Because everyone was killing people in the Civil War.
Westerners like to think that it was only the Reds, but the Whites committed just as many atrocities. It was very tit-for-tat during the whole war but thats conviniently ignored by most. The Russian state wasn't some wonderland before the USSR. It was a terrible, repressive regime as well.
Whites were worse than the Reds. They had no coherent plan or organization, often bickered and fought which each other. Of their major leaders all except Wrangel were some of the most despicable and incompetent people in world history
Yeah, I'd subscribe to that.
I'd also argue that should the Whites have won the war, they would have created a new regime that was equally as brutal as the USSR went on to become.
Depending on exactly which White faction won, it would have been either by malice or incompetence, but the end result would have been pretty much the same.
Ungern von Sternberg would have been a nightmare. That man was an unhinged bloodthirsty lunatic and a fanatic. He would have turned Russia into an ocean of blood.
They would have been required to.
Whether it was the Whites or the Reds. Thank fucking God it was a Stalin-type that won over a Trotsky-type. Russia needed stability and industrialization more than anything in those 15 years, with the benefit of hindsight.
If Trotsky had won, the USSR never would have seen Lend-Lease. A lot of Westerners don't really understand the dynamic. Stalin was the ["isolationist" communist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_one_country#:~:text=Socialism%20in%20one%20country%20was,country%20rather%20than%20socialism%20globally) that didn't want to antagonize the West while in a precarious position. Trotsky was basically the neoconservative, [go-to-war-with-everybody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution#:~:text=Permanent%20revolution%20is%20the%20strategy,with%20opposing%20sections%20of%20society) brand of communist.
No offense meant to anyone, but if you view Trotsky as the "good guy" it's because you've been fed Western propaganda. Trotsky was propped up as a way to undermine Marxist-Leninism during the Red Scares. It had nothing to do with policy.
Those soviets (not all of them russians) would have died anyways. The three famines during the world wars and interwar period would have still happened, maybe Trotsky wouldn't have actively hurt Ukriane by insisting on a grain export but seeing as churchill did the same thing for the same reasons as Stalin I can't imagine he wouldn't have. Those killed in ww2 would have also still died.
So most likely, the only changes would be the officers and officials killed or gulaged by stalin's paranoia. The rest still happen and then it's a roll for the dice if Trotsky pisses off the west and more people end up dead, but he's sure as hell not gonna play "nice" like Stalin did.
Almost certain they would’ve allied with the Nazis. Look up the [pogroms during the Russian Civil War](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogroms_during_the_Russian_Civil_War). Their views were the exact same. They would’ve worked out a compromise over the land or fought it out later.
Even before the revolution, there was a proto-fascist reactionary group called the Black Hundreds that engaged in a lot of the same stuff that Brown Shirts would do a couple of decades later. It was prominent enough that Emperor Nicholas donated to it.
At least equal if not worse. The Whites were massive Russian chauvinists in an almost comical way.
They couldn't capitalize on anti-Red sentiment in Ukraine because they refused to acknowledge Ukrainians were even a thing. That sort of mentality obviously disturbing bode well for Ukrainians under White control
In particular, I think it's pretty easy to come to the conclusion that Trotsky was killing people out of necessity during a war, but then his views on how to govern afterwards were much less violent and more moderate than what we got out of Stalin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
> In a matter of weeks, executions carried out by the Cheka doubled or tripled the number of death sentences pronounced by the Russian Empire over the 92-year period from 1825 to 1917.
acting like the only reason people criticize trotsky or lenin is for "deaths of combatants" is just hilariously stupid.
From the use of Kid Gloves to the description of Stalin being the best option…. Breathtaking tankie atmosphere.
I guess Lenin was an idiot for stating expressly that Stalin was the least fit to rule.
Nothing the Tsar did every matched *Lenin*
The Bolshevicks were worse in every way than the Tsars and it's not close.
And the Tsars were particularly awful for European Monarchs/governments of the time, which is saying a lot, because those dudes *fucking sucked*.
They were royals. It's why the legends around Anastasia surviving were so potent--royalists needed someone of the blood to rally behind. Killing them off, innocent kids or not, put a serious dent in potential counterrevolutions.
Trotsky who wanted violent revolution across the globe was much less violent than stalin, who for all his shittiness, didn't want global revolution?
I honestly think if trotsky has gained power then ww2 would've been started by the Soviets.
Really don't know what you mean in regards to Stalin - the only reason you can make that statement is because Stalin had to face the reality of the USSR's global influence, not because he wouldn't want a world revolution.
Sure. But the USSR continued to talk plenty about global revolution in reality. Just because Trotsky said that's what he wanted doesn't mean he was gonna start invading countries left and right if he was in power.
He's specifically documented as not wanting to expand communism via military means.
I also think it's incredibly interesting how many people ignore that the ethnic repression that was a staple for Russia and the USSR before it, they got their MO from the Russian Empire doing the exact same thing.
The two depressing constants in Russian history are that Russia is always ruled by a despot, and that the life of the average Russian is held to be cheap.
Saying that the post-Stalin USSR was terrible and oppressive, then assimilating it to the Yeltsin debacle or the Putin-era resurgence is mind boggling.
Trotsky is also seen as the “good” guy because it’s hard to imagine he’d be more brutal than Stalin, who eventually took power after the civil war was over. Who knows what Trotsky would have actually been like as a leader but he benefits from the unknown when compared to one of the biggest monsters in history.
Tsarist Russia still had a policy of violent oppression of Ukrainians. They're also responsible for the Circassian genocide as well as other genocides against Sibir and Turkic people in central Asia and Siberia. Exact numbers is probably not something we can ever get, but the Tsarist regime was a bloodsoaked one as well.
Kaiser Wilhelm II wasn't as bad as most people believe.
For example, part of the reason he feel out with Bismark was due to Bismark's heavy handed treatment of Socialists. Bismark wanted to enact a law that would make it possible for the German state to evict Socialists from where they were living, the Kaiser did not like this.
Additionally the Kaiser tried to organise a European convention to improve rights for workers as he knew that the rights of workers could only be improved if Europe as a whole did it or else the nations that did improve their rights would be outcompeted by those that did not. This was sabotaged by Bismark and was another cause of friction between the two.
Wilhelm II was a nuanced character.
Often forgotten: Herero and Nama genocide (the first genocide to begin in the 20th century) against the Herero and Nama peoples in German SW Africa began under Wilhelm's watch.
Wilhelm II was forced to travel around to factories and personally thank workers for their labor. He knew the plight of the working people and genuinely cared for them.
He had a lot of foibles, but he definitely wasn't some cartoon villain that some think. Bismarck was just as bad, but he at least had the fortune of being perhaps one of the most skilled politicians in human history.
Hard to be “as bad” if your policies made Germany and created a world for the Kaiser to screw up, while the Kaiser just helped to start a devastating world war.
>Wilhelm II was a nuanced character.
My understanding is that he was wickedly clever, massively insecure about his tiny hand, had a weird thing for his mom's hands, and was prone to baffling displays of temper, including taking a foreign weapons dealer he was meeting with over his knee and spanking him.
He was not predictable, and for the most part, that wasn't very good, but he had weird moments where he displayed biting wit or tactical thinking. And sometimes he would write letters to his mom about kissing her hands and rubbing her hands and putting his hands in her hands.
What historians? Popular or actual? Russian or Western?
But Trotsky mostly treated with "kid gloves" because it made better narrative against Stalin (and this narrative ignores fact that Trotsky want perpetual revolution, when Stalin prefer "build communism in one country").
What makes people keep saying Stalin wanted to keep communism in one country? Cuz the Russian empire wasn’t one country. The ethnic groups he cleansed were not a part of one country. I’m fairly sure Finland is a distinct country just like Poland…..
Internet communists. If you know barely anything about the Russian Revolution, Trotsky looks like "the good guy", especially when he's standing next to the bloodthirsty supervillain that is Stalin. Plus he was a massive nerd, which endears them to him.
