page_title: Leon Trotsky
section_title: A year in the wilderness (1925)
hierarchical_section_title: Leon Trotsky / Russian Revolution and aftermath / A year in the wilderness (1925)
caption_attribution_description: English: Leon Trotsky and Leonid Serebryakov attend the Congress of Soviets of the Soviet Union May 1925
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: For Trotsky, 1925 was a difficult year. After the bruising Literary Discussion and losing his Red Army posts, he was effectively unemployed throughout the winter and spring. In May 1925, he was given three posts:  chairman of the Concessions Committee, head of the electro-technical board, and chairman of the scientific-technical board of industry. Trotsky wrote in My Life that he "was taking a rest from politics" and "naturally plunged into the new line of work up to my ears".
  Some contemporary accounts paint a picture of a remote and distracted man. Later in the year, Trotsky resigned his two technical positions (maintaining Stalin-instigated interference and sabotage) and concentrated on his work in the Concessions Committee.
  In one of the few political developments that affected Trotsky in 1925, the circumstances of the controversy over Lenin's Testament were described by American Marxist Max Eastman in his book Since Lenin Died (1925). Trotsky denied this statements made by Eastman in an article he wrote.
  
  In the meantime, the troika finally broke up. Bukharin and Rykov sided with Stalin while Krupskaya and Soviet Commissar of Finance Grigory Sokolnikov aligned with Zinoviev and Kamenev. The struggle became open at the September 1925 meeting of the Central Committee and came to a head at the XIV Party Congress in December 1925. With only the Leningrad Party organization behind them, Zinoviev and Kamenev, dubbed The New Opposition, were thoroughly defeated while Trotsky refused to get involved in the fight and did not speak at the Congress.
caption: Leon Trotsky and Leonid Serebryakov attend the Congress of Soviets of the Soviet Union in May 1925
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