Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Russian counter-revolutionary, politician, and left deviationist pseudo-Marxist theorist. Like Benito Mussolini's move from the PSI to founding the Fascist party, Trotsky's extreme form of leftism morphed into Fascism and counter-revolutionary anti-communism, although he retained a veneer of Marxism unlike Mussolini, which has deceived millions into thinking it's genuine socialism.
He was originally a strongly anti-Bolshevik, anti-Lenin Menshevik, and was exiled after participation in the 1905 Revolution. From this exile until his return, he cultivated ties to British intelligence, as well as British, French, and American capital. He remained in exile until the February Revolution in 1917, when he returned back to Russia and eventually joined the Bolsheviks with the permission of his British masters. This was allowed solely due to his opposition, along with the British for obvious reasons, to Russia making a separate peace with Germany, which Lenin favored.
The British Government had decided to let Trotsky return to Russia. According to the memoirs of the British agent Bruce Lock- hart, the British Intelligence Service believed it might be able to make use of the “dissensions between Trotsky and Lenin.”
"Trotsky reached Petrograd in May. At first he tried to create a revolutionary party of his own—a bloc composed of former émigrés and extreme leftist elements from different radical parties. But it was soon clear that there was no future for Trotsky’s movement. The Bolshevik Party had the support of the revolutionary masses. In August, 1917, Trotsky made a sensational political somersault. After fourteen years of opposition to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Trotsky applied for membership in the Bolshevik Party." [1]
This above quote makes clear his opportunist nature. Despite joining the Bolsheviks, he remained an anti-Bolshevik in spirit, and he continued to agitate against peace from within the party. Indeed, when he was sent to Brest-Litovsk as Foreign Commissar, he sabotaged negotiations with Germany in the name of "world revolution", which nearly resulted in a total collapse of the revolution from a renewed German offensive.
"Trotsky had been sent to Brest-Litovsk with categorical instructions from Lenin to sign peace. Instead of following Lenin’s instructions, Trotsky was issuing inflammatory appeals to the European proletariat to rise and overthrow their governments. The Soviet Government, he declared, would on no account make peace with capitalist regimes. “Neither peace nor war!” Trotsky cried. He told the Germans that the Russian Army could fight no more, would continue to demobilize but would not make peace. Trotsky from his return onwards continued to agitate against the Soviet government and advocate for a destructive adventurist foreign policy." [2]
This infantile adventurism would continue, and was one of the reasons, along with his collaboration with foreign intelligence, being a capitalist roader, factionalism, and attempts to overthrow the Soviet government after it became clear that neither the party nor the masses supported him, that he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. However, he still retained a strong following within the USSR, which was linked to British and Japanese intelligence, and used it to continue to agitate for the overthrow of the Soviet government. They hoped, along with Trotsky, that a Japanese or German invasion would lead to the collapse of the Soviet government and an opportunity for his return, and as the Soviet Union was at war with Japan at the time, and feared war with Germany, this fifth column was a serious threat, leading to them being purged in the so-called "Great Terror" (a term invented by the British intelligence asset Robert Conquest, the more accurate term being Yezhovshchina).
From exile, Trotsky would become a full-time propagandist against the Soviet Union, enthusiastically promoted by western newspapers and intelligence agencies as a "good Bolshevik" or "freedom fighter".
"From Prinkipo during 1930-1931, Trotsky launched an extraordinary anti-Soviet propaganda campaign which soon penetrated every country. It. was an entirely new kind of anti-Soviet propaganda, infinitely more subtle and confusing than anything that had been devised by the anti-Bolshevik crusaders in the past."
"Times had changed. Following the great Crisis, the whole world was revolutionary-minded in that it did not want a return to the ways of the past which had brought so much misery and suffering. The early counterrevolution of Fascism in Italy had been effectively promoted by its ex-Socialist founder, Benito Mussolini, as the 'Italian Revolution.' In Germany, the Nazis were gaining mass backing, not only by enlisting anti-Bolshevik reaction, but also by posing, among the German workers and peasants as 'National Socialists.' As far back as 1903, Trotsky had mastered the propaganda device of what Lenin called 'ultra-revolutionary slogans which cost him nothing.'"
"Now, on a world-wide scale, Trotsky proceeded to develop the propaganda technique he had originally employed against Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. In innumerable ultra-leftist and violently radical-sounding articles, books, pamphlets and speeches, Trotsky began to attack the Soviet regime and call for its violent overthrow— not because it was revolutionary; but because it was, as he phrased it, 'counterrevolutionary' and 'reactionary.'”
