ON THIS DAY · 17 JANUARY 1928

Trotsky’s exile to Alma-Ata

17 Jan 1928 — Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army, is carried by OGPU agents onto a train and sent to Alma-Ata, more than 3,000 km from Moscow. He kept writing to his supporters from Kazakhstan until the regime decided that even this exile was too close.

The moment in context

Stalin’s rise depended first on surviving a warning from Lenin himself, and the way the leaders handled it shows how the party already worked. In December 1922 and January 1923, partly paralysed by strokes, Lenin dictated notes later called his Testament. He wrote that Stalin had concentrated “unlimited authority” in his hands, and in a postscript of 4 January 1923 he called him “too rude” and proposed removing him as General Secretary, the head of the party’s administrative office, much like a chief of staff. The quarrel behind the postscript was the Georgian Affair, marked on the map at Tiflis, where Stalin and his ally Sergo Ordzhonikidze had bullied Georgian communists into a federation with Armenia and Azerbaijan. When the notes were read to delegation leaders at the Thirteenth Congress, the party’s national gathering, in May 1924, Zinoviev and Kamenev argued that Stalin should stay, because they needed him against Trotsky. The men best placed to stop Stalin chose to shield him, and the text stayed unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1956.

From Stalin’s rise to power, chapter 1 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953 (1928).

The place: Trotsky’s exile to Alma-Ata — map and full story →

The atlas that shows it

The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953

12 CHAPTERS · AN INTERACTIVE SITUATION MAP