Josh Ireland

A key organiser.

You can't imagine that revolution without Trotsky, I don't think.

And obviously, this will all be rewritten later because for Stalin, the idea that Trotsky could ever have played a positive role.

And what's sort of weird is it's quite a bloodless coup.

Yeah, bizarre.

I mean, their instinct is right, that actually this is a sort of house of cards that you just need to give a tiny push to.

And suddenly everyone wakes up and this has happened, that there is this group of, in the eyes of many, maniacs who are in charge of the country.

Yeah.

Exactly.

That's a really good way of putting it.

And then it's only later that there's a sort of belated reaction to it.

And this is sort of Trotsky's second great moment.

So Russia descends into an absurdly brutal civil war.

It's the kind of thing... It's a kind of...

real prefiguring of the sort of bloodiness and the viciousness and the brutality that will follow later in the 20th century.

It's the kind of war where prisoners are being skinned alive, where people are being boiled to death, where there are massacres, and it's terrible and it's vicious.

And for a while it looks as if the counter-revolutionary forces, who are known as the white armies,

are going to seize power again, that the Bolsheviks are going to fall.

And this is where Trotsky is appointed leader of the Red Army.

Hang on, he's got no military experience.