"Overnight, many of the older anti-Bolshevik crusaders abandoned their former pro-Czarist and openly counterrevolutionary propaganda line, and adopted the new, streamlined Trotskyite device of attacking the Russian Revolution 'from the Left.' In the following years, it became an accepted thing for a Lord Rothermere or a William Randolph Hearst to accuse Josef Stalin of “betraying the Revolution.'”
"Trotsky’s first major propaganda work to introduce this new anti-Soviet line to the international counterrevolution was his melo dramatic, semi-fictitious autobiography, My Life. First published as a series of anti-Soviet articles by Trotsky in European and American newspapers, its aim as a book was to vilify Stalin and the Soviet Union, increase the prestige of the Trotskyite movement and bolster the myth of Trotsky as the 'world revolutionary.' Trotsky depicted himself in My Life as the real inspirer and organizer of the Russian Revolution, who had been somehow tricked out of his rightful place as Russian leader by 'crafty,' 'mediocre' and 'Asiatic' opponents."
"Anti-Soviet agents and publicists immediately ballyhooed Trotsky’s book into a sensational worldwide best seller which was said to tell the 'inside story' of the Russian Revolution."
"Adolf Hitler read Trotsky’s autobiography as soon as it was published. Hitler's biographer, Konrad Heiden, tells in Der Fuehrer how the Nazi leader surprised a circle of his friends in 1930 by bursting into rapturous praises of Trotsky’s book. 'Brilliant!' cried Hitler, waving Trotsky’s My Life at his followers. 'I have learnt a great deal from it; and so can you!'”
"Trotsky’s book rapidly became a textbook for the anti-Soviet Intelligence Services. It was accepted as a basic guide for propaganda against the Soviet regime. The Japanese secret police made it compulsory reading for imprisoned Japanese and Chinese Communists, in an effort to break down their morale and to convince them that Soviet Russia had betrayed the Chinese Revolution and the cause for which they were fighting. The Gestapo made similar use of the book....'
"My Life was only the opening gun of Trotsky’s prodigious anti-Soviet propaganda campaign. It was followed by The Revolution Betrayed, Soviet Economy in Danger, The Failure of the Five-Year Plan, Stalin and the Chinese Revolution, The Stalin School of Falsification, and countless other anti-Soviet books, pamphlets and articles, many of which first appeared under flaring headlines in reactionary newspapers in Europe and America. Trotsky’s 'Bureau' supplied a continual stream of 'revelations,' 'exposures' and 'inside stories' about Russia for the anti-Soviet world press."
"For consumption inside the Soviet Union, Trotsky published his official Bulletin of the Opposition. Printed abroad, first in Turkey, then in Germany, France, Norway and other countries, and smuggled into Russia by secret Trotskyite couriers, the Bulletin was not intended to reach the Soviet masses. It was aimed at the diplomats, state officials, military men, and intellectuals who had once followed Trotsky or who seemed likely to be influenced by him. The Bulletin also contained directives for the propaganda work of the Trotskyites both within Russia and abroad. Ceaselessly, the Bulletin drew lurid pictures of coming disaster for the Soviet regime, predicting industrial crises, renewed civil war, and the collapse of the Red Army at the first foreign attack. The Bulletin skillfully played on all the doubts and anxieties which the extreme tensions and hardships of the construction period aroused in the minds of unstable, confused and dissatisfied elements. The Bulletin openly called upon these elements to undermine and carry out acts of violence against the Soviet Government." [3]
This arch-reactionary was liquidated in 1940 in Mexico City, to the great benefit of the international proletariat.
From the above quotations, it's quite clear how Trotskyite left-opposition to actual socialism morphed into the synthetic leftism promoted most notoriously by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was founded in large part by the two ex-Trotskyites James Burnham and Sidney Hook in collaboration with the CIA, and the neoconservative extreme anti-communism that many of his American followers adopted, including the two aforementioned. While in some senses these neocons were truer Trotskyites than those who continue to call themselves Trotskyists, as they understood that the true essence of Trotskyism is anti-communism and bourgeois reaction and just decided to entirely drop the Marxist facade. Avowedly "communist" Trotskyite parties still exist, and continue to attract and deceive those otherwise on the right track. These parties need to be exposed as reactionary fascists and destroyed, and members of these parties who were simply duped by the Trotskyites' seemingly socialist rhetoric and who haven't totally gone off the anti-communist deep end to be shown the true nature of Trotskyism.