WI Trotsky outlives Stalin

Trotsky avoids being murdered and outlives Stalin by a few years. Could he be rehabilitated by Krushev and allowed back into the USSR?
 
Interesting question. Was Stalin the only one who didn't like Trotsky?

Hatred of Trotsky was as close to universal among the leadership as it could get. Even Gorbachev didn't posthumously rehabilitate him (it took until 2001 OTL), and there's a reason for that. Some of what he wrote towards the end would make the blood of anyone who lived through the Great Patriotic War boil:

The German soldiers, that is, the workers and peasants, will in the majority of cases have far more sympathy for the vanquished peoples than for their own ruling caste.

You can replace Stalin with whoever you like from the postwar leadership, the only way Trotsky comes back alive to the USSR is in chains.
 
Last edited:
Trotsky avoids being murdered and outlives Stalin by a few years. Could he be rehabilitated by Krushev and allowed back into the USSR?

No. Khrushchev couldn't even succeed in getting Bukharin rehabilitated, which he seems to have wanted to do https://books.google.com/books?id=rdAPGf2c1DwC&pg=PA21 and had no desire to have Trotsky rehabilitated. Trotsky's non-Bolshevik past, his arrogance, his call for a "political revolution" in the USSR and many other things all made him unacceptable even to the most anti-Stalinist leading figures in the CPSU.
 
Very difficult to Trotsky to live longer than Stalin. Trotsky's health wasn't very good anymore on his last months so he probably would had died in few years even without assassination. And Stalin probably would live new one if previous fails.

And even if Trotsky manages live longer than Stalin, it would have quiet small effects. Trotsky was very hated among leadership of USSR and probably even common Soviets didn't like him very much if they have ever heard about him.
 
Frankly, I think that Khrushchev and company were glad Trotsky was dead when they decided to go forward with De-Stalinization. Trotsky being around would have probably made reform a lot more difficult, and a lot more toxic. Trotsky would be on the minds of the conservative Soviet politicians, being the great boogieman. Trotsky alive embodies opposition to Stalinism, which means he gets to dictate the very concept of criticism of Stalin. It means if he does not shut up, he would trip up the moves made by the reformists, and the old guard could point to Trotsky and throw accusations that the reformists were in the same vein as that boogieman. The reformists in the USSR would prefer to run that discussion by themselves, and embody it with themselves, without an albatross. That's my opinion, at least. I think the worst thing in the world for Khrushchev would be for Trotsky to write that he agrees with him.
 
My own favorite question about Trotsky living longer is whether he would eventually abandon his position that the USSR was still a "workers' state" (however "degenerated") and therefore worthy of "unconditional defense." It has been argued that he had too strong an emotional stake in the October Revolution (of which he was a co-leader) to ever admit that it had been a failure--and acknowledging that the USSR was no longer a workers' state would be such an admission. Even apart from such psychological arguments, there are respectable Marxist arguments that the Soviet bureaucracy could not be a ruling class--or indeed any sort of class--in the Marxist sense. (Indeed, those heterodox Trotskyists who disagreed with Trotsky about the USSR being a workers' state could never agree about just what it was--"bureaucratic collectivism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucratic_collectivism and "state capitalism" https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1955/statecap/index.htm being the most popular theories.)

On the other hand, it is notable that Trotsky's widow, Natalia Sedova, did change her mind on this question. Announcing her resignation from the Fourth International in 1951, she explained: "Obsessed by old and outlived formulas, you continue to regard the Stalinist state as a workers’ state. I cannot and will not follow you in this...you continue to say that under this unspeakable regime, Russia is still a workers’ state. I consider this a blow at socialism. Stalinism and the Stalinist state have nothing whatever in common with a workers’ state or with socialism. They are the worst and the most dangerous enemies of socialism and the working class." https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/socialistvoice/natalia38.html
 
Top