“The leader and figurehead of the opposition and main target of vilification was Leon Trotsky. Serge left Vienna and sped to join the struggle for the soul of the revolution. Discussion, not to speak of opposition, was stifled. Votes were formalities, forced through by the newly created majority – the Lenin levy, 250,000 new recruits to the party who owed everything to the party apparatus. Poets, worker militants and intellectuals were committing suicide from despair. The other side of repression was corruption. By the winter of […]