397. Stalin: Killing Trotsky (Part 3)

Empire: World History

This episode explores the intense rivalry between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, tracing Trotsky's journey from his wealthy Ukrainian childhoo

Key takeaways

• Leon Trotsky, born Lev Bronstein, was a highly intelligent revolutionary from a wealthy Ukrainian family who rose to prominence during the Russian Revolution.
• Stalin utilized sophisticated stagecraft, such as manipulating funeral dates and airbrushing records, to undermine Trotsky's legitimacy after Lenin's death.

Main topics

• Trotsky's early life and family background
• Stalin vs. Trotsky power struggle

Notable quotes

To pick out one's enemy, to prepare all the details of the blow, to slake one's thirst for a cruel revenge and then go home to be... There is nothing sweeter.

Conclusion

A gripping historical account of how personal vendettas and political

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note-taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own methods, sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there, sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation, and that no longer needed. happen ever again, because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo, it records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can refer to afterwards. I only picked up Plaud a few weeks ago and already it's changing the way that I work. With OnePress, the device transcribes those real conversations and Speaker 3 (0:50) turns them into clear Speaker 7 (0:51) actions. It also has a brilliant feature called Ask Plaud. which calls up details of hazy, long-gone conversations in seconds. Empire listeners can go to uk.plaud.ai forward slash empire. That's uk.plaud.ai forward slash empire. And use the promo code empire to get 10 % off any Plaud device. Speaker 7 (1:25) John Lev Bronstein, his comfortable childhood was far removed from the life we might expect for a communist revolutionary. But what drove him to become one of the leading figures of the Russian Revolution? And why, long after Stalin had stripped him of his army, his party and his country, did he still want Trotsky dead? Speaker 1 (1:45) Well, hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. Speaker 7 (1:48) And me. William Durham-Poole. Speaker 1 (1:50) Last time we left you with Lenin's dying testament, a letter about the men who should step into his job. And in that document, he talked about Stalin and he called him too crude for the job. And he asked comrades, he went further and said, find a way to remove him. And this document also had something to say about the other man vying for the job. Lenin thought Trotsky might have been the most able man on the Central Committee. But he had a caveat. But, but, but, Trotsky, he said, has an excessive self-confidence. Speaker 7 (2:24) Today, we turn to Trotsky properly, the rival Stalin feared and hated most, and eventually had killed by an ice pick, or was it an ice axe, on the other side of the world. Anyway, we are joined today by the wonderful Giles Milton, friend of the show and author of The Stalin Affair, the impossible alliance that won the war. With Giles, we're going to be discussing Stalin and Trotsky's infamous rivalry. Welcome, Giles. Welcome Speaker 5 (2:50) back. Thank you very much for having me back. And it was an ice axe. We know definitely from the wound. ghastly wound, the gash to Trotsky's head, which we will be coming to, I'm sure, later in the episode, we know for sure that it was Speaker 7 (3:04) an ice axe. Something with a long flanged head rather than a kind of micro pick. Exactly. If you Speaker 5 (3:11) get one of those in the back of your head, it doesn't go well for you. I wouldn't want either. No, I wouldn't think an ice pick Speaker 1 (3:17) is that much fun either. But look, before we get to the end, because this is the Dalrymple method, before we get to the end of the story... start at the beginning of the story. Giles, tell us about Trotsky the boy. He wasn't Trotsky. He was Lev Bronstein. And can I just say that I don't know if I mentioned it on the other podcast, but Lev Bronstein also happens to be the name. of Leon Britton, a former Tory cabinet minister. Yeah, he was also left Bronstein and he changed his name to Leon Britton. So you've got two very different people. Trotsky, Leon Britton, but we're talking about Trotsky. So he's born on the 26th of October, 1879. Where does he fit in the scheme of his family? Speaker 5 (3:56) Yeah, he's born in the Ukraine. He is one of eight