Churchill's Connections

Leon Trotsky

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1879-1940
Soviet politician

  1. Introduction
  2. Stories
  3. Biographical summary
  4. See also
  5. Further reading
  6. References

1. Introduction

Leon Trotsky was born Lev Bronstein to Jewish parents in what is now central Ukraine. He became involved in political activities at an early age and was sentenced twice to exile in Siberia. He played a leading role in the October 1917 Revolution after which he was made head of the Red Army. His army won the civil war but he was later expelled from the Soviet Union by Stalin, his main rival, moving to Turkey, France and Norway before finally settling in Mexico. He and Churchill wrote articles trading blows with each other. In 1940, he was attacked at his home by a Stalin agent with an ice axe, dying the next day, aged 60.

2. Stories

  • Trotsky spent much of his life outside the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, moving frequently as an exile.
  • One of the key features of ‘Trotskyism’ was the notion of ‘permanent international revolution’ which conflicted with Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’.
  • Churchill’s involvement in the Russian civil war (1917-1922) was another military defeat for him after Gallipoli.
  • Churchill used a new gas as a weapon against Trotsky’s Red Army in northern Russia in 1919.
  • As well as being militarily opposed, Churchill and Trotsky engaged in written battles.
  • Trotsky’s death was brought about by a Stalin agent with an ice axe.
  • Although Trotsky died relatively young, aged 60, he outlived nearly all of his close family, mainly due to Stalin’s persecution.

Trotsky spent much of his life outside the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, moving frequently as an exile.

Lev Bronstein was born in Yanovka, a small village in present day Ukraine, at the south-western end of the Russian Empire. His parents were farmers who sent him at age eight to stay with a relative 150 miles (240 km) away in Odessa on the Black Sea for his school years. He began his political activism before leaving school and turned to Marxism shortly after meeting his Marxist girlfriend, Alexandra Sokolovskaya. They married while both were imprisoned for their activism and were then exiled to Siberia where they had two daughters, Zinaida and Nina.

Bronstein escaped in a hay wagon and travelled to London using a passport with a false name, Leon Trotsky. He retained the name as well as using numerous other aliases. ‘Trotsky’ may have been the family name of one of his jail guards; ‘Leon’ was his grandfather’s first name.

Trotsky split from Alexandra (perhaps without getting divorced) and married Natalia Sedova, also a revolutionary, whom he met in Paris and with whom he had two sons, Lev and Sedov. He returned to Russia but was arrested for participating in the 1905 Revolution and was sent again to Siberia. He escaped en route and settled in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, until World War I when he moved to France. He was deported to Spain for his anti-war stance and again from Spain to the USA.

After briefly aligning with the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks (see Joseph Stalin), Trotsky avoided being associated with either faction until returning to Russia in 1917 when he joined the Bolsheviks. He was instrumental in the October Revolution and became the country’s second most senior leader under Lenin.

Trotsky was appointed head of the military, rapidly developing the Bolsheviks’ ‘Red Army’ into a disciplined force. The social democrats’ ‘White Army’ was temporarily supported by Britain, the USA and others in a civil war eventually won by the Reds.

Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin came to power, establishing a base that excluded Trotsky. After considerable faction-fighting, Trotsky was exiled to Kazakhstan, then expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. He spent four years in Turkey, two in France, two in Norway and was finally given open-ended asylum in Mexico by President Lázaro Cárdenas (1895-1970).

One of the key features of ‘Trotskyism’ was the notion of ‘permanent international revolution’ which conflicted with Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’.

The term ‘communism’ became closely associated with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels after the publication of their Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848, written for the Communist League, a London-based international workers’ organisation. In the Soviet context, the formulation of communism evolved from ‘classical Marxism’ (as expounded by Marx) to ‘orthodox Marxism’ (as developed by his followers after his death) to ‘Menshevism’ and ‘Bolshevism’ (in early twentieth century Russia) to ‘Marxism-Leninism’ (as adopted by the Soviet Union). The latter is a somewhat misleading term for Stalin’s own approach, also referred to as ‘Stalinism’. Trotsky generally viewed himself as an orthodox Marxist but his interpretations and influence were such that he earned his own ‘-ism’.