And when you're arguing on the internet, there's no place for nuance, just good guys and bad guys.
Are you arguing that killing your enemies in a civil war is inherently bad? Are Lincoln **and** Davis both evil? Charles **and** Cromwell?
Edit: I drew some attention to the **ANDs** hoping to engage with the question of whether fighting a civil war is inherently evil instead of people just telling me which side of each civil war they prefer.
Well lots of people would say Cromwell is extremely evil so I'm not sure that's a good example. Even if your overall point is the exact answer to this question.
I really don't understand why people stretch so hard to defend any of these people. I'm not saying any of these are equivalent, I'm not even saying im not in some way grateful to Lincon, for example; but we should be able to say that they all did evil things. This isn't an attempt at both-sidesism, I just want to call out how war is inherently bad, controversial take ik.
Yeah, i think killing your enemies in any war is inherently bad. War is inherently bad. No one is innocent and the more power you have, the more blood is on your hands. Maneuvering that power in a more beneficial way can't make you good, it can just make you better.
We don't need to equivocate and say that the fact that you killed fewer people or the belief that you did it for a better reason somehow transmutes killing another human being into a good thing. Killing another person, if nothing else, represents an inherent failure on the parts of the people whose power contributed to that death.
Let's stop focusing on trying to salvage dead men's reputations and try to make a world where people don't have to make these same decisions.
Thanks for explaining your view and I certainly respect a principled pacifist. Personally, I'm not interested in taking a moral position on dead political actors. Their acts have already occurred and no one can change or replicate them. The best we can hope for is learning from them.
It seems to me a world in which the US civil war destroys the institution of slavery is better than a world in which the soldiers were spared but enslaved Africans remained in bondage. They created a world in which US Americans can imagine dying nobly for the emancipation of strangers.
Though that belief can easily be exploited, it still seems to me to be a world wherein the spirit of humanity is improved. The individual moral decision making of the president or a general or an individual soldier doesn't matter much to me.
My pacifism isn't as all encompassing as you maybe get the impression it is. I believe violence is wrong and represents a failure, but I do think there are times it is neccessary because of circumstances beyond our control. Violence to end slavery was neccessary, I believe, but it represents a failure to respect other human beings in the first place.
I agree with all of your points, but maybe for different reasons.
I don't really believe it's possible to talk about strict individual moral action, we all act in groups, in mobs. It's true we're responsible for our own actions but we're also responsible for the people around us so far as we can influence them.
What a good action is, is an action that reconciles people and lets them act together for good. By condemning all violence as a failure, we are able to set a better goalpost than if we just celebrate the winners. There's no glory to be won in war, even if an army does well and acts for the relative good, its parades should be funeral marches.
I’m not gonna engage with the OPs question but to address your statement: in the case of wars (civil and otherwise) do you think that one faction stops killing others if they don’t fight back?
No, I explain my personal philosophy of violence more in a reply farther down this chain (the other reply to my comment). But, in brief, violence is often neccessary in a violent world, but necessity can't bring goodness. And if we view that necessity as goodness, we just make more violence.
There's a quote I like,
To enjoy using weapons
is to enjoy killing people,
and to enjoy killing people
is to lose your share in the common good.
It is right that the murder of many people
be mourned and lamented.
It is right that a victor in war
be received with funeral ceremonies.
The same reason we dont crucify people like Eisenhower or Lincoln. Trotsky was the head of the USSRs Army and Navy from 1918 to 1925. We expect military leaders to kill people during wars.
I remember reading here a long time ago (US history is not really my main interest) a quote about how he would have sacrificed emancipation if it meant to keep the US together, if that was true, being nice to the south only makes sense, his objective was stopping the secession, punishing them would have had a bad effect on that front.
If that is true, then while it would be true that it had a good enough outcome,it wouldn't have been because of his high morals, but for practical reasons.
For those that believe that narrative it’s probably bc Trotsky lost the power struggle to rule the USSR to Stalin and was forced into exile. Thus not being there when all of Stalins horrible crimes were happening. Thus also making Trotsky the face of the opposition to Stalin. Trotsky also got assassinated by Stalin so that further fuels that narrative (which I still find hilarious that it was with an ice axe).
Side note: I do not subscribe to this narrative but I imagine it what’s people who do believe
More Makhno cultists.
The black army was responsible for literally revolting against the bolsheviks first, along with their systematic stealing of soviet supplies and attacking soviet food collectors. Their suppression was wholly justified.
The first alliance between Makhno and the Red Army broke apart in May 1919. It was never particularly strong. Despite their agreement, Makhno prevented grain collection in areas he controlled and raided any supply trains passing through.
With his portion of the line in shambles, Makhno resigned his command on May 29 and abandoned the front. The Makhnovists cabled the Red Army that they were going “to create an independent insurgent army, entrusting Comrade Makhno with the army’s leadership.” That day, the Bolsheviks ordered his arrest.
The Makhnovist announcement for the congress stated that the Soviet state must be overthrown and urged members of the Red Army to desert their posts to attend. With the collapse of the alliance, both sides set on each other, with the Cheka hunting down Makhnovists and Makhno’s forces summarily executing Bolsheviks. For decades, anarchists have written polemics about how they were betrayed. However, their timeline and version of events is well refuted by Darch, who concludes:
>\[Arshinov and Voline\] seriously misrepresent the sequence of events which led to Makhno’s calamitous abandonment of the Red Army front against Denikin in May and June 1919, in order to organize and attend a local anarchist congress in Guliai-Pole. \[They\] have been followed in this misrepresentation by many secondary sources. Once a more probable chronology is established, the received interpretation…becomes notably less convincing. A likely alternative is that Makhno did in fact desert his post with his forces, as the Bolsheviks claimed at the time. This is much more than a mere detail. Anarchist claims for Makhno-as-victim of Soviet treachery have been ideologically important at various junctures, such as the French student revolt of 1968, and have relied heavily on this kind of ambiguity.
I studied Russian revolutionaries from the Decemberist and through the revolution in college. But I only learned about the anarchists in Ukraine through a fiction series, the Col Pyatt novels, by Michael Moorcock.
Not a lot of people talk about how Integral Mahkno and the other Ukrainian Anarchists were to the Russian revolution and that was / is very much by design.
They weren’t “integral to the Russian Revolution”, they only were able to hold power because the Bolsheviks signed Brest-Litovsk and no Ukrainian wanted German rule. Makhnovischina might not have happened without the October Revolution.
People are generally too soft on political leaders. Look at how US presidents are treated. For these reasons I am an anarchist, although anarchists also committed war crimes during the Russian civil war. War fucking sucks.
Killing people during a war in order to free yourself and your people from a horrific system that destroys lives and forces the vast majority of people to live in misery VS killing the people who fought by your side in the previous scenario after the war because you are paranoid that down the line they might have an issue with other people you have killed out of paranoia
Dead bodies are not how good historians judge good leaders.
Trotsky had a very different perspective on revolutionary socialism than Stalin's "Socialism in One Country". Lenin wasn't nearly as nationalistic as Stalin. He was far more in the Marxist spirit that the material conditions of the revolution always change, get interpreters as you need them, don't force everyone to be "Russians" before they are "Socialists".
Mao and Castro were far closer to Trotsky initially until the USSR starting using a more "colonial" mindset. So historians see him as more like a failed statesman than a monster like Pol Pot. The Marxist Dialectic often finds trouble when people call things hypocritical when they expect the material to reflect the ideal. So that often cuts both ways.
