However, Trotsky learned from his mistakes. He showed considerable organising skills in the civil war when he created the Red Army. He was distrusted and disliked by many in the group, but looked like the most obvious successor to Lenin, at the time.
Trotsky was not a people person, as he once famously quoted "nature and individuals occupied a lesser place then books and ideas…people passed through my mind like shadows." He was also a very arrogant man, who was very narrow minded, looking at many people as if they were his inferiors. This made him very unpopular with the other party leaders. He underestimated others too; in this case Stalin was one fatal mistake and error. His defect was shared by other revolutionaries in the Mensheviks such as Zinoviev, Kaminev and Bukharin who also had his interest in political arguments. Out of all the Mensheviks in the party, Trotsky was probably the most widely known.
Stalin was born in 1879 into a working class family in Georgia. His real name was Joseph Djugashvili; he only used Stalin as a sort of alias name in pre-revolutionary Russia. His mother, a nun in a local church devoted all her time and money into Joseph's development. She had lost other children in their infancy, making him very special to her. His father, a blacksmith and a drunk would beat Joseph. Once beating him so badly and severely on his left arm, that the wound never recovered leaving him with a hard defect. Stalin was very intelligent. When kids his age were starting to improve their Georgian language, he was writing and reading it. In fact, he wasn't allowed to study Georgian at school, so was forced to learn Russian also.
Through the devout of his mother, he began to train priesthood in an orthodox seminary in Georgia, where he was caught many times showing more interst in political rather then theological ideas. Not long after that, he was expelled from the seminary in 1899 due to his involvement in the resistance against Tsarist control. Joseph later on was drawn to the Social Democratic workers party. When the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, Joseph organised the Bolsheviks. The party needed funds so Joseph, with a few other men, was involved in a number of bank and train robberies. For these actions he was arrested many times and was sent into exile to Siberia.
After the revolution in 1917, Stalin was allowed back into Russia where his reputation was well known and drew him very close to Lenin. Lenin was very impressed with Stalin's abilities and in 1918 Lenin had promoted Stalin to become one of the six members of the central committee. After the civil war following the Bolshevik seizure of power, Stalin was given the job of Commissar of Nationalities. This position enabled Stalin to exercise military authority and led him into a number of disputes with Trotsky, that time the Commissar of War. Stalin later was promoted to general secretary of the party by Lenin. We know that Lenin regretted very deeply doing that as he so wrote in his testament. He said that Stalin had concentrated too much power into his own hands. After Lenin died following a series of strokes in Jan 1924 no one talked about the removal of Joseph Stalin from power.
Main differences
The two men, roughly the same age, had different backgrounds and lifestyles. Trotsky on the one hand was born into a rich lifestyle with good education and studied Maths at university for a year, while Stalin on the other was from a poor family and studied only at school until the age of about 14-15. They were both intelligent men, ruthless men. They both believed in a Socialist Revolution. They were both good at editing newspapers and writing, and both showed abilities of oratory, Stalin more the Trostky. But what set them apart was that Trotsky was the more intellectual of the two and held more of the theories and speculations. This attracted him to Lenin very early on. Stalin on the other hand, cold connect with the proletariat class more as he himself was one and understood them better.
Trotsky also had two other big disadvantages which proved quite serious in judging the power given after Lenin. First of all, He was very arrogant and narrow minded. Fellow members of the party disliked and distrusted him for this. Stalin was able to outmanoeuvre and outwit Trotsky when he joined sides with some members of the left to get rid of him. Secondly, Trotsky had a Jewish background, which didn't do him any favours in a country with a lot of anti-Semitism.
Stalin was able to skilfully work with Trotsky's drawbacks and together with his own political genius laid the ground work for him becoming Dictator. Weber suppressed