Trotsky was a fairweather comrade who became a wrecker when he lost popularity. Wreckers, especially ones who are “men of letters” and have an excellent rhetorical “in” like being a veteran of the revolution should not be dealt with as lightly as with exile. Either you re-educate them (this is most preferable), you leave them to rot in jail, or you kill them. Exile, even “internal exile”, is leaving them as a serious liability for counter revolutionary agitation.
Stalin did have Trotsky killed though, eventually. I just feel like you’re looking back with the benefit of hindsight and seeing things, not necessarily with Trotsky specifically, but generally being like, “The problem is they let bad people come to power instead of good people,” and that’s not a valid criticism if it’s something that you can only see in hindsight. Did Stalin let people he thought were reactionary/revisionist hang around? If so, why, if not, then was Stalin’s method of determining who was bad flawed, and in what way? You can’t just say “these people shouldn’t have come to power” you have to look at why they came to power and how they could have been identified and prevented.
Trotsky lived for a decade in exile when the exile was over basically the issues I outline, and later on Stalin and Co. did have people killed for roughly the same crimes Trotsky committed and was exiled for (indicating that they learned from the mistake).
That’s the point. He did basically what you said he should do. It’s like you’re saying, “I agree with his decisions, I just don’t agree with the outcomes they led too.” I don’t have any information on when precisely Stalin decided he wanted Trotsky dead, but you can’t just assume that he can write his name in a death note and have him drop immediately, and if one guy surviving ten years in a foreign country can destroy an entire revolutionary project just by writing then tbh it seems like the whole thing was doomed from the start. You can’t predict every such case, it’s not a valid criticism.