children. And they are a family. They're wealthy, prosperous farmers. I suppose we'd call them in English, we'd call them yeoman farmers. They own quite a lot of land. They've made quite a lot of money. But they are illiterate. The dad can't read and write, and nor can the mum. And they produce these eight children. You know, sometimes families are blessed with an extraordinary sort of opportunity. And Lev Bronstein is... gifted. He's intellectually capable, far more so than any of the other families. He goes off to primary school, to high school, and eventually goes to university as well. So this is a guy in the family with the brains. At University, Odessa University, he studies maths and science, but he soon gets drawn into revolutionary activities. These are far more exciting than, you know, doing arithmetic. And this is where we see at a very early age, still a student, Trotsky becomes the revolutionary. Speaker 1 (4:51) Now, you know I'm a sucker for a sad story for a sad child. And Robert Service has a wonderful book on Trotsky, and he has this observation that his mum wasn't exactly, you know, sort of apple pie and hugs, because as a toddler, he had, you know, fainting blackouts. It was a thing. It was a mark of his childhood. And it actually came from the mother's side of the family. And when he had this blackout, he wet himself on the floor. And instead of like sweeping him up and going, my love, are you okay? Like anyone would. She just asks him straight out, aren't you ashamed of yourself? And he's sort of largely raised by a much kinder woman, a nanny called Masha, who, you know, sort of allows him to grow. And every time he climbs a tree, she's sort of having a heart attack because he might fall out and kill himself. But anyway, he gets through. There's Speaker 7 (5:39) another sort of legendary story. And Giles, you could tell us whether this is true, that young Lev watched his dad mistreat a peasant. Is this historical? Speaker 5 (5:51) Yeah, I think, you know, his father was quite a brutal individual, as many, you know, you might expect the patriarch of a farming family to be. He was also extraordinarily miserly, apparently. So, you know, the family were wealthy. But young Trotsky writes about his father coming to meet him at the station when he was coming back from his studies. And his father would give the most minuscule tip to the porter carrying all the bags and everything. And even the young Trotsky at the time was really embarrassed and ashamed of his father, thinking, come on, you could give this poor peasant a little bit more money. What Speaker 1 (6:23) did friends and neighbours think of him? Because we know that when Stalin was growing up, people were generally afraid of him because he was a thug who spoke with his fists rather than his mouth. What about Trotsky? Speaker 5 (6:34) I think they were a bit, a little bit sort of bemused by him. This is rough peasant country in the Ukraine. And suddenly this guy comes along who's rather elegant, rather effete, extremely intelligent, enormously fastidious about how he looks. And there are some fabulous photos of the young Trotsky with his hair. Yes, wonderful hair. We'd say now it's called Ambros. You know, he wears this hair swept upwards and, you know, always looking very neat and tidy in his clothes and everything. So I think people... Couldn't quite make him out. What the hell have the Bronstein family produced? They've sort of produced this weird intellectual in his rather smart clothes. Speaker 1 (7:09) Yeah, I mean, just in case you haven't, you know, you're listening to us and you're not watching us on the YouTube, because we're on the YouTube now, everyone. Come join us on that. He looks so much like Steve. from Stranger Things. If you're a fan of Stranger Things, this is a man who could have worked in Scoops Ahoy, let me tell you that. Anyway, that's just my tuppence where. I Speaker 5 (7:28) do think his contemporaries thought he was perhaps a little bit of a weirdo. He was not always very pleasant as well. I think he had a habit of putting people down. Lenin's wife had a particular dislike of him. didn't she? She really didn't like him. This is going to be a long running sort of element of their relationship. Yeah, I think you have a quote there, don't you, Willie, about what she said. Yes, Speaker 7 (7:50) we have a letter, not from Len's wife, but to her from a guy called Alexander Bogdanov, who's another of these early revolutionaries. And he wrote, Trotsky came round to see me. I very much dislike him. He's totally