Trotsky, Leon (1879-1940)

A photograph of the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky, taken in June 1917. Trotsky came to prominence as one of the main organizers of the October Revolution of 1917. An advocate of world revolution, as opposed to Stalin's ‘socialism in one country,’ Trotsky was exiled by Stalin in 1929 and was murdered in Mexico in 1940.

Russian revolutionary. He joined the Bolshevik party and took a leading part in the seizure of power in 1917 and in raising the Red Army that fought the Civil War 1918-20. In the struggle for power that followed Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin defeated Trotsky, and this and other differences with the Communist Party led to his exile in 1929. He settled in Mexico, where he was assassinated at Stalin's instigation. Trotsky believed in world revolution and in permanent revolution (see Trotskyism), and was an uncompromising, if liberal, idealist.

Trotsky was isolated by Stalin, who used the opposition to Trotsky's belief that socialist revolution had to be exported by the USSR to the rest of the world, as well as the personal feud between Trotsky and Grigory Zinovyev, head of the communist International, to oust him. Trotsky was left without support and lost his power in the party. Trotsky had been described as capable but arrogant by Lenin, and it was this perceived arrogance and intellectual capacity that made him unpopular with many of the other Bolshevik leaders after Lenin's death in 1924. Stalin was then able to use Trotsky's ideas for the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union through five-year plans, despite attacking the idea when Trotsky promoted it before his exile from Russia.

Trotsky became a Marxist in the 1890s and was imprisoned and exiled for opposition to the tsarist regime. He lived in Western Europe from 1902 until the 1905 revolution, when he was again imprisoned but escaped to live in exile until 1917, when he returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks. Although as a young man Trotsky admired Lenin, when he worked with him organizing the revolution of 1917, he objected to Lenin's dictatorial ways. He was second in command until Lenin's death, and was minister for foreign affairs 1917-18 and minister for war 1918-January 1925. Trotsky's brilliant organizational skills and inspirational leadership of the Red Army gained victory for the Bolsheviks over the White Russian tsarists in the Russian civil war (1918-21), although the Bolsheviks controlled only one third of the country and suffered attack from abroad. In exile in Mexico, he was killed with an ice pick. Official Soviet recognition of responsibility for his assassination through the secret service came in 1989.

Trotsky's later works are critical of the Soviet regime; for example, The Revolution Betrayed (1937). His greatest work is his magisterial History of the Russian Revolution (1932-33).