Frasi di Lev Trotsky

Lev Trockij , Lev Trotsky o Leon Trotsky nella traslitterazione anglosassone, pseudonimo di Lev Davidovič Bronštejn è stato un politico, rivoluzionario e militare russo naturalizzato sovietico, nativo dell'attuale Ucraina.

Bolscevico e protagonista di primo piano della rivoluzione russa, Presidente del soviet di Pietrogrado durante le rivoluzioni del 1905 e del 1917, fu tra le personalità più influenti della Russia post-rivoluzionaria e della neonata Unione Sovietica, dapprima come commissario del popolo agli Affari esteri e in seguito come organizzatore e comandante dell'Armata Rossa , commissario del popolo alla Guerra e membro del Politburo. Fu anche scrittore di notevoli capacità, soprannominato Penna dai compagni di partito.

Dopo la morte di Lenin, a seguito della sua lotta politica e del duro contrasto con Stalin negli anni venti, fu espulso dal Partito Comunista Sovietico ed esiliato, mentre l'opposizione di sinistra veniva smantellata dal gruppo stalinista, favorevole alla burocratizzazione totalitaria dell'URSS e al concetto di socialismo in un solo paese.

Dopo molte peregrinazioni, si stabilì in Messico sotto la protezione del governo di Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, dove fu accolto da una cerchia di sostenitori locali, tra cui gli artisti Diego Rivera e Frida Kahlo, e ricevette numerose visite di ammiratori, come André Breton. Venne assassinato nel 1940, nella sua casa in un sobborgo di Città del Messico, da un agente sovietico di origine spagnola, Ramón Mercader.

Nel 1938 ha fondato la Quarta Internazionale. Le idee di Trockij, improntate all'internazionalismo proletario e alla rivoluzione permanente, formano la base del trotskismo.

✵ 26. Ottobre 1879 – 21. Agosto 1940
Lev Trotsky photo
Lev Trotsky: 131   frasi 19   Mi piace

Lev Trotsky frasi celebri

“La conquista del potere da parte del proletariato non conclude la rivoluzione, ma la apre soltanto.”

citato in "Prima di morire – Appunti e note di lettura", Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1998

Questa traduzione è in attesa di revisione. È corretto?

Lev Trotsky Frasi e Citazioni

“La vecchiaia è la cosa più inattesa che può capitare a un uomo.”

citato in Focus n. 115, p. 170

“Nessuno è più superstizioso degli scettici.”

da Letteratura e rivoluzione

“Hitler si è forgiato insieme alla sua opera. Ha imparato per gradi, una tappa dopo l'altra, durante la lotta…”

Origine: Da un reportage di Georges Simenon, 1933; citato in Simenon: «Scusi Trotskij, permette tre domande?» https://web.archive.org/web/20160101000000/http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2003/novembre/28/Simenon_Scusi_Trotskij_permette_tre_co_0_031128057.shtml, Corriere della Sera, 28 novembre 2003.

“La fede senza lavoro è morta.”

Origine: Citato in Max Eastman, Il giovane Trotsky (1925), traduzione di Roberto Cruciani, Massari, 2006, p. 64. ISBN 8845702316

“La rivoluzione socialista comincia su basi nazionali, ma non può restare circoscritta entro questi confini.”

citato in "Prima di morire – Appunti e note di lettura", Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1998

“L'idea umanitaria moraleggiante è la più sterile di fronte al processo della storia.”

citato in Focus n. 110, p. 175
Citazioni di Lev Trotsky

“Dobbiamo porre fine una volta per tutte ai vaneggiamenti quacchero-papisti sulla santità della vita umana.”

Origine: Citato in AA.VV., Il libro della politica, traduzione di Sonia Sferzi, Gribaudo, 2018, p. 244. ISBN 9788858019429

Lev Trotsky: Frasi in inglese

“Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

Trotsky's Testament (1940)
Contesto: Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

“Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality.”

Origine: In Defense of Marxism (1942), p. 66
Contesto: Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality.

“An ally has to be watched just like an enemy.”

As quoted in Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-67 (1974) by Adam Bruno Ulam

“I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.”

Trotsky's Testament (1940)
Contesto: For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

“I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed by their own laws. Mere impatience will not expedite their change.”

Leon Trotsky libro My Life

Foreword
My Life (1930)
Contesto: I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed by their own laws. Mere impatience will not expedite their change. I have grown accustomed to viewing the historical perspective not from the stand point of my personal fate. To understand the causal sequence of events and to find somewhere in the sequence one's own place – that is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, it is the greatest personal satisfaction possible for a man who does not limit his tasks to the present day.

