessity to act at every step in the capacity of 'pacifiers' and oppressors will swiftly disintegrate the armies of occupation, infecting them with a revolutionary spirit.”

Leon Trotsky

Manuscript from 1940, as translated in Writings of Leon Trotsky‎ edited by George Breitman

“In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had, before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of radicalism of the masses -- of the workers and the poorer peasants and farmers, and of the petty bourgeois class. In Italy, after the war and before 1922, we had a revolutionary wave of tremendous dimensions; the state was paralyzed, the police did not exist, the trade unions could do anything they wanted -- but there was not party capable of taking the power. As a reaction came fascism.”

Leon Trotsky

Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1944)

“The Constituent Assembly placed itself across the path of the revolutionary movement, and was swept aside.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 2

“It would be childish to think that the Stalin bureaucracy can be removed by means of a Party or Soviet Congress. Normal, constitutional means are no longer available for the removal of the ruling clique … They can be compelled to hand over power to the Proletarian vanguard only by FORCE.”

Leon Trotsky

Bulletin of the Opposition, October 1933. Quote from Harpal Brar's Trotskyism or Leninism? p. 625

“Capital was really safer in Russia than anywhere else. … No true Marxist would allow sentiment to interfere with business.”

Leon Trotsky

During a 1921 meeting with American businessman Armand Hammer, as quoted in Hammer: Witness to History by Hammer and Neil Lyndon (1988), p. 160

“The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces — in nature, in society, in man himself.”

Leon Trotsky

The Russian Revolution (1930)

“In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

Ch. 11 https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch11.htm <br class="br">The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

“Both Hitler and Mussolini have plagiarized and imitated practically everything from everyone. Mussolini stole from the Bolsheviks and from Gabriele D'Annunzio, and found inspiration in the camp of big business. Hitler imitated the Bolsheviks and Mussolini.”

Leon Trotsky book Stalin

Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence (1941), translated by Charles Malamuth, p. 412

“Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.”

Leon Trotsky

Literature and Marxism (1924)

“One thing is clear. Every passing day will deepen the policy of the proletariat in power, and more and more define is class character. Side beside with that, the revolutionary ties between the proletariat and the nation will be broken, the class disintegration of the peasantry will assume political form, and the antagonism between the component sections will grow in proportion as the policy of the workers' government defines itself, ceasing to be a general-democractic and becoming a class policy.”

Leon Trotsky book Results and Prospects

Results and Prospects (1905)

“The proletariat, once having taken power, will fight for it to the very end. While one of the weapons in this struggle for the maintenance and the consolidation of power will be agitation and organization, especially in the countryside, another will be a policy of collectivism. Collectivism will become not only the inevitable way forward from the position in which the party in power will find itself, but will also be a means of preserving this position with the support of the proletariat.”

Leon Trotsky book Results and Prospects

Results and Prospects (1905)

“Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

Source: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), p. 41

“Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps… Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.”

Leon Trotsky

Statement of 1918, as quoted in Trotsky : The Eternal Revolutionary (1996) by Dmitri Volkogonov, p. 213

“The peasantry, having lifted itself up out of its medieval status, cannot politically generate it's own rage. — Speech in Paris, 1934”

Leon Trotsky

“Lenin's methods [of "hard" centralism and mistrust of the working class] lead to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a "dictator" substitutes himself for the central committee. … The party must seek the guarantee of its stability in its own base, in an active and self-reliant proletariat, and not in its top caucus … which the revolution may suddenly sweep away with its wing.”

Leon Trotsky book Our Political Tasks

"Our Political Tasks" (1904), as quoted in The Prophet Armed (1963) by Isaac Deutscher

“The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a "self-made" man arising from this movement.”

Leon Trotsky

Source: Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1944), Ch. 1

“In times of peace, the capitalists used to guarantee their interests by means of the "peaceful" robbery of hired labor. During the war they served those same interests by means of the destruction of countless human lives.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 3

“Terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operations. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Terrorism and Communism (1920)

“The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state … Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i. e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), p. 177

“No one yet has learned to drive a locomotive sitting in his study.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 7, p. 101

“In a revolutionary period, the party which has been thrown from power, which does not reconcile itself with the stability of the ruling class, and which proves this by its desperate struggle against the latter, cannot be terrorized by the threat of imprisonment, as it does not believe in its duration. It is just this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread recourse to shooting in a civil war.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 4 : Terrorism, p. 55

“It could and must, be explained that in the civil war we destroyed the White Guards in order that they should not destroy the workers. Consequently, our problem is not the destruction of human life, but its preservation. But as we have to struggle for the preservation of human life with arms in our hands, it leads to the destruction of human life - a puzzle the dialectical secret of which was explained by old Hegel, without reckoning other still more ancient sages.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Chapter three, p. 53

“The political worshipers of routine, incapable of surveying the historical process in its complexity, in its internal clashes and contradictions, imagined to themselves that history was preparing the way for the Socialist order simultaneously and systematically on all sides, so that concentration of production and the development of a Communist morality in the producer and the consumer mature simultaneously with the electric plough and a parliamentary majority.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 1

“The balance of political power at any given moment is determined under the influences of fundamental and secondary factors of differing degrees of effectiveness, and only in its fundamental quality is it determined by the state of the development of production.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 1

“The argument which is repeated again and again in criticisms of the Soviet system in Russia, and particularly in criticisms of revolutionary attempts to set up a similar structure in other countries, is the argument based on the balance of power.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 1, opening

“Leninism is orthodox, obdurate, irreducible, but it does not contain so much as a hint of formalism, canon, not bureaucratism. In the struggle, it takes the bull by the horns. To make out of the traditions of Leninism a supra-theoretical guarantee of the infallibility of all the words and thoughts of the interpreters of these traditions, is to scoff at genuine revolutionary tradition and transform it into official bureaucratism. It is ridiculous and pathetic to try to hypnotize a great revolutionary party by repetition of the same formulae, according to which the right line should be sought not in essence of each question, not in the methods of posing and solving this question, but in formation of a biographical character.”

Leon Trotsky

The New Course (1924).