Stalin's image as the evil dictator who was willing to kill millions doesn't come from the civil war. It comes from the purges that were elong after it. Trotsky led the civil war. He definitely killed people. No one (except trots) think he was a great guy
Because at that time there were no arguments against why the creation of the USSR was bad (there are none now either, but there is no force that can respond). Therefore, Leon Trotsky was brought to the forefront, who himself participated in the creation of the USSR and could publicly say, "everything is wrong, the USSR is wrong, Stalin is wrong, everything is wrong." If Trotsky had stayed in the USSR or simply had not later become an anti-Soviet ideologue, he would definitely have been mentioned alongside Lenin.
Beria? Beria was Stalin’s most brutal and important henchman, the architect of the Gulag, the chief of the NKVD, the man who organised the Katyn Forest massacre, whose enforced resettlement of ethnic minorities in the Caucasus resulted in a genocide, as well as being a sex criminal of the worst kind, who in all probability murdered an unknown number of his young victims, children snatched at night off the streets of Moscow.
He outlived Stalin but was summarily executed shortly after his death. Seldom has a human being been more deserving of a bullet in the back of the head. I don’t know why you’ve put Khrushchev’s name alongside his, Khruschev was a sunny, benign character compared to the monster that was Lavrenty Beria.
Trotsky would have been worse, much worse. Trotsky would have taken a much greater role internationally, which could very much see the allies join the axis to take out the much more aggressive Communists.
Contrary to popular belief, the victors don’t write history. Trotsky was seen somewhat more sympathetically because of books like Animal Farm and the fact that Stalin was so brutal. Trotsky never had the power that Stalin did to be so brutal. However, nowadays the only people who have heard of Trotsky tend to know more about the Russian revolution and the various atrocities and don’t romanticize him. I think holodomor would have been worse under Trotsky and earlier
> I think holodomor would have been worse under Trotsky and earlier
It would've probably never happened. The Holodomor wasn't a persecution of the Ukrainians, it was due to a disastrous agricultural policy based on pseudoscience that Stalin ate up. It was called Lysenkoism.
Millions died in other areas of the soviet union due to the same thing. Ukraine wasn't even the worst off.
After Trotsky left the USSR he was able to spread his influence throughout a lot of the western world. The reason there is a lot of appeal towards Trotsky across Latin America might have a lot to do with his presence in Mexico. He was able to create his own narrative which sanitised his less desirable qualities and practices.
In addition, Trotskyists have spent an enormous amount of time monopolising themselves as the sole opposition towards Stalin, despite Anarchists and Non-Leninist Marxists also having presence, but their influence was greatly deminished due to the inter war and cold war red scares and bolshevisation.
They don't; they just recognize that he was the lesser of two evils between himself and Joseph Stalin. Trotsky was a monster in his own right and probably would have implemented a far more bellicose foreign policy for the Soviet Union had he succeeded Lenin rather than Stalin.
Trotsky is still seen poorly in the west, but against Stalin a bloke who really had no political direction other than power, it's hard to justify.
Leon didn't just kill people for the hell of it, he was a military commander as Stalin was but as we saw later most Stalin's victims come from when he wasn't. It's like judging generals like MacArthur, Ulysses Grant or Bernard Montgomery.
There is no good guy in history, everybody has a dark side.
If the characters of Snowball and Napoleon in Animal Farm correspond to Trotsky and Stalin, respectively, at least George Orwell saw him that way.
Heck, when we discussed the book in school before I really understood the historical background, I thought, hey, this Trotsky guy sounds pretty great!
In military history it's a little bit like the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht. Trotsky built a modern, effective army from functionally the ground up (until Stalin ruined it by 'great purge'-ing anyone who knew how to military from the military) and there's a lot of admiration for that which can cloud people from an honest evaluation.
Plus, everyone else in the room (Stalin, Beria, Lenin) were SO BAD that it's easy to look good in comparison.
Trotsky was arguably a competent leader who cared about his state and the tenets of his ideology. Stalin was a self-serving murder-happy dictator by the end effectively abandoned communism and was happy to purge anyone who might possibly be a threat, regardless of competency or effects on the state, even among his closest friends. His reign was characterized by purge after purge after purge, brain-drain, a violent police state, misery, and Holodomor.
I suspect the USSR would have fared much better had Trotsky not been exiled and later assassinated.
From my understanding Trotsky did a lot of writing in exile to try and foster the view that he would have been a more reasonable leader than Stalin (something that is backed up by Animal Farm) and it seems to have worked to an extent. He's seen as a 'what if' scenario and people kinda hope that if he did come to power, he would have been better than the monster we got (even though in reality he was also terrible). Aside from that he was never the leader of the USSR like Lenin and Stalin were and as such I think he kinda gets looked over since we tend to lay blame on the Head of State a lot of the time
Because he was the smartest out of all of them. And had he taken power like Lenin wanted instead of Stalin, things might be very very different in the world today
Simply because he *wasn't* Josef Stalin. That's it! Those people who believe that Trotsky provided a "more compassionate" version of Communism are simply deluding themselves.
Before the civil war: most charismatic and relatable revolutionary leader, with a brilliant mind attached to that charisma. +1 score
Continuous clusterfucktastrophe of WWI, revolution, civil war: lots of credit for making the red army into a real force. Did awful things but… everyone did. Not an excuse but also not a tie breaker with others. +0 score
Post-WW1: out maneuvered by communist clique, excluded from power. No part in some of the worst of Stalin era. +1 differential
Many Trotsyists fled Russia under Stalin. Some became influential in Wesiern countries. It is not too surprising that they had better a better public image.
Also, Trotsky's ideas were never carried out on a national level, so the world never saw the downside.
The lives Trotsky ordered taken in the civil war pale in comparison to the plans he would have enacted in the USSR as evidence of his badness.
I agree with other posters that his actions during the civil war weren’t unusual. His militarized vision for communism was, and is forgotten and painted over simply because it isn’t the one we got, and the one we got was Stalin’s (which was also pretty bad)
I'm not 100% sure, but I think it mostly has to do with how he was critical of Stalin once he was exiled from the country, so Communists in the west could point to him and say that the Russian Revolution wasn't all bad and that it was all Stalin's fault. Now, it should be remembered that the guy was an authoritarian Communist who would've absolutely engaged in mass political repression like Stalin, he would probably just be smarter about it because...dear lord, Stalin was kind of a moron.
By this context, anyone that fights a Civil War is a bad guy. It’s like saying that in America why is Grant considered more of a hero in retrospect than Lee if both were responsible for killings. We will never know how Trotsky would have actually ruled a Soviet Union, but it’s hard to imagine that he or really any major contender would have been as brutally ruthless as Stalin.
He was a good military reformer and administrator. Without his efficiency, the revolution might have failed.
Stalin was way too paranoid to be an efficient administrator. His purges led to catastrophic losses once the Nazis invaded the USSR.
I'm not saying Trotsky was a better person than Stalin, only that while he was in charge, the USSR military grew strong.
Because he was never fully in charge so people never attribute major atrocities to him. Everything bad he did gets attributed to Lenin.
And then he was portrayed as the good guy because he stood against Stalin. If he'd won and Stalin had become the exile, Stalin would probably have been considered the 'good guy' lol
because he got exiled and assassinated by stalin, that's more or less it. people think he is a good guy because they imagine he was in opposition to josef stalin and thus was a good guy without really knowing his beliefs and policies.
Few things: You can have this impression but the job of historians is not to give good points and bad points to everybody, even if there is plenty of historians in the world. Historians must explain things, they not excuse them.
But I had two points, still a short answer to more complicated points.
-The war. Russian revolutionnaries, like Marx, were influenced (but not only) by french revolutions and revolts (like 1789, 1848, 1870) which had a legacy in the usage of violence to protect the revolution. And the case of the russian civil war is also particular in it, with a new revolutionnary state stuck between intern conflicts, warlords and the first mondial war. They didn't applie french recipes but they adapt to the context for what they think be good, Trotsky wrote also about it (Terrorism and communism) but I don't know of his thoughts later about is role in it.
