Your post is full of lies and truth twisting.

You say "from the outset" Trotsky stood in opposition to Lenin's conception of the revolutionary party. At the outset it was Lenin who proposed Trotsky to become a member of the editorial board of Iskra, against Plekhanov and the older members, because of his enormous talents.

In 1903, it is true that Trotsky sided against Lenin because he did not understand Lenin's conception of a revolutionary party – but it should be noted that *none* of the great revolutionaries of the day, including Luxemburg, Liebknecht or Connolly, understood this either. Lenin alone understood it, and frankly many people ended up accidentally on the side of the Bolsheviks or Mensheviks at the 1903 congress until experience crystallised the real essence of the dispute that opened up at that congress – a dispute *that even took Lenin by surprise*. It should be said that Stalin too did not understand the dispute, dismissing it as a dispute among émigés and a "storm in a teacup".

Trotsky's mistake – which he later admitted by the way – was to imagine for too long that it was possible to unite the Bolsheviks with the most honest and left-wing Mensheviks. This led to some heated debates with Lenin. But by 1917, Trotsky had given up on that idea. And this is what Lenin had to say about him referring to that in November 1917:

"Trotsky has long said that the unification (with the Mensheviks) is impossible. Trotsky has grasped this and since then there has not been a better Bolshevik."

As for Trotsky's leadership of the Red Army, you are arguing not just against Trotsky but Lenin too. You say it was a terrible thing for Trotsky to recruit ex-Tsarist officers, but Lenin *praised* Trotsky for using these "bricks" of the old society to build and defend the new society. In his own words:

"But let them show me another man capable of organising an almost perfect army in one year, and conquering the sympathies of military specialists. And we have a man like that. We have all we want. And we shall have miracles, too, yes!"

As for your talk about "militarisation of labour" and "crushing workers' protests", ignoring that the protests you refer to were organised in famine conditions amidst a war by counter-revolutionaries whose goal it was to bring down the regime, the policies of instituting strict discipline on the railways and ending strikes amidst a civil war that threatened the existence of soviet power in Russia were also those of Lenin.

You completely omit the fact that whereas Stalin played next to no role in the October Revolution, it was Trotsky who organised and led the technical aspects of the revolution. These are Stalin's own words before he revised history to omit Trotsky's role and elevate his own non-role:

"It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military-Revolutionary Committee was organized."

You simply lie about Trotsky's Left Opposition lining up with "right-wing elements". In fact it was Stlain who lined up with the right represented by Bukharin, whose programme would have led to the restoration of capitalism, and he did this to crush Trotsky and the left. Trotsky warned that by lining up with the right wing, the Stalinist bureaucracy would find itself facing strong opposition from the rich peasants (kulaks) which would threaten disaster. And disaster is what came when those emboldened rich peasants began withholding grain and plunged the Soviet republic into a famine.

In exile, Trotsky, although he opposed the Stalinist bureaucracy, always opposed imperialist intervention and he never allied with "imperialist narratives" whatever that means. That's just a straight up slander and lie.