Leon Trotsky Quote

[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova]In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

Leon Trotsky

[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova]In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

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About Leon Trotsky

Lev Davidovich Bronstein (7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, journalist, and political theorist. He was a central figure in the 1905 Revolution, October Revolution, Russian Civil War, and the establishment of the Soviet Union. Alongside Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky was widely considered the most prominent Soviet figure and was de facto second-in-command during the early years of the Russian Soviet Republic. Ideologically a Marxist and a Leninist, his thought and writings inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.
Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Yanovka in what was then the Russian Empire, Trotsky was initially a narodnik, but embraced Marxism soon after moving to Nikolayev in 1896. In 1898, he was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia, but in 1902 escaped to London, where he met Lenin and wrote for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party's paper Iskra. Trotsky initially sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks during the party's 1903 split, but was non-factional from 1904. During the 1905 Revolution, Trotsky returned to Russia and became chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. He was again exiled to Siberia, but escaped in 1907 and spent time in London, Vienna, Switzerland, Paris, and New York. After the February Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the tsar, Trotsky returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played an important role in the October Revolution that overthrew the Provisional Government.
In Lenin's first government, Trotsky was appointed the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and led the negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I. From 1918 to 1925, he served as the People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, founding the Red Army; establishing conscription, training, and discipline; and leading it to victory in the Russian Civil War. In 1922, Trotsky and Lenin formed an alliance against the emerging Soviet bureaucracy; Lenin proposed that Trotsky become his Deputy Chairman and preside over economic management at the Council of People's Commissars, but he declined the post.During the New Economic Policy, Trotsky led the party's Left Opposition, which advocated a programme of rapid industrialisation, voluntary collectivisation of agriculture, and expansion of workers' democracy. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky was outmaneuvered by Joseph Stalin and his allies and lost his positions: he was expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and from the party in 1927, internally exiled to Alma Ata in 1928, and deported in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937.
In exile, Trotsky wrote extensively and polemically against Stalinism, supporting proletarian internationalism against Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country". Trotsky's own theory of "permanent revolution" posited that the revolution could only survive if extended to advanced capitalist countries. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union had become a "degenerated workers' state" due to its isolation, and called for an end to Stalin's bureaucratic dictatorship. He founded the Fourth International in 1938 as an alternative to the Comintern. In 1936, Trotsky was sentenced to death in absentia at the first of the Moscow show trials, and in 1940, he was assassinated at his home in Mexico City by NKVD agent Ramón Mercader.
Written out of Soviet history books under Stalin, Trotsky was one of the few of his rivals who never received political rehabilitation from later leaders. In the Western world, he emerged as a hero of the anti-Stalinist left for his defense of a more democratic, internationalist form of socialism against Stalinist totalitarianism and intellectual contributions to left-wing movements. Whilst some of his wartime measures have proved controversial and have been criticised along with his ideological defence of the Red Terror. Modern scholarship generally ranks his leadership of the Red Army highly among historical figures and he is credited for his major involvement with the military, economic, cultural and political development of the Soviet Union.