Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and Lev Davidovich Bronstein have been known to most of the world by their aliases from the revolutionary underground: Lenin and Trotsky. The very core of their identities is bound up with their uncompromised and uncompromising revolutionary commitments. More than this, any revolutionary of today or tomorrow who wants to be effective must have a serious familiarity with who they were, what they said, and what they did.[1]

At least four realities indicate that the Trotsky we know today would have been impossible without Lenin, and that the Lenin we know today would have been impossible without Trotsky.

Most obvious among these realities is their collaboration in the victory of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and in the victory of their Bolshevik party and its regime in the brutal civil war of 1918-1921 – Lenin as the driving force in the forging of an irreplaceable and necessary revolutionary organization, the Bolshevik party; Trotsky in his ability to organize and lead the 1917 insurrection, and then to forge the Red Army and lead it to victory.

What helped make this essential collaboration possible were the qualities one can find in the second reality – the way each of them used revolutionary Marxist theory, from the start of the twentieth century to the ends of their lives. It is worth taking time to explore this.

Lenin succinctly explained the need to utilize Marxist theory not as dogma, but as a guide to action, understanding that general theoretical perspectives must be modified through application to “the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.” Lenin more than once complained that many calling themselves Marxists have a “conception of Marxism [that] is impossibly pedantic. They have completely failed to understand what is decisive in Marxism, namely, its revolutionary dialectics. They have even failed absolutely to understand Marx’s plain statements that in times of revolution the utmost flexibility is demanded.” According to Lenin, Marx’s dynamic approach to revolution was something they “walk around and about … like a cat around a bowl of hot porridge.”[2]

Yet Lenin’s engagement with Marxism – critical-minded and creative as it was – was in no way superficial. As Trotsky explained, the young Lenin would “follow the evolution of Marx’s thought,” experiencing “its irresistible force” and discovering “under introductory sentences or notes lateral galleries of conclusions,” profoundly impressed by their “aptness and depth.” Trotsky concludes: “Marx never had a better reader, one more penetrating or grateful, nor a more attentive, congenial, or capable student.” He adds that Lenin “mistrusted in advance the attempts of self-satisfied ignoramuses and well-read mediocrities to replace Marxism with some other, more-portable theory.” These are all qualities one finds in Trotsky as well. We should also note that both Lenin and Trotsky shared a belief in what Georg Lukács called “the actuality of revolution” – or as Max Eastman put it, a rejection of “people who talk revolution, and like to think about it, but do not ‘mean business’ … the people who talked revolution but did not intend to produce it.”[3]

What Marxist perspectives represented for Lenin all of his life can be found in this lengthy extract of one of his earliest writings from the 1890s:

"The worker cannot fail to see that he is oppressed by capital, that his struggle has to be waged against the bourgeois class. And this struggle, aimed at satisfying his immediate economic needs, at improving his material conditions, inevitably demands that the workers organize, and inevitably becomes a war not against individuals, but against a class, the class which oppresses and crushes the working people not only in the factories, but everywhere. …

When its advanced representatives have mastered the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker, when these ideas become widespread, and when stable organizations are formed among the workers to transform the workers’ present sporadic economic war into conscious class struggle—then the Russian worker rising at the head of all the democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the Russian working class (side by side with the proletariat of all countries) along the straight road of open political struggle to the victorious communist revolution".[4]

This too was Trotsky’s outlook, from his earliest years in the Marxist movement until he was struck down by a Stalinist assassin in Coyoacán.

It is worth giving attention to the commentary of the outstanding Marx scholar David Riazanov on the importance, for Lenin’s political orientation, of an 1850 address by Marx and Engels evaluating the revolutionary experience of 1848. Among the key points that the Address makes, we find these words:

“While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible …, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.”[5]

According to Riazanov, Lenin knew these words by heart, and “used to delight in quoting from them.” Riazanov emphasizes the key points: “We must use every possible means to goad on the revolution, to make it permanent, and not to let it lapse … We cannot afford to be satisfied with immediate conquests. Each bit of conquered territory must serve as a step for further conquests.”[6]