An early draft of the Manifesto by Engels was in the form of a catechism of a ‘Communist Confession of Faith’ and asked, ‘Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?’ Answer: ‘No. […] [It] must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries’.1 Trotsky adhered to this international approach whereas Stalin established a national version due to the failure of communist movements in other countries as well as to his instinct for isolationism. Stalin re-interpreted the term ‘socialism’ to indicate a transition towards communism.2 Trotsky’s ‘permanent’ revolution is a concept of wide-ranging social, political and economic revolution without necessarily waiting for classical Marxist conditions of readiness.

The draft catechism also asked: ‘What will be the course of this revolution?’ Answer: ‘Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.’3 Despite using despotic methods himself, Trotsky was critical of Stalin’s accumulation of power and did not believe that Stalin’s system provided rule by the proletariat.

The Manifesto stated that Communists are ‘the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country’.4 Developing this, Bolsheviks (including Lenin and Stalin) insisted on close control by professional revolutionaries; Mensheviks had a looser approach. Trotsky’s early support for the Mensheviks and late conversion to Bolshevism contributed to Stalin’s distrust. Despite ideological differences, however, their main issue was simply an enormous power struggle, which Trotsky lost.

Churchill’s involvement in the Russian civil war (1917-1922) was another military defeat for him after Gallipoli.

The Russian civil war was a complex combination of conflicts with a wide range of belligerents. Although the primary battle was between pro and anti Bolshevik forces, some participants sought secession from the former Russian Empire. Others, such as Japan, saw an opportunity to secure or expand their territories.

At the time of the October 1917 Revolution, Churchill was minister of munitions under Prime Minister David Lloyd George, becoming secretary of state for war and air in January 1919. In March 2018, the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, withdrawing Russia from World War I. Churchill felt betrayed after supplying munitions to Russia and was concerned that they would fall into German hands. He was also furious about the release of around a million German soldiers from the east to fight instead on the Western Front, writing in 1919 that ‘every British and French soldier killed last year was really done to death by Lenin and Trotsky’.5

The Allies sent troops to try to re-establish the Eastern Front and became embroiled in the civil conflict after the end of World War I. Churchill was vocal about the need to oppose expansionist Bolshevism and had some success in persuading his own government and others to fight the Red Army, despite war-weariness.

Trotsky created a strong force using former Tsarist officers, conscription, executions for dissent and ‘blocking troops’ which were placed behind front line troops to shoot them if they disobeyed orders. He used the Cheka (secret police) to repress any mutinies and to obtain food from local populations. His military successes and his opposition’s fragmented objectives and lack of commitment resulted in the withdrawal of most foreign troops, including British, by late 1919.

Churchill’s noisy role in the Russian civil war added to his reputation amongst some as an unsuccessful warmonger but it had less of a negative effect on his career than Gallipoli. He retained his positions as secretary for war and air until 1921 and then became secretary of state for the colonies until the Conservative general election defeat in 1922.

Churchill used a new gas as a weapon against Trotsky’s Red Army in northern Russia in 1919.

Churchill was in favour of using gas in some circumstances to reduce fatalities and deter conflict (see Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani). On 25 January 1919, he wrote that ‘The use of these gas shell[s] having become universal during the great war, I consider that we are fully entitled to use them against anyone pending the general review of the laws of war which no doubt will follow the Peace Conference’.6

Two days after Churchill’s note, he received a report from General Ironside that three gas shells had been fired by the Red Army. Churchill leapt on this and soon a shipment of gas was on its way from the UK to northern Russia, with instructions for its fullest use against the Bolsheviks. There were two additional reports of Red Army use of gas but all three attempts were ineffective. Churchill ensured that the enemy’s ‘first use’ of gas (i.e. non-retaliatory) was publicised in the UK press, without reference to its highly limited nature.

The shipment was a new product, ‘M gas’, causing breathing difficulties, vomiting, and, at high doses, bleeding from the nose and mouth and a day or two of incapacitation. Due to unsuitable terrain and weather, the 50,000 ground units were never used except to make around 1000 improvised aerial bombs. Most of these were deployed, dropped from aircraft at the end of August 1919, causing widespread panic. Spirited Australian attacks and the new weapon lifted White Russian fighting morale, resulting in a Red Army retreat. Ironside wrote, ‘Gas bombing proved highly successful and materially helped the Russian situation’.7

The Paris Peace Conference decided on an Allied withdrawal from Russia. In September and October 1919, British troops withdrew from the north, destroying all their equipment, much of it sunk in the Northern Dvina River. The M gas units were dumped in the White Sea, off the Russian north coast.

