Lev Davidovich Bronstein 1879 to 1940 Born in Yanovka, Kherson, Ukraine Aged 8 he was sent to Odessa He was enrolled in a Lutheran German-language school
Trotsky was appointed as the Peoples Commissar of Foreign Affairs
superior to Stalin and Stalin knew it".
1940 Trotsky aged 60 was in Coyocan (Place of the Coyotes) on the southern outskirts of Mexico City. The Blue house "Casa Azul" where Trotsky was living had been Frida Kohla childhood home, Diego bought it after they married. After Frida's death in 1954 turned it into a Museum to commemorate her.
Trotsky had been commissioned to write biography of Stalin his archenemy, by an NY publisher only because he needed the money. Even his wife Natalie objected to this as he should have written about Lenin instead.
After in Hitler /Stalin pact Trotsky predicted that Hitler would turn on the Soviets.
Trotsky had an escape in Mexico when raiders tried to get into his house.
1930s he had published a history of the Russian Revolution.
1918 Trotsky was Lenin's most important ally, the revolution came under threat and he created the Red Army and turned it into a disciplined fighting force. For 2 and a half years as war commissar he had lived moving in a railway carriage. Trotsky's whistle stop speeches were rousing that nothing could surpass. Lenin an Trotsky were synonymous with Russian Bolshevism. The October Revolution in 1917 withdrew Russia from the war and in March 1918 they signed the Treaty of Brest- Litovsk a separate peace with Germany.
1924 Lenin died and he was heir apparent, but he was outmaneuvered by Stalin who exiled him to Central Asia in 1927 and then out of the Soviet Union in 1928 and he settled in Turkey where he lived for 4 years and was rejected for a visa by many countries. He kept on writing all the time political pamphlets and books. It is possible that Lenin was poisoned at a time that Trotsky was away and it was manipulated that he would not be at the funeral so that Stalin could take control.
1936 He was living in Norway during the show trials. The Kremlin put pressure on Norway to expel him and he was offered asylum in Mexico, due to Diego Rivera direct appeal to President Lazaro Cardenas.
Trotsky was able to avoid the slaughter of the Bolshevik Old Guard in Stalin's great terror, even though he had ridiculed Stalin amongst the Communists.
The Soviets came to the aid of the Spanish Republic against the Franco. There were many NKVD recruits amongst the International Brigade which Comintern had organized and they took refuge in Mexico. Not only Trotsky but his extensive files that he took out in 1929 had to be protected.
1915 "Joe Hill" a tribute to Swedish - American song writer and labour activist executed by firing squad after a long controversial trial. At Utah State Prison, Salt Lake City.
President Cardenas had promised to make priority of agrarian reform and to eliminate the estates of the latifundios. To do this he needed the left to win labour support. Diego Riviera was Mexico most prominent artist and there were attempts on his life.
1879 Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein born a Jew resulted in the White Guard portraying fears of Jewish Bolshevism. He brought about conscription and filled the ranks of the Red Army with thousands of former Czarist military officials. His long absences from Moscow made it easier for his political enemies to outmaneuver him. He had led the heroic defense of Petrograd which others wanted to abandon. " Courage boys Comrade Trotsky is leading you. By 1920 with the Civil War won, the Red Army had 5 million men in uniform.
Under the Soviets there were hundred of industrial accidents and coal mine explosions as a results of the 5 year plans which had been set up at break neck speed. The regime accused the disaster on sabotage. The Show Trial confessions were s a result of prolonged mental torture, with family members held as hostages. Some confessions spared people the executioners bullet.
1941 Author Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon dramatized these trials.
In the USA there was an enquiry into Trotsky innocence under the chairmanship of John Dewey who had had a reputation as a supporter of the Soviets which he had visited in 1928. John Dewey 1858-1952 was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. To Dewey, Trotsky was a prisoner of ideology. He was tragic to see a brilliant native intelligence locked up in absolutes.
Trotsky's two daughter from his first marriage were both dead, one from sickness the other suicide in Berlin after the soviets stripped her of the Soviet citizenship. Their mother had disappeared into a Soviet Gulag.
1918 The Revolution had triumphed in Russia but had failed to spread. Now officially the Communist Party began to experiment with limited capitalism known as NEP new economic policy. When Lenin died in 1924 he had declared at some later date the socialist offensive would be completed. After Trotsky was banished from the USSR Stalin turned sharply left and peasant resisters were branded Kulaks and slaughtered by the millions. This created the man made famine in the Ukraine between 1932-1933 Also the purges eliminated Trotsky's comrades and loved ones and the men and women who had made the revolution. Trotsky however lacked the gift of personal friendship.
1934 Sergei Kirov murder was orchestrated by Stalin and he used it to start the Great Terror for the next several years.
1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky(Red Napoleon) the outstanding civil war commander and 7 other top ranking officers were tried in secret and executed the following day. This was the start of a massive purge of the arm's officer corps. A country that uses all the methods of fascism can hardly be held up as a democracy, and democracy could not survive if it was restricted to one political party.
