Originally Posted by
Turtler
1)Ehhh.... I think there's a couple important distinctions to keep in mind here. Trotsky certainly whipped (and shot) the Army of Workers and Peasants into a formidable force that evnetually won the Civil War. However, that basically translated into it being a huge, unwieldy force of ill-trained infantry and cavalry capable of eventually, eventuallllly overcoming the tattered Whites, in large part through sheer use of manpower. What we think of when we think of the Red Army- as a true force capable of plausibly going toe to toe with the major industrialized powers and winning- was a product of the post Civil War years, and especially the officer corps like Tuch, Zhuk, etc. al as well as Soviet industrialization. Most of said officers being no more favorably inclined to Trotsky than to Stalin, if not the exact opposite due to the fact that the former made a lot of enemies amongst their ranks due to his position during and after the Civil War.
The Trotsky era Red Army was nothing to wave off, but it also wasn't an overwhelmingly credible political threat to the major powers. An EXCELLENT barometer for this is the early Red Army's preformance against the IJA during the Civil War years in the 1910's and '20's, given that the IJA was in a broad stasis in terms of equipment (types), doctrine, and tactics for the 40 some years between the Russo-Japanese War and the downfall of the Empire in '45, and how the Far Eastern Front utterly wrecked them in the 1930's. Broadly speaking, the same military that Zhukov etc. al. defeated in the 1930's was well beyond the abilities of Trotsky and his Red Army to overcome just a decade earlier, with the Japanese defeat and withdrawal from the Far East being political rather than military. I can't think of a bigger indictment against Trotsky's military genius than that.
On top of that the Romanians in particular held them off with one hand due to the damage caused by the Central occupation and their commitments to fighting Petrograd's ally in Budapest, the Poles came back from the brink when they by conventional standards shouldn't have, the Baltic Republics humiliated them royally after having to rebuild from scratch, and the Western Allies made hay of them pretty much wherever and whenever they were stupid enough to attack their rather small and war weary expeditionary forces.
Trotsky deserves a lot of credit for turning the Red Army into a mass organization capable of actually throwing enough men and material at all comers to solidify the Soviet regime and for being the fine mixture of capable and sociopathic enough to use it well, but I'd only call him an organizational genius, not a military one.
2)Right. Nevermind the fact that Rapallo and the alliance with Seeckt's Reichwehr had already gone through, and that Soviet policy- including that tied to Trotsky- depended on to a great deal. Because they RECOGNIZED that as things stood they didn't have the sophistication or raw competence to fight a non-insignificant industrial power without the help of a major industrial power.
3)The logic is good, but I'm not so sure about the conclusions. While I agree that Stalin made a boo-boo in withholding the KPD's intervention against the rising Nazis and that that is the sort of mistake Trotsky would not have made, I think it's worth noting that Trotsky- being the dogmatic, expansionist, Imperialist (Hurr hurr) scumbag he was- would have made DIFFERENT mistakes. Even the KPD under Stalin was a major force on Germany's streets geared towards violent revolution. Under Trotsky's tutelage he would've probably tried to turn it into something like the Roehm era SA: a huge, militant, mass movement aimed at fighting on the streets, overthrowing the government and installing a revolution by force of arms.
The problem with this? Well... what happened to the Roehm era SA again? Heck, what happened to the far less militarized and less intimidating historical KPD?
That sort of force is a threat, and a target for coalitions. It will unite forces that otherwise would want nothing to do with each other against the greater common threat. That's one of the tools Hitler historically used, and that sort of activity by the KPD would have made it vulnerable to the same. Particularly since a Trotskyite KPD would've probably been pushed into starting a civil war against the government, and openly rebelling against Weimar in that sustained a fashion would've shot up a warning light like even Hitler never did.
Oh? This ought to be good....
4)I agree. However, that's not what we're talking about, now is it?
The USSR under Trotsky wouldn't be *not* tearing itself apart in a paranoid fever dream. It would just be tearing itself apart from a *different* fever dream, in different ways.
5)FPPHHHh.... Bwahahaahaaa....
Sorry, couldn't help myself. But seriously?
Trotsky's alliances with the Anarchists were purely pragmatic, and almost always when he had absolutely no other choice in the matter due to inferior strength. He preferred to wipe them out outright when given the chance (in ways just as cruel and thorough as Stalin ever did) and even when allied he ALWAYS was the one to backstab them. Take a look at the sad, sick history of his ties with Makhno and the Black Army during the Civil War. The only time he didn't was after his exile, when he no longer had the capability to do much more than rant and speak.
