Who was Leon Trotsky?
> http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2012/10/who-was-leon-trotsky.html
>
> thoughts?
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> -Nathan Tankus
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Great Wednesday morning read and half hour of an interview. And it wonders, pretty much what I wondered all the while reading Trotsky...what if this guy had won? I think the fact that he didn't says alot more. I have no idea. I would trust his abilities at evoking popular support for what would appear as necessary struggle and a hard life to continue industrialization and variations in land reform. He would have tried persuasion first, more or less as he did in organizing and running the red army during the civil war. It's about the only period he had near absolute power.
I am certainly no scholar, so it is just a perhaps romantic wishful thinking.
Robert Services book got very bad reviews from the historians. I read some about this controversy and decided not to buy the book. Right or wrong, I came to the conclusion it was part of the neocon big project to re-write the history of the 20thC.
It is a serious project and I am afraid, there will not be enough pro-active resistance to it. Although I was cheered by the very chilly reception to the Service biography.
Part of the answer can be found in the post Stalin era under the rise and fall of Khrushchev under a Politburo that retained enough of Stalin's influence to put in Brezhnev. Khruschchev was a liberal? Is that the kind of Politburo or internal structure that Trotsky would have left? I have no idea, but I doubt it. He was part of a coalition. He knew all the personalities of the purged who got the bullet. I can't remember them all, but he had fought it out politically with many.
Too many conundrums, and we have what happened. It seems likely that communism would not have become such an anathma, and that might have had a very large consequence especially in the post-WWII era.
CG