After the concentration of sole power in his hands, Leon Trotsky would hardly have betrayed the communist ideals, but it is likely that he would have put them into practice in a more rigid and uncompromising form than Joseph Stalin.
Power struggle
When Lenin's health deteriorated at the beginning of 1923, a serious struggle for power began in the leadership of the CPSU (b). The situation was aggravated by the "Letter to the Congress", in which Lenin sharply criticized his closest associates - Stalin and Trotsky, calling the former "rude and disloyal", the second "boastful and self-confident." It was Trotsky who found himself in a disadvantageous position in the upcoming battle: the troika consisting of Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, armed with the term "Trotskyism", was preparing to give a serious battle to their main political opponent.
To begin with, the composition of the Central Committee was expanded at the expense of the supporters of the troika, which allowed the main Bolshevik body to make decisions bypassing Trotsky. Later, Stalin, who headed the Organizational Bureau and the Secretariat of the Central Committee, began to appoint his proteges to key party posts, which ultimately neutralized the competitor. Lev Davidovich could have been saved by the XIII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in May 1924 in Moscow, but after losing the debates preceding the congress, he remained in an absolute minority and soon completely lost control over the Central Committee. And yet, if we assume that Trotsky nevertheless gained the upper hand over Stalin, then what path would the USSR take? Let's think it over.
Chaos of a bright future
Trotsky, unlike the restrained and pragmatic Stalin, was an impulsive and categorical person. It is his political ideals that can best characterize the lines from the International: "We will destroy the whole world of violence to the ground, and then we will build ours, we will build a new world - whoever was nothing will become everything." Speaking at a rally in Kazan in 1918, Trotsky said: “We highly value science, art, we want to make art, science, all schools and universities accessible to the people. But if our class enemies want to show us once again that all this exists only for them, we will say: death to theater, science, art. " Such populist statements, and in the future, possibly, inconsistent actions, would most likely complicate the building of socialism in the country by the most serious distortions,which could cause dissatisfaction with Trotsky's policy both in the ranks of party associates and among the broad masses of the population. “We, comrades, love the sun that shines on us, but if the rich and exploiters want to monopolize the sun, we will say: let the sun go out and darkness reign, eternal darkness,” Trotsky drew to the people the frightening prospects of socialist construction.
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Father of terror
Despite the fact that many people associate the repressive methods of Soviet policy exclusively with the name of Stalin, the Bolshevik terror is an invention of Lenin and Trotsky. If the latter had inherited power in the USSR, the scope of the repressions would have been no less, and perhaps even more ambitious, than under Stalin. In 1920, Trotsky wrote a book with the ominous title "Terrorism and Communism", which was a response to the theses of the German Marxist Karl Kautsky. In it, Lev Davidovich not only justifies the Red Terror of the period of the Civil War, but also urges not to abandon it after its end. Even in political struggle, Trotsky advises to operate not with arguments, but with force: "The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it."
Of course, the idealist Trotsky explained the coercive policy of the state by the interests of the working masses, without which the government cannot do anything. However, no one would have given guarantees that with the concentration of all power in the hands of Trotsky, he would not have introduced an absolute dictatorship. Trotsky's political methods were most clearly demonstrated during the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, when more than 1,000 sailors were killed, which testified to the true attitude of the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council to democracy. It is curious that Stalin himself repeatedly turned to the book "Terrorism and Communism" and more than once quoted excerpts from it to justify political repression. Without sinning against the truth, it should be admitted that Trotsky may well share with Stalin the title of the ideologist of the great terror.
United States of the World
Trotsky has repeatedly stated that he is not going to confine himself to building socialism in a single state, to which Stalin was inclined. His ideal is the fire of the world revolution. It is likely that, having come to power, he would have continued to support the Comintern, like any communist demonstrations around the globe. So, if Stalin and Zinoviev reacted very coolly to the uprising of the Hamburg communists, Trotsky was convinced that this was the beginning of the communist revolution in Germany.
Until the end of his life, Trotsky believed that a communist state "United States of Europe and Asia" would be built in the eastern hemisphere of the earth, in which citizens freed from the bourgeois shackles would live and universal equality and prosperity would reign. If the state led by Trotsky conducted a consistent campaign to communize the planet, it is quite possible that the Western countries would take up arms against the USSR, uniting in an anti-Soviet coalition. Without reliable allies, our country, most likely, would have to enter into a protracted military conflict with the leading powers of the world - the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and no one knows how this confrontation would end.
Argentine writer Marcos Aginis in his book "Young Leva" writes: "If Trotsky's theses prevailed over Stalin's, then in Europe everything would have gone differently." However, the Argentinian idealizes his idol. "Beautiful and full of ideals" young Trotsky admired him and it seemed to him that this revolutionary would never have become what Stalin later turned into.
Personal freedom
However, one can partly agree with Aginis. Trotsky did not suffer from leaderism; the cult of personality was unacceptable to him. In this regard, Trotsky's words about the attitude of society towards Lenin are indicative in this respect, which made him not a revolutionary leader, but "the head of the church hierarchy" and used his quotes for "false sermons." Completely differently than Stalin, Trotsky perceived the position of individuals in the classless state built by the Bolsheviks. At the dawn of the Soviets, Trotsky became interested in Freud and psychoanalytic experiments, the purpose of which was to create a "new man." So, on the initiative of Trotsky, the house-laboratory "International Solidarity" was opened, where the younger generation was freed from all kinds of psychological complexes. An important element of upbringing was the exclusion of parents from this process. According to the plan, the outdated institution of the family was to be replaced by a commune that would erase the line between the personal and the public, no matter whether it was material property or human feelings. It is not known which path Soviet society would have taken if all of Trotsky's social experiments had not been stopped.
Industrial breakthrough
Trotsky's concept of over-industrializing the country was initially rejected by Stalin. The leader of the USSR was more attracted by the model of reforms proposed by Nikolai Bukharin, which assumed the development of private entrepreneurship by attracting foreign loans. However, already in 1929, the Bukharin approach was replaced by the Trotskyist one, albeit without the extremes inherent in the methods of war communism, on which Lev Davidovich was going to rely. According to Trotsky's program of forced industrialization, the rapid growth of the national economy was to be achieved on the basis of using exclusively internal resources, the development of heavy industry by means of agriculture and light industry. With this one-sided approach, the peasantry had to "pay" for the costs of rapid industrial growth. One can only assumewhat excesses and shocks industrialization would turn for the country if the process was controlled by the author of the idea himself.
War cannot be avoided
The most tragic page in the Stalin era and throughout Soviet history was the Great Patriotic War. Could Trotsky have prevented this catastrophic event if he took over as head of state? It is known that Trotsky treated Hitler with hostility, but the Fuhrer, on the contrary, showed every respect to the prominent revolutionary. Hitler's biographer Konrad Heiden recalled how highly the German leader praised Trotsky's memoirs, calling them "a brilliant book" and noting that "he learned a lot from their author." In the documents of the Reich, there is even evidence that the German government made plans to create a collaborationist government of the USSR headed by Trotsky. However, it was not Stalin's personality that prompted Germany to aggression against the USSR, but Hitler's irrepressible ambitions. Be in Stalin's place Trotsky,then a staunch anti-Semite Hitler would have found additional arguments for an attack on the Soviet Union.