His family were relatively wealthy farmers. Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein on November 7, 1879, in Yanovka, Ukraine, the Russian Empire. He has been criticised by others for promoting internal repression during the Red Terror – and making the Bolshevik party increasingly authoritarian and intolerant of criticism – a repressive organisation which would ultimately be used against him by Stalin. To some Marxists, Trotsky is an icon of true Marxists principles and someone who would have avoided the worst excesses of Stalin’s dictatorship. He was also an internationalist, seeking a worldwide Communist revolution. Leon Trotsky was a committed Marxist – dedicated to the overthrow of Capitalist systems he saw as inherently unjust. In 1940, he was executed, on Stalin’s orders, while living in exile in Mexico. After Lenin’s death, Trotsky was outmanoeuvred by Stalin, and he was expelled from the Communist party and Russia.

Second, only to Lenin, Trotsky was a key figure in the Russian civil war and the formative years of the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was a Russian Marxist and leading figure in the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Leon trotsky