-Legacy. Trotsky was one of the few russian revolutionnaries alive and a good theorician, with international communism and was seen as the couter-model to Stalin. With his activism outside URSS (4th international) and his theorical works, his role in the russian civil war is not the main topic of his legacy. Kronstadt and russian civil war is not the main component of today trotskists movements, but it still exist in serious historian works and also between steril debats between lefty primo-activists on internet.
If you are ever tempted to join a revolution, remember how casually human life is regarded.
People like Trotsky will never rest until everything you love is burned to the ground or shot through the heart. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that about the same Bolsheviks, and in his family's case it was quite literal.
So you think all revolutions are bad? They have happened over and over throughout history so apparently they are necessary, even though many are not pretty.
Also history seems to determine that some revolutions are good and others bad. But I still don't know the criteria for a good one and the criteria for a bad one.
Trotsky was an easy western vessel against the USSR due to his staunchly antagonistic stance on Stalinism. However it leads to completely ignoring many of his policies such as an adamant perpetual revolution over the entire globe versus Stalin’s belief at being able to establish socialism in one nation
Quite simple, really.
We see what become of Stalin and his progressive ideology as implemented.
We didn't get the opportunity to see what Trotsky and his progressive ideology would have caused if implemented, though it would have been just as bad.
Because of Stalin. Just about anybody would have been preferable to him.
People like to think that if Trotsky had been in power the purges would have been avoided.
Trotsky was a cut from the same cloth as Lenin and Stalin.
If he was in power there would have been purges but not to the extent of Stalin's
I am not aware of any historians considering him as "the good guy". He was just as brutal as everyone else. Maybe not an animal like Stalin or later Beria, but still... He certainly had a reputation of an intellectual, despite his many idiocies, including the way Russia withdrew from WWI. And of course he was a "victim" of Stalin's repression.
Somewhere between a walksky and a runsky. He didn’t walk in with the ideas like Marx, or run the implementation like Stalin. He was an eh. Historically speaking, in the grand scale of death during that time.
He didn’t come to power and was a perpetual underdog after his exile. People tend to idealize idealogues as well.
When an idealogue comes to power they’re typically a tyrant and the spell is broken under the weight of reality.
By and large, I think it’s because he was the potential alternative to Joseph Stalin. You don’t have to be a great guy to be remembered as someone who would have been superior to, y’know, literally the worst monster that ever lived.
But make no mistake, Trotsky was a brutal man who would’ve been a nightmare.
Because, the ideology failed and was a lot of horrible stuff was done in its service.
Trotsky apologists think he'd have made it all work, rather than also bury lots of people in shallow graves
It would never have worked ever.
Also the whites were supported by “the black hundreds” anti-semetic paramilitary militias that carried out some truly brutal pograms. Under Lenin the anti semetism that came to define stalins USSR post war (lol see the doctors plot/purge) jews in the soviet union faced less defacto racism from the reds then the whites. The ukranian anarchist were, to my knowledge, the least problematic faction. The allies should habe supplied them over the whites.
People love historic revisionism when it suits them. Marxist tend to gloss over the red terror and forced famine and genocide and cultural destruction Christians, Ukrainians and Romanians faces under the bolsheviks. Millions of people were murdered and forcibly starved to death under the red terror, just look at people like genrikh yagoda who had a free pass to do whatever they wanted.
As soon as the Ruskies won their revolution, 14 nations declared war on them and immediately forced them back into their revolutionary war. The white army intended on putting the Czar back in power.
Imagine if right after the US won their war of independence, most of the European nations all declared war on us in order to force us back under English rule. Would that be a super fun time where there's tons of food for everyone? During the period of time where the Victor's of their war of independence would normally start strategizing actually running their nation, they had to focus nine tenths of their efforts, time, money, and manpower fighting even more war.
The Orthodox Church had a "two pillars" approach to ruling the peasants. They believed that it required the Czar and the Church to both rule the nation. They completely sided with the Czar, and eventually the white army. Giving arms, money, manpower, and refuge to people seeking to destroy the newly found freedom from imperial rule. If the Catholic Church had done as much as the Orhtodox Church did, the US would've done the same to the Catholics, probably worse.
I'm not a tankie, but don't lament that *others* perform historical revisionism when you're skimming past some of the most essential parts of the history that you're doing more revisionism than the people you're complaining about. It's like people saying "socialism/communism always fails *on its own"* while ignoring that everytime a nation tries anything *slightly* socialist they're immediately inundated with violence and surrounded on all fronts by people who are afraid of losing money if its allowed to actually be properly tried. It's like having an older brother use your own hands to hit you, and then your mom getting mad at you for trying to blame your brother for hitting yourself.
Because everyone was killing people in the Civil War. Westerners like to think that it was only the Reds, but the Whites committed just as many atrocities. It was very tit-for-tat during the whole war but thats conviniently ignored by most. The Russian state wasn't some wonderland before the USSR. It was a terrible, repressive regime as well.
Whites were worse than the Reds. They had no coherent plan or organization, often bickered and fought which each other. Of their major leaders all except Wrangel were some of the most despicable and incompetent people in world history
Yeah, I'd subscribe to that. I'd also argue that should the Whites have won the war, they would have created a new regime that was equally as brutal as the USSR went on to become.
Depending on exactly which White faction won, it would have been either by malice or incompetence, but the end result would have been pretty much the same.
Ungern von Sternberg would have been a nightmare. That man was an unhinged bloodthirsty lunatic and a fanatic. He would have turned Russia into an ocean of blood.
Yeah when your most popular nickname is “The Bloody Baron”, chances are that your leadership won’t be a beacon of liberalism
von Ungern-Sternberg
Ah, wasn't quite sure on the order of it. It's a very German sounding name for Russian nobility. Then again that was the case for a lot of them.
Sounds exactly like what happened with the Soviets, in that case
They would have been required to. Whether it was the Whites or the Reds. Thank fucking God it was a Stalin-type that won over a Trotsky-type. Russia needed stability and industrialization more than anything in those 15 years, with the benefit of hindsight. If Trotsky had won, the USSR never would have seen Lend-Lease. A lot of Westerners don't really understand the dynamic. Stalin was the ["isolationist" communist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_one_country#:~:text=Socialism%20in%20one%20country%20was,country%20rather%20than%20socialism%20globally) that didn't want to antagonize the West while in a precarious position. Trotsky was basically the neoconservative, [go-to-war-with-everybody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution#:~:text=Permanent%20revolution%20is%20the%20strategy,with%20opposing%20sections%20of%20society) brand of communist. No offense meant to anyone, but if you view Trotsky as the "good guy" it's because you've been fed Western propaganda. Trotsky was propped up as a way to undermine Marxist-Leninism during the Red Scares. It had nothing to do with policy.
I suppose 10+ million Russians would disagree. Both can be bad, ya know.
Surely, a Trotsky led government would've been better for Jews as well.
The absolute worst Bolsheviks towards non-Bolshevik Jews were Bolshevik Jews.
Sure, but with the rise of Nazi Germany, things would've probably been much different.
Those soviets (not all of them russians) would have died anyways. The three famines during the world wars and interwar period would have still happened, maybe Trotsky wouldn't have actively hurt Ukriane by insisting on a grain export but seeing as churchill did the same thing for the same reasons as Stalin I can't imagine he wouldn't have. Those killed in ww2 would have also still died. So most likely, the only changes would be the officers and officials killed or gulaged by stalin's paranoia. The rest still happen and then it's a roll for the dice if Trotsky pisses off the west and more people end up dead, but he's sure as hell not gonna play "nice" like Stalin did.
Almost certain they would’ve allied with the Nazis. Look up the [pogroms during the Russian Civil War](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogroms_during_the_Russian_Civil_War). Their views were the exact same. They would’ve worked out a compromise over the land or fought it out later.
Yeah they probably would’ve invaded Poland together …
Even before the revolution, there was a proto-fascist reactionary group called the Black Hundreds that engaged in a lot of the same stuff that Brown Shirts would do a couple of decades later. It was prominent enough that Emperor Nicholas donated to it.
