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 TThermidor - The name of the eleventh month in the calendar adopted by the French Revolution. On the ninth of Thermidor (July 27) in 1794, Robespierre, a Jacobin, was overthrown - starting shifts to the right in the government that opened the way for Bonaparte and the destruction of the First Republic. Trotsky often compared the policies of Stalinism with the Thermidorian reaction. Trotsky, Leon - (1879-1940) Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, Leon Trotsky became a revolutionary in 1896 and a collaborator with Lenin on Iskra in 1902. He broke with Lenin the next year over the nature of the revolutionary party and aligned himself with the Mensheviks. He broke with the Mensheviks in 1904 and tried during the next decade to reunite the party. In the 1905 revolution, he was the leader of the St. Petersburg Soviet and developed the theory of permanent revolution. In 1915 he wrote the Zimmerwald manifesto against the war. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917, was elected to its Central Committee, and organized the Bolshevik insurrection that made the new Soviet state possible. His first government post was as commissar of foreign affairs. Then as commissar of war he organized the Red Army and led it to victory through three years of civil war and imperialist intervention. He formed the Left Opposition in 1923 and fought for the next decade to return the Soviet Union and the Communist International to Leninist internationalism and proletarian democracy. Defeated by the Stalin faction, he was expelled from the Communist Party and the Comintern, and exiled to Turkey in 1929. In 1933 he gave up his efforts to reform the Comintern and called for the creation of a new International. He viewed his work on behalf of the Fourth International as the most important of his career. In 1940, murdered by a Stalinist assassin at his home in exile, in Mexico. Third International (The Communist International / Comintern) - The First World War put to the test the statements of the Second International about the international solidarity of the working class and their anti-war resolutions. Virtually every section - the most notable exception being the Russian - turned to support their own ruling class in the war effort. This split the International in nearly every country; the Russian Revolution gave impetus to the creation of a new International based on those groups who had stood out against the tide of chauvinism. Organized under Lenin's leadership as the revolutionary successor to the Second International the Third (Communist) International was set up in 1919.In Lenin's time its world congresses were held once a year-the First in 1919, the Second in 1920, the Third in 1921, the Fourth in 1922-despite the civil war and the insecurity of the Soviet Union. Trotsky regarded the theses of the Comintern's first four congresses as the programmatic cornerstone of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. The Fifth Congress, where Stalin's machine was in control, was held in 1924, the Sixth not until 1928, and the Seventh not until 1935. Trotsky called the Seventh the "liquidation congress" of the Comintern (see Writings 1935-1936). At first the leading body of world socialism, it degenerated under Stalin, becoming a tool of the Russian bureaucracy, and the Seventh Congress was in fact the last before Stalin announced its dissolution in 1943 as a gesture to his imperialist allies. |
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