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“Modern Trotskyism is not a political trend in the working class, but a wild and unprincipled gang of saboteurs, diversionists, scouts, spies, murderers, a gang of sworn enemies of the working class who are hired by intelligence agencies of foreign states" (Stalin, On the inadequacies of party work and measures to eliminate Trotskyist and other double-dealers, 1937, p. 14).
In the past, Trotskyism was an anti-Leninist, opportunist trend and the most dangerous agent of the imperialists and the bourgeoisie in the labor movement, the most vile variety of Menshevism. Trotskyists were the main group that imposed centrism (see).
In the course of the struggle against the CPSU(b), Trotskyism ceased to be a political trend in the working class and turned into a vanguard of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, waging a struggle against Soviet power and the construction of socialism in the USSR, against communism.
Trotsky always waged a treacherous struggle against Leninism, against the party of Lenin and Stalin. Even at the Second Congress of the RSDLP (1903), Trotsky, together with the Mensheviks, fought against the Bolsheviks. On the issue of the first paragraph of the party rules, Trotsky defended Martov's Menshevik formulation and fiercely opposed Lenin's formulation, who fought for the creation of a monolithic and militant, clearly organized party. Trotsky, in essence, denied the dictatorship of the proletariat. After the II Congress of the Party, Trotsky, together with the Mensheviks, undermined the Bolshevik Party system in every possible way, thwarted the decisions of the Congress, trying to seize the leading centers of the Party, and destroy Party work.
During the Russo-Japanese War and the first Russian revolution (1904-07), Trotsky slipped into defencism, was against the defeat of the tsarist government, which led to the weakening of tsarism and the strengthening of the revolution, Trotsky, together with the Mensheviks, pursued the treacherous line of curtailing the revolution of 1905-07. Trotsky waged a struggle against the Leninist theory of the socialist revolution. Denying the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, he denied the possibility of an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry; considered impossible the victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the victory of revolutionary democracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Thus, Trotsky also denied the victory of the socialist revolution, the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Defending the counterrevolutionary, Menshevik theory of "permanent revolution", Trotsky did not believe in the strengths and abilities of the Russian proletariat and the revolutionary potential of the peasant movement, argued that the peasantry is a class hostile to the proletariat.
During the years of the Stolypin reaction, Trotsky supported the Mensheviks, the liquidators, who sought to liquidate the RSDLP. As a centrist, Trotsky tried to reconcile and unite the Bolsheviks with the liquidators on the platform of the liquidators. Describing Trotsky's position, Lenin wrote: "Trotsky behaves like a despicable careerist and factionalist... He pays lip-service to the Party and behaves worse than all other factionalists" (Lenin, Vol. XXV, p. 38). It was during these years that Lenin called Trotsky "Judas Trotsky." In 1912 Trotsky organized the anti-party August bloc, which united all anti-Bolshevik groups and trends against Lenin, against the Bolshevik party. Trotsky and the Trotskyists took a liquidationist position on all basic questions, covering up their liquidationism with conciliationism. Unmasked by Lenin and Stalin, the Trotskyist August bloc collapsed under the blows of the Bolsheviks in 1913-14.
During the First World War, Trotsky fought against Lenin, against the Bolshevik Party on all the most important issues of socialism and war. Trotskyists defended open social-chauvinists, demanded a rejection of the class struggle during the war, supported the imperialist war, covering up their betrayal of the proletariat and socialism with “leftist” phrases about the struggle against the war, calculated to deceive the working class. Having made his way in 1917 by deception into the ranks of the Bolshevik Party in order to shake and blow it up from within, Trotsky organized anti-party counterrevolutionary groups of Trotskyists, which opposed the Bolshevik party and its leaders, Lenin and Stalin, on all the main issues of Marxism-Leninism and revolution.
During the preparation and implementation of the October Socialist Revolution (April 1917-1918), Trotsky, together with other traitors to the party — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin, Pyatakov — tried to betray the armed uprising and turn the Bolshevik Party off the path of the socialist revolution.
In February 1918, the Trotskyite-Bukharinite gang of traitors thwarted the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk with Germany, seeking to place the still not strong Soviet Republic, which did not have a strong army, under the mortal blow of German imperialism. The betrayal of Trotsky and Bukharin cost the Soviet state dearly. The new conditions of the world were much more difficult than the original ones. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania retreated to Germany. Ukraine was turning into a dependent German state. The Soviet republic undertook to pay indemnity to the Germans. Lenin pointed out that Bukharin and Trotsky "in fact helped the German imperialists and hindered the growth and development of the revolution in Germany" (Lenin, Vol. XXII, p. 307).