Six years later, the Geneva Protocol of 1925 prohibited ‘the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases’,8 which the UK ratified in 1930, with reservations including allowance for retaliatory use.

As well as being militarily opposed, Churchill and Trotsky engaged in written battles.

In 1929, Churchill published a lengthy attack on Lenin, including likening him to a ‘plague bacillus’.9 While in exile in Turkey, Trotsky defended Lenin in an article entitled ‘Mr Churchill is Wrong’ (1929). He ridiculed Churchill for trying to take literary revenge after military defeat, mocking his style: ‘Verily, he juggles with antitheses as an athlete with dumb-bells. But the observant eye soon notices that the dumb-bells are painted cardboard, and the bulging biceps are eked out with padding.’ He pointed out some factual errors and dismissed Churchill for being muddle-headed. He blamed him for the magnitude of Russian civil war deaths because of his support for the Red Army’s opponents, and called him ‘a mediocre organizer, and a very bad prophet’.10

Churchill responded with an article entitled ‘The Ogre of Europe: A Study of a Living Dead Man Trotsky’ (1930). He republished it with some updates seven years later in Great Contemporaries (1937), by which time Trotsky was in Mexico. The latter version described Trotsky as ‘a skin of malice stranded for a time on the shores of the Black Sea and now washed up in the Gulf of Mexico’.11 Churchill, an enthusiast of irony, delighted in his expulsion from the Soviet Union: ‘Trotsky was marooned by the very mutineers he had led so hardily to seize the ship’.12 He noted that Trotsky had applied for exile in the very countries whose social, economic and political systems he had hoped to overturn. He observed that Trotsky had abandoned his first wife and disowned his father only to find himself abandoned and disowned by others.

‘He will perhaps have leisure to contemplate his handiwork’, wrote Churchill. ‘No one could wish him a better punishment than that his life should be prolonged, and that his keen intelligence and restless spirit should corrode each other in impotence and stultification.’13

The following year, Churchill told Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to the UK (see Soviet Spies), ‘I hate Trotsky! […] It is a very good thing that Stalin has got even with him.’14 He was unaware that Stalin was not yet finished with Trotsky.

Trotsky’s death was brought about by a Stalin agent with an ice axe.

In May 1940, a failed attempt was made on Trotsky’s life when a number of gunmen fired on his home with machine guns at four o’clock in the morning. He and his wife survived in the darkness by hiding between the bed and the wall. His 14-year-old grandson Vsevolod was grazed by a bullet on the foot.

A bodyguard, Robert Sheldon Harte, was abducted and later found dead by a roadside. It has not been resolved whether he was killed for being a Trotsky loyalist or for being an accomplice of the NKVD (a precursor of the KGB) who had opened the gate for the attackers but had then expressed misgivings about the shootings before they took place.

Three months later, a Spanish communist called Ramón Mercader, trusted by Trotsky, made his way into Trotsky’s study with an ice axe hidden under a raincoat. Mercader gave Trotsky a paper to study then sank the wide end of the axe into his skull. Trotsky remained alert enough for a scuffle before Mercader was detained. Trotsky was taken to hospital where he died the next day.

Two years beforehand, the NKVD had arranged for Mercader to befriend one of Trotsky’s confidantes, Sylvia Ageloff, an American social worker. After developing a relationship in Paris, she and Mercader lived in New York together and then in Mexico City, where Sylvia met with Trotsky, sometimes accompanied by Mercader. Mercader took his time in establishing confidence with Trotsky and his guards and on 20 August 1940 was allowed into the house without checks.

Mercader claimed that his motive was personal disaffection with Trotsky and was sentenced to 20 years’ prison by a Mexican court in 1943. Charges against Sylvia Ageloff as a suspected accomplice were dropped. Mercader’s true identity and NKVD involvement were not revealed for another 10 years.

After serving his full sentence, Mercader was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, its highest honour, and lived in the Soviet Union, Cuba and Czechoslovakia. His mother, Caridad, an NKVD agent who is believed to have helped recruit her son, received the Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s highest civilian honour.

Although Trotsky died relatively young, aged 60, he outlived nearly all of his close family, mainly due to persecution by Stalin.

