Trotsky, Leon (1879-1940)
Became a revolutionary in 1896. Later worked with Lenin on Iskra in 1902. He broke with Lenin the next year over the nature of the revolutionary party and aligned himself with the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. He broke with the Mensheviks in 1904 and tried during the next decade to reunite the factions of the RSDLP. In the 1905 revolution, he was the leader of the St. Petersburg Soviet and developed the theory of Permanent Revolution. In 1915 he wrote the Zimmerwald manifesto against the war.
Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and was elected to its central committee. Shortly following Trotsky helped organize the October Revolution.
Trotsky's first government post in the R.S.F.S.R. was as commissar of foreign affairs. In 1918 he became commissar of war, organizing the Red Army and leading it to victory through the civil war and imperialist intervention.
In 1923 Trotsky formed the Left Opposition and for the ensuing decade battled the reactionary wave of Stalinism sweeping through the Soviet Union. The opposition was unsuccessful, and Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and the Comintern, and exiled to Turkey in 1927. In 1933 he gave up his efforts to reform the Comintern and called for the creation of a new International. He viewed his work on behalf of the Fourth International as the most important of his life. See the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive
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