Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky (also spelled Trotski) was born in 1879 and assassinated in Mexico in 1940. The Russian-Soviet revolutionary and Marxist politician first joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and became a Bolshevik in 1917. He was chairman of the Petrograd Soviet during the 1905 Revolution. In 1917, alongside Lenin, he was a leading figure in the October Revolution and subsequently held senior positions in the Soviet government. During the Russian Civil War, he founded and led the Red Army. As leader of the Left Opposition, he opposed the growing bureaucratization of the party and Stalin. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. In 1938, he helped organize the Fourth International.