Leon Trotsky

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Leon Trotsky
Лев Троцкий
Trotsky in the 1930s
People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs of the Soviet Union[a]
In office 14 March 1918 – 12 January 1925
Premier	Vladimir Lenin Alexei Rykov
Preceded by	Nikolai Podvoisky
Succeeded by	Mikhail Frunze
People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Russian SFSR
In office 8 November 1917 – 13 March 1918
Premier	Vladimir Lenin
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Georgy Chicherin
Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet
In office 20 September 1917 – 26 December 1917
Preceded by	Nikolay Chkheidze
Succeeded by	Grigory Zinoviev
Personal details
Born	Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-11-07)7 November 1879 (N.S.) Yanovka, Russian Empire
Died	21 August 1940(1940-08-21) (aged 60) Mexico City, Mexico
Manner of death	Assassination
Resting place	Leon Trotsky House Museum
Citizenship	Soviet Union (1922–1932) Stateless (1932–1940)
Political party	Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1898–1917) Mezhraiontsy (1917)[1] All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (1918–1927)
Spouses	Aleksandra Sokolovskaya ​ ​ (m. 1899; div. 1902)​ Natalia Sedova ​ (m. 1903)​
Children	Zinaida Nina Lev Sergei
Signature
Leon Trotsky's voice Recorded 1920
Central institution membership 1917–1927: Full member, 6th–14th Politburo of AUCP(b) 1917–1927: Full member, 6th–14th Central Committee of AUCP(b) 1919–1920: Full member, 8th Orgburo of RCP(b) 1923–1924: Full member, 12th Orgburo of RCP(b) 1910–1912: Full member, 5th Central Committee of RSDLP Other offices held 1905: Chairman, St. Petersburg Soviet 1917: Chairman, Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee 1917–1918: Member of the Russian Constituent Assembly for Novgorod 1918: Chairman, Supreme Military Council 1918–1925: Chairman, Revolutionary Military Council

This article is part of a series about Leon Trotsky
Personal Childhood and family Train House Museum Russian political activities First exile Russian Revolution of 1905 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Russian Civil War Trade-union debate Kronstadt rebellion Scissors Crisis Deposition Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites" American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky Dewey Commission Assassination perpetrator Political ideology Leninism Democratic centralism Trotskyism orthodox Anti-Stalinist left Soviet democracy Worker's control Affiliations Left Opposition United Opposition Fourth International Bibliography Our Political Tasks Our Revolution 1905 The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects Terrorism and Communism Trotsky's Military Writings Literature and Revolution New Course Lessons of October Towards Socialism or Capitalism? Leon Trotsky on China My Life The Permanent Revolution History of the Russian Revolution The Revolution Betrayed The Stalin School of Falsification Their Morals and Ours: The class foundations of moral practice The Transitional Program Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence Writings of Leon Trotsky The Spanish Revolution, 1931-1939 The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany In Defence of Marxism
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Lev Davidovich Bronstein^[b] (7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky,^[c] was a Soviet politician, revolutionary, and political theorist. He was a central figure in the 1905 Revolution,^[3] October Revolution, Russian Civil War, and establishment of the Soviet Union. In the early years of Soviet Russia, Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were widely considered its two most prominent figures, and Trotsky was Lenin's de facto second-in-command in the government from 1917 to 1923.^[4][5][6] Ideologically a Marxist and a Leninist, Trotsky's thought inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Trotsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898. He was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia, but in 1902 escaped to London, where he met Lenin and wrote for the party's newspaper Iskra. Trotsky initially sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks after the party's 1903 schism, but declared himself non-factional in 1904. During the failed 1905 Revolution, Trotsky returned to Russia and was elected chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. He was again exiled to Siberia, but escaped in 1907 and spent time in London, Vienna, Switzerland, Paris, and New York. After the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew the tsar, Trotsky returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played an important role in the October Revolution that overthrew the Provisional Government.

In Lenin's first government, Trotsky was appointed as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and led negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I. He served as the People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs from 1918 to 1925, during which he founded the Red Army and led it to victory in the Russian Civil War. In 1922, Lenin formed an alliance with Trotsky against the growing Soviet bureaucracy^[7] and proposed that he become his Deputy Chairman and preside over economic management,^[8] but Trotsky declined.^[9] Starting in 1923, Trotsky led the party's Left Opposition faction, which opposed the concessions of the New Economic Policy. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky emerged as the most prominent critic of Joseph Stalin, but was quickly outmaneuvered by him politically. Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and from the party in 1927, internally exiled to Alma Ata in 1928, and deported in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937.

In exile, Trotsky wrote polemically against Stalinism, supporting proletarian internationalism against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country. Trotsky's own theory of permanent revolution posited that the socialist revolution could only survive if spread to advanced capitalist countries. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union had become a "degenerated workers' state" due to its isolation, and called for an end to Stalin's dictatorship. In 1938, Trotsky founded the Fourth International as an alternative to the Soviet-led Comintern. After being sentenced to death in absentia at the first Moscow show trial in 1936, Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 at his home in Mexico City by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader.

Written out of official Soviet history under Stalin, Trotsky was one of the few of his rivals who was never politically rehabilitated by later leaders. In the West, Trotsky emerged as a hero of the anti-Stalinist left for his defense of a more democratic, internationalist form of socialism^[10][11] against Stalinist totalitarianism, and for his intellectual contributions to Marxism. While some of his wartime actions are controversial, such as his ideological defence of the Red Terror^[12] and suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, scholarship ranks Trotsky's leadership of the Red Army highly among historical figures, and he is credited for his major involvement with the military, economic, cultural^[13] and political development of the Soviet Union.

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