Trotsky was the fifth of eight siblings but only four survived past childhood, due to illness. His adult sister Elizaveta (‘Liza’) also died of illness, aged 48. His adult brother Alexandr was shot as part of Stalin’s Great Purge (or Great Terror) in the 1930s, in which dissenters and Trotsky associates were eliminated.

His younger sister Olga became a Bolshevik politician and married Lev Kamenev, who had an affair with Churchill’s cousin Clare Sheridan (see also Soviet Spies). Sheridan may also have had an affair with Trotsky (her sculpture of him is in his house in Mexico, now a museum). Kamenev fell out of favour with Stalin and was executed in 1936. Olga’s two sons were executed in the late 1930s and she was shot in 1941, the year after Trotsky’s death, during the Medvedev Forest massacre, one of a number of mass killings of political prisoners by the NKVD.

Trotsky’s first wife Aleksandra died in the Great Purge. Their younger daughter Nina died of tuberculosis in 1928. Their elder daughter Zinaida married twice and had two children. She was allowed to leave the country and take her son Vsevolod with her, after which their Soviet passports were cancelled, as well as Trotsky’s. She contracted tuberculosis and suffered from depression, committing suicide in Berlin in 1933. Vsevolod joined his grandfather Leon, changed his name to Esteban and became the Trotsky museum curator in Mexico. Zinaida’s daughter Alexandra was brought up by relatives in the USSR and lived until 1989.

Trotsky’s second wife Natalia accompanied him throughout his exile. After his death, she continued mingling with revolutionaries and co-wrote a biography about him. Their elder son Lev left the Soviet Union with his parents and was an active Bolshevik. He died in 1938 after an appendicitis operation at a private clinic in Paris, perhaps with NKVD involvement. Their younger son Sergei chose to remain in the Soviet Union, becoming an engineering professor. He died in 1937, probably killed in the Great Purge, even though he was politically inactive.

3. Biographical summary

OccupationCommunist theorist, activist, politician
CountryRussia, Soviet Union
CareerAnti-tzarist activist (1896-98). Imprisoned in Siberia (1898-1902). Escaped to London, UK (1902-03). Assisted failed Russian Revolution (1905). Deported to Siberia (1906-07). Escaped to UK, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain and USA (1907-1917). Balkans war correspondent (1912-14). Bolshevik leader in October Revolution (1917). Commissar for Foreign Affairs (1917-18). Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs (1918-25). Created the Red Army (1918). Red Army campaigns in Russian Civil War (1917-23). Member of Politburo (1919-26). Expelled from Politburo (1926). Exiled to Alma-Ata (now Almaty, Kazakhstan) (1928), then from the Soviet Union (1929). Moved to Turkey and France (1933), Norway (1935) then Mexico (1936). Continued activism and writing (1933-40).
Born1879 in Yanovka, Russian Empire (now Bereslavka, Ukraine)
FatherDavid Bronstein (1847-1922), wealthy Jewish farmer
MotherAnna Zhivotovskaya (1850-1910)
SiblingsFifth of eight siblings (five survived to adulthood):
1. Died in youth
2. Died in youth
3. Aleksandr (1870-1938); shot in Great Purge
4. Elizaveta ‘Liza’ (1875-1924); died of illness as adult
5. Lev Davidovich Bronstein ‘Trotsky’ (1879-1940)
6. Clara (b.1880); died in youth
7. Olga (1883-1941); Bolshevik politician; married Bolshevik leader Lev Kamenev; imprisoned; shot by NKVD
8. Antonia (1885-1938)
EducationFrom age eight in Odessa; from age 16-17 (1896) in Nikolayev; University of Odessa (mathematics; incomplete)
Spouses1. Aleksandra Sokolovskaya (1872-1938), educator; m. 1899, div. 1902; arrested and shot, around age 65
2. Natalia Sedova (1882-1962); m. 1903 until Trotsky’s death; died in Paris, France
RelationshipsPossibly Clare Sheridan, Churchill’s cousin, in 1920; Frida Kahlo, painter, in Mexico City
ChildrenWith Aleksandra Sokolovskaya:
1. Zinaida ‘Zina’ (1901-1933); suicide; son Esteban (originally Vsevolod) Volkov
2. Nina (1902–1928); tuberculosis
With Natalia Sedova:
3. Lev Sedov (1906-1938), probably assassinated (poison)
4. Sergei Sedov (1908-1929), shot
Died1940 in Mexico City, Mexico (25 years before Churchill), aged 60; assassinated
BuriedAshes buried in the garden of his home in Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico (now a museum)
NicknameLyova (a diminutive of Lev, as a child); Pero (‘feather’ or ‘pen’ in Russian, a pen name as a young author); numerous pseudonyms for evasion; ‘Snowball’ in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945)
Height5’8½” (1.74 m)
Time magazineFront cover three times: 1925, 1927, 1937

