Trotsky's defeat in the struggle for the succession to Lenin, 1922 to 1929, including the trade union dispute, the Lenin Testament, the troika, the Left Opposition platform, the United Opposition of 1926-1927, the November 1927 expulsion, and the Alma-Ata and Prinkipo exiles

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to outline the political struggle between Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership between 1922 and 1929 and to assess the reasons for his defeat. Strong answers integrate Lenin's incapacity from May 1922, the Testament, the troika, the literary discussion, Socialism in One Country, the Left and United Oppositions, the November 1927 demonstrations, and the Alma-Ata and Prinkipo exiles.

The answer

Lenin's incapacity and the trade union dispute

Lenin suffered his first stroke on 25 May 1922 and his second on 16 December 1922. The third stroke on 9 March 1923 ended his political activity. He died on 21 January 1924. The succession question was therefore live for nearly two years before Lenin's death.

The 1920-1921 trade union dispute had already exposed Trotsky to inner-Party criticism. Trotsky proposed the militarisation of the trade unions and their fusion into the state apparatus; Lenin opposed the position; the Tenth Party Congress (March 1921) rejected Trotsky's line. The dispute left Trotsky with a reputation for high-handedness.

The Testament and the troika

Lenin's "Letter to the Congress" (dictated 23-26 December 1922 with a postscript on 4 January 1923) is known as the Testament. It described the leading Bolsheviks individually. Of Trotsky: "Personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of the work." Of Stalin: "Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution." The postscript proposed Stalin's removal from the General Secretaryship.

The Testament was suppressed at the Thirteenth Party Congress (May 1924). Zinoviev moved that it not be read to the full Congress. Trotsky, who could have insisted on its publication, did not press the point. The Testament reached the West through Max Eastman's Since Lenin Died (1925) and was officially published only in 1956.

The "triumvirate" or "troika" of Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Stalin formed in late 1922 around the joint objective of preventing a Trotsky succession. Zinoviev chaired the Comintern and Leningrad; Kamenev chaired Moscow and the Politburo in Lenin's absence; Stalin held the General Secretaryship from 3 April 1922 and controlled the appointments.

The literary discussion

Trotsky's New Course articles in Pravda (December 1923) attacked the inner-Party regime as bureaucratic. The troika orchestrated a Party-wide counter-attack at the Thirteenth Party Conference (January 1924) condemning Trotsky for "petty-bourgeois deviation."

The literary discussion of November-December 1924 was a more explicit clash. Trotsky's essay The Lessons of October, published as preface to volume 3 of his collected works, attacked Zinoviev and Kamenev for their October 1917 opposition to the insurrection. The essay was tactically blunt: it gave the troika a unifying enemy and reminded the apparatus that Trotsky had been outside the Bolshevik Party until July 1917.

Socialism in One Country

Stalin advanced the doctrine of Socialism in One Country in October-December 1924 in the second edition of his Problems of Leninism. The doctrine held that socialism could be built within the boundaries of the Soviet Union without waiting for international revolution. The slogan condensed the new Soviet bureaucracy's preference for consolidation over international risk.

Trotsky read it as the explicit abandonment of Permanent Revolution and as the theoretical signature of Soviet Thermidor: bureaucratic conservatism. The 1925-1927 inner-Party struggle was structured around this doctrinal divide.

The Left Opposition

The Left Opposition was the Trotsky platform of 1923-1925. Its core demands were:

• Faster, planned industrialisation, financed by graduated taxation of the better-off peasantry.
• Inner-Party democracy and the end of the ban on factions.
• Restoration of the Comintern's revolutionary line in Germany and China.
• Open discussion of the Lenin Testament.

The platform's economic substance (industrialisation, planning) was largely adopted by Stalin in disguised form after 1928. The doctrinal substance (Permanent Revolution, internationalism) was rejected.

The United Opposition

In April 1926 Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin and joined the Trotsky group to form the United Opposition. The fusion came too late: Stalin had already removed Zinoviev from the Leningrad organisation (January 1926) and from the Comintern (October 1926). The 1926 platform restated the Left Opposition demands.

The Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission in July 1926 expelled Zinoviev from the Politburo. The October 1926 plenum forced Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev to capitulate on the question of factional discipline. The November 1926 Fifteenth Party Conference condemned the Opposition.

The November 1927 demonstrations

The Trotskyist counter-demonstrations on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution (7 November 1927) were the public moment of defeat. Mounted militia broke up small Opposition columns in Moscow and Leningrad. The events were the pretext for expulsion.

The Joint Plenum of 14 November 1927 expelled Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Party. The Fifteenth Party Congress (2-19 December 1927) ratified the expulsion and gave a final ultimatum to the rest of the Opposition.

Alma-Ata and Prinkipo

Trotsky was deported on 17 January 1928 to Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in Kazakhstan, 4,000 km from Moscow. From Alma-Ata he wrote prolifically, including the 1928 manuscript The Permanent Revolution. The OGPU intercepted his correspondence but did not yet move to a tighter confinement.

On 12 February 1929 Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union to Turkey on the ship Ilich. He landed at Constantinople and settled on the island of Prinkipo (now Buyukada) in the Sea of Marmara. The Soviet Union was now closed to him for the rest of his life.

Why Trotsky lost: the historiography

Deutscher (The Prophet Unarmed, 1959) treats the defeat as the working out of structural forces (Lenin's death; the failure of the German revolution; the bureaucratisation of the Party; the Stalin General Secretaryship from 1922) within which Trotsky's tactical errors (the Testament passivity, the Lessons of October, the late United Opposition) were marginal. The book is the classic Trotskyist reading.

Service (Trotsky, 2009) is harder on Trotsky's personal failings: arrogance, isolation, an unwillingness to build a faction, and tactical bluntness. Brown (The Rise and Fall of Communism, 2009) blends the two readings. Rogovin's 7-volume Was There an Alternative? (1992-2002) gives the most archival-grounded Trotskyist account.

How to read a source on this topic

Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification (1937) and The Real Situation in Russia (1928) are the major contemporary participant accounts. Stalin's Foundations of Leninism (1924) and Problems of Leninism (later editions) are the doctrinal record from the other side.

The October 1927 platform of the United Opposition, suppressed in the Soviet Union until 1990, is the Opposition's clearest single document.

Examples in context

Example 1. The Lenin Testament (December 1922 to January 1923). Suppressed by Zinoviev and Kamenev in May 1924, the Testament warned about Stalin's character and proposed his removal. Trotsky refused to make political use of it. Robert Service (Trotsky, 2009) and Stephen Kotkin (Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 2014) emphasise Trotsky's tactical errors, including his absence from Lenin's funeral on 27 January 1924 (the result of misleading information from Stalin).

Example 2. The United Opposition of 1926-1927. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev united against Stalin and Bukharin. The 7 November 1927 demonstration on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution was broken up. Trotsky was expelled from the Party on 14 November and exiled to Alma-Ata in January 1928, then to Turkey on 12 February 1929. Pierre Broue's account integrates Politburo minutes; Isaac Deutscher (The Prophet Unarmed, 1959) is the canonical sympathetic study.

Try this

Q1. Source A is an extract from Lenin's Testament (4 January 1923). Using Source A and your own knowledge, explain why Trotsky lost the succession struggle. [5 marks]

• What the marker wants. Identify suppression of Testament; cite Trotsky's tactical errors (missing Lenin's funeral, late opposition); link to Stalin's institutional control.

Q2. Evaluate the extent to which Trotsky's defeat in the 1920s succession struggle was a result of his political miscalculation. [25 marks]

• What the marker wants. Weigh personal errors against structural Leninism and institutional asymmetry; use Deutscher, Service, Kotkin, Broue.

Q3. Compare the views of Isaac Deutscher and Robert Service on Trotsky's defeat. [10 marks]

• What the marker wants. Deutscher (tragic defeat of principled politics by bureaucracy) versus Service (Trotsky's character flaws decisive); judgement.