If a lightning bolt killed Stalin and Leon Trotsky became chief person of Russia, would he be just as tough?

Question

I assume that this is decades ago.

Answer 1

Undoubtedly he would have been tough. Trotsky was the leader whose military ability enabled the Soviets to survive the White Revolution and the Allied intervention.

What he might not have been was as paranoid as Stalin. For all his writings, Trotsky could have dealt with the western powers more appropriately. It is also very unlikely he would have made any agreements with Hitler.

All in all, it was a shame he never got the chance. How could he have been worse than Stalin?

Answer 2

Good question.

Trotsky was by far the purest of the Marxist theoreoticians of the whole bunch, and that was what finally killed him, Stalin knew that his blunt and brutal take-over would not survive long with a star player like Trotsky against it.

How would things have been if Leon had become Lenin's successor ?

Hmmm, very difficult to say. In the short term I suspect that the excesses and distortions that dogged the Soviet experiment would not have produced the same results. And I am really sure that "Animal Farm" would either not have been written, or it would have turned out very differently.

Ultimately what killed Soviet communism was that we, the human species, are not ready to truly share yet. The methods employed of basically trying to force people to do this collapsed because most, if not all of the grass-roots people were doing everything they could to alleviate the effects of the hopelessly inefficient and top-heavy bureaucracy of the Politburo and it's minions.

Take Moscow as a typical example, by the 1980's just about anyone holding a senior position in a major industry had to hold down at least one or two other 'unofficial' jobs just to make ends meet. This kind of 'private enterprise' was the outward sign of the inevitable collapse.

If Leon Trotsky had taken command, I doubt that much would have changed about that. The real benefit would have been to the Soviet citizens, possibly as many as 100 million of them, who might not have been slaughtered, starved, worked, medicated and frozen to death under the scourge of Joe Stalin, the world's most prolific butcher of humanity.

Answer 3

No. Trotsky was a Marxist and believed in the true workers state. Stalin and his regime represented the interests of this bureaucracy. But in order to consolidate their control over society this bureaucracy had to eliminate the genuine traditions of Bolshevism. Thus the struggle between Stalin's faction and the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, was a struggle between the genuine representatives of the working class and the up-and-coming bureaucratic elite.

Trotsky led an implacable struggle against the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. The Stalinist regime's response was to expel him from the Soviet Communist Party and then exile him from the Soviet Union itself. Huge numbers of his supporters inside the Soviet Union ended up in Stalin's camps from which they were never to return. From exile Trotsky gathered supporters inside the Communist Parties with which he built the International Left Opposition.

Trotsky alone defended the genuine traditions, ideas and methods of Marxism. This in itself was a great achievement. But he went further: he was able to analyse and explain the phenomenon of Stalinism and offer an alternative to this terribly deformed caricature of what a genuinely healthy workers' state should be.

Answer 4

No doubt of it. The Trotskyietes would probably have been just as horrible as the Stalinists proved to be. Not sure of the number but think Stalin murdered around 20-million Russians. He did not give a damn about Russians - he was from Georgia - a Georgian.

Time for a re-read of George Orwell's book, "1984" - pretty much how Britain looks today if you ask me. We're now got a staggering 4.2 billion spy-cams in our towns and cities. Soon they will be in our bedrooms.

Big Brother is watching you.

The Yanks tore down a few spy-cams recently as they said [rightly] they were against the Constitution [un-constitutional]. Well good for them. Maybe we should ping away at a few with out air pistols.

Answer 5

No. Stalin was a murdering sociopath. Trotsky was simply Marxist.

Answer 6

I highly doubt that Trotsky would be as cruel as Stalin.

Answer 7

"Tough" is the wrong word. Lenin was not "tough", he was a morally degenerate monster whose actions can be characterized only as "cruel", "monstrous", Inhuman."

And yes, Trotsky would do the same things, more or less.

Answer 8

Basics:

Stalin was a gangster greedy for power and used all means to achieve it and hold it.

Trosky was an intellectual.

Two different points of view towards life.

I find communism contrary to human nature. So, I think that neither would have been good for humanity.

Answer 9

both were "Pansy's" and Communist,,,, who cares the world became a better place after there death

Answer 10

preposterus.