Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky was a Russian Marxist revolutionary who, with Vladimir Lenin, led the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and then built the Red Army that won the Russian Civil War. Defeated by Joseph Stalin in the struggle to succeed Lenin, he was expelled from the Soviet Union and spent his last years in exile as Stalin's most prominent critic on the left, until a Soviet agent killed him in Mexico in 1940.

He was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879 (26 October in the old Russian calendar) at Yanovka, a farming estate in the Kherson province of the Russian Empire, in today's Ukraine. His parents were prosperous Jewish farmers. He went to school in Odessa and Mykolaiv, and by his late teens had become involved in underground socialist circles. Arrested in 1898 for organising a workers' union, he spent two years in prison and was then exiled to Siberia, where he married a fellow revolutionary, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya.

In 1902 he escaped, using a forged passport in the name of Trotsky, a name he kept for the rest of his life. He made his way to London and joined Lenin and the editors of the Marxist newspaper Iskra. When the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party split in 1903, Trotsky sided at first with the Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks, and for more than a decade he stood between the two factions, often quarrelling with both.

During the revolution of 1905 Trotsky returned to Russia and became the leading figure, and eventually chairman, of the Saint Petersburg Soviet, the council of workers' delegates that briefly challenged the tsarist government. He was arrested when the soviet was suppressed, tried and sentenced to exile in Siberia for life, but escaped again in 1907.

From this experience came his best-known theory, permanent revolution. Most Marxists thought a backward country like Russia would first need a long period of capitalist, middle-class rule before socialism was possible. Trotsky argued that the Russian middle class was too weak to lead its own revolution, so the working class would have to take power itself, and that a workers' government in Russia could survive only if revolution spread to the advanced countries of Europe. He spent the following years in Vienna, then in Paris during the First World War, writing against the war. Expelled from France in 1916, he reached New York in January 1917.

After the fall of Nicholas II in February 1917, Trotsky returned to Petrograd in May and joined the Bolsheviks in the summer, now in full agreement with Lenin. In September he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, and through its Military Revolutionary Committee he organised the armed takeover of 25 October (7 November new style), the core of the Russian Revolution.

As the first commissar for foreign affairs he led the peace talks with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, where he tried to stall with a policy of "neither war nor peace" until a renewed German advance forced the Bolsheviks to accept harsh terms in March 1918. He then became commissar for war and created the Red Army almost from nothing, introducing conscription, recruiting former tsarist officers watched over by political commissars, and travelling between fronts in an armoured train. By 1921 the Red Army had defeated the White armies. Trotsky defended the methods of the Red Terror, including hostage-taking and summary executions, and in March 1921 he oversaw the crushing of the sailors' revolt at Kronstadt.

As Lenin's health failed in 1922–1923, Trotsky was widely seen as his likely successor, but he had few allies inside the party machine. Stalin, as general secretary, controlled appointments, and formed an alliance with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to block him. Trotsky led the Left Opposition, which criticised the growth of bureaucracy and called for faster industrialisation and more democracy within the party. Against his internationalism, Stalin set out the doctrine of "socialism in one country".

Trotsky lost one post after another. He was removed as war commissar in 1925, expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and from the party in November 1927. In 1928 he was exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, and in February 1929 he was deported from the Soviet Union altogether.

He lived first on the island of Büyükada near Istanbul, then in France and Norway, and from January 1937 in Mexico, where the painter Diego Rivera helped him find refuge in Coyoacán, outside Mexico City. In these years he wrote his autobiography, My Life, a three-volume History of the Russian Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed (1936), which described the Stalinist Soviet Union as a workers' state ruled by a privileged bureaucracy. In 1938 he founded the Fourth International as a rival to the Stalin-controlled Communist International.

In the Moscow show trials of 1936–1938, Stalin's prosecutors named Trotsky as the organiser of a vast conspiracy, and many of his former colleagues were shot. An independent commission chaired by the American philosopher John Dewey examined the charges and found them false. Trotsky's family was destroyed: both his sons died, the younger shot in the Soviet Union and the elder in suspicious circumstances in Paris in 1938, and his first wife and other relatives perished in the purges. In May 1940 a group of gunmen raided his house but failed to kill him. On 20 August 1940 Ramón Mercader, a Spanish communist working for the Soviet secret police, struck him with an ice axe in his study; Trotsky died the next day, 21 August.

In the Soviet Union, Trotsky was for decades erased from official history or presented as a traitor, and his role in 1917 and the Civil War was rarely acknowledged until the late 1980s. Abroad, his ideas inspired a large number of small Trotskyist parties and groups, especially in western Europe and Latin America, which split repeatedly over doctrine. Historians remain divided about him. Admirers see a brilliant organiser, orator and writer who offered a socialist alternative to Stalin's dictatorship. Critics point out that he helped build the one-party state, defended terror and repression while he held power, and turned to arguments for democracy within the party only after he had lost.