uncongenial. Speaker 5 (8:04) And Nadia, I have to say, would have agreed with that wholeheartedly. But Lenin had one strength, and this certainly marks him out from Stalin. He was a brilliant public orator. If you put him in a room with a thousand people, he could whip them up into a crazy thing. You know, I mean, he was really fantastic at speaking. And Speaker 7 (8:21) there are pictures of him, aren't there, at the time, on top of sort of cars and trucks, speaking to the crowds very animatedly. Absolutely. He never used a script, by the way. It was all Speaker 5 (8:29) off the cuff. And he just had this way with words and he just knew how to get a crowd going. And this was to really mark him out from Stalin. Stalin, who is hopeless public speaker, had a thick Georgian accent, hated speaking in public as well. So there's a real difference between the two as they become rivals for the leadership to take over from Lenin. Speaker 1 (8:50) You can understand why Stalin, who we now know as a man who bears a grudge and sometimes even for very small things. hates Lenin. There is another story, which I'd love you to tell us, before the revolution, that tells you a lot about where Trotsky stood with Lenin. Can you tell us about Paris and the shoes? Speaker 5 (9:07) This is a lovely little anecdote. Lenin and Trotsky went off to Paris together, which gives an indication of, you know, they were pretty close friends, genuine friends at this point. Lenin buys a pair of shoes, very elegant, dainty shoes, puts them on, starts walking around, and they are absolute agony. They're squeezing his feet, you know. And so he takes them off, gives them to Trotsky. I've had shoes like that, Speaker 7 (9:27) exactly. Speaker 5 (9:28) He says, I can't wear these shoes, they're for you. So Trotsky puts them on, they're all rather comfortable. He thanks Lenin, starts walking around, and they're agony for him. too. And Lenin takes great delight in tormenting him as Trotsky's walking around in these incredibly painful shoes. And some people have said that this is a sign of Lenin's sadism, perhaps, but I think it's also a sign of their friendship, their banter, that they were genuinely pretty close to each other, far more than Lenin was ever close to Stalin. You know, they were friends. They were friends to the point where they'd go off to Paris together. There's another little anecdote, which I think is absolutely wonderful, that at the time of the Civil War, so this is a desperate time in Russia, a young American-British sculptress goes off to Moscow. This is one of the Westerners who's fired by the potential hopes and promises of the revolution. She's called Claire Sheridan, and she sculpts several of the main, the principal architects of the revolution. She sculpts Lenin, Dzerzhinsky. And she sculpts Trotsky. So she spends a lot of time on her own in the room with him. And they develop a very, very close friendship. Claire Sheridan is a great believer in free love. She persuades Trotsky, she rather finds him rather dishy, persuades him to take off his shirt, admires his chest. Trotsky says as she measures him with her calipers, he says, you're caressing me with your tools of steel. And all of this, clearly, they quite possibly have a sexual relationship, in fact. Now, this would just be a simple anecdote, were it not for one extraordinary fact. Claire Sheridan has a very famous first cousin. Her first cousin is Winston Churchill. So at that very time, Churchill is pouring British troops and munitions into Russia to try and snuff out this new regime. Claire Sheridan, his first cousin, is there not only sculpting Trotsky, but quite possibly sleeping with her as well. Sleeping with the Speaker 1 (11:18) enemy. And Speaker 5 (11:19) from that point on, she will be monitored by what becomes MI6, who monitor all her phone conversations, all her letters and everything, desperately worried that she's going to cause real problems for her cousin. Speaker 1 (11:31) Is there a suggestion, though, that Trotsky knows who's in power and knows how to rock boats, and that's why he himself is drawn to her? Or is this just one of those things that happens? Speaker 5 (11:40) It's quite possible, but it's also possible Trotsky, a bit of a womaniser, as many of these Bolshevik revolutionaries were, saw his opportunity, good-looking woman in his studio. Oh, well, if she wants me to take my clothes off, why not? She wants to caress me with her calipers, I'm up. Exactly. It sounds like a carry-on film, doesn't it? Speaker 7 (11:58) Anyway, we discussed how, surprisingly