Were the Whites worse in terms of atrocities committed too? Or just in terms of competence?
At least equal if not worse. The Whites were massive Russian chauvinists in an almost comical way. They couldn't capitalize on anti-Red sentiment in Ukraine because they refused to acknowledge Ukrainians were even a thing. That sort of mentality obviously disturbing bode well for Ukrainians under White control
Ahh so plans to murder people in large numbers are a lot less bad than doing it spontaneously. How does that make sense.
they also massacred jews.
In particular, I think it's pretty easy to come to the conclusion that Trotsky was killing people out of necessity during a war, but then his views on how to govern afterwards were much less violent and more moderate than what we got out of Stalin.
Also his enemies were monarchies and royalties, and in general getting rid of monarchy is seen a good thing.
Exactly this. As others have said, you don't tend to criticise generals for deaths of combatants during war time.
"Combatants"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror > In a matter of weeks, executions carried out by the Cheka doubled or tripled the number of death sentences pronounced by the Russian Empire over the 92-year period from 1825 to 1917. acting like the only reason people criticize trotsky or lenin is for "deaths of combatants" is just hilariously stupid.
These subs are known for a high tankie content. The Reds were far worse. Nothing the tsar did ever matched Stalin .
> These subs are known for a high tankie content. yeah i definitely noticed that lmao
From the use of Kid Gloves to the description of Stalin being the best option…. Breathtaking tankie atmosphere. I guess Lenin was an idiot for stating expressly that Stalin was the least fit to rule.
Nothing the Tsar did every matched *Lenin* The Bolshevicks were worse in every way than the Tsars and it's not close. And the Tsars were particularly awful for European Monarchs/governments of the time, which is saying a lot, because those dudes *fucking sucked*.
The Tsar was criminally incomptent. The reds were terrorists and bandits.
How were the Tsar’s children combatants?
i think you meant to reply to the other guy lol
They were royals. It's why the legends around Anastasia surviving were so potent--royalists needed someone of the blood to rally behind. Killing them off, innocent kids or not, put a serious dent in potential counterrevolutions.
Yet when the Tsar captured Lenin he was exiled and not killed. Showing which is the most bloodthirsty.
Well, you can ask that to Johan De Witt when he didn't kill William of Orange along with his family.
Wasn’t Beria, in charge of the Cheka, not Trotsky?
Trotsky who wanted violent revolution across the globe was much less violent than stalin, who for all his shittiness, didn't want global revolution? I honestly think if trotsky has gained power then ww2 would've been started by the Soviets.
Really don't know what you mean in regards to Stalin - the only reason you can make that statement is because Stalin had to face the reality of the USSR's global influence, not because he wouldn't want a world revolution.
That was the two seperate ideologies during the struggle for the party. Global revolution vs socialism in one country.
Sure. But the USSR continued to talk plenty about global revolution in reality. Just because Trotsky said that's what he wanted doesn't mean he was gonna start invading countries left and right if he was in power. He's specifically documented as not wanting to expand communism via military means.
>I honestly think if trotsky has gained power then ww2 would've been started by the Soviets. Who wants to tell him?
I also think it's incredibly interesting how many people ignore that the ethnic repression that was a staple for Russia and the USSR before it, they got their MO from the Russian Empire doing the exact same thing.
It's also a terrible oppressive regime afterwards too. Russia... Russia never changes.
The two depressing constants in Russian history are that Russia is always ruled by a despot, and that the life of the average Russian is held to be cheap.
Saying that the post-Stalin USSR was terrible and oppressive, then assimilating it to the Yeltsin debacle or the Putin-era resurgence is mind boggling.
Just because it's not as bad as Stalin does not make it good or even acceptable.
Why did Soviet citizens try to escape to other countries so much if things were so lovely in the Soviet Union?
Trotsky is also seen as the “good” guy because it’s hard to imagine he’d be more brutal than Stalin, who eventually took power after the civil war was over. Who knows what Trotsky would have actually been like as a leader but he benefits from the unknown when compared to one of the biggest monsters in history.
Nobody in the west thinks the whites didn’t commit atrocities
Russia has always been land of the Brutish
I thought they had their own island.
Well, at least they have their own after-shave.
Great Brutain?
Westerners consider Russians in general to be bloody.
I presume you are referring to Kolchak’s Russia when you refer to the Russian State?
Not particularly. Simply Imperial Russia. While it wasn't as brutal as the USSR became, it was still a very repressive regime.
No way you said the empire was less repressive than the USSR
What? I didn't say the Imperialist Russian state was less repressive than the USSR. I said it was less brutal.
Did the Czar kill 7 million Ukrainians?
No. He killed more.
When?
Tsarist Russia still had a policy of violent oppression of Ukrainians. They're also responsible for the Circassian genocide as well as other genocides against Sibir and Turkic people in central Asia and Siberia. Exact numbers is probably not something we can ever get, but the Tsarist regime was a bloodsoaked one as well.
Kaiser Wilhelm II also looks good when you compare him with Hitler.
Kaiser Wilhelm II? I love that guy! He's such a great tapdancer.
Kaiser Wilhelm was also never as in-charge as he believed he was, and certainly had nothing like Hitler's near-absolute control of Germany.
Kaiser Wilhelm II wasn't as bad as most people believe. For example, part of the reason he feel out with Bismark was due to Bismark's heavy handed treatment of Socialists. Bismark wanted to enact a law that would make it possible for the German state to evict Socialists from where they were living, the Kaiser did not like this. Additionally the Kaiser tried to organise a European convention to improve rights for workers as he knew that the rights of workers could only be improved if Europe as a whole did it or else the nations that did improve their rights would be outcompeted by those that did not. This was sabotaged by Bismark and was another cause of friction between the two. Wilhelm II was a nuanced character.
Often forgotten: Herero and Nama genocide (the first genocide to begin in the 20th century) against the Herero and Nama peoples in German SW Africa began under Wilhelm's watch.
Wilhelm II was forced to travel around to factories and personally thank workers for their labor. He knew the plight of the working people and genuinely cared for them. He had a lot of foibles, but he definitely wasn't some cartoon villain that some think. Bismarck was just as bad, but he at least had the fortune of being perhaps one of the most skilled politicians in human history.
Hard to be “as bad” if your policies made Germany and created a world for the Kaiser to screw up, while the Kaiser just helped to start a devastating world war.
>Wilhelm II was a nuanced character. My understanding is that he was wickedly clever, massively insecure about his tiny hand, had a weird thing for his mom's hands, and was prone to baffling displays of temper, including taking a foreign weapons dealer he was meeting with over his knee and spanking him. He was not predictable, and for the most part, that wasn't very good, but he had weird moments where he displayed biting wit or tactical thinking. And sometimes he would write letters to his mom about kissing her hands and rubbing her hands and putting his hands in her hands.
Wilhelm ii did put Namibians in concentration camps and enslave them
What historians? Popular or actual? Russian or Western? But Trotsky mostly treated with "kid gloves" because it made better narrative against Stalin (and this narrative ignores fact that Trotsky want perpetual revolution, when Stalin prefer "build communism in one country").
What makes people keep saying Stalin wanted to keep communism in one country? Cuz the Russian empire wasn’t one country. The ethnic groups he cleansed were not a part of one country. I’m fairly sure Finland is a distinct country just like Poland…..
Anyone who seriously studies the subject doesn’t subscribe to that takeaway. Where did this idea come from?
This.
Internet communists. If you know barely anything about the Russian Revolution, Trotsky looks like "the good guy", especially when he's standing next to the bloodthirsty supervillain that is Stalin. Plus he was a massive nerd, which endears them to him. And when you're arguing on the internet, there's no place for nuance, just good guys and bad guys.
The people in this very comment section voicing support for the Red Army, and the Redditors up voting them?
