Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879–1940) was a Marxist revolutionary, a principal organizer of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, and the founder and commander of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1918–1921). He served as the Soviet government's first People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, in which capacity he led the Soviet delegation in early negotiations with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk before being replaced by Georgy Chicherin; the resulting Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918.

As Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, Trotsky built the Red Army from disparate militias into a conscript force of several million, controversially employing former Tsarist officers under political commissar supervision. He was a founding figure of the Communist International (Comintern), established in 1919 to promote world revolution.

After Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky lost the succession struggle to Joseph Stalin. Their dispute was partly doctrinal: Trotsky advocated permanent revolution, arguing that socialism in the USSR could survive only if revolution spread internationally, while Stalin championed socialism in one country. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, exiled internally to Alma-Ata in 1928, and deported from the Soviet Union in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937, hosted initially by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

In exile he founded the Fourth International in 1938 as a rival to the Stalin-aligned Comintern, and wrote extensively, including The Revolution Betrayed (1936), which characterized the USSR as a "degenerated workers' state" run by a bureaucratic caste. He was condemned in absentia during the Moscow Trials of 1936–1938. On 20 August 1940, NKVD agent Ramón Mercader attacked Trotsky with an ice axe at his home in Coyoacán, Mexico City; he died the following day. His ideas continue to underpin Trotskyist political currents worldwide.