Leon Trotsky

Lev Davidovich Bronstein ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; ; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''.}} (), was a Soviet revolutionary, Marxist theorist and politician whose particular strain of Marxist thought is known as Trotskyism.

Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party a few weeks before the October Revolution, thus immediately becoming a leader within the party, and was one of the leaders of the October Revolution. Once in government, Trotsky initially held the post of the Commissar for Foreign Affairs and was involved in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany as Russia pulled out of World War One. Trotsky became more prominent from March 1918 to January 1925 as the leader of the Red Army in the post of Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. Trotsky was a vital leading figure in the Red victory in the Russian Civil War. He was one of the seven members of the first Politburo.

After the rise of Joseph Stalin, Trotsky was removed from his positions and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929. He spent the rest of his life in exile, and was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent.

Trotsky's ideas developed the basis of Trotskyism, a prime school of Marxist thought that opposes the theories of Stalinism. He was written out of the history books under Stalin and was one of the few Soviet political personalities who was not rehabilitated by the Soviet administration under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. Provided by Wikipedia