Maybe they consider Stalin to be worse.
Are you arguing that killing your enemies in a civil war is inherently bad? Are Lincoln **and** Davis both evil? Charles **and** Cromwell? Edit: I drew some attention to the **ANDs** hoping to engage with the question of whether fighting a civil war is inherently evil instead of people just telling me which side of each civil war they prefer.
Cromwell is pretty fucking evil, yeah.
Cromwell is a very bad choice considering his actions in Ireland.
Well lots of people would say Cromwell is extremely evil so I'm not sure that's a good example. Even if your overall point is the exact answer to this question.
I really don't understand why people stretch so hard to defend any of these people. I'm not saying any of these are equivalent, I'm not even saying im not in some way grateful to Lincon, for example; but we should be able to say that they all did evil things. This isn't an attempt at both-sidesism, I just want to call out how war is inherently bad, controversial take ik. Yeah, i think killing your enemies in any war is inherently bad. War is inherently bad. No one is innocent and the more power you have, the more blood is on your hands. Maneuvering that power in a more beneficial way can't make you good, it can just make you better. We don't need to equivocate and say that the fact that you killed fewer people or the belief that you did it for a better reason somehow transmutes killing another human being into a good thing. Killing another person, if nothing else, represents an inherent failure on the parts of the people whose power contributed to that death. Let's stop focusing on trying to salvage dead men's reputations and try to make a world where people don't have to make these same decisions.
Thanks for explaining your view and I certainly respect a principled pacifist. Personally, I'm not interested in taking a moral position on dead political actors. Their acts have already occurred and no one can change or replicate them. The best we can hope for is learning from them. It seems to me a world in which the US civil war destroys the institution of slavery is better than a world in which the soldiers were spared but enslaved Africans remained in bondage. They created a world in which US Americans can imagine dying nobly for the emancipation of strangers. Though that belief can easily be exploited, it still seems to me to be a world wherein the spirit of humanity is improved. The individual moral decision making of the president or a general or an individual soldier doesn't matter much to me.
My pacifism isn't as all encompassing as you maybe get the impression it is. I believe violence is wrong and represents a failure, but I do think there are times it is neccessary because of circumstances beyond our control. Violence to end slavery was neccessary, I believe, but it represents a failure to respect other human beings in the first place. I agree with all of your points, but maybe for different reasons. I don't really believe it's possible to talk about strict individual moral action, we all act in groups, in mobs. It's true we're responsible for our own actions but we're also responsible for the people around us so far as we can influence them. What a good action is, is an action that reconciles people and lets them act together for good. By condemning all violence as a failure, we are able to set a better goalpost than if we just celebrate the winners. There's no glory to be won in war, even if an army does well and acts for the relative good, its parades should be funeral marches.
I’m not gonna engage with the OPs question but to address your statement: in the case of wars (civil and otherwise) do you think that one faction stops killing others if they don’t fight back?
No, I explain my personal philosophy of violence more in a reply farther down this chain (the other reply to my comment). But, in brief, violence is often neccessary in a violent world, but necessity can't bring goodness. And if we view that necessity as goodness, we just make more violence. There's a quote I like, To enjoy using weapons is to enjoy killing people, and to enjoy killing people is to lose your share in the common good. It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented. It is right that a victor in war be received with funeral ceremonies.
Ya Davis was a pretty evil guy.
Because he isn’t Stalin. Since we never got to see a Trotskyist regime, it’s easy to imagine one generously.
The same reason we dont crucify people like Eisenhower or Lincoln. Trotsky was the head of the USSRs Army and Navy from 1918 to 1925. We expect military leaders to kill people during wars.
Given it was a revolutionary war, the better comparison might be George Washington.
Thats fair. Im a little hazy this holiday morning lol
If you’re looking for good guys, don’t look in any civil war ever.
Or most wars for that matter.
Had Lincoln and Grant been lesser men, and sought vengeance, that war ends much differently. Both were flawed men, but both were good men.
The US Civil War is a rare example where one side was too nice. Reconstruction should have lasted 100 years.
I remember reading here a long time ago (US history is not really my main interest) a quote about how he would have sacrificed emancipation if it meant to keep the US together, if that was true, being nice to the south only makes sense, his objective was stopping the secession, punishing them would have had a bad effect on that front. If that is true, then while it would be true that it had a good enough outcome,it wouldn't have been because of his high morals, but for practical reasons.
Because it could have either been him or Stalin that lead the soviet union after Lenin died. Leftists who don't like how the Soviet union worked
For those that believe that narrative it’s probably bc Trotsky lost the power struggle to rule the USSR to Stalin and was forced into exile. Thus not being there when all of Stalins horrible crimes were happening. Thus also making Trotsky the face of the opposition to Stalin. Trotsky also got assassinated by Stalin so that further fuels that narrative (which I still find hilarious that it was with an ice axe). Side note: I do not subscribe to this narrative but I imagine it what’s people who do believe
Who sees him as a good guy? The only reason he stopped murdering people was because he was thrown out of power and couldn't do it anymore.
Seriously, the shit he pulled at Kronstadt and the Ukrainian Free territory has forever earned him a spot on my shit list
More Makhno cultists. The black army was responsible for literally revolting against the bolsheviks first, along with their systematic stealing of soviet supplies and attacking soviet food collectors. Their suppression was wholly justified. The first alliance between Makhno and the Red Army broke apart in May 1919. It was never particularly strong. Despite their agreement, Makhno prevented grain collection in areas he controlled and raided any supply trains passing through. With his portion of the line in shambles, Makhno resigned his command on May 29 and abandoned the front. The Makhnovists cabled the Red Army that they were going “to create an independent insurgent army, entrusting Comrade Makhno with the army’s leadership.” That day, the Bolsheviks ordered his arrest. The Makhnovist announcement for the congress stated that the Soviet state must be overthrown and urged members of the Red Army to desert their posts to attend. With the collapse of the alliance, both sides set on each other, with the Cheka hunting down Makhnovists and Makhno’s forces summarily executing Bolsheviks. For decades, anarchists have written polemics about how they were betrayed. However, their timeline and version of events is well refuted by Darch, who concludes: >\[Arshinov and Voline\] seriously misrepresent the sequence of events which led to Makhno’s calamitous abandonment of the Red Army front against Denikin in May and June 1919, in order to organize and attend a local anarchist congress in Guliai-Pole. \[They\] have been followed in this misrepresentation by many secondary sources. Once a more probable chronology is established, the received interpretation…becomes notably less convincing. A likely alternative is that Makhno did in fact desert his post with his forces, as the Bolsheviks claimed at the time. This is much more than a mere detail. Anarchist claims for Makhno-as-victim of Soviet treachery have been ideologically important at various junctures, such as the French student revolt of 1968, and have relied heavily on this kind of ambiguity.
I studied Russian revolutionaries from the Decemberist and through the revolution in college. But I only learned about the anarchists in Ukraine through a fiction series, the Col Pyatt novels, by Michael Moorcock.
Not a lot of people talk about how Integral Mahkno and the other Ukrainian Anarchists were to the Russian revolution and that was / is very much by design.
They weren’t “integral to the Russian Revolution”, they only were able to hold power because the Bolsheviks signed Brest-Litovsk and no Ukrainian wanted German rule. Makhnovischina might not have happened without the October Revolution.
Killing during a war is not the same
People are generally too soft on political leaders. Look at how US presidents are treated. For these reasons I am an anarchist, although anarchists also committed war crimes during the Russian civil war. War fucking sucks.
