Russia wrestles with Trotsky and Revolution

By Joshua Yaffa
November 7, 2017

On Monday .. viewers of Channel One — Russia’s .. state-run television network — were treated to the première of a lavish .. series about Leon Trotsky ... a ferociously talented orator and a brilliant organizer, who had grand ideas about the stream of history and his own role in it. The show portrays Trotsky as wielding a charismatic and forceful intellect, and as a man of style and passion ...

The series is remarkable when compared to the silence with which Putin and others in the Kremlin are greeting the Revolution’s anniversary ... no gatherings or opportunities for national dialogue or engagement with the legacy of what Trotsky and the rest of the Bolsheviks bequeathed to the world .. because Putin sees the Bolshevik revolutionaries as forerunners to those who might challenge his .. power today. "Someone decided to shake Russia from inside, and rocked things so much that the Russian state crumbled," Putin once warned a gathering of students and young teachers. "A complete betrayal of national interests! We have such people today as well" ...

The fall of 1927 saw the first mass celebrations of the Revolution’s anniversary, and the nascent creation of its mythology—just as Trotsky was being excommunicated from the Communist Party. Stalin quickly managed to erase Trotsky from the narrative of the Revolution, adding himself and his own trumped-up exploits. Trotsky was hounded out of the Soviet Union, and in 1940 was murdered with an ice pick in Mexico City by an undercover N.K.V.D. intelligence agent. For generations of Soviet citizens, Trotsky was either a scoundrel or a nonentity ...

... This makes "Trotsky," the show, at once daring and edgy by the standards of Russian state television, while also pulling up short of making inferences that directly challenge the authority of the Putin system ...

https://www.newyorker.com/sections/news/putins-russia-wrestles-with-the-meaning-of-trotsky-and-revolution