This too was essential to Trotsky’s approach. We can see, in the 1850 text by Marx and Engels, elements of Trotsky’s later theory of permanent revolution. “Trotsky is deeply committed to one element in classical Marxism,” as Isaac Deutscher has observed, “its quintessential element: permanent revolution.”[7] Revolutionary theorists and activists—seeking to apply such Marxism to the world around them—will naturally come up with formulations going in a “permanent revolution” direction. Lenin’s own thought before 1917 pushes in that direction, but it was Trotsky’s sparkling prose that most clearly and boldly formulated the interrelated elements of permanent revolution as early as 1905-1906. Trotsky’s formulation linked the struggle for democracy—the end of feudal privileges, freedom of expression, equal rights for all, rule by the people—with the struggle for socialism, a society in which the great majority of people would control the economic resources of society, to allow for the full and free development of all. It also linked the struggle for revolution in Russia with the cause of socialist revolution throughout the world.

Trotsky’s version of the theory of permanent revolution contained three basic points. (1) The revolutionary struggle for democracy in Russia could only be won under the leadership of the working class with support from the peasant majority. (2) This democratic revolution would begin a transitional period in Russia in which all political, social, cultural, and economic relations would continue to be in flux, leading in the direction of socialism. (3) This transition would be part of, and would help to advance, and must also be furthered by an international revolutionary process. With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the founding of the Communist International in 1919, this was the orientation of Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades.

This brings us to the third reality highlighting a unity of Lenin and Trotsky. During the years of civil war, foreign intervention, and economic collapse, amid the fierce struggle for the survival of the revolutionary regime, they made use of extremely authoritarian and repressive emergency measures. They oversaw the creation of a bureaucratic apparatus to oversee this struggle for survival – more than once riding roughshod over dissatisfied comrades, workers, and peasants who wanted to see a return to the original revolutionary ideals. Lenin and Trotsky themselves continued to believe in those ideals, and increasingly became concerned over the power and abuses of the bureaucratic apparatus that they had helped put in place.

In their biography of Trotsky, Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova described Lenin’s evolving viewpoint in this way: “Lenin’s speeches and writings of 1921-22 … did not conceal his uneasiness and occasional bitterness. Reminiscences by his contemporaries show that Vladimir Ilyich was . . . highly critical of the outlook and conduct of those Party leaders who favored a bureaucratic dictatorship.” In 1922 Lenin was felled by the first of the strokes that brought his death two years later. Returning from a visit to him, a prominent comrade, Lev Kamenev, addressed the question “what does Lenin condemn?” The answer, he noted, was: “Very much and first of all, with special emphasis, our bureaucratic apparatus.”[8]

Joseph Stalin was a central figure in that apparatus, and his power was growing dramatically. A concerned Lenin sought to recruit Trotsky to join with him in combatting the bureaucratic degeneration and Stalin’s influence, but he was incapacitated and then died before that collaboration could be consolidated.

Two of Lenin’s comrades – Lev Kamenev and Gregory Zinoviev – shortsightedly made common cause with Stalin, and very early on sought to undermine Trotsky’s influence. But as German Communist Clara Zetkin (a confident of Rosa Luxemburg, and later of Lenin and his companion Nadezhda Krupskaya) wrote to a trusted friend in 1924, Krupskaya “said to me recently that it is false what Kamenev and Zinoviev assert, that Lenin never trusted Trotsky. On the contrary, Lenin had to the end of his days been fond of Trotsky and held him in high regard.”[9]

By 1926, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Krupskaya felt compelled to join with Trotsky and others in a United Opposition, to struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration and Stalin’s negative influence. But it was too late, and they were overwhelmed by the Stalinist bureaucracy, which would soon carry out a so-called “revolution from above.” This identified socialism with the modernization of the Soviet Union through a planned economy, overseen by a bureaucratic dictatorship. Essential elements of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s socialist orientation – such as workers’ democracy and revolutionary internationalism – were diluted into meaningless categories and compromised out of existence by the Stalin regime.

For the rest of his life, Trotsky continued his resistance against bureaucratic dictatorship and Stalinism – as an inseparable part of his ongoing struggle against capitalism and imperialism, and for a genuinely socialist future. In doing what he could to build within the broader socialist and communist movement a revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary force, it was the orientation he had shared with Lenin that he sought to advance. This included a commitment to forging, once again, the kind of revolutionary party that Lenin had done so much to create in the struggle for revolution, democracy, and socialism in Russia.

