‘Pravda’ acknowledges Trotsky’s role

Press, 12 September 1988, Page 8

‘Pravda’ acknowledges Trotsky’s role

NZPA-AP Moscow “Pravda” has acknowledged for the first time in decades that Leon Trotsky played a key role in the Russian Revolution and defence of the young Soviet State, but said Vladimir Lenin at one point considered him a Judas.

For decades Trotsky’s name has been virtually banned from the Soviet State-run press, and his role in the creation of the world’s first socialist State virtually wiped from the historical record.

By the time of his murder in 1940 while exiled in Mexico City, Trotsky’s image had been cut or airbrushed from archive photographs of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and he was portrayed in official histories as a

revolutionary turncoat who had opposed both Lenin and Josef Stalin. As part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s drive for “glasnost,” or increased openness, Soviet historians have been more frankly assessing their country’s past, including the role of Stalin’s foes, like Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev and Trotsky. The “Pravda” article, an excerpt from a Stalin biography being written by Colonel General Dmitri Volkogonov, described Trotsky in language that, during Stalin’s rule, might well have cost its author his life, and that would have been unimaginable in the pages of the Communist Party ■ daily as little as a year ago. “Being quite a gifted publicist, speaker and or-

ganiser, Trotsky played a well-known role in the October armed uprising and eventually in the civil war years when he was people’s commissar for military and naval affairs and chairman of the Revolutionary Council,” the article said.

Although recognising Trotsky’s abilities and his deeds on behalf of the revolution, the article pointedly noted that Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, had called Trotsky a Judas in 1911, and that Trotsky did not join the Bolsheviks until 1917. The headline of the full-page “Pravda” article called Trotsky The Demon of the Revolution, indicating that a fullblown return to official favour is unlikely.