Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky appears not through a sustained personal storyline but as a figure whose influence crosses borders. The book sets his construction of the Red Army against the faltering Italian left: in Russia, revolution has acquired an army and a reach across multiple fronts; in Italy, socialist and communist organizations struggle to defend their institutions, agree on a common strategy, and withstand fascism. Trotsky’s importance lies both in what he organizes and in the political distinction he insists Italians must understand.

The organizer of the Red Army

Before the Russian Revolution, Trotsky is described as a man of letters nicknamed “Pen.” The narrative makes the contrast between that reputation and his later role explicit: he leaves his desk and, in a matter of months, organizes the Red Army. The transformation is not presented as a private change of character so much as a historical reversal, in which an intellectual becomes the organizer of armed revolutionary power.

The scale of that achievement is measured in several ways. In the account of 1919, the Red Army has been assembled from nothing in less than a year, and its example is said to have changed how war can be conceived. Rather than treating conflict as confined to a single battlefield, the narrative describes a fluid, planetary war, extending across vast spaces and linked to the idea of universal brotherhood. By late 1922, it describes the army as the largest popular army in history: millions of armed workers and peasants, formed during four years of bloody civil war and fighting on two continents and dozens of fronts. These details give Trotsky a reach beyond the battlefield; his work becomes a demonstration of the scale on which revolutionary politics can organize itself.

A distant measure of Italian weakness

Trotsky’s military achievement first enters the Italian story as an unfavorable comparison. As Benito Mussolini waits for organizers to open the Fascist section on Via Monte di Pietà, the narrative contrasts his small movement with Trotsky’s rapidly assembled army. Mussolini has not managed to arrange shifts of squads to defend his newspaper, and the paper is losing circulation; Trotsky, by contrast, has built a force of immense size. The contrast does not make the two situations identical. It makes the difference in organization and momentum impossible to overlook.

The same comparison broadens in July 1919, when the red flag is described as already triumphant in Russia and flying on at least sixteen fronts, from Vilnius to Samara and Vladivostok. The account also points to the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic under Béla Kun and to a sea of red flags in Milan during the workers’ strike. These events do not establish Trotsky’s presence in Hungary or Italy. Instead, his Red Army supplies the measure by which the narrative sets revolutionary possibility abroad against the unsettled Italian scene. In Milan, the workers await Nicola Bombacci; in Russia, the example associated with Trotsky is already that of mass organization on a continental scale.

The argument over a united front

Trotsky’s other major role is strategic. At the end of October 1922, he is in Moscow as the Italian Communist delegation arrives for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. The Italian Communist Party has split from the Socialist Party and then divided internally. Its minority wing, led by Angelo Tasca, favors meeting with the socialists; the majority, led by Amadeo Bordiga, opposes a “unified front.” Russian Bolsheviks press for a merger or common bloc capable of opposing fascism with the wider proletariat, while Bordiga resists.

The disagreement is not merely over organizational arrangements. Bordiga treats democracy and fascism as expressions of the same capitalist counterrevolution, and therefore sees little strategic difference in the fascists taking power. Trotsky, as the book presents his intervention, insists instead on the distinctive character of Italian fascism: its unprecedented mobilization of the petite bourgeoisie against the proletariat. Bordiga remains deaf to that distinction. The narrative thus assigns Trotsky the role of warning that political forms which may share a class basis can still differ in their methods and immediate dangers. His advocacy of a united front follows from that analysis: effective opposition requires recognizing fascism as a particular force, not collapsing it into a category already understood.

Defeat, hierarchy, and narrative significance

Nicola Bombacci is aligned with Moscow and supports restoring a united front. At an earlier party congress in Rome, he had openly opposed the abstract purism of Bordiga’s faction, which sought to avoid contamination with the socialists. The outcome for Bombacci is isolation, mistrust, and removal from the party’s central committee; he writes to Grigori Zinoviev that he has suffered a “political assassination.” Trotsky’s position is part of the larger argument Bombacci shares, but the account does not turn their association into a personal alliance or describe a private exchange between them.

By the time the Italian delegation reaches Russia, the book juxtaposes the ascendancy of the Russian communists with the retreats of their Western counterparts. The Bolsheviks are approaching the foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, while Italian communists arrive after defeat by fascists, division from the socialists, and a further internal split. Trotsky’s achievement gives that imbalance a concrete form: millions organized into an army stand opposite Italian factions unable to agree on a common political response. Within the Communist International, Russian hegemony looms; the defeated Western parties can do little more than support the Russians’ advance from a position of weakness.

Trotsky therefore functions as both organizer and political diagnostician. The army associated with his name makes revolutionary capacity visible, while his insistence on fascism’s distinctive mobilization challenges the Italian communists’ tendency to treat democracy and fascism as interchangeable. The book does not resolve the strategic dispute through a scene of debate with him. Instead, it lets the dispute and the difference in historical fortunes carry his significance: the man once called “Pen” stands at the center of a Russian revolution able to organize power, while Italian communists argue over how to understand a movement that is defeating them.