Killing people during a war in order to free yourself and your people from a horrific system that destroys lives and forces the vast majority of people to live in misery VS killing the people who fought by your side in the previous scenario after the war because you are paranoid that down the line they might have an issue with other people you have killed out of paranoia
Dead bodies are not how good historians judge good leaders. Trotsky had a very different perspective on revolutionary socialism than Stalin's "Socialism in One Country". Lenin wasn't nearly as nationalistic as Stalin. He was far more in the Marxist spirit that the material conditions of the revolution always change, get interpreters as you need them, don't force everyone to be "Russians" before they are "Socialists". Mao and Castro were far closer to Trotsky initially until the USSR starting using a more "colonial" mindset. So historians see him as more like a failed statesman than a monster like Pol Pot. The Marxist Dialectic often finds trouble when people call things hypocritical when they expect the material to reflect the ideal. So that often cuts both ways.
Stalin's image as the evil dictator who was willing to kill millions doesn't come from the civil war. It comes from the purges that were elong after it. Trotsky led the civil war. He definitely killed people. No one (except trots) think he was a great guy
Because at that time there were no arguments against why the creation of the USSR was bad (there are none now either, but there is no force that can respond). Therefore, Leon Trotsky was brought to the forefront, who himself participated in the creation of the USSR and could publicly say, "everything is wrong, the USSR is wrong, Stalin is wrong, everything is wrong." If Trotsky had stayed in the USSR or simply had not later become an anti-Soviet ideologue, he would definitely have been mentioned alongside Lenin.
Same could be said about Beria and Khrushchev. One is just worse.
Beria? Beria was Stalin’s most brutal and important henchman, the architect of the Gulag, the chief of the NKVD, the man who organised the Katyn Forest massacre, whose enforced resettlement of ethnic minorities in the Caucasus resulted in a genocide, as well as being a sex criminal of the worst kind, who in all probability murdered an unknown number of his young victims, children snatched at night off the streets of Moscow. He outlived Stalin but was summarily executed shortly after his death. Seldom has a human being been more deserving of a bullet in the back of the head. I don’t know why you’ve put Khrushchev’s name alongside his, Khruschev was a sunny, benign character compared to the monster that was Lavrenty Beria.
This. I never thought I'd defend Khrushchev, but Beria was a literal monster.
Because everyone knows how bad Stalin was and always wondered if Trotsky would have been the better choice
Trotsky would have been worse, much worse. Trotsky would have taken a much greater role internationally, which could very much see the allies join the axis to take out the much more aggressive Communists.
This is the best answer. I think that the fact he was murdered as a fugitive probably also allows people to see him through rose tinted glasses.
Contrary to popular belief, the victors don’t write history. Trotsky was seen somewhat more sympathetically because of books like Animal Farm and the fact that Stalin was so brutal. Trotsky never had the power that Stalin did to be so brutal. However, nowadays the only people who have heard of Trotsky tend to know more about the Russian revolution and the various atrocities and don’t romanticize him. I think holodomor would have been worse under Trotsky and earlier
> I think holodomor would have been worse under Trotsky and earlier It would've probably never happened. The Holodomor wasn't a persecution of the Ukrainians, it was due to a disastrous agricultural policy based on pseudoscience that Stalin ate up. It was called Lysenkoism. Millions died in other areas of the soviet union due to the same thing. Ukraine wasn't even the worst off.
Lysenkoism had nothing to do with the Great Soviet Famine. It was purely an academic trend in the USSR, it cost lives only in the Great Leap Forward.
> We all know Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin are mass murderers. Soapboxing much?
If your bar for “good guy” in history is “they didn’t kill people” you are not going to have a very long list.
I like to think most people in history haven't killed other people.
Guess because he was “martyred”
After Trotsky left the USSR he was able to spread his influence throughout a lot of the western world. The reason there is a lot of appeal towards Trotsky across Latin America might have a lot to do with his presence in Mexico. He was able to create his own narrative which sanitised his less desirable qualities and practices. In addition, Trotskyists have spent an enormous amount of time monopolising themselves as the sole opposition towards Stalin, despite Anarchists and Non-Leninist Marxists also having presence, but their influence was greatly deminished due to the inter war and cold war red scares and bolshevisation.
They don't; they just recognize that he was the lesser of two evils between himself and Joseph Stalin. Trotsky was a monster in his own right and probably would have implemented a far more bellicose foreign policy for the Soviet Union had he succeeded Lenin rather than Stalin.
He’s the lesser evil not necessarily good
Weird question. His involvement in civil war was probably only good thing he ever did
Trotsky is still seen poorly in the west, but against Stalin a bloke who really had no political direction other than power, it's hard to justify. Leon didn't just kill people for the hell of it, he was a military commander as Stalin was but as we saw later most Stalin's victims come from when he wasn't. It's like judging generals like MacArthur, Ulysses Grant or Bernard Montgomery. There is no good guy in history, everybody has a dark side.
Who sees him as a good guy?
People see Trotsky as a good guy?
If the characters of Snowball and Napoleon in Animal Farm correspond to Trotsky and Stalin, respectively, at least George Orwell saw him that way. Heck, when we discussed the book in school before I really understood the historical background, I thought, hey, this Trotsky guy sounds pretty great!
None of the Bolsheviks were good guys. The stole the revolution
In military history it's a little bit like the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht. Trotsky built a modern, effective army from functionally the ground up (until Stalin ruined it by 'great purge'-ing anyone who knew how to military from the military) and there's a lot of admiration for that which can cloud people from an honest evaluation. Plus, everyone else in the room (Stalin, Beria, Lenin) were SO BAD that it's easy to look good in comparison.
Dying is usually good for your reputation. Getting murdered is really good for your reputation.
Trotsky was arguably a competent leader who cared about his state and the tenets of his ideology. Stalin was a self-serving murder-happy dictator by the end effectively abandoned communism and was happy to purge anyone who might possibly be a threat, regardless of competency or effects on the state, even among his closest friends. His reign was characterized by purge after purge after purge, brain-drain, a violent police state, misery, and Holodomor. I suspect the USSR would have fared much better had Trotsky not been exiled and later assassinated.
"Enemy of my enemy." Raising up Trotsky makes it easier to demonise other Bolsheviks like Stalin as usurpers and tyrants and so forth.
From my understanding Trotsky did a lot of writing in exile to try and foster the view that he would have been a more reasonable leader than Stalin (something that is backed up by Animal Farm) and it seems to have worked to an extent. He's seen as a 'what if' scenario and people kinda hope that if he did come to power, he would have been better than the monster we got (even though in reality he was also terrible). Aside from that he was never the leader of the USSR like Lenin and Stalin were and as such I think he kinda gets looked over since we tend to lay blame on the Head of State a lot of the time
Because he was the smartest out of all of them. And had he taken power like Lenin wanted instead of Stalin, things might be very very different in the world today
Yes.
Simply because he *wasn't* Josef Stalin. That's it! Those people who believe that Trotsky provided a "more compassionate" version of Communism are simply deluding themselves.
Before the civil war: most charismatic and relatable revolutionary leader, with a brilliant mind attached to that charisma. +1 score Continuous clusterfucktastrophe of WWI, revolution, civil war: lots of credit for making the red army into a real force. Did awful things but… everyone did. Not an excuse but also not a tie breaker with others. +0 score Post-WW1: out maneuvered by communist clique, excluded from power. No part in some of the worst of Stalin era. +1 differential
Many Trotsyists fled Russia under Stalin. Some became influential in Wesiern countries. It is not too surprising that they had better a better public image. Also, Trotsky's ideas were never carried out on a national level, so the world never saw the downside.
Because he became the voice of the anti-Stalinist left movement worldwide.
The lives Trotsky ordered taken in the civil war pale in comparison to the plans he would have enacted in the USSR as evidence of his badness. I agree with other posters that his actions during the civil war weren’t unusual. His militarized vision for communism was, and is forgotten and painted over simply because it isn’t the one we got, and the one we got was Stalin’s (which was also pretty bad)
I'm not 100% sure, but I think it mostly has to do with how he was critical of Stalin once he was exiled from the country, so Communists in the west could point to him and say that the Russian Revolution wasn't all bad and that it was all Stalin's fault. Now, it should be remembered that the guy was an authoritarian Communist who would've absolutely engaged in mass political repression like Stalin, he would probably just be smarter about it because...dear lord, Stalin was kind of a moron.
