“You are bankrupt, you have played out your role, go where you belong to the dustbin of history.”
Trotsky to Martov, when the Bolsheviks seized complete power at the Congress of the Soviets, October 25, 1917
WHEN LEON TROTSKY, president of the Congress of the Soviets and second only to Lenin, in the Bolshevik faction, uttered these words, he was one of the most powerful men in the world, he expelled the former Vulius Cedarbaum, known as Martov, leader of the Meshevick wing of the Soviets, and took absolute power. The slogan, “all power to the Soviets” which had brought then victory, became “all power to the Bolsheviks.” Yet Trotsky steadily let the absolute power slip from his hands until his famed “Clemenceau” ended his power in the Soviet government.
Leon Trotsky, born Lev Bronstein was the son of a provincial entrepreneur and he enjoyed a comfortable income. Young Bronstein as a student, worked himself up into a fine ideological frenzy over the rights of Marxism. He was one of those whirling dervishes which are set in motion by new ideas, and he became, a prominent writer in the movement. Inevitably he went abroad to visit Lenin the leader of the party. When he arrived at the Lenins flat in London, Madame Lenin called out to her husband, “the Pero (the pen) has arrived.”