Leon Trotsky would've done more good than harm had he succeeded Lenin.

Before I begin, I would like to state that before the debate was accepted, it was asked and answered that the debate will be about Trotsky"s net impact on the world, and not just how he would have done compared to Stalin (or any alternative timeline for that matter). I will address this in two segments, so that we can have a few in depth sections, rather than many shallow sections. 1) Starting WW2 One of the biggest concerns with Trotsky leading the USSR by 1922 (assuming he took over the same time that Stalin did, in his place) is his willingness for war, coupled with the world"s distaste for communism would have sparked a different WW2, with most of Europe allied with Germany against the USSR. Let us first dive into his willingness for war. We can first see in his autobiography "My Life" that he excepted forced conscription into military service, should volunteers not be sufficient [1], "In a short time, we had to go from voluntary enlistment to conscription, from detachments of irregulars to a proper military organization. We had continuously to fight the methods of the irregulars " a fight that demanded the utmost persistence and unwillingness to compromise, sometimes even the sternest measures. " We can also look into his past activities as the leader of the Red Army, in such wars as against Poland. He would go on to later state, "It is no wonder that my military work created so many enemies for me. I did not look to the side, I elbowed away those who interfered with military success"" Turning to how the rest of the world viewed communists at the time, there was little large scale support outside of Europe. The USA, going through their "red scare" in 1919 " 1921 was passing laws left and right to halt communist thought from progressing into the country. Of course, communists engaging in political bombings during a time of hyped up nationalism at the closing of the Great World War may not have been the best timing to build public support. Anyway, at a time when the USA"s economy was bombing, they were pumped from one major war victory which had established a number of European allies, and their distaste for communism would all fuel a US involvement in an anti-communist way in Europe, especially if Russia continued to aggress against European nations (I will go into this later). The distaste for Communism can be seen in other countries as well, from England [2] to Germany [3]. Just like with Germany only being allowed to attack so many countries before the rest of the world would get involved, the same would apply to the USSR under Trotsky. 2) Permanent Revolution failures This heavily ties back into section one as well (towards Trotsky"s driving force for aggression). As outlined in his book "Permanent Revolution" [4], the revolution must be global as he said, "The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable. " This is one area on which he fought greatly with Stalin on, in that Stalin supported the concept of "Socialism in one country," while he was the exact opposite. The concept of trying to support communist uprisings everywhere as fast as possible is ultimately doomed to fail in a 1920"s world. The Soviets wanted to be able to assist the Communist Revolutions in Germany in 1919, however, in order to assist in any meaningful way (at least meaningful to their ideology) they invaded Poland and started a war which cost a little over 100,000 lives just so they could share a border with Germany and better supply the revolution there [5]. The action of supplying numerous revolutions and invasions would lead to trigging WW2 (as outlined in the previous section) but should for some whacky reason not get any military counter against the soviets, it would lead to the collapse of the USSR. The USSR in our timeline originally planned to have Stalin"s socialism in one state, until WW2 broke out and they found the option of grabbing a bunch of nations on their march to Germany. But they were never too heavily involved in other nations" revolutions. While we can name North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc, those are over the course of decades and still fairly small in number. Trotsky, with his view on the permanent revolution, would have the USSR engaged in assisting as many revolutions as possible, at a time when the USSR economy was growing, but still fairly weak, as it never did recover until the early 30"s [6]. If it tried to stretch itself in any manner like Trotsky"s ideals would call for, the strain on the workers of the USSR would cause an economic collapse that would cripple the country into the status of a 3rd world nation which would likely see a counter revolution back to a capitalist state (as many communist nations have been doing since the collapse of the USSR) as people got tired of being poor and having their labor go to funding revolutions around the globe. So in recap, what we find is that a USSR under Trotsky in 1922 would be supporting, sponsoring and funding countless violent uprising across the globe, instigating wars against their neighbors, and likely triggering WW2, fighting over communism, rather than fascism. It is not possible to know exactly how many would die in such a violent global climate, or how many would suffer and die from having their labor stolen and shifted to funding that violence, but it can easily be concluded that such is not a net benefit to the world. Thank you [1] . http://www.marxists.org... [2] . http://www.bbc.co.uk... [3] . http://www.historicaleye.com... [4] . http://www.marxists.org... [5] . http://books.google.com... [6] . http://www.voxeu.org...