Leon Trotsky

Biography

Lev Davidovich Bronstein — known to history as Leon Trotsky — was born on November 7, 1879, in Yanovka, a small farm village in Ukraine, the son of a prosperous Jewish farmer. He was one of the most intellectually brilliant and operationally gifted revolutionaries of the twentieth century, the man who built the Red Army from scratch and led it to victory in the Civil War, and yet he ended his life as a hunted exile, assassinated by Stalin's agent in a Mexico City suburb. Trotsky came to Marxism through the revolutionary underground of southern Ukraine in the 1890s, was arrested, exiled to Siberia, and escaped abroad — the first of many times he would slip out of tsarist custody. He became a leading figure in the Russian Social Democratic Party, coined the theory of 'permanent revolution' (which held that a socialist revolution in backward Russia could only survive if it spread to industrialized Western Europe), and earned fame as a writer and orator of exceptional power. He returned to Russia during the 1905 Revolution, led the short-lived St. Petersburg Soviet, was arrested, escaped from exile in Siberia by sleigh, and spent the years until 1917 writing and agitating in Vienna, Paris, and New York. When he returned to Petrograd in May 1917, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and immediately became Lenin's most indispensable lieutenant. As Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee, he personally organized the October coup — it was Trotsky's operational planning that made the nearly bloodless seizure of power possible. As Commissar for War from March 1918, he performed perhaps the most extraordinary feat of organization in modern military history: building a 5-million-man fighting force in two years from virtually nothing. He recruited former Tsarist officers by guaranteeing their families' safety (as hostages), established political commissars to monitor their loyalty, restored traditional military discipline (including the death penalty), and made relentless use of his armored train — traveling 65,000 miles to crises across the vast front, personally rallying wavering troops. His military victories — recapturing Kazan in 1918, organizing the defense against Kolchak and Denikin in 1919, suppressing Kronstadt in 1921 — saved the Bolshevik regime. But his arrogance, his open contempt for Stalin, and his failure to fight for power after Lenin's death in 1924 cost him everything. Stalin outmaneuvered him in the succession struggle, expelled him from the party, and had him exiled to Central Asia, then Turkey, then Norway, and finally Mexico. On August 20, 1940, Stalin's agent Ramón Mercader drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull as he sat reading at his desk in Coyoacán. He died the next day. He was sixty years old.

Key Battles