STIRRER OF STRIFES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 228, 21 October 1940, Page 3

STIRRER OF STRIFES

EVER A FIERY FIGURE AMERICAN COMMENT Leon Trolsky was ever a fiery figure—and more than once the flames he fanned lashed back to sear their .'author, says the Christian Science Monitor. Boston. Of irony, too, there was plenty in the career of this Russian revolutionary. The very name by which the world knew him was not his own —he was born Lev Bronstcin —■ but that of one of his gaolers in Siberia, whose cognomen he took for passport purposes on his escape. That same Siberia which saw him after the 1905 uprising against the Czar was to see him again in 1928 on his way to exile from a nation he had helped to bathe in blood and from a regime lie h?ul helped to build. That he has now come to his end by the hand of an assassin in Mexico is another chapter in the already innumerable tragedies and cruelties by which the Government of Lenin and later ot' Stalin lias held its swav as successor to the; Czars in Russia Trotsky was, if anything, more of a Communist than is Stalin. I7jh assailed the political regime which squeezed him out as being not Marxian but a kind of Red Fascism. As an organiser, propagandist and strategist, he had the energy and cleverness of genius. To him has ,':een attributed the technique of revolution which in October, 1917. struck at utility plants as the nerve centres of Russian cities. H's organisation of the Red Army, his hammering together of scattered, illequipped, disheartened military rem nants to smash one foe after another. make of it a grim and. again, an ironic monument to his talents The gnmness and the irony ai\? not altogether accident or circii'jt-

stance. The surroundings of youth which gave rise to rebellion against tyranny are not to lie dismissed, nor is the courage repeatedly displayed against whatever odds. The leader who plays with hate and intrigue strikes sparks that fall where healing a'td confidence are immcasur-~-oiy more needed.