LEON TROTSKY Biography - Activists, Revolutionaries and other freedom fighters

 
 

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LEON TROTSKY

Name: Leon Trotsky                                                                       
Born: 7 November 1879 Kherson, Russian Empire                                           
Died: 21 August 1940 Coyoacán, Mexico D.F, Mexico                                       
                                                                                         
Leon Trotsky (November 7 [O.S. October 26] 1879 - August 21, 1940), born Lev Davidovich 
Bronstein, was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik                                               
revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was one of the leaders of the Russian             
October Revolution, second only to Lenin. During the early days of the Soviet           
Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as           
the founder and commander of the Red Army and the People's Commissar of War. He         
was also among the first members of the Politburo.                                       
                                                                                         
After leading the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies           
and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing bureaucratization of           
the Soviet Union, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported             
from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge. As the head of the Fourth                     
International, he continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the         
Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico by Ramón Mercader, a           
Soviet agent. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of           
Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories and practices of Stalinism.