Chomsky and Trotsky

Trotsky was the one who laboured to destroy and undermine the popular organizations of workers in the Soviet Union, the factory councils and soviets, [and he was the one] who wanted to subordinate the working class to the will of the maximum leader and to institute a program of militarization of labor in the totalitarian society that he and Lenin were constructing. That was the real Trotsky – not only the Trotsky who sent his troops to Kronstadt and wiped out Makhno’s peasant forces once they were no longer needed to fend off the Whites, but the Trotsky who, from the very first moment of access to power, moved to undermine popular organizations and to institute highly coercive structures in which he and his associates would have absolute authority, with absolute submission of the working population to these leaders. That was the essential doctrine of Trotskyism in power, whatever he may have said before or after.
- from interview in The Chomsky Reader, p41, Pantheon Books 1987.

PS Most of my life I’ve seen Trotsky as the revolutionary hero of the 1917 revolution contrasted with the betrayer and villain, Stalin. No doubt this mainly derives from Animal Farm. Chomsky's pithy critique changes my view.