Trotsky remained a persona non grata within throughout the various post-Stalin regimes. It was not until the Glasnost period that Trotsky made a qualified return within Soviet discourse. He was no longer as demonized within the Soviet press as in prior periods, but the Soviet leadership was still quite cool to the murdered ideologue. A 8 November 1987 NYT article quoted Gorbachev who disparaged Trotsky on the seventieth anniversary of the USSR noting that

after Lenin's death, [Trotsky] displayed excessive pretensions to top leadership in the party, thus fully confirming Lenin's opinion of him as an excessively self-assured politician who always vacillated and cheated.

While being a vacillator and cheater was hardly praise, Gorbachev's dismissal of Trotsky was lighter than previous statements on Trotsky made by Soviet mouthpieces. The 1979 entry for Trotskyism in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia dismissed the man and his followers contending that:

The existence of Trotskyism and its periodic activation in individual countries are traceable to various causes, among which are the following: the attraction into the revolutionary movement of large numbers of petit-bourgeois-minded and politically inexperienced intellectuals, students, peasants, and craftsmen, who easily fall under the influence of the “ultrarevolutionary” slogans of the Trotskyists; the antirevolutionary activity of “left-wing” and right-wing revisionists, whose views and actions often coincide with those of the Trotskyists; and the use and support of Trotskyism by forces of anticommunism and imperialism, which find in Trotskyism an ally in the struggle against Marxism-Leninism.

Trotsky and Trostkyism were absent from the rehabilitation process that followed in the wake of Khrushchev's secret speech and the Thaw.

The reason for this continued antipathy to Trotsky was not that he was one of Stalin's chief rivals but that Trotsky represented a systematic critique of the very structure of the USSR. Trotskyism generally held that the Stalin turn was a move to a hegemonic ascendancy of the bureaucracy that stifled any revolutionary sentiment. Trotsky himself would critique the Five Year Plan and other elements of the Soviet command economy as emblematic of this process. Although Khrushchev denounced the excesses of Stalin's personality cult and the purges, he held that the 5YPs and Stalin's forced industrialization were essential developments of the Soviet state. Moreover, Trotsky and Trotskyites also likened the Stalin-era USSR to being functionally no different than the Fascism of Hitler. The German Marxist emigre Otto Rühle would maintain in works like "The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism" that Stalin's state was simply "Red Fascism." Trotsky also critiqued Stalin's responses to the rise of fascism his perch abroad noting in various pamphlets that Stalinism's pernicious influence on the Comintern and various Communist parties allowed fascism to capture various states. This was a narrative that was anathema to any Soviet government after 1941 when the Great Patriotic War displaced 1917 as the central legitimizing plank for the Soviet state. Trotskyite critiques of the 5YPs, the questionable directions given to the Comintern, attacks on the advent of "National Bolshevism," or any hint that the USSR abetted the rise of Fascism was not welcome within the Soviet Union even without Stalin. Rehabilitating Trotsky would have meant having to reconsider his critiques of Soviet state-building and diplomatic policies of the 1930s. That would have been a rehabilitation too far for the post-Stalin Soviet establishment.

Another element making a rehabilitation of Trotsky a dead letter was that Trotsky claimed he was the intellectual and political heir to Lenin. The cult of personality surrounding Lenin remained another of the consistent features of Soviet political life through successive regimes. Khrushchev would claim that the Thaw and friendly competition with the West was congruent with Leninism while the neo-Stalinist turn of Brezhnev also emphasized its Leninist roots. Gorbachev's sold his broader reform platform as recapturing the spirit of Lenin and the ideals of 1917. Acknowledging Trotsky threatened to undermine this connection to the founder of the Soviet state because it implied a political road not taken in the great Soviet experiment.

There was also a Cold War-dimension to the Soviet state's hostility to Trotsky and Trotskyism. American and other anticommunists soon realized the power of this dissident and his ideas. The geopolitical rivalry of the Cold War made for strange bedfellows, but various anticommunist groups did act as silent promoters of Trotskyism. George Orwell's novels Animal Farm and 1984, both of which featured characters who were thinly-veiled representations of Trotsky, benefited from this anticommunist largess. The CIA provided funding via fronts of film versions of both Animal Farm and 1984 and even pressured for a change the end of the latter film where Winston defiantly chants "Down with Big Brother," rather than giving in. This support for Trotskyism was not generous or ideologically motivated, but thought to be tactically useful in the Cold War as Trotskyism would divide domestic Communist parties and undermine the pretensions of the CPSU in the USSR. Anticommunist literature like the hyperbolic comic book This Godless Communism ignored Trotsky's ideas and portrayed him as a martyr to a Soviet dictatorship that was loyal to no one.

The closest Trotsky came to a rehabilitation was during the heady days of Glasnost and Perestroika where there was a tacit admission that Trotsky's warnings of an overly bureaucratic state had some validity. Yet not even Gorbachev made the leap to embracing the man. It was only in 1989 that the Soviet press first acknowledged that the Soviet government was behind Trotsky's assassination. Some Soviet historians of 1917 likewise began to approach Trotsky's role in events with a more sympathetic tone. This was though very much an exception rather than the rule and there was still a widespread sentiment within Soviet discourse that Trotsky was at best a preening egotist or, worse, a Judas to the Soviet state and this sentiment remained until the collapse of the USSR.