The organization question, in fact, had once been a point of bitter disagreement between the two revolutionaries. The revolutionary party that Lenin helped to forge is described by Max Eastman in this way:

It is an organization of a kind which never existed before. It combines certain essential features of a political party, a professional association, a consecrated order, an army, a scientific society – and yet it is in no sense a sect. Instead of cherishing in its membership a sectarian psychology, it cherishes a certain relation to the predominant class forces of society as Marx defined them. And this relation was determined by Lenin, and progressively readjusted by him, with a subtlety of which Marx never dreamed.[10]

From the early 1900s onward, Lenin’s political orientation had involved an uncompromising attitude regarding how the revolutionary organization must function. His comrade and companion, Nadezhda Krupskaya, commented that “the comrades grouped around Lenin were far more seriously committed to principles, which they wanted to see applied at all cost and pervading all the practical work.”[11] This generated tensions and even splits – such as the 1903 division between Bolshevik and Menshevik factions within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Although Trotsky had initially been close to Lenin (an older comrade, Plekhanov, had tagged him as “Lenin’s cudgel”), he now broke with Lenin, favoring socialist unity against what he saw as the factionalism, arrogance, and intolerance of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, leading to fierce polemics between him and Lenin over more than a decade. Trotsky initially believed that the unfolding of revolutionary circumstances would inevitably bring about the unity of revolutionary forces, so that – in the meantime – the different factions should coexist in the same organization. Yet when all was said and done, Lenin’s Bolsheviks proved to be a cohesive and effective revolutionary instrument, and the politically diverse conglomeration which Trotsky and others sought to maintain did not. As Trotsky later explained:

“A simple conciliation of factions is possible only along some sort of “middle” line. But where is the guarantee that this artificially drawn diagonal line will coincide with the needs of objective development? The task of scientific politics is to deduce a program and a tactic from an analysis of the struggle of classes, not from the [ever-shifting] parallelogram of such secondary and transitory forces as political factions.”[12]

Coming to this conclusion in early 1917 and perceiving the convergence of his own strategic orientation with that of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky rejoined Lenin in a common organization – causing Lenin to assert that from that moment on, “there has been no better Bolshevik.”[13]

This is the fourth reality constituting an elemental unity of Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky and the saving remnant of his co-thinkers around the world, from the late 1920s onward, persistently referred to themselves as Bolshevik-Leninists. In preserving the tradition and orientation associated with Lenin and his revolutionary comrades, they provided a vital resource for activists of today and tomorrow.

Paul Le Blanc

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[1] See Paul Le Blanc, Leon Trotsky (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), and Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (2023).

[2] V. I. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics,” Collected Works, Vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), p. 42; V. I. Lenin, “Our Revolution,” Collected Works, Vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), p. 476.

[3] Leon Trotsky, The Young Lenin (New York: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 187, 188; Georg Lukacs, Lenin, A Study in the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso, 2011), p. 11; Max Eastman, Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), pp. 150, 151.

[4] V. I. Lenin, “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats,” Collected Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960), pp. 299, 300. That this orientation informs all of Lenin’s political thought can be seen in V. I. Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings, ed. by Paul Le Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008).

[5] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850),” in The Political Writings of Karl Marx, ed. by David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2019), pp. 317-18.

[6] David Riazanov, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, An Introduction to Their Lives and Work (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), p. 100.

[7] Isaac Deutscher, “Introduction,” The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology (New York: Dell, 1964), p. 18. Also see: Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution (London: Verso, 1981); Michael Löwy and Paul Le Blanc, “Lenin and Trotsky,” in Tom Rockmore and Norman Levine, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2018), 231-256; Richard B. Day and Daniel F. Gaido, eds., Witnesses to Permanent Revolution, The Documentary Record (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011).

[8] Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 103; Kamenev quoted in Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 603.

[9] Clara Zetkin, Letter to Yelena Stasova, 29 March 1924, in Mike Jones and Ben Lewis, eds., Clara Zetkin, Letters and Writings (London: Merlin Press, 2015), p. 126.

[10] Eastman, Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution, pp. 159-60. See also Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015).

[11] N. K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 96.

[12] Leon Trotsky, Stalin, An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence (New York: Stein and Day, 1967), p. 112. Also see Dianne Feeley, Paul Le Blanc, and Thomas Twiss, Leon Trotsky and the Organizational Principles of the Revolutionary Party (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).

[13] Leon Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), p. 105.

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