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The dismissal of Trotsky is the climax of a long struggle in the Russian Communist party the ruling and indeed the only open party in Russia. The old guard of the Bolshevik leaders whom Trotsky has assailed on points of policy has won, iron discipline has been enforced and the heretic, important as he is, cast out.

The story goes back some time. Trotsky has never been one of the straitest sect of Bolsheviks. In the days of violent theoretical discussion about tactics between 1905 and the first revolution of 1917 he was often opposed to the formulae of Lenin and Bolsheviks, and he only joined them in 1917 after he had made an abortive effort to bring about a working arrangement between them and the other Marxian sect of the Mensheviks.

His part in the October revolution, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, his achievements as War Minister, his brilliant oratory and inexhaustible energy gave him a position in the party second only to that of Lenin. But during the first years of the Soviet Government he was frequently in a minority, notably on the rejection of his plan for Sovietising of the trade unions and fusing them with the State and his plans for the militarisation of labour. He was an early supporter of the New Economic Policy, which marked the end of Communism and the transition to freer trading, and if he had had his way he would have extended it farther and given more authority to bourgeois specialists.

Beginning of the disputeThe present storm broke out first in the autumn of 1923. An economic crisis was threatened, and Trotsky and some of his colleagues put before the Central Committee of the Communist party a programme of party policy. It sought to discredit the autocratic bureaucracy which controlled the party and to give scope for the toleration within it of groups of varying opinion. It sought also to bring in young members and to make the young students the barometer by which the party should be guided.

On the economic side the party was criticised for not going far enough towards meeting foreign capitalism. The discussions on the programme went on with great vigour. Trotsky, in a famous open letter, warned the Party of the danger of losing the revolutionary spirit through the ossification of the old guard leaders. The only way of meeting this danger, he said, is to make a serious, thorough, and radical change in the direction of democratisation of the party, and to bring into the party an influx of factory workers and youth.

The old guard deemed Trotsky and his friends as working against all the canons of Bolshevism, with seeking to break up the orthodox idea of the party as a monolithic whole, and with that greatest of all sins a petty bourgeois deviation in policy. The Oppositionists, as they were called, met with a smashing blow. Most of them were scattered or recanted. Even Trotsky himself seems to have submitted to the party.

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Leon Trotsky dismissed from the Russian Communist party archive, 1925 - The Guardian