Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879 to 1940) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, Soviet politician and political theorist. He chaired the Saint Petersburg Soviet in the 1905 Revolution, joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, helped lead the October Revolution and, as People's Commissar for Military Affairs from 1918 to 1925, built the Red Army that won the Russian Civil War. After Lenin died he led the Left Opposition against Joseph Stalin, was expelled from the party, exiled in 1928 and deported from the Soviet Union in 1929. In exile he developed the theory of permanent revolution, wrote The Revolution Betrayed in 1936 and founded the Fourth International in 1938. A Stalinist agent, Ramon Mercader, assassinated him in Mexico City in 1940. His ideas gave rise to the Marxist school known as Trotskyism.