Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky organised the October revolution, built the Red Army, and was murdered in Mexico with an ice axe. Born Lev Bronstein in 1879 in southern Ukraine to a prosperous Jewish farming family, he was drawn into Marxism as a teenager, arrested at nineteen and exiled to Siberia, and escaped in 1902 using a forged passport in the name of a jailer, Trotsky. He split with Lenin in 1903, arguing against a party of professional revolutionaries, and spent fourteen years between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. He chaired the St Petersburg Soviet during the 1905 revolution at twenty-six, and developed the theory of permanent revolution. He joined the Bolsheviks in mid-1917 and, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, planned and executed the seizure of power in October through its Military Revolutionary Committee. As commissar for war from 1918 he built the Red Army from nothing to some five million men, recruiting former tsarist officers under political commissars, restoring discipline including executions, and travelling the fronts in an armoured train for two and a half years. The Bolsheviks won the civil war largely because of it. He also directed the suppression of the Kronstadt sailors' revolt in 1921. Lenin's stroke in 1922 began the succession struggle. Trotsky was the obvious heir and was outmanoeuvred by Stalin, who controlled the party machinery, and by his own reluctance to organise a faction. He was expelled in 1927, exiled to Alma-Ata, deported in 1929, and stripped of citizenship. He wrote continuously in exile and founded the Fourth International. A Soviet agent killed him at Coyoacán in August 1940.

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