At most, he might've been more restrained for the time, because he'd calculate the importance of making/keeping Spain Red as more important than culling the political threat posed by them as soon as possible. And even that's debatable and would only last for the duration of the civil war.
6)Riiight. Nevermind the fact that Trotsky's brilliant tactics were poor substitutes for what the Germans, Italians, and veteran troops from the Army of Africa could bring to the table. It's very hard to take militias up against professional troops and do much of anything beyond losing. It's even moreso to take disorganized, fiercely independent almost fully infantry militias and have them stand against a combined arms force of professionals. The loyalists did well for what they had, but in the end I doubt they had much chance after they failed to stop the North from falling.
That, and keep in mind that a huge chunk of why the war lasted as long as it did was because of the number of forces in play that were at least mildly sympathetic or neutral to the Republic, especially the Western Democracies, and even then they weren't the most successful in doing that. A Trotskyite Soviet Union and Spanish "Republic" would absolutely not engender that sort of sympathy at all, if not lead to a broader alliance against what's seen as a puppet of the Kremlin in Western Europe.
Again, Trotsky made enemies, and kept them. It was what he did. The Soviet Union was the original rogue state in the post-WWI world, and it was only because of Stalin's pragmatism that he managed to bleed that away until he invaded Poland and Finland. Trotsky was not the most pragmatic, especially when it came to rigid doctrinnaire ideology. That is why his support would most likely act like a massive pair of cement shoes to a government desperately trying to sell itself to the West as the legitimate, free, democratic-republican government of Spain. He was so loudmouthed and belligerent he made it exponentially more likely to unite non-Communists who would have otherwise been shooting each other against him.
7)Ehhh... *Taps wrist* Time Out, Time Out, Time Out.
Calling Trotsky- overall- competent and sane is dubious, in my opinion. Was he competent in some ways? Absolutely. The guy was a masterful organizer, a hell of an inspirer, and wasn't lacking in bravery or charisma. He also wasn't exactly the dullest knife in the drawer.
Was he sane? In some ways, certainly more than Stalin, like his healthier ability to avoid being paranoid (even if he was just as murderous overall, he didn't think EVERYBODY was conspiring against him) and probably would have been less crushing towards the ethnic and religious minorities.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. From what I understand of him, the man was less "competent and sane" and more "incompetent and insane in ways different from Stalin." Simply put, if he were fictional people would probably accuse the writer of making a strawman. He was THAT dogmatic, that he was *incapable* of understanding anything that didn't fit neatly into the Marxist-Engellian worldview. Sure, this was a problem for every Bolshevik leader including Stalin, but Trotsky was below even the norm because often times he practically ignored reality in favor of "substituting his own." His form of "peoples' war" was something he stuck more or less to the end, even when little things like the invasion of Poland and the Spanish Civil War- and his own maulings against the Westerners/Poles/etc discredited. Did this mean that his doctrine was useless? Hardly, but it wasn't a cure all. No single tactic is.
Trotsky didn't see that. He couldn't. He was categorically inflexible, and incapable of making himself adapt to reality on a number of issues. That sort of inflexibility and refusal to play well is what eventually let Stalin show him the door.
This isn't to say he was a simpering idiot. Just that he had crushing shortfalls, and ones that would have been far easier to overcome than many of Stalin's.
Agreed. Wholeheartedly.
8)Again, calling him brilliant is pushing it. Maybe we can call him a brilliant thinker or author or debater, but calling him brilliant overall is pushing it. For someone who is supposedly lionized as being a leader and intellectual, he was remarkably bad at two of the hallmarks of both: independent critical thinking.
And I would say it is VERY necessarily a bad thing.
9)And pay attention to A: What actually happened during the "shortages" and
B: What actually happened with Trotsky and his record.
Simply put, his theory had its' chance to spread in the chaos after WWI and the Great Depression. By and large, it proved a damp squib. The Communist cause received a number of converts, yes, and some of thos ewould eventually triumph. However, by and large the Communist cause failed to take hold of another major polity. Even without those "bread and circuses", the old overlords- especially democratic ones- managed to weather the storm with their institutions and popularity intact. And even where they didn't, they tended to be replaced by overlords that were no more sympathetic and often *far* less so to Communism.
For an argument that hinges on his supposedly savvy evaluation, that isn't very reassuring. Again, he was quite savvy within grounds, but he possessed close to nil ability to think outside of his own narrow biases. And that was what would have likely done him in, but not before he was about as bad as Stalin ever was.