They seized him and left his food on the table untouched. A few weeks after he vanished, a body, missing its head and legs, washed up on the Seine. It was not enough to just kill Klement; decapitation and dismemberment were required to incite extra terror. Despite a difficult relationship with his father, Leon worked tirelessly for him in Paris.
When Sedov checked himself into a private clinic in Paris run by Russian emigres complaining of an appendicitis, the Soviets knew. He died there under mysterious circumstances in February , five months before Klement disappeared. To this day, the cause of death has not been conclusively determined.
In a moving tribute to his son, Trotsky told of the terrible grief he and Natalia felt. That did not save him. He vanished and, it is believed, was shot in October Kirov was gunned down in December Likely, Stalin himself was responsible for the assassination. The murder gave him the pretext for systematically and publicly purging the Communist Party. Old Bolsheviks, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, stood accused of conspiring against the Soviet government.
Following their death sentences, several successor trials ensued through Trotsky knew that a combination of torture, threats to family members, and promises of freedom, if confessions were given, allowed the travesties to occur. The violence swept away both supporters and opponents of Stalin and Stalinism. Radek and Rakovsky, former allies of Trotsky who later submitted to Stalin, were killed. Others were murdered in labor camps, the infamous Gulags, or in prisons.
The secret police put him to death in January In this period, the Soviet Union was perhaps the most dangerous place in the world for independent-thinking Marxists, an astounding thing to say, given the records of the fascist regimes.
From the Show Trials, ever more outlandish tales about Trotsky were spun. The stories relayed by the accused placed him at the center of a massive, worldwide anti-Soviet conspiracy.
Turning his calls for an anti-Stalin revolution against him, Vyshinsky pilloried Trotsky, the inveterate adversary of fascism, as the master fascist, as the string-puller and puppet-master.
Yet Trotsky fought back vigorously. Its aim was to provide a revolutionary alternative to the Moscow-led Third or Communist International Comintern. This Fourth International would bolster radical, anti-Stalinist working-class parties and unions around the world.
When it came to repudiating the preposterous charges raised in the Show Trials, he received considerable help.
Similar organizations were founded elsewhere. Only one of the members, Alfred Rosmer, a syndicalist and early supporter of the October Revolution, could be described as a Trotsky supporter. Traveling to the Mexican capital, the Commission held thirteen sessions in April Trotsky, speaking in his quite imperfect English, responded to every accusation leveled by the Stalinists.
He cast a powerful impression on those present, including the liberal Dewey, no admirer of his politics. In September , the Commission issued its findings, clearing Trotsky of all the charges.
The following years were dark, awful times for Trotsky, Natalia, and their inner circle. Losing two sons and innumerable comrades and friends to Stalin did not break his spirit, but the losses threw a shadow over everything he had done.
With the Japanese in China, Hitler moving into Austria, and threatening Czechoslovakia, and Mussolini dreaming of a Roman Empire in the Mediterranean, the prospect of a new world war soon overtook him.
Following the Munich Agreement of September , Trotsky expected the Soviet government to seek an agreement with Hitler. Whatever anti-Nazi sentiments issued from the Kremlin, Trotsky thought, were not worth the paper they were written on. In the aftermath of the Show Trials, he believed an even more important reason would drive Stalin to come to an agreement with Berlin: survival. The Stalin regime was too despotic and unpopular to weather the storm of total war.
According to Trotsky, a settlement with Nazi Germany might secure some stability for the dictatorship. When Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, his German counterpart, signed a Non-Aggression Pact between the two nations on August 23, , Trotsky was scarcely surprised.
In a steady stream of articles and interviews, he condemned the role of the Soviet Union, a state that, at least in its rhetoric, had sided with the colonized against imperialism. The betrayal of the principles of Red October had reached a new level of treachery.
Perhaps Stalin, Trotsky surmised, now seemed content with partitioning Eastern Europe with the German fascists. The Soviet attack on Finland in November , the beginning of the Winter War , made him wonder how far Stalin was willing to go to create a sphere of interest for himself.
While he again damned Soviet aggression, Trotsky, at the same time, despised Marshal Mannerheim, the right-wing Finnish leader rallying his people.
This was a huge dilemma for Trotsky. How could one support social revolution in areas under Soviet control without giving any ground on his anti-Stalinism?
Lenin — Russian Revolution. See all related overviews in Oxford Reference ». Russian revolutionary leader who, from the October Revolution to the death of Lenin, was the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union. He lost ground to Stalin after Lenin's death and was assassinated in exile.
Born in Yelisavetgrad now Kirovograd , the son of a farmer, Trotsky was educated at a local Jewish school before attending schools in Odessa and Nikolaev, from which he graduated in He first supported the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party against the Bolsheviks led by Lenin; during the revolution he was elected as speaker for the Mensheviks in the St Petersburg Soviet.
He was exiled to Siberia a second time in but escaped to Vienna, where he worked as the editor of the newspaper Pravda. Trotsky abandoned the Mensheviks to rejoin Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the Sixth Party Congress in July ; with Lenin he helped to organize the October Revolution and the overthrow of the provisional government. When the Bolsheviks came to power he was named commissar for foreign affairs in the new Soviet government and led the negotiations with the Germans at the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference.
During the civil war, in the capacity of minister for war, he built up the Red Army and directed the campaign against the White Army. His rapid advancement and his views on the nature of the revolutionary process he believed that socialism inside Russia was not possible until revolution had occurred in western Europe created bitter enemies.
When Lenin died in , Trotsky attempted to form an alliance with Lev Kamenev — and Zinoviev but was defeated in the struggle for power by Stalin. It seems insignificant, aside from the fact that, at 17 years old, Brown remains The arrival of the enslaved Africans in the New World marks a beginning of two and a half centuries of slavery in North Viking 1, an unmanned U.
On June 19, , the spacecraft entered into orbit around Mars and devoted the next month to imaging the Martian surface with the purpose of finding an appropriate landing During the Lebanese Civil War, a multinational force including U. Marines lands in Beirut to oversee the Palestinian withdrawal from Lebanon.
It was the beginning of a problem-plagued mission that would stretch into 17 months and leave U. In , a Czechoslovakians protested the invasion with public demonstrations and other On August 20, , a dispatcher in the New York Times office sends the first telegram around the world via commercial service. Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. Policy in the Far East.
On August 20, , seven men, including legendary all-around athlete and football star Jim Thorpe, meet to organize a professional football league at the Jordan and Hupmobile Auto Showroom in Canton, Ohio. The meeting led to the creation of the American Professional Football Politics had long been the Harrison family business.
Sergeant Charles Floyd dies three months into the voyage of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, becoming the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die during the journey. Lewis and Clark left St. Louis the previous May, heading up the Missouri River with a party of 35 men,
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