"" The Last Romantic of the Revolution "? - Leon Trotsky against Stalin and Hitler" report by Leonid Luks

On April 12, 2019, within the framework of the seminar "West and East: Universalism of Culture" of the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue, the academic supervisor of the Laboratory, Professor at the Catholic University (Eichstätt) L. Luks gave a report.

The report was dedicated to Trotsky's controversy with the official line of the Comintern in the early thirties, as well as his analysis of fascism and national socialism.Trotsky’s persistent struggle against Stalin, which Lenin’s former comrade-in-arms had led since 1929 until his death in 1940, is not typical of Bolshevism of that time. The expulsion from the USSR, which Trotsky experienced so hard, ultimately turned out to be a gift of fate, since an effective struggle against the new despotism was possible only from abroad. But not only Stalin’s domestic policy, but his foreign policy, which was detrimental to the European labor movement, could, after 1929, be essentially criticized only from emigration. This is especially true of the absurd concept of "social fascism" that triumphed in the Comintern definitively in 1929, almost on the eve of the seizure of power by the Nazis. Among the few communists who openly fought against the identification of social democracy with fascism and warned against the catastrophic consequences of such tactics, was first of all Trotsky. You can blame Trotsky for anything, but not that he underestimated the Nazi threat.

The event was managed by the head of the Laboratory - V.K. Kantor.