No, the peasantry were not "cowed by fear," this is ahistorical. Here's an excerpt from This Soviet World, written by journalist Anna Louise Strong in 1936:

Among the many flaming words which poured from the hearts of two hundred combined-harvester operators meeting in December 1935 in Moscow with the heads of Party and government, amid jubilation over present success and promises to make the future even more victorious, there was one poignant phrase of contrast with the past.

“We sons and daughters of peasants—had there been no Soviet power, no Party of Lenin-Stalin, our lot would have been slavery to kulaks, or dawnless poverty in the mire of small peasant farming.”

These words illumine with a piercing ray the tremendous changes that have taken place in the Soviet rural districts in a span of years so brief that the past still remains vivid in the minds of men not yet thirty years old. “When I worked as a fourteen-year-old farmhand under the tsar,” said the combine operator Kapusta, “I never saw the leaders of the government, never saw even the boss for whom I worked. . . . I never expected from life such happiness, such joy.”

Five years ago Kapusta was an unskilled worker. But not Kapusta alone; so were they all. What else but unskilled workers were there on the backward individual farms of peasant Russia, where fifteen years ago the tractor was stoned as a “devil machine?” Even five years ago, who among Russian peasants had ever seen a combine-harvester? Today not only are millions of peasants acquainted by sight with the most modern farm machinery, but hundreds of thousands have mastered its operation and make a more continuous use of it than is possible on the private farms of America, which are too small to utilize profitably this modern machine. The combine is already a machine too good for capitalism. The American average harvesting record per combine is 578 acres, while the Soviet average secured in 1935 was 643. The champion operators who met in Moscow spurned this average. They had made records of a thousand, two thousand and even twenty-five hundred acres for the harvest season, and were swearing a solemn oath to train before next harvest many more operators like themselves.

The time of this great advance has been so short that they can all look back as if to yesterday and recall the days of ignorance and poverty, when they slaved for wealthier farmers or wasted nine-tenths of their labor trudging from strip to strip of their medieval peasant fields. Today the very word “peasant” is passing from their vocabulary. They speak of themselves as “kolhozniks,” members of the collective economy, joint owners and users of the large-scale farm on which they work. They know quite well that if there had been no collectivization of farming, their slavery and darkness would have continued. For if modern machines had come to the Russian soil under capitalist conditions, a minority of successful farmers would have gained the means of production and risen to a brief wealth on the impoverishment of millions—brief until they in turn were robbed by the big banks of the cities, as farmers are under capitalism.

The soviet model freed the peasantry from a slave-like experience under the Kulak farming. Stalin was no Tsar either, he requested to resign on half a dozen confirmed occasions, only to be rejected. The painting of Stalin as someone worse than, say, Churchill is an invention that came after his death. In his time, he was not feared but loved. An excellent history on the legend of Stalin and how it changed over time is given by Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo.

Nobody ever said the Soviet Union was ideal. What it was, is enormously progressive and a dramatic uplifting for working people. There were many problems with it, but the good outweighed the bad. Learning from the past requires understanding the good and the actual bad, not just accepting capitalist framing of socialist states as correct.

It's not at all a contradiction. At best, Trotsky genuinely believed he was saving socialism by opposing the soviets and organizing against them, while the soviets were trying to build socialism on a more theoretically correct path. The least charitable reading of Trotsky is that he was just an opportunist that wanted fame, and didn't actually do anything he said he did to oppose the Soviets.