Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and Soviet politician. [1] He chaired the Petrograd Soviet during the October Revolution of 1917, served as the first Soviet commissar for foreign affairs and then for military affairs, and founded and led the Red Army through the Russian Civil War. Defeated by Joseph Stalin in the struggle for leadership after Lenin's death, he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and assassinated in Mexico in 1940. [2]
Early life and revolutionary beginnings
He was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 26 October 1879 at Yanovka (Bereslavka) in Kherson province, in what is now Ukraine, to a prosperous Jewish farming family. He joined revolutionary circles in Nikolayev in his late teens. [1]
Arrested in 1898, he was exiled to Siberia, where he began writing on Marxist theory. He escaped in 1902 using a forged passport bearing the name Trotsky, which he kept for the rest of his life, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party émigré community in London.
1905 and the theory of permanent revolution
Returning to Russia during the 1905 revolution, Trotsky became chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies at the age of 26. He was arrested when the Soviet was suppressed and again exiled to Siberia, escaping a second time. [2]
From this period he developed the theory of permanent revolution, arguing that in an economically backward country the bourgeois-democratic and socialist stages of revolution could telescope into one, with the working class taking power directly, and that the revolution could only be secured if it spread internationally. [3]
1917 and the civil war
Trotsky returned to Russia after the February Revolution, joined the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1917, and was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in September. As head of its Military Revolutionary Committee he directed the practical organisation of the seizure of power in October. [1]
As People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs he led the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk, and after resigning over the treaty terms he became Commissar for Military Affairs. In that role he built the Red Army from disparate detachments into a force of several million, reintroducing conscription, centralised command and the employment of former imperial officers under political commissars. [2] The army's victory in the civil war was central to the survival of the Soviet state; the campaign was also conducted with severe coercive measures, including summary executions and the Red Terror, in which Trotsky was directly implicated. [4]
Defeat and exile
After Lenin's incapacity and death in 1924, Trotsky led the Left Opposition against the party bureaucracy and against Stalin's doctrine of socialism in one country. He was removed from his military post in 1925, expelled from the party, deported to Alma-Ata in 1928 and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. [1]
He lived successively in Turkey, France, Norway and, from 1937, Mexico. In exile he produced The History of the Russian Revolution and The Revolution Betrayed, and in 1938 he founded the Fourth International as a rival to the Comintern. [3]
Assassination and legacy
On 20 August 1940, at his fortified house in Coyoacán, Mexico City, Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe by Ramón Mercader, an agent of the Soviet security services, and died the following day. [2]
Trotskyism persisted as a distinct current of Marxist politics through the twentieth century, and Trotsky's historical writings remain among the most widely read accounts of the Russian Revolution. [1]
