Trotsky, Leon, alias of Lev Davidovich Bronstein 1879-1940
Russian revolutionary

He was born in Yanovka, Ukraine, and educated in Odessa. At the age of 19 he was arrested as a Marxist and was sent to Siberia. He escaped in 1902, joined Lenin in London, and in the abortive 1905 revolution became President of the St Petersburg Soviet. After escaping from a further exile period in Siberia, he became a revolutionary journalist among Russian �migr�s in the West. He returned to Russia in 1917, joined the Bolshevik Party and with Lenin played a major role in the October Revolution. As Commissar for Foreign Affairs he conducted negotiations with the Germans for the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918). In the Russian Civil War, as Commissar for War, he created the Red Army of 5 million men from a nucleus of 7,000 men. On Lenin's death in 1924 Trotsky's influence began to decline. Stalin, who opposed his theory of 'permanent revolution', ousted him from the politburo, and he was exiled to Central Asia (1927), and then was expelled from the USSR (1929). He continued to agitate and intrigue as an exile in several countries. In 1937, having been sentenced to death in his absence by a Soviet court, he found asylum in Mexico City. There he was assassinated with an ice pick in 1940 by Ramon del Rio (alias Jacques Mornard). Ruthless, energetic, a superb orator and messianic visionary, Trotsky inspired as much confidence in Lenin as he awakened mistrust in Stalin. In his later years he was the focus of those Communists, Soviet and otherwise, who opposed the endless opportunism of Stalin. He was the revolutionary 'pur sang', a writer of power, wit and venom, an advocate of permanent revolution and, in contrast to Stalin's 'socialism in one country', world revolution. His publications include History of the Russian Revolution (1932) The Revolution Betrayed (1937), Stalin (1948) and Diary in Exile (translated 1959), and remain influential in western Marxist circles. In January 1989, as part of the policy of glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev, it was revealed that Trotsky was murdered by the Soviet secret police. Trotsky's son, Sergei Sedov, who was shot dead in Moscow in 1937, was rehabilitated by the Soviet Supreme Court in 1988.

Bibliography: Robert D Warth, Leon Trotsky (1977)