“No, the Soviet woman is not yet free.”

Leon Trotsky libro The Revolution Betrayed

Origine: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Ch. 7,
Contesto: No, the Soviet woman is not yet free. Complete equality before the law has so far given infinitely more to the women of the upper strata, representatives of bureaucratic, technical, pedagogical and, in general, intellectual work, than to the working women and yet more the peasant women. So long as society is incapable of taking upon itself the material concern for the family, the mother can successfully fulfill a social function only on the condition that she has in her service a white slave: nurse, servant, cook, etx.

“I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one's personal fate.”

Leon Trotsky libro My Life

Ch. 45 : The Planet without a Visa http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch45.htm
My Life (1930)
Contesto: I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one's personal fate. On the contrary, I appraise my fate objectively and live it subjectively, only as it is inextricably bound up with the course of social development.
Since my exile, I have more than once read musings in the newspapers on the subject of the "tragedy" that has befallen me. I know no personal tragedy. I know the change of two chapters of the revolution. One American paper which published an article of mine accompanied it with a profound note to the effect that in spite of the blows the author had suffered, he had, as evidenced by his article, preserved his clarity of reason. I can only express my astonishment at the philistine attempt to establish a connection between the power of reasoning and a government post, between mental balance and the present situation. I do not know, and I never have, of any such connection. In prison, with a book or a pen in my hand, I experienced the same sense of deep satisfaction that I did at the mass-meetings of the revolution. I felt the mechanics of power as an inescapable burden, rather than as a spiritual satisfaction.

“I felt the mechanics of power as an inescapable burden, rather than as a spiritual satisfaction.”

Leon Trotsky libro My Life

Ch. 45 : The Planet without a Visa http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch45.htm
My Life (1930)
Contesto: I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one's personal fate. On the contrary, I appraise my fate objectively and live it subjectively, only as it is inextricably bound up with the course of social development.
Since my exile, I have more than once read musings in the newspapers on the subject of the "tragedy" that has befallen me. I know no personal tragedy. I know the change of two chapters of the revolution. One American paper which published an article of mine accompanied it with a profound note to the effect that in spite of the blows the author had suffered, he had, as evidenced by his article, preserved his clarity of reason. I can only express my astonishment at the philistine attempt to establish a connection between the power of reasoning and a government post, between mental balance and the present situation. I do not know, and I never have, of any such connection. In prison, with a book or a pen in my hand, I experienced the same sense of deep satisfaction that I did at the mass-meetings of the revolution. I felt the mechanics of power as an inescapable burden, rather than as a spiritual satisfaction.

“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains”

Their Morals and Ours (1938)
Contesto: (On the American Civil War) "History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"

“Life in the future will not be monotonous.”

Literature and Marxism(1924)
Contesto: Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected. Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples' palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy, and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will be burst open and again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous.

“Every oppositionist becomes ipso facto a terrorist.”

Statement from interview with New York Evening Journal, January 26, 1937. Quote from Harpal Brar's Trotskyism or Leninism? p. 625.
Contesto: Inside the Party, Stalin has put himself above all criticism and the State. It is impossible to displace him except by assassination. Every oppositionist becomes ipso facto a terrorist.

“If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature? Of course no one speaks about an exact mirror. No one even thinks of asking the new literature to have mirror-like impassivity. The deeper literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to "picture" life.”

Leon Trotsky libro Literature and Revolution

Literature and Revolution (1924), edited by William Keach (2005), Ch. 4 : Futurism, p. 120
Variants:
Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Remarks apparently derived from Trotsky's observations, or those he implies preceded his own, this is attributed to Bertolt Brecht in Paulo Freire : A Critical Encounter (1993) by Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, p. 80, and to Vladimir Mayakovsky in The Political Psyche (1993) by Andrew Samuels, p. 9
Art is not a mirror held up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Contesto: Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. But at present even the handling of a hammer is taught with the help of a mirror, a sensitive film that records all the movements. Photography and motion-picture photography, owing to their passive accuracy of depiction, are becoming important educational instruments in the field of labor. If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature? Of course no one speaks about an exact mirror. No one even thinks of asking the new literature to have mirror-like impassivity. The deeper literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to "picture" life.

“A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified”

Origine: Their Morals and Ours (1938)
Contesto: A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified, From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.

“Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.”

Leon Trotsky libro Literature and Revolution

Origine: Literature and Revolution (1924)

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