Official Soviet portrait of Leon Trotsky from Wikipedia
Official Soviet portrait of Leon Trotsky from Wikipedia
Born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, he changed his name during Czarist days to Leon Trotsky, derived from a German term for "defiance". Lenin probably would have named him as his successor, but Lenin's stroke prevented that. Trotsky was a party theorist, and seems to have been closer to the original intent of Marx than any other prominent Soviet figure. He was Marxist but not Stalinist.
He led the Left Opposition in a failed struggle against the policies of Josef Stalin in the 1920s, a rather dangerous move. That got him expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929.
Trotsky fled for exile in Mexico as Stalin seized power. He was sentenced to death in absentia, and was assassinated by an agent of Stalin with an ice ax in Mexico City in 1940.
You can tour his home in Mexico City. His home is very swanky. The communist leaders were all for collectivism and "from each according to his abilities, to each according to their needs", so long as it didn't apply to them. Their needs-to-abilities ratios were always rather high.
On the way to Trotsky's house:
The local revolutionaries have marked the way!
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Here is
the exterior of Trotsky's house.
It was enclosed by a strong wall, gotta keep the restless proletariat out. |
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| Leon Trotsky's Kitchen |
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| Me, in Leon Trotsky's Kitchen |
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Leon Trotsky's Bedroom
Featuring Leon Trotsky's Sombrero, and Leon Trotsky's Walking Stick. |
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Leon Trotsky's Study
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Leon Trotsky's Garden
Complete with Soviet flag and hammer-and-sickle monument. |
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Leon Trotsky's Rabbit Hutches
An American leftist was there on a pilgrimage on the day I visited. He didn't seem to see the ironic humor in anything.
He said that he had once won a write-in contest to Radio Havana, and got a free trip to Havana for a couple of weeks at Castro's expense. He and the other contest winners had breakfast every morning with some North Koreans, who he said were very happy to meet him and to be there.
Of course — they were North Koreans! They are accustomed to being starved by their government. Give them breakfast and you own them.
Making it stranger was the fact that he was from Evansville, the city that is one of Indiana's centers of right-wing cranks. There is the group that thinks that U.S. currency is some Illuminati plot, and so they are printing their own alternative currency (accepted at a few gun stores and pawn shops nation-wide). And then there is the Ku Klux Klan activity. And, it seems, a few left-wing cranks for balance...
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