4. See also

Communist leaders

  • Mao, Zedong
  • Stalin, Joseph

Churchill and gas warfare

  • Al-Gaylani, Rashid Ali

Espionage

  • Soviet spies
  • Wells, H.G. (affair with Russian double agent Moura Budberg)

Bolshevik sympathisers

  • Chaplin, Charlie
  • Sheridan, Clare
  • Wells, H.G.

Churchill controversies

  • Chemical weapons
  • Warmongering

5. Further reading

Trotsky

  • Patenaude, Bertrand M., Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2010)
  • Renton, Dave, Trotsky (Haus, 2004)
  • Service, Robert, Trotsky: A Biography (Pan Macmillan, 2010)

Trotsky’s and Churchill’s articles about each other

  • Churchill, Winston S., ‘Leon Trotsky, Alias Bronstein’, in Great Contemporaries (Putnam, 1937), pp. 197–205
  • Trotsky, Leon, ‘Mr. Churchill Is Wrong’, Marxists.Org, 1929

Communism

  • Holmes, Leslie, Communism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP Oxford, 2009)

Russia

  • Galeotti, Mark, A Short History of Russia (Ebury Publishing, 2021)
  • Hosking, Geoffrey, Russian History: A Very Short Introduction (OUP Oxford, 2012)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 and civil war

  • Kinvig, Clifford, Churchill’s Crusade: The British Invasion of Russia, 1918-1920 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2007)
  • Smith, Steve, The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (OUP Oxford, 2002)
  • Wright, Damien, Churchill’s Secret War with Lenin: British and Commonwealth Military Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918-20 (Helion Limited, 2017)

Miscellaneous

  • Chambers, Roland, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome (Faber & Faber, 2009) (married Trotsky’s secretary Evgenia Shelepina; possibly a double agent)
  • Merridale, Catherine, Lenin on the Train (Penguin Books Limited, 2016 (Lenin’s return to Russia in 1917)
  • Schneer, Jonathan, The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin’s Russia (Oxford University Press, 2020)

6. References

1. Frederick Engels, ‘The Principles of Communism’, Marxists.Org, 1847. Engels did not define ‘civilized’, but added, ‘that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany’.

2. Engels’ Principles of Communism had a different interpretation of socialism, describing it in three forms: Reactionary, Bourgeois and Democratic.

3. Engels.

4. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, 1848.

5. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume 4: The Stricken World, 1916–1922 (Houghton Mifflin, 1966), p. 278. He continued that the deaths were ‘not in fair war, but by the treacherous desertion of an ally without parallel in the history of the world’.

6. Churchill to Chief of Imperial General Staff, 25 January 1919, quoted in Richard M. Langworth, ‘Churchill and Chemical Warfare’, The Churchill Project – Hillsdale College, 2015.

7. Christopher Dobson and John Miller, The Day They Almost Bombed Moscow: The Allied War in Russia, 1918-1920 (Atheneum, 1986), p. 204.

8. United Nations, ‘Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare’, United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, 1925. Various countries incorporated reservations. The effect of the UK reservations was that the treaty was binding only with other countries that had ratified it and only if they and the other countries’ allies did not breach it. The latter condition would become important in World War II: see Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris.

9. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis Volume IV: 1918-1928: The Aftermath (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), p. 39.

10. Leon Trotsky, ‘Mr. Churchill Is Wrong’, Marxists.Org, 1929.

11. Winston S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries (Putnam, 1937), p. 167.

12. Churchill, Great Contemporaries, p. 173.

13. Churchill, Great Contemporaries, p. 174.

14. Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932-1943, ed. by Gabriel Gorodetsky, trans. by Tatiana Sorokina and Oliver Ready (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 107.