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Person1879 – 1940

Leon Trotsky

Also called: Trotsky, Lev Trotsky

Bolshevik leader who directed the armed rising of the October Revolution, negotiated with Germany as foreign commissar, and built the Red Army that won the Civil War

Chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet in the 1905 revolution, he long kept his distance from the Bolsheviks before joining them in 1917. He directed the armed rising of October and, as commissar for war, built the Red Army, even employing former tsarist officers. His theory of “permanent revolution”, insisting the revolution must spread abroad, set him against Stalin’s “socialism in one country”. Defeated in the power struggle, he was expelled in 1929 and murdered in exile in Mexico in 1940 by an agent sent by Stalin.

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4 related events

  1. 1
    1917October Revolutionleader

    The Bolsheviks led by Lenin overthrew the Provisional Government in an armed rising and set up a Soviet government — the world’s first socialist regime.

  2. 2
    1918Treaty of Brest-Litovskdiplomat

    Soviet Russia made a separate peace with Germany and the other Central Powers and left the war, giving up vast lands including Poland, the Baltic region and Ukraine.

  3. 3
    1918 – 1922Russian Civil War and War Communismcommander

    The Bolsheviks’ Red Army fought and defeated the counter-revolutionary Whites and foreign interventionist forces, while the government imposed War Communism — forced grain requisitioning and the nationalization of industry.

  4. 4
    1922Founding of the Soviet Unionrelated figure

    Four Soviet republics — Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia — joined to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s first socialist federal state.

Related works

People who appear alongside

  • Vladimir Lenin1870 – 1924

    Leader of the Bolsheviks who set up the Soviet government in the October Revolution of 1917, chaired it, and founded the USSR in 1922

  • Alexander Kerensky1881 – 1970

    Minister of justice and war and then prime minister (1917) of the Provisional Government after the February Revolution; he kept Russia in the war and was overthrown in October

  • Joseph Stalin1878 – 1953

    General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party who ruled the USSR from the late 1920s until his death, led the war against Germany and drew Eastern Europe into the Soviet bloc

Themes this person appears in

  • World War I and the Russian Revolution1908 – 1923

    From the Balkan crises to a war of trenches and total mobilization that toppled four empires; the Russian Revolution it unleashed, which created the first socialist state; and the Versailles settlement of national self-determination and the League of Nations