If no Trotskyism, is there a replacement Stalinist scapegoat?

Cregan

Cregan

This is going to be a multi-question post.

Trotsky was laid low by sickness at inopportune times during 1923-24, around Lenin's death, when he would emerge as leader of the Left Opposition.

WI Trotsky had died from sickness around this time?

What happens with the Soviet succession struggle with both Lenin and Trotsky dying (from natural causes) around the same time?

Does the Bolshevik Left Opposition still form? If so, who leads it? Will they be as iconic as Trotsky and be able to articulate/propagandize their own ideological current like OTL Trotskyism? Or will the Left Opposition dissolve and fade away from the history books like the Right Opposition did? (I can't really see any leading Left Oppositionists (e.g. Radek, Rakovsky, Bubnov, etc.) being able to effectively lead the movement or produce as much popular writing as Trotsky did abroad, so I think it will be crushed and forgotten much earlier).

Also, with Trotsky conveniently gone, does Stalin break with the troika (Zinoviev/Kamenev) and/or the Right Opposition (Bukharin/Rykov/Tomsky) much earlier to seize absolute power more quickly? Or does he still follow largely the same path to power as IOTL?

Lastly, if nobody takes up the mantle of Trotskyism, who becomes the primary "wrecker" scapegoat for the Stalinists?
 

Don Draper

Something like Trotskyism would exist in Western countries even without Trotsky, in that there would still be a constituency for a "revolutionary" leftist ideology that is still anticommunist.

Re: Soviet internal politics, Stalin would probably break with Zinoviev/Kamenev slightly earlier, but with the Right Opposition around the same time if collectivization follows the same schedule (I think it would).

Plenty of other people were accused of being behind wrecking (the British, later on Zinoviev, Germans, Poles). Not hard to just drop Trotsky from the list.
 
Last edited:
Cregan

Cregan

Don Draper said:
Something like Trotskyism would exist in Western countries even without Trotsky, in there would still be a constituency for a "revolutionary" leftist ideology that is still anticommunist.
Click to expand...

But this Western leftist ideology wouldn't be Bolshevik/Leninist like Trotskyism is right? Without Leon Trotsky, one of the co-leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution and father of the Red Army, founding this ideological current I think anti-Stalinist leftists will inevitably drift over to syndicalism, anarchism, and Luxembourgism - i.e. revolutionary leftist but rejecting Bolshevism and Lenin.

I guess Trotskysim is unique in that sense, Bolshevik/Leninist but rejecting Stalinism. The other anti-Stalinist leftist trends are anti-Lenin and generally anti-October (or at least against the Soviet conduct during the Russian Civil War), whereas Trotskyism doesn't reject those and instead seeks to "redeem" the Bolshevik revolution. It's fascinating.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top