Between Revolution and Repression: Interview with Osvaldo Coggiola on Leon Trotsky

The Brazilian-Argentine professor discusses the revolutionary’s legacy, his conflict with Joseph Stalin, and the global consequences following his assassination.

Social Communication Service: Who was Leon Trotsky, and what was his influence in the Soviet Union?

Osvaldo Coggiola: It is enough to say that he was, alongside Lenin, the main leader of the Bolshevik Party and of the October Revolution of 1917, and the one responsible for its survival as the founder and principal commander of the Red Army. In the history of the October Revolution, Trotsky acquired a singular role starting with the 1905 Revolution, when he presided over the Petrograd Soviet. Deported to Siberia by the Tsarist regime, he fled to Western Europe, where he wrote an assessment of the events (1905) from his privileged position as a participant. But he did not stop there: through this analysis, he presented a theory of the Russian and international revolution—“permanent revolution”—which withstood the test of events.

In August 1917, Lenin and Trotsky were the most voted members of the new Bolshevik Central Committee, beginning a joint effort that would globally associate their names with the Russian Revolution. Trotsky explicitly acknowledged his earlier mistake regarding the party question, which had previously put him at odds with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

As a result of his military victory against foreign intervention and internal counterrevolution, the Soviet Union— a federal state pact between revolutionary Russia and six Soviet republics granted independence by the 1917 Revolution—was founded in 1922. However, by late 1923, with Lenin removed from political activity before his death, Trotsky began a struggle against the leading faction of the new state and the Bolshevik Party (the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, CPSU), led by Stalin. This struggle began internally but soon took on an international dimension.

What later became known as “Trotskyism” originated in the Left Opposition of the CPSU, created in 1923 against the policies pursued by Stalin. The opposition fought both in domestic policy (for the right of tendencies and the revitalization of the soviets, for an industrialization plan to strengthen the social base of the proletarian dictatorship) and in international policy (against the theory of “socialism in one country,” advocating a revolutionary orientation for the Communist International, including a united workers’ front against Nazism).

Its fate is well known: almost all its members—including many leaders of the 1917 Revolution—were massacred by Stalinist repression, not without first organizing internationally, breaking with the Communist International in 1933 (after Hitler’s victory), and founding the Fourth International in 1938, considered by the Red Army’s organizer as the most important work of his life.

The Fourth International aimed to continue the struggle of the Third (Communist) International for the overthrow of world capitalism through proletarian revolution, placing it in irreconcilable opposition to the policy of “peaceful coexistence.” Trotsky rejected the idea that the USSR was an “imperialist” country and denied explanations of Stalinism as merely a “deviation” due to a “cult of personality.” Every political phenomenon had a social root: Stalinism was the bureaucratization of the Soviet state, caused by its international isolation and imperialist encirclement. Based on this, he argued for a political revolution in the USSR to return political power to the proletariat.

Social Communication Service: What were the possible political motivations for his assassination in 1940?

Osvaldo Coggiola: Trotsky’s trajectory after being expelled from the USSR in 1929, though full of difficulties, was far from being—as some historians later claimed—a voice in the wilderness. If it had been, it would be impossible to understand Stalin’s determination to physically eliminate him (within the Soviet secret police, the GPU, a “Trotsky Section” was created specifically for this purpose).

The proclamation of the Fourth International in 1938 was a response to the worst defeats suffered by the international workers’ movement up to that point: the rise of Nazism, the crushing of the German proletariat, and the extermination of the revolutionary vanguard of the October Revolution by the Stalinist bureaucracy. It was also a declaration of the continuity and vitality of socialist revolution under conditions of isolation and political and ideological regression.

Until 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, this revolutionary vanguard, led by Trotsky, fought within parties and the Communist International (as the Left Opposition) to reform them. The effort to build the Fourth International dates from the moment when the Left Opposition broke definitively with the Communist International, considering it irrecoverable due to its alignment with counterrevolution.

Trotsky’s assassination in 1940 was not merely the fulfillment of a personal vendetta; it aimed to—and did—deliver a severe blow to the possibility of a political reversal that could have decisively influenced the course of Soviet and world history.

Social Communication Service: What were the repercussions and consequences of his death?

Osvaldo Coggiola: The main consequence of Trotsky’s death was the decapitation of the Fourth International. The assassination was the culmination of the Moscow Trials (1936–1938), in which Trotsky was the principal accused and was sentenced to death in absentia, as he had been exiled from the USSR in 1929.

In these trials, the grotesque caricature of the October Revolution presented by Stalin justified the extermination of the entire old Bolshevik guard, accused of being “Trotsky’s accomplices” (while Trotsky himself was accused of being a Hitler agent). In 1938, machine-gun fire in the Vorkuta concentration camp in Siberia ended the lives of the last organized cadres of the Fourth International in the USSR.

Less than two years before the assassination, in 1938, the Fourth International’s founding program declared: “The world political situation is characterized above all by the historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat… Without a social revolution, in the next historical period, all human civilization is threatened with catastrophe. Everything depends on the proletariat, above all on its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.”

Exactly one year later, on September 3, 1939, France and England declared war on Germany, officially inaugurating World War II—the greatest catastrophe in human history up to that point.

In preparing the Fourth International, Trotsky collaborated with numerous revolutionary leaders from around the world—figures from Russia, China, Europe, Latin America, and beyond—many of whom were later assassinated. They represented the best of the international workers’ and revolutionary movement, persecuted by both fascism and Stalinism, yet able to leave behind an organization and a program for future generations.

The program was based on defending proletarian revolution (abandoned by the Second and Third Internationals), revisiting the principles of the first four congresses of the Communist International (1918–1922), and analyzing the new situation created by the Soviet Union’s regression (the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy). It proposed a political revolution in the USSR to complete the process, much like the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 completed the social revolution of 1789 in France.

Unlike that bourgeois (national) revolution, however, the political revolution in the USSR would be part of an international proletarian revolution. Trotsky believed that a global revolution would revitalize the Soviet proletariat, enabling it to break free from the constraints of Stalinism.

Without Trotsky and his main collaborators, who were assassinated, the Fourth International entered a period of crisis, regression, and fragmentation from which it has not fully recovered. His absence helps explain the outcome of the crisis of Stalinism, including the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and the restoration of capitalism in China.

As a result, today’s global crisis—an unprecedented crisis of capitalism in its imperialist phase—has led to increasingly intense and deadly conflicts: economic crises with rising unemployment and poverty, ecological destruction, and destructive wars that exacerbate nationalist divisions among the oppressed.

The only progressive solution to this historical crisis, marked by global conflicts and processes, would be based on international worker solidarity—proletarian internationalism—rebuilt toward a common political action on a world scale, a goal Trotsky fought for throughout his life. His struggle remains unfinished, and this task remains for current generations.

Originally published on the page of the School of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo.