If you could eliminate one person from history...who would it be?

[LooseWilly]

391. Are you arguing that the White Army "civil war", funded and supported by external powers...

wasn't pressure from external states?... and also that it didn't force anti-democratic measures upon the Bolsheviks in order to successfully fight a war against counter-revolutionaries?

Are you sure your nose isn't just out-of-joint because they won? (Maybe that's why you would eliminate Lenin?... Hoping to have the White Army and their US & UK financiers and arms suppliers win control of the USSR?)

The only path I can imagine by which Trotsky (who was a classic fence-straddler and probably couldn't've actually won enough support to achieve leadership in his own right, but instead found his true "glory" in the skill with which he played Menshevik factions against Bolshevik factions in order to heighten & prolong tensions so that he could lead his fellow fence-straddlers into a position of importance simply as a minority who could swing a "majority" either way, by hopping the "fence" one way or the other, as opportunity/opportunism permitted) could have... even had he somehow reached a leadership position amongst the Bolsheviks... avoided the (US & UK financed & backed) "civil war" (and numerous opportunistic incursions/invasions) would have been by... cooperating with the "opposition" forces (i.e. capitulation, large or small, to the Western Imperialist Powers that didn't want communism/socialism to achieve any hint of legitimacy, and didn't want to lose the opportunity to exploit rich Russian Empire resources).

Trotsky would have essentially had to have agreed with the capitalist powers to half-ass the socialism of the USSR ... much like Andrew Johnson agreed with the Ex-Confederacy to half-ass Reconstruction (making the product of the October Revolution as hollow a victory for workers as Emancipation was a hollow victory for African Americans facing Jim Crow). There is simply no other way for the "civil war" not to have happened.

The absurdity of your argument on this point is almost laughable... because, had such an agreement been made, there would have been NO WAY that the worker enthusiasm for the Five-Year Plans could have been mustered to industrialize the USSR enough to face the Nazi onslaught. The sufferings of the "civil war" were endured in the face of attacks by dispossessed kulaks, often armed by foreigners... and the results of those first few Five-Year Plans show an enthusiasm by the population that shows that these were not "popular" forces fighting an oppressive government to liberate the people... they were opportunists struggling in the face of potential loss of their old privileges (which would, presumably, have been restored under a capitalist, pro-UK/US governmental body).

It wasn't the "civil war" (or fights against foreign aggressions and opportunistic sponsoring of local dissidents, as I would call it) and consequent "depleting its resources" that most threatened the USSR... it was the inherent backwardness of a completely non-industrialized serf-state that had been inherited from the Tsars, who had no interest in industrialization since their lives were just fine without it.

And it was that nation of serfs and illiterates that Hitler expected to roll like a hick fresh off the turnip truck in downtown Berlin.

I'm not sure what "imperialism into the Eastern Bloc" you are referring to, nor which "imperialistic trade deals with the west" you mean... when you make these sorts of assertions you should really attach at least a hint of detail, so your readers have at least a starting place for assessing what you're saying.

Trotsky's "idealism" in the face of measures taken in the face of "civil war" (incursions by forces of and proxies of imperialist powers from abroad) is rather admirable... but wasn't liable to prepare the country even to face those incursions... let alone the Nazi incursion to come.

Or... are you arguing that Trotsky would've made so many concessions to the West that the likes of Chamberlain wouldn't've considered "egging Hitler on" with appeasements like the "gifting" of Czechoslovakia... in order to "entice" Hitler east... and try to "manipulate" him into attacking the USSR for them, in an attempt to use Hitler just as the UK (& US) had previously used the "White Army"?

Because that seems to be the only way your argument for the elimination of Lenin being a good thing makes sense... if you just don't want socialism to ever be really tried... but instead only "fence-straddler" tried (while waiting indefinitely on the results of the permanent revolution's scorecard among workers abroad).

You know, tried in a way that is palatable to UK & US industrialists and financiers... because, really... only with their blessings, can the world be made... better?