Events Shape People More Than People Shape Events. How Accurate Is This Statement in Relation

“Events shape people more than people shape events.” How accurate is this statement in relation to Leon Trotsky?

Events undoubtedly shape people, but to a greater extent it is people who shape events. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the life of Leon Trotsky.

At the point where Trotsky began his participation in Russian history, his ideas were largely formed. He was a committed revolutionary, and he devoted the rest of his life to making, defending and ultimately attacking the revolution in his homeland. Trotsky was an active participant in all the key events of Russian history between 1905 and 1923, with the exception of the First World War. When Revolution broke out in 1905, he returned to Russia from exile to help organise the working class, finishing up as chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. He did the same in 1917, only this time his role was crucial to the November Revolution. It was he who planned and organised the insurrection, arranging for the Red Guards to capture key public buildings and installations in Petrograd and Moscow. The historian Isaac Deutcher doubts any other leader could have done what Trotsky did. In the early days, even Stalin acknowledged his crucial role in the Revolution – proof that Trotsky was a major shaper of events in Russian history. With the Bolsheviks in power, Trotsky was given the task of negotiating a peace with Germany. Here he was less successful. His strategy of drawing out negotiations resulted in a resumption of hostilities between the two powers and a loss of further territory. Undaunted, Trotsky’s next task was to defend the regime against the Whites, and it is here that he achieved his greatest victory. As Commissar for War, he brought his intellectual and organisational skills to the Red Army, and soon turned it into a formidable fighting force. Realising the need for experienced military leaders, Trotsky recruited 50,000 former tsarist officers into the Red Army. He also reintroduced conscription, allowing the Red Army to expand to 5 million men between 1918 and 1920 – more than a match for the Whites. Trotsky then toured the various fronts in an armoured train, to direct the war and inspire the troops. The key to his success was his ability to marshal his forces to the fronts where they were needed, taking advantage of his shorter lines of communication. The Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War did more than anything else to shape the nation’s history for the next seventy years. By 1920, virtually all the Party’s opponents had been eliminated. However, the country itself was devastated by fighting and the by depredations of War Communism. Trotsky now sought to stabilise the economy by devising a policy that became known as NEP. Lenin implemented it in 1921, and it became the bedrock of Russia’s economic recovery. It also restored the Bolsheviks’ popularity with the peasants. Sadly, the successes Trotsky enjoyed between 1917 and 1921 did nothing to shape his political career, and he was unable or unwilling to establish himself as Lenin’s successor. His rudeness and arrogance made him many enemies, and he failed to take his main rival, Joseph Stalin, seriously. As such, he chose to keep Lenin’s “testament” secret from the public, thereby denying himself the chance to destroy Stalin’s credibility. Even historians who admire Trotsky, such as Deutcher, criticise him for this. The legacy of that failure was the period of fear and terror that followed in the 1930s. Now, events finally did conspire to shape Trotsky’s life. Forced into exile, he spent his remaining years being hunted by Stalin’s secret police. Even so, he still maintain his commitment to the Revolution, and spent his final days rallying people against the dictator.

Hence it can be seen that Leon Trotsky was primarily a man who shaped history. It was only in the last part of his life that history finally impacted on him.