Editing Leon Trotsky (section)

=== Trotsky's contribution to the Russian Revolution ===
[[File:Leon Trotsky as the October Revolution Guard.jpg|thumb|upright=.7|Trotsky, the [[People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs]], as the Guard of the [[October Revolution]], 14 May 1923]]
Historian Vladimir Cherniaev sums up Trotsky's main contributions:
{{Blockquote|Trotsky bears a great deal of responsibility both for the victory of the Red Army in the civil war, and for the establishment of a one-party authoritarian state with its apparatus for ruthlessly suppressing dissent... He was an ideologist and practitioner of the Red Terror. He despised "bourgeois democracy"; he believed that spinelessness and soft-heartedness would destroy the revolution, and that the suppression of the propertied classes and political opponents would clear the historical arena for socialism. He was the initiator of concentration camps, compulsory "labour camps", and the militarization of labour, and the state takeover of trade unions. Trotsky was implicated in many practices which would become standard in the Stalin era, including [[summary execution]]s.<ref name="auto2">V. I͡U. Cherni͡aev, "Trotsky" in {{cite book|editor1-first=Edward |editor1-last=Acton |editor2-first=Vladimir I͡u. |editor2-last=Cherni͡aev |editor3-first=William G. |editor3-last=Rosenberg|title=Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NAZm2EdxKqkC&pg=PA191|year=1997|publisher=Indiana University Press|page=191|isbn=978-0-253-33333-9}}</ref>}}
Historian Geoffrey Swain argues:
{{Blockquote|The Bolsheviks triumphed in the Civil War because of Trotsky's ability to work with military specialists, because of the style of work he introduced where widescale consultation was followed through by swift and determined action.{{sfn|Swain|2014a|p=210}}}}
Lenin said in 1921 that Trotsky was "in love with organisation," but in working politics, "he has not got a clue." Swain explains this by arguing Trotsky was not good at teamwork, being a loner who had mostly worked as a journalist, not a professional revolutionary like others.{{sfn|Swain|2014a|p=211}}