Trotsky's life and writings in exile, 1929 to 1940, including the Prinkipo, French, and Norwegian residences, the Mexican refuge, the autobiography My Life (1930), the History of the Russian Revolution (1932), and The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to outline Trotsky's eleven years of exile and the major books written in that period. Strong answers integrate the Prinkipo, French, Norwegian, and Mexican residences, the conditions of exile (passport, surveillance, family deaths), and the four major works (My Life, History of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed, the unfinished Stalin).

The answer

Prinkipo, 1929 to 1933

Trotsky landed at Constantinople on 12 February 1929 with Natalia Sedova and their son Lev Sedov, with no other country willing to admit him. The Turkish government granted asylum on condition of residence on Prinkipo (now Buyukada), an island in the Sea of Marmara some 20 km from Constantinople. Trotsky settled in the rented Villa Yanaros, then the Villa Izzet Pasha. He had no diplomatic protection; his security depended on Turkish gendarmerie and his own household guards (Sedov, Jan Frankel, and two or three rotating European Trotskyists).

The Prinkipo years were the most productive of the exile. Trotsky completed My Life (1930), the three volumes of History of the Russian Revolution (1931-1933), The Permanent Revolution (1929-1930), and the Bulletin of the Opposition that became the central organ of the international Left Opposition.

My Life (1930)

My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography was completed at Prinkipo in the spring of 1929 and published in German, French, English, and Russian editions in 1930. The book covered the period from Yanovka to the 1929 expulsion. It is the principal participant account of Trotsky's life and the basis of Deutscher's three-volume biography.

The book combined narrative autobiography with political polemic against Stalin. It established the canonical version of the succession struggle that Trotsky's followers and most Western historians would accept until Service's 2009 revisionism.

The History of the Russian Revolution (1932)

The three-volume History of the Russian Revolution was the major literary work of the exile. Volume one (The Overthrow of Tsarism) appeared in 1931; volumes two and three (The Attempted Counter-Revolution; The Triumph of the Soviets) appeared in 1932. The English translation by Max Eastman appeared with Gollancz in 1932-1933.

The History is the canonical Marxist narrative of 1917. The structural argument is that 1917 confirmed Permanent Revolution: the bourgeoisie failed; the proletariat led; the revolution passed from bourgeois to socialist tasks; the regime depended on international revolution. The literary structure is the famous "law of combined and uneven development" worked out through narrative.

E. H. Carr called the History "the most brilliant work of historical writing produced by a participant in the events." Most non-Trotskyist historians since have agreed about the prose while qualifying the argument.

France, 1933 to 1935

The Nazi seizure of power in Germany (30 January 1933) and the worsening security situation on Prinkipo led the French government of Edouard Daladier to grant Trotsky a residence permit in July 1933. He lived at Royan on the Atlantic coast, then at Barbizon outside Paris, then at Domesne under permanent surveillance. The French Communist Party, the right press, and the post-February 1934 Doumergue government all worked to revoke the residence. Trotsky moved between increasingly clandestine addresses.

The French years produced the major journalism on the rise of fascism. Trotsky's pamphlet The Only Road for Germany (September 1932) and the articles collected in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (1933) argued for a working-class united front to stop Hitler before January 1933, against the Comintern's "social fascism" line.

Norway, 1935 to 1936

In June 1935 Trotsky and Natalia Sedova moved to Norway on a permit granted by the Norwegian Labour Party government of Johan Nygaardsvold. They settled at the home of Konrad Knudsen at Wexhall near Oslo. The conditions of the Norwegian permit prohibited political activity.

In Norway Trotsky wrote The Revolution Betrayed (1936), the mature analysis of Stalinism. The book argued:

• The Soviet Union remained a "degenerated workers' state" in which state property continued to define the social regime.
• Power had been seized by a privileged bureaucracy that had expropriated the working class politically.
• The bureaucracy was unstable: its privileges were not yet inheritable, and a "political revolution" by the working class could overthrow it without restoring capitalism.
• Stalin embodied "Soviet Thermidor," the bureaucratic conservation of the revolution's social conquests under reactionary political forms.

The book is the basis of every subsequent Trotskyist analysis of the Stalin regime and remains the most influential single text of Western anti-Stalinist Marxism.

The August 1936 Moscow show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev included accusations that they had received instructions from Trotsky in Norway. The Nygaardsvold government, fearing diplomatic and economic pressure from the Soviet Union, interned Trotsky at Hurum from August 1936. Trotsky was forbidden to publish.

Mexico, 1937 to 1940

The Cardenas government of Mexico, sympathetic to Trotsky as a victim of Stalin, granted asylum on 7 December 1936. Trotsky and Natalia Sedova boarded the Norwegian tanker Ruth at Oslo on 19 December 1936 and arrived at Tampico on 9 January 1937. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo housed them at the Blue House (Casa Azul) in Coyoacan, Mexico City. From April 1939 they moved to a separate house on Avenida Viena, also in Coyoacan.

The Mexican years produced the Dewey Commission hearings (10-17 April 1937 in Coyoacan), the unfinished biography Stalin (commissioned by Harper Brothers in 1938 and published posthumously in 1946 in Charles Malamuth's edited version), the founding of the Fourth International (September 1938), and an enormous volume of pamphlets, articles, and letters.

Trotsky's son Lev Sedov died in Paris on 16 February 1938 in suspicious circumstances after an operation; his younger son Sergei Sedov was shot in the Gulag in October 1937 (the Trotskys learned of this only after Trotsky's own death); his first wife Alexandra Sokolovskaya was shot in 1938; his daughters Zinaida and Nina had died earlier. By 1940 Trotsky and Natalia Sedova alone survived from his immediate family.

How to read a source on this topic

The Bulletin of the Opposition (Byulleten Oppozitsii), published from Paris between 1929 and 1941 in 87 issues, is the central documentary record of Trotsky's exile politics. The Hoover Archives at Stanford hold the major Trotsky papers; the Harvard "exile papers" (sealed until 1980) are the major collection on the late 1930s.

Pierre Broue's 1,100-page Trotsky (1988) is the standard Trotskyist biography of the exile period. Service (Trotsky, 2009) gives a more sceptical account of the Coyoacan household.

Common exam traps

Confusing Prinkipo and Coyoacan. Prinkipo is the Turkish island, 1929 to 1933. Coyoacan is the Mexico City suburb, 1937 to 1940.

Forgetting the family losses. By 1940 every member of Trotsky's immediate family except Natalia Sedova was dead.

Misdating The Revolution Betrayed. Written 1936 in Norway, published 1937.

In one sentence

Trotsky's eleven years of exile took him through Prinkipo (1929-1933), France (1933-1935), Norway (1935-1936), and Mexico (1937-1940), and produced four major books (My Life, History of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed, the unfinished Stalin), the founding of the Fourth International, the Dewey Commission rebuttal of the Moscow Trials, and the most influential body of anti-Stalinist Marxist writing of the twentieth century.