Such fears would have been stoked by his support, in 1921, for the militarisation of labour (in effect placing the workers under his personal direct command). This faction was aided by the fear that Trotsky as commander of the Red Army (with a predilection for being seen in public in dashing military uniforms) could assume the role of a military dictator.

As Trotsky’s hagiographer Isaac Deutscher points out in his The Prophet Armed, Stalin began his dominance of the Soviet government as part of “a special faction the sole purpose of which was to prevent Trotsky having a majority which would enable him to take Lenin’s place.” Trotsky himself can be seen as being one of the main causes of Stalin’s ascendancy. Despite presenting themselves as mortal enemies, the camp followers of Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin were competing government management teams operating under the same basic philosophy – that the workers could not, as a whole, come to socialist consciousness and bring socialism about for themselves.