Leon Trotsky

Lev Davidovich Bronstein ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; ; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''.}} (), was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Trotskyism.

Born to a wealthy Ukrainian-Jewish family in Yanovka (now Bereslavka), Trotsky embraced Marxism after moving to Nikolayev in 1896. In 1898, he was arrested for revolutionary activities and subsequently exiled to Siberia. He escaped from Siberia in 1902 and moved to London, where he befriended Vladimir Lenin. During the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party ideological split, he sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks. Trotsky helped organize the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, after which he was again arrested and exiled to Siberia. He once again escaped and spent the following years working in Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain and the United States. After the 1917 February Revolution brought an end to the Tsarist monarchy, Trotsky returned to Russia and became a leader of the Bolshevik faction. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played a key role in the October Revolution which overthrew the new Provisional Government.

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 the First World War. From March 1918 to January 1925, Trotsky was the head of the Red Army and played a vital role in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War. He was one of the seven members of the first Politburo.

After the death of Lenin and 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, writing prolifically and engaging in open critique of Stalinism. In 1938, Trotsky and his supporters founded the Fourth International in opposition to Stalin's Comintern. After surviving multiple attempts on his life, Trotsky was assassinated in August 1940 in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet NKVD agent.}} Written out of the history books under Stalin, Trotsky 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