Word: stalinize
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Trotsky's letters disclose a new and fascinating personal dimension of the revolutionary genius who, as Lenin's right-hand man, led the Bolshevik armed forces in the October 1917 revolution. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky lost a struggle for power to Stalin; this ended in Trotsky's banishment and Stalin's Great Purge of supposed "Trotskyites" in the late 1930s. The consequences of that savage quarrel run like a sanguinary thread throughout the Trotsky correspondence...
...letters show, the exiled Trotsky was as indefatigable in his attempts to overthrow Stalin as Stalin was tireless in his efforts to kill Trotsky, his family and his followers. A large number of Trotsky's letters are devoted to the organizing of his own revolutionary groups outside the U.S.S.R.-even as Stalin was organizing a special unit of his far-reaching secret police, the GPU, to hunt down Trotsky's supporters, family and Trotsky himself. By 1938 his first wife and two sons had already been exterminated...
...chilling letter sent to his second wife in 1937, Trotsky described an early attempt to assassinate him. He wrote that the wife of a pro-Stalinist official named Vishniak, who "hated the official line and showed sympathy to me personally," had warned him that Stalin wanted to finish him off "accidentally." The accident actually took place on the anniversary of the October revolution in 1927 when shots aimed at Trotsky's car missed their target and killed a militiaman...
...many respects, Trotsky underestimated Stalin, whom he dismissed as a "gray, colorless mediocrity." In the early 1930s, his letters show, Trotsky believed he would soon be restored to power in Moscow. Trotsky's secretary in the years of exile, Frenchman Jean van Heijenoort, who catalogued the letters at Harvard, told TIME Correspondent Marlin Levin that only Hitler's rise and the destruction of the German Communist Party in 1933 shattered Trotsky's hopes...
...antiFascist, fled to France and later joined the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. After World War II he served as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister in Italy's first postwar government. His alliance with the Communist Party and his opposition to NATO earned him the Stalin peace prize in 1951; he repudiated the award five years later, after the Soviets smashed the Hungarian revolution. In 1962 Nenni's Socialists joined the Christian Democrats in a center-left coalition that ruled for 14 years, during which he served as Deputy Prime Minister in three Cabinets...