Anti-Trotsky Is On TV!

Netflix has an 8-part Russian-language mini-series purporting to portray the life of Leon Trotsky. Wikipedia has a short description at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotsky_(TV_series). They say that it won a bunch of awards: “The Association of Film and Television Producers in Russia awarded the series in the categories Best Sound, Best Editing Best Makeup, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Special Effects, Best Actress (Olga Sutulova), Best Actor (Konstantin Khabensky), Best TV series.” It was released on the anniversary of the Russian revolution and, understandably, drew a lot of watchers. I don’t think that Russians, even old Russians from the Soviet days, have ever heard much about the man, so they’re bound to be curious.

I’m no expert, but I’ve studied Trotsky’s works, and some histories of the Soviet Union, so I know that the mini-series plays very loose with the truth. The people who actually know something about the Russian revolution and about Leon Trotsky are furious. Check out the World Socialist Web Site commentary at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/19/tele-n25.html.

Here’s the short version of what actually happened. Trotsky was a leading figure in the unsuccessful 1905 revolution that took place when the Russian Empire suffered an ignominious defeat by the Japanese. He was well known, especially as an agitator. In the late summer of 1917, Trotsky joined Lenin’s Bolsheviks and was taken into their central leadership just a few months before they took power. He was entrusted with negotiating a peace settlement with the Germans. The leadership then put him in charge of the Red Army in the extremely important civil war that quickly followed. Lenin died in 1924 and Trotsky was exiled in 1928. Trotsky then started organizing his worldwide following into a new anti-Stalin “Fourth International.” He was murdered in Mexico in 1940, but his followers continue to this day.

TV Trotsky is portrayed as an oversexed megalomaniac who spends his days killing people, screwing around, and scheming. Stalin’s sex life is left out. He just robs people and schemes. Lenin is kind of a weak buffoon that the evil Trotsky manipulates. In this version, Lenin didn’t even lead the Russian Revolution: Trotsky carried it out as a putsch, then manipulated the feeble-minded Lenin into taking credit.

I ought to mention that there’s a tremendous amount of anti-semitism in this new Russian version. Women are just sex machines drooling over the power-mad title role. Actually, it would be really hard to find anything good about any of the characters in this version of the Russian revolution and its aftermath.

One may conclude then, that the misleading series is not a good way to understand the Russian revolution or its aftermath. But the TV mockumentary has value for trying to understand the current mindset in Russia. I think they want to be seen as open minded, because they talked about someone whose name and reputation were repressed in the Soviet days. I also think they want to discredit the revolutionaries and what they built.

The effect on the few Americans who find everything else in their world so boring that they are willing to sit through this repetitious collections of scraps, is that it may make them want to learn some real history from somewhere else. We Americans, like the people who made this TV series, don’t know much about Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the Soviets, either.

—Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” program at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site