During the years of foreign military intervention and the civil war (1918–20), Trotsky and the Trotskyists treacherously ruined work in the Red Army, trying to weaken its combat power, sabotaging the military successes of the Red Army, providing direct assistance to the interventionists and the bourgeois landlord counter-revolution.
During the transition to peaceful work to restore the national economy (1921-1925), Trotsky, at the head of all anti-party elements, waged a fierce struggle against the Leninist party and its leaders, Lenin and Stalin, who successfully led the Soviet country to socialism along the path of a new economic policy. In 1923, the Trotskyists, trying to disintegrate the party, imposed a general party discussion on it, in which they were utterly defeated throughout the Soviet Union. The Thirteenth Party Conference and the Thirteenth Congress of the RCP(b) (1924) condemned the Trotskyist opposition as a clearly expressed petty-bourgeois deviation from Marxism, as a revision of Leninism. In 1924, Trotsky, in his slanderous article "The Lessons of October", tried to replace Leninism with Trotskyism. Stalin proved in his speeches that the ideological defeat of Trotskyism is a necessary condition for ensuring the country's further victorious movement towards socialism and rallied the party around the Central Committee to fight for the victory of socialism. In 1925, the Trotskyists opposed the Lenin-Stalin doctrine of the victory of socialism in the Soviet country, against the party's course towards the victorious building of socialism in the USSR, against the socialist industrialization of the country. The Trotskyists opposed the general line of the party, Stalin’s plan of the socialist industrialization of the country with the bourgeois plan of enslaving the USSR, transforming the Soviet Union into a helpless agrarian appendage of the capitalist world, disarmed and deprived of the possibility of existence in a capitalist environment. The Trotskyists tried to disintegrate and split the Bolshevik party after the death of Lenin, infect it with disbelief in the victory of socialism in the USSR and create a party to restore capitalism.
During the years of the struggle for the socialist industrialization of the country (1926-29), the Trotskyists continued their treacherous struggle against the Lenin-Stalin party. In 1926, Trotsky organized an anti-party, counterrevolutionary Trotskyite-Zinoviev bloc, which launched undercover work against the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state. Under Stalin's leadership, the Bolshivik Party ideologically and organizationally defeated the Trotskyite-Zinoviev bloc. At the XV Congress of the CPSU(b) (1927), the Trotskyists and Zinovievites were expelled from the Bolshevik party for counterrevolutionary activity. “Having been ideologically defeated by the Bolshevik party, having lost all support in the working class, the Trotskyists ceased to be a political trend and turned into an unprincipled careerist clique of political swindlers, into a gang of political double-dealers” [History of the CPSU(b). Short course, pp. 285-286]. In 1929, Trotsky was expelled from the USSR abroad for his anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary activities, where he continued the treacherous struggle against the Lenin-Stalin party in the Soviet state.
In 1932-33, the Trotskyists and Bukharinites organized an anti-Soviet "bloc of Rights and Trotskyites." The trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938 showed that the Bukharinites and Trotskyists, headed by Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, conspired against Lenin, against the Bolshevik party, against the Soviet state from the very first days of the Great October Socialist Revolution; they have long constituted one common gang of the people's worst enemies. They sought to disrupt the Peace of Brest, together with the "Left Social-Revolutionaries" to overthrow Soviet power, arrest and kill V. I. Lenin, I. V. Stalin, Y. M. Sverdlov and form a new government of Trotskyists, Bukharinites, and "Left" SRs. They organized the villainous wounding of Lenin in the summer of 1918; prepared an anti-Soviet mutiny of the "Left" SRs in the summer of 1918; deliberately exacerbated differences in the party in 1921, seeking to undermine and overthrow Lenin's leadership from within; tried to overthrow the party leadership during the illness and after the death of Lenin. The Trotskyists and Bukharinites had long before entered the service of foreign intelligence services, gave out state secrets and supplied foreign intelligence with espionage information, carried out sabotage, diversion, explosions; organized the villainous murder of Kirov, Menzhinsky, Kuibyshev, and Gorky. The trials found that the Trotskyist-Bukharin traitors, fulfilling the will of their masters, foreign bourgeois intelligence services, aimed at destroying the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state, undermining the country's defenses, facilitating foreign military intervention, preparing the defeat of the Red Army, the division of the USSR, the destruction of the gains of workers and collective farmers, and the restoration of capitalist slavery in the Soviet Union. For these monstrous crimes, according to the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the Bukharinite-Trotskyite traitors were shot. The Soviet people approved the defeat of the counterrevolutionary "bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" and rallied even more closely around the Lenin-Stalin party. Trotsky was killed in 1940 by one of his henchmen. Trotskyism is the worst enemy of all working mankind; Trotskyists everywhere play the role of provocateurs and spies of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie in the labor movement, striving to disintegrate the communist movement.
Source: The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Volume 55 (1947), pp. 42-45.