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Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)Russian revolutionary. Born on 7 November, of Ukrainian Jewish parents, Lev Bronstein became a social democrat while a student. He founded the South Russian Workers' Council in 1897, but was arrested soon after and exiled to Siberia. In 1902, he escaped abroad to join Lenin in London, returning briefly to St Petersburg to take part in the 1905 Russian Revolution. After another spell of prison, he went abroad again in 1907. Ten years later, he returned to Russia and was an important figure in the 1917 October Revolution. Appointed the new regime's minister for external affairs, he concluded the difficult Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended World War I hostilities between Russia and Germany in March 1918. A highly cultured intellectual, with an enormous appetite for work and great personal charisma, he threw his energies into organising the Red Army and defending the new revolutionary government from the attacks of counter-revolutionaries and foreign governments whose aim was to destroy the new state at birth. But his preoccupation with defence meant that he spent too little time building up support inside the Communist party. As a result, when Lenin died in 1924, Trotsky was outmanoeuvred by Stalin, who became the new leader. Opposing Trotsky's ideas about 'permanent revolution', Stalin dismissed him from the government in 1925 and expelled him from the party in 1927. Exiled two years later, in a series of publications, Trotsky fiercely criticised Stalin's regime, where power was held by the bureaucrats and not the ordinary people. On 21 August 1940, while living in Mexico City, he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent. His ideas lived on, however, and he became increasingly important as an icon of radical revolutionary ideas in the postwar period. |
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