If you live in Melbourne, Australia, and are at a loose end over the Easter break, you might consider attending Marxism 2020, Australia's biggest socialist conference. As you can see from the screen grab, the conference theme is "A world to win." Marxist evangelists seek to win the world to the hammer and sickle, just like Christian evangelists. Indeed, a cursory search of library union catalogues shows that it is also the title of several books on Christian evangelism and missions, as well as about socialism and communism. Does this mean that conference delegates dream of enacting a worldwide Marxist utopia?
The other day, one of the conference organisers did a radio interview. When asked to do so, she was unable to name one country where Marxism has worked. The interviewer said that he visited Russia in 1987, only 4 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and saw first hand the dire situation the country was in as a result of 70 years of Communist rule. She responded by saying that she was a Trotskyist, and that Trotskyists were persecuted by other Communists. This is true, but doesn't really answer the question.
Leon Trotsky was Stalin's rival after the death of Lenin in 1924. Trotsky was eventually forced into exile in 1928, and was assassinated in 1940 by a Spanish agent with links to Stalin at his home in Mexico. There was not enough time for a more comprehensive interview, but I would have liked to hear her opinions on whether or not Soviet Communism would have turned out differently under Trotsky's leadership instead of Stalin's. It is almost as though he was a political Messiah, a benign and compassionate revolutionary.
This is not the case at all. The late Richard Pipes, a well known historian who specialised in Russian history, notes that Trotsky was in favour of forced labor, terror, and concentration camps, all of which were key features of the Stalinist dictatorship. In view of these sentiments, "it is likely that if he had succeeded Lenin, we would have witnessed in the Soviet Union much the same oppression of labor as he did under Stalin."
It is significant to note that Trotsky, not Stalin, introduced concentration camps to deal with the enemies of the new regime. It was Stalin who developed the gulag system by building upon Trotsky's work. As Pipes also notes:
"Though the fact is little-known, it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who introduced into Soviet Russia the concentration camp, an institution that under Stalin developed into the monstrous Gulag empire...Trotsky ordered a network of concentration camps to be constructed to isolate “sinister agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites, and speculators” who were not executed or subjected to other penalties...By 1919, concentration camps were established in every provincial capital. In 1923, Russia had 315 concentration camps with 70,000 inmates."
Elsewhere, Andrew Stuttaford calls Trotsky a "mass murderer." In Trotsky's worldview, murder was permissible if the ends justified the means, the means being the consolidation of Bolshevik power. He was the commissar of the Red Army during the brutal Russian Civil War (1918-1921). As such, he must take some of the responsibility for the deaths of 8 million people during the war.
Conference delegates such as this interview participant would do well to take off their historiographical blinkers, develop some critical thinking skills, and not see Trotsky as a revolutionary hero to be looked up to.
https://fee.org/articles/why-trotsky-believed-it-was-moral-to-kill-the-tsars-children/
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/trotsky-angel-enlightenment-or-frustrated-dictator
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/communism-memory-and-forgetting/
https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/crimes-and-mass-violence-russian-civil-wars-1918-1921.html
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/04/don-t-idealize-leon-trotsky.html
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/80739/trotsky-the-jew
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