The starting point of the present article is Trotsky's biography by Pierre Broué, but it intends to be more than a mere review of the book. Following Trotsky's life story, it insists specially on the most democratic moments of his political life (Our Political Tasks, 1904) and on the most authoritarian ones (the rejection of all political alliances in October 1917, the militarisation of labor etc). After that, the text analyses closely two problems related to Trotsky's fate: the problem of the tension between the internal democracy within the party and the external dictatorship, and, on a more general level, the problem of the nature of the political system under Lenin, and afterwards, under Stalin. Finally, it discusses the question of the relation between Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism.
Trotsky; Lenin and Stalin; Marxism; Democracy