Lenin vs Trotsky

[Furious Mental]

Trotsky was the architect of the Red Army, without which the Bolsheviks could not have won the civil war. He was also an important revolutionary theorist in his own right. However, Lenin was obviously the major personality in the Bolshevik revolution. If you evaluate them as they would have you evaluate them, you have to conclude that Lenin was more important because a revolutionary army doesn't just spring up from nowhere; the political struggle of professional revolutionaries (of whom Lenin was clearly the dominant one) is necessary before anyone decides to take up arms. Of course, they would also say to you that ultimately they are just agents of impersonal historical forces anyway. On top of that all that, with a few exceptions Leninism is part of the philosophy of every communist movement in the world, and Leninist ideas regarding party organisation and political strategy have been directly copied by movements across the political spectrum, including the most extreme anti-communists. To an extent, this is an accident of history because, of course, Stalin deprived Trotsky of the chance to have a greater impact on the Soviet Union and world history, and worked consciously to erase such influence as he had had.