Trotsky was attracted to Frida Kohla the daughter of a German - Jewish immigrant father and Mexican native mother, she was an exciting beauty despite being a polio cripple and suffering pain physically. Her signature dress was that of Tehuantepec of long dresses that hid her deformed right leg. There are numerous photos of Trotsky in the company of Frida inviting speculation.
Trotskys and Natalie's younger son Seryozh was deported to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, in 1937 he was executed.in a Soviet prison. When Trotsky met Natalie in Paris he was married to Alexandra but she was in distant Siberia with 2 small children.
1910 to 1920 Mexico was in the midst of a revolutionary decade against the dictator Porfirio Diaz, There was a civil was with revolutionaries like Emillano Zapata and Pancho Villa and this all left a million dead Mexicans. After this 1920-1924 President Obregon tried to create a renaissance of to unify the country and develop a Mexican cultural heritage. Diego Riviera returned from Paris to play a part in this as premium painters was given commissions to decorate public building s with Frescos. Jose Orozco as well as David Siqueiros whose names also developed. Diego began to paint Frescos on the Ministry of Education building and became internationally renown, but not rich so he was able to earn a lot by selling his painting to Americans.1927 Rivera made an extensive visit to Soviet Russia and attended the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution.
Stalin sat down with Sergei Eisenstein and supervised the editing of the "October" movie thus Lenin's role was reduced and Trotsky was cut out altogether.
Stalin sat for Diego whose portrait of him shows that the artist was not impressed by his subject.
1931 Trotsky's son Lyova had gone to Berlin where he ran the Bulletin of the Opposition and at the same time he tried to finish his engineering degree which was cut short when he left Moscow. Once the Nazi's came to power he and Jeanne barely managed to escape. However in 1938 was dead in a private hospital in Paris a week after an emergency appendectomy. There were many Russian emigres in this hospital and Trotsky suspected he was murdered. Lyova was the son closest to Trotsky and in Turkey he had assisted his father in writing his autobiography and history of the Russian Revolution.
1926 Lenin's testament was published by the NY Times this had been suppressed in Russia when Lenin died in 1924. Lenin said that Stalin was a danger to the country and the party. The Central Committee voted to remove Trotsky from the party as he supported these sentiments.
1933 When Trotsky and Natalie were in Paris he worked closely with Lyova before he had to move to Norway and left Lyova in Paris. The Norwegian government was under pressure from Moscow to intern Trotsky and Natalie.
Mark Zborowski was recruited by the GPU when he was hard up for money and became friendly with Jeane and infiltrated Lyova. Trotsky's files in the Paris apartment were stolen by thieves and ended up in the Kremlin. After Lyovo died Mark took over his role in Paris
When Ignace Reiss defected he contacted Trotsky and informed him that Stalin intended eliminating anything of Trotskyism, and he should get Lyovo out of Paris 1939. Jeane now sent their son Seva to Mexico.
1932 The Soviet Government deprived Trotsky and his whole family abroad of their Soviet Citizenship. Anyone related to Trotsky including his sisters as well as his son in law and even the orphaned children were all killed in the purges or disappeared.
With the Civil War on in Spain Mexico provided a haven for political refugees from the conflict. Alexander Orlov was the top Soviet official in war torn Spain, he was the one who helped recruit Philby,Mc Clean and Burgess.
Gogol was the father of Russian Comedy and the forerunner of Gonclorov , Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. During the first decade of the Bolshevik rule Trotsky had been the most influential literary critic. In 1923 Trotsky published his finest works Literature and Revolution. Great art he declared was timeless and classless, and the domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command. However in 1932 The Union of Soviet Writer was brought under the party in the name of "socialist realism."
1925 Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad.
In the USA the communist party lined up behind FD Roosevelt in the New Deal. One could reject Soviet Communism without abandoning Marxist principles and Leninist ideals. The writer and critic Mary Mc Carthy was enlisted to the cause of Trotsky.
Max Eastman wrote that "Stalinism was not a perversion of Leninism but its logical outcome" .
André Breton was a French writer and poet, the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism. He met Freud in Vienne in 1921. He also met Salvador Dali and arrived in Mexico and was bewitched by Frida Kohla "windows into the unconscious mind."
1938 Frida Kohla had one person exhibition at the Julian Levy Gallery NY.
The Juan Gorman Affair. Frescos of Diego's that inside the Terminal building portrayed Hitler and Mussolini and these images put the Mexican government into a political dilemma.
President Cardenas had nationalized the Mexican oil industry, this caused Britain to sever diplomatic ties with Mexico and Germany and Italy became the main oil purchases now. The government wanted these frescos destroyed and when Trosky never stood up to support Diego said "you consider your asylum rights too important". Later Diego made public his break with Trotsky.
Trotsky was assassinated in August 1940 in Mexico. (To be completed)
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