page_title: Leon Trotsky
section_title: Fate of Left Oppositionists after Trotsky's exile (1929–1941)
hierarchical_section_title: Leon Trotsky / Russian Revolution and aftermath / Fate of Left Oppositionists after Trotsky's exile (1929–1941)
caption_attribution_description: English: The publication of My Life (Leon Trotsky autobiography) as reported in the USSR. The editors of Projector titled the publication: "On the service of bourgeoisie".
context_page_description: Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Russian revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Trotskyism.
  Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party a few weeks before the October Revolution and became one of the leaders of the party. Once in government, Trotsky initially held the post of the Commissar for Foreign Affairs and was involved in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany as Russia pulled out of World War One. Trotsky became more prominent from March 1918 to January 1925 as the leader of the Red Army in the post of Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. Trotsky was a vital leading figure in the Red victory in the Russian Civil War. He was one of the seven members of the first Politburo.
  After the rise of Joseph Stalin, Trotsky was removed from his positions and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929. He spent the rest of his life in exile and was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet NKVD agent.
  Trotsky was openly critical of Stalinism.
context_section_description: After Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union, Trotskyists within the Soviet Union began to waver. Between 1929 and 1932, most leading members of the Left Opposition surrendered to Stalin, "admitted their mistakes" and were reinstated in the Communist Party. One initial exception to this was Christian Rakovsky, who inspired Trotsky between 1929 and 1934 with his refusal to capitulate as state suppression of any remaining opposition to Stalin increased by the year. In late 1932, Rakovsky had failed with an attempt to flee the Soviet Union, and was exiled to Yakutia in March 1933. Answering Trotsky's request, the French mathematician and Trotskyist Jean Van Heijenoort, together with his fellow activist Pierre Frank, unsuccessfully called on the influential Soviet author Maxim Gorky to intervene in favor of Christian Rakovsky, and boarded the ship he was traveling on near Constantinople. According to Heijenoort, they only managed to meet Gorky's son, Maxim Peshkov, who reportedly told them that his father was indisposed, but promised to pass on their request. Rakovsky was the last prominent Trotskyist to capitulate to Stalin in April 1934, when Rakovsky formally "admitted his mistakes" (his letter to Pravda, titled There Should Be No Mercy, depicted Trotsky and his supporters as "agents of the German Gestapo"). Rakovsky was appointed to high office in the Commissariat for Health and allowed to return to Moscow, also serving as Soviet ambassador to Japan in 1935. However, Rakovsky was cited in allegations involving the killing of Sergey Kirov, and was arrested and imprisoned in late 1937, during the Great Purge.
  Almost all Trotskyists who were still within the Soviet Union's borders were executed in the Great Purges of 1936–1938, although Rakovsky survived until the Medvedev Forest massacre of September 1941, where he was shot dead along with 156 other prisoners on Stalin's orders, less than three months into the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. Also among the Medvedev Forest victims was Trotsky's sister/Kamenev's first wife, Olga Kameneva.
caption: The publication of Trotsky's autobiography My Life as reported in the Soviet Union in August 1929, with the editors of Projector titled the publication: "On the service of bourgeoisie"
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