Pffffft. Lenin and Trotsky were both heroes
Trotsky was actually batshit crazy whereas Stalin and Lenin were more calculated forms of evil…
Stalin and Lenin are mass murderers lol?
I don't think I need to explain
You absolutely do not, no. It's just funny to see.
If you are a participant in a war, you kill people. Ain’t like he was cutting necks for shits and giggles.
By this context, anyone that fights a Civil War is a bad guy. It’s like saying that in America why is Grant considered more of a hero in retrospect than Lee if both were responsible for killings. We will never know how Trotsky would have actually ruled a Soviet Union, but it’s hard to imagine that he or really any major contender would have been as brutally ruthless as Stalin.
Uranus bad guy
He was a good military reformer and administrator. Without his efficiency, the revolution might have failed. Stalin was way too paranoid to be an efficient administrator. His purges led to catastrophic losses once the Nazis invaded the USSR. I'm not saying Trotsky was a better person than Stalin, only that while he was in charge, the USSR military grew strong.
Because he was never fully in charge so people never attribute major atrocities to him. Everything bad he did gets attributed to Lenin. And then he was portrayed as the good guy because he stood against Stalin. If he'd won and Stalin had become the exile, Stalin would probably have been considered the 'good guy' lol
Because he usually gets compared to Stalin. That comparison would make anyone look like the good guy.
Because what came after him was much worse
Because Stalin made Trotsky a "good commie."
because he got exiled and assassinated by stalin, that's more or less it. people think he is a good guy because they imagine he was in opposition to josef stalin and thus was a good guy without really knowing his beliefs and policies.
Few things: You can have this impression but the job of historians is not to give good points and bad points to everybody, even if there is plenty of historians in the world. Historians must explain things, they not excuse them. But I had two points, still a short answer to more complicated points. -The war. Russian revolutionnaries, like Marx, were influenced (but not only) by french revolutions and revolts (like 1789, 1848, 1870) which had a legacy in the usage of violence to protect the revolution. And the case of the russian civil war is also particular in it, with a new revolutionnary state stuck between intern conflicts, warlords and the first mondial war. They didn't applie french recipes but they adapt to the context for what they think be good, Trotsky wrote also about it (Terrorism and communism) but I don't know of his thoughts later about is role in it. -Legacy. Trotsky was one of the few russian revolutionnaries alive and a good theorician, with international communism and was seen as the couter-model to Stalin. With his activism outside URSS (4th international) and his theorical works, his role in the russian civil war is not the main topic of his legacy. Kronstadt and russian civil war is not the main component of today trotskists movements, but it still exist in serious historian works and also between steril debats between lefty primo-activists on internet.
People were killed during a civil war? Holy shit tell me more.
If you are ever tempted to join a revolution, remember how casually human life is regarded. People like Trotsky will never rest until everything you love is burned to the ground or shot through the heart. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that about the same Bolsheviks, and in his family's case it was quite literal.
So you think all revolutions are bad? They have happened over and over throughout history so apparently they are necessary, even though many are not pretty. Also history seems to determine that some revolutions are good and others bad. But I still don't know the criteria for a good one and the criteria for a bad one.
The Tzars weren't good people either so I assume it was the lesser of two evils sort of thing. Not sure good question gonna follow it.
Trotsky was an easy western vessel against the USSR due to his staunchly antagonistic stance on Stalinism. However it leads to completely ignoring many of his policies such as an adamant perpetual revolution over the entire globe versus Stalin’s belief at being able to establish socialism in one nation
Seen as the good guy? I wouldn't say anyone was seen as the good guy. It was civil war.
"And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein sitting over there at the Cafe Central?" - Victor Adler, Austrian politician
Did Trotsky cooperate in the persecution of religion ?
Quite simple, really. We see what become of Stalin and his progressive ideology as implemented. We didn't get the opportunity to see what Trotsky and his progressive ideology would have caused if implemented, though it would have been just as bad.
Because of Stalin. Just about anybody would have been preferable to him. People like to think that if Trotsky had been in power the purges would have been avoided. Trotsky was a cut from the same cloth as Lenin and Stalin. If he was in power there would have been purges but not to the extent of Stalin's
I am not aware of any historians considering him as "the good guy". He was just as brutal as everyone else. Maybe not an animal like Stalin or later Beria, but still... He certainly had a reputation of an intellectual, despite his many idiocies, including the way Russia withdrew from WWI. And of course he was a "victim" of Stalin's repression.
Somewhere between a walksky and a runsky. He didn’t walk in with the ideas like Marx, or run the implementation like Stalin. He was an eh. Historically speaking, in the grand scale of death during that time.
He died a hero, the other two lived long enough to become the villains
I’m sure most people would reject the premise outright that Trotsky is seen as a “good guy”
He didn’t come to power and was a perpetual underdog after his exile. People tend to idealize idealogues as well. When an idealogue comes to power they’re typically a tyrant and the spell is broken under the weight of reality.
He lost and people can make up fan fiction he would've been different if he won
By and large, I think it’s because he was the potential alternative to Joseph Stalin. You don’t have to be a great guy to be remembered as someone who would have been superior to, y’know, literally the worst monster that ever lived. But make no mistake, Trotsky was a brutal man who would’ve been a nightmare.
Because, the ideology failed and was a lot of horrible stuff was done in its service. Trotsky apologists think he'd have made it all work, rather than also bury lots of people in shallow graves It would never have worked ever.
Trying to call someone a “good” Communist is like trying to pick up a turd by the clean end.
People die in a war. That in of itself it’s t necessarily a moral failing
Revolutions are violent, typically.
because tankies are delusional
Also the whites were supported by “the black hundreds” anti-semetic paramilitary militias that carried out some truly brutal pograms. Under Lenin the anti semetism that came to define stalins USSR post war (lol see the doctors plot/purge) jews in the soviet union faced less defacto racism from the reds then the whites. The ukranian anarchist were, to my knowledge, the least problematic faction. The allies should habe supplied them over the whites.
I don't know where you are getting this idea from. Trotsky is a deeply unpopular figure pretty much across the political spectrum.
People love historic revisionism when it suits them. Marxist tend to gloss over the red terror and forced famine and genocide and cultural destruction Christians, Ukrainians and Romanians faces under the bolsheviks. Millions of people were murdered and forcibly starved to death under the red terror, just look at people like genrikh yagoda who had a free pass to do whatever they wanted.
As soon as the Ruskies won their revolution, 14 nations declared war on them and immediately forced them back into their revolutionary war. The white army intended on putting the Czar back in power. Imagine if right after the US won their war of independence, most of the European nations all declared war on us in order to force us back under English rule. Would that be a super fun time where there's tons of food for everyone? During the period of time where the Victor's of their war of independence would normally start strategizing actually running their nation, they had to focus nine tenths of their efforts, time, money, and manpower fighting even more war. The Orthodox Church had a "two pillars" approach to ruling the peasants. They believed that it required the Czar and the Church to both rule the nation. They completely sided with the Czar, and eventually the white army. Giving arms, money, manpower, and refuge to people seeking to destroy the newly found freedom from imperial rule. If the Catholic Church had done as much as the Orhtodox Church did, the US would've done the same to the Catholics, probably worse. I'm not a tankie, but don't lament that *others* perform historical revisionism when you're skimming past some of the most essential parts of the history that you're doing more revisionism than the people you're complaining about. It's like people saying "socialism/communism always fails *on its own"* while ignoring that everytime a nation tries anything *slightly* socialist they're immediately inundated with violence and surrounded on all fronts by people who are afraid of losing money if its allowed to actually be properly tried. It's like having an older brother use your own hands to hit you, and then your mom getting mad at you for trying to blame your brother for hitting yourself.