Leon Trotsky. Ardent Fanatic - Great And Terrible

Leon Trotsky gives a speech in Copenhagen in November 1932

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was not lucky. As one of the main figures of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the creator of the Red Army, he did not even manage to get into the Small Soviet Encyclopedia, the first edition of which began in 1928. And all because already in 1927 he was expelled from the party. And the blame for everything is the personal characteristics of his psyche.

Best student

Leiba Bronstein was born on October 26 (November 7, new style), 1879 in the village of Yanovka, Kherson province. He was the fifth child in the family of wealthy landowners David and Anna Bronstein. Psychopathic negativism in Leo's character manifested itself early enough.

Diagnostic guess

Mixed personality disorder (mosaic psychopathy) against the background of hypomanic conditions.

Leiba Davidovich Bronstein. Norway, 1936

"From the second grade he was expelled (temporarily) for protesting against … a teacher of French … Trotsky was again almost expelled from the fifth grade for a new protest against a teacher of Russian literature, but the case was limited only to a punishment cell and a troika for behavior."

But God did not deprive the boy of abilities, “Lev Bronstein was the best student in the class all the time in all disciplines. He gave up sports, walks, and empty pastime in the name of comprehending the sciences. The ease with which the student quickly became the first student left an imprint on Trotsky's character, which made itself felt throughout his future stormy life.

He knew how to attract the attention of others. It was not difficult: his excellent memory and outstanding eloquence favorably distinguished him from his peers. These personality traits contributed to the fact that a sixteen-year-old teenager was drawn to the revolutionary underground.

Legacy fainting

As is often the case with psychopathies, the traits of an unstable character in adolescence over the years have been replaced by hyperthymicity, and hysterical features have become more pronounced. By the time he was eighteen, the boy was a fanatic type.

The first information about Trotsky's poorly understood nervous breakdown dates back to this time. Biographers have expressed a variety of assumptions about him. “By the time of the first investigation in 1898-1900. Trotsky's epileptic seizure, noticed by the prisoners, also applies. Ziv, who was present at the same time (GA Ziv was a school friend of Trotsky, one of his first biographers) recalled that this kind of fainting with Trotsky occurred later.

By the way, Trotsky himself was repeatedly forced to admit such fainting. One of them, which happened to him at the most inopportune moment - on the night from 24 to 25 October 1917, that is, during the October armed uprising, he told in his autobiographical book "My Life".

In 1902, the revolutionary fled from exile abroad. In a fake passport, he "at random" entered the name Trotsky, calling himself after the senior warden of the Odessa prison

Natalia Sedova, Frida Kahlo, Leon Trotsky, 1937

The nature of such seizures has not been fully clarified, but it can hardly be considered epileptic. Lev Davidovich himself wrote: “I inherited the tendency to fainting during physical pain or malaise from my mother. This gave rise to one American doctor ascribing epilepsy to me."

Modern psychiatrists suggest the presence of hereditary vegetative-vascular dystonia, which “consisted in rare fainting, psychogenically provoked. His daughters and grandson Seva had the same tendency to faint."

Over the years, the seizures became more frequent, lasted more than a day or two, and Lev Davidovich was forced to admit that he had a "disease of the nervous system." Dr. G. Ziv, as well as the Social Democrat L. G. Deutsch, who knew the revolutionary closely, believed that these seizures were in the nature of epilepsy.

“Many traits of his character also prompted such an assumption: pronounced selfishness, hypertrophied conceit, excessive and painful pride, a desire for extravagance in speech, writing and deeds, a certain kind of picky pedantry (the notorious“logic”), which manifests itself even in a clear, accurate handwriting,”wrote G. Ziv.

last love

In 1932, the revolutionary was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. In 1933 he moved to France, and in 1936 he emigrated to Mexico, where he lived in the house of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. He became interested in the artist, passed notes to Frida, hiding them in books. One of them read: “You gave me back my youth and took away my mind. With you I feel like a seventeen-year-old boy."

No doubt, no conscience

Lev Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin and Lev Kamenev during a break from work

Hysterical and psychopathic personality traits determined the behavior of Lev Davidovich. "Bursting like a rocket into the Russian Social Democratic movement, Trotsky invariably amazed both his friends and his enemies with the contrast of behavior, the eccentricity of his actions, which often verged on shocking."

The combination of emotional coldness with a powerful temperament and innate artistry made him irresistible in the eyes of the crowd. "But the most frequent definition in Trotsky's descriptions was the epithet" nervous."

Winston Churchill painted literary portraits of a number of political figures in the thirties. About Leon Trotsky, he said: “In his nature were hidden all the qualities necessary in the art of destruction of society: organizational talent, like Carnot, cold detached intellect, like Machiavelli, oratorical ability to captivate the crowd, like Cleon, cruelty, like Jack the Ripper …"

In the first post-revolutionary years, Lev Davidovich did not even have a question about the morality or immorality of his actions. He did not suffer from remorse about the thousands who died on his instructions in the Civil War.

“He had no conscience or remorse. This, of course, is the trait of a fanatic psychopath … Among other features, Trotsky's pedantry deserves attention. He suffered from mosaic psychopathy, in the structure of which hyperthymic, fanatical, hysterical and, to a lesser extent, epileptoid characteristics were combined.

In the words of Lunacharsky, Leon Trotsky during the period of preparation for the Bolshevik uprising "walked like a Leiden bank, and every touch to it caused a discharge."

Always second

The political activities of Leon Trotsky were distinguished by diversity, which was facilitated by his erudition and literary talent. According to him, already during his first exile in 1900, he went "on the literary road." In an evening he could write a long article, and in three months - a book. He gave speeches for eight or nine hours, "exhausting the listeners with words." And once he broke, probably, a world record: shortly before October he spoke from the rostrum of the Petrograd Soviet for a total of twelve hours in one day. Like all talented orators of the artistic type, he himself was easily ignited by the flames with which he sought to ignite the audience.

His popularity at this time can only be compared with the popularity of Lenin. For his services to the state in 1923, Gatchina was renamed the city of Trotsk. But Lev Davidovich belonged to the type of politicians who are strong only on the crest of the wave, and even backed by a certain figure number 1, more important and strong. In terms of personal psychological qualities, Trotsky was only a figure 2 - the supreme executor, and not an initiator, not a generator of leading ideas.

L. D. Trotsky among the Red Army men. 1918 year. Archive of S. V. Lyubaev

It is natural that after the death of Lenin, "figure No. 1", he "became again what he was before the alliance with Lenin - a communist writer for whom the battlefield is paper, weapons are different polemic and propaganda genres."

Lev Davidovich was an adherent of the unpromising scheme of the permanent world proletarian revolution. He persistently confessed this scheme, despite the fact that it was at odds with reality. Trotsky could not show flexibility in this matter and was deposed from the state Olympus.

In September 1924, being dissatisfied with the political "alignment" created in the country, he wrote an article "Lessons of October". In it, he venomously reminded his prosperous party leadership colleagues of what they were trying to forget. And he hurt himself badly. The Social Revolutionaries, who had been exiled by that time to the Gulag camps, put together the following ditty: “It is dangerous business to write books in Russia. You, Lyova, squeezed in vain "The Lessons of October" ".

Hysterical personalities have a special gift for self-hypnosis. The natural fear of an incomprehensible disease, multiplied by the opinion of an authoritative doctor, not least caused the political collapse of the true author of the October Revolution. Fate lured Trotsky to the pinnacle of power, and pathological personality traits pushed him down.

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