The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately wicked: who can know it?
Jeremiah 17:9
"Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) was the organizer, propagandist, and military leader of the communist seizure of power in Russia following the revolution of 1917. He was communist dictator Lenin’s heir apparent, until Stalin usurped this position. Intolerant, tactless and impatient, Trotsky had an unbounded faith in Marxism, which was reinforced by his uncritical acceptance of Darwinism.
He crushed the Ukrainian Army of Insurgent Peasants; and its anarchist guerrilla leader, Nestor Makhno (1889–1934), who had been his ally against the White Russians, was badly wounded but managed to flee the country with his family. Trotsky brutally suppressed the Soviet sailors at Kronstadt, and committed other acts of violence with ease, ‘because of his absolute conviction that they served the purposes of the proletariat and its permanent revolution’.
After the end of the Russian Civil War, Trotsky’s boundless energies were channelled into handling administrative details and carrying out such pet projects as the leadership of the Society of the Godless, which was responsible for the spread of the Soviets’ antitheistic propaganda. He was an ardent atheist and advocated an “atheistic substitute” for religion; this involved the use of the theatre for antireligious propaganda, and Communistic rituals of ‘red’ baptisms, ‘red’ weddings, ‘red’ Easters, etc.
How could it have come about that Trotsky, the son of a rich Jewish land-owner, became so vehemently prejudiced against his father’s class and against religion? It had a lot to do with his college failure and his sexual sin.
At the age of 17, Trotsky dropped out of college to join a revolutionary commune. The only Marxist member of this group was a woman, some six years his senior, named Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya. At first, he was ferociously antagonistic to both Alexandra and her Marxist views, so much so that at a New Year’s Eve party in 1896 he proposed a toast with the words, “A curse on all Marxists, and on all those who want to bring hardness and dryness into all life’s relationships!”
However, he then began an affair with her, which caused him to reconsider her Marxism. After the commune’s activities landed its members in the Tsar’s prisons, Trotsky had ample time to develop his ideologies.
Trotsky read Darwin’s Origin of Species and his Autobiography. Years later he wrote, “Darwin destroyed the last of my ideological prejudices. … Darwin stood for me like a mighty doorkeeper at the entrance to the temple of the universe. I was intoxicated with his minute, precise, conscientious and at the same time powerful, thought. I was the more astonished when I read … that he had
In 1940, Trotsky, while living in exile in Mexico, was assassinated on the orders of Josef Stalin, another who was converted to an atheistic view of life through reading Darwin. Stalin was perhaps history’s greatest mass murderer. He and Trotsky acted in a way that was quite consistent with their presuppositions: if no one made me, no one owns me, and there is no absolute right or wrong. In such an evolution-based worldview, there is nothing intrinsically ‘wrong’ with murdering people, even millions of them." CMI