When Lenin died in 1924, Trotsky lost his standing in the Communist hierarchy. In 1925, his adversaries, led by Stalin, ousted Trotsky from political life in the Soviet Union and the Communist International, on grounds that he was a counterrevolutionary instigator.
In 1928, Stalin exiled him to Central Asia and in 1929 expelled him from the USSR. He spent the next decade seeking a refuge from which to criticize Stalin and organize a new Communist International.
On August 21, 1940, he was assassinated in Mexico, supposedly by a Stalinist agent.
In the Soviet Union, he became regarded as a traitor, and his role in the revolution and the early Soviet regime expunged from official records. Even during Glasnost, a time when freedom of information was not suppressed, his reputation was never fully reinstated.
TROTSKY AND THE JEWISH QUESTION
Trotsky believed that Jewish people should assimilate and that the solution to the “Jewish problem” lay in the socialist reshaping of society within an international framework.
In 1903, he attacked the Bund for its nationalist character during the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party. In his own experience, his Jewish origin was a political handicap. When Lenin proposed to put him at the head of the first Soviet government, Trotsky refused, saying, “would it be wise to give into the hands of the enemies such an additional weapon as my being Jewish?” Later, he himself was shocked by the antisemitic rhetoric of his political opponents. In 1937, the reemergence of anti-Semitism in Germany and the Soviet Union led him to admit, in an interview with the New York Jewish Daily Forward, that the Jewish problem required a territorial solution, although not necessarily a return to Zion.
Until the end, he believed that the ultimate solution to the problem of anti-Semitism lay in the emancipation of all humanity by international socialism. In the interview with the Forward, Trotsky argued, “The longer the rotten bourgeois society lives, the more and more barbaric will antisemitism become everywhere.”