Lev Davidovich Bronstein (7 November 1879 – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Bolshevik revolutionary leader who led the Red Army to victory during the Russian Civil War and helped in the creation of the Soviet Union. Trotsky was a supporter of Vladimir Lenin from the beginning, and he founded his own branch of Marxism-Leninism known as Trotskyism, an ideology which would be persecuted under his rival, Joseph Stalin. Stalin defeated Trotsky in a power struggle after Lenin's death and forced him to go into exile in Mexico, where he was killed in 1940.
Biography
Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was a Marxist revolutionary who came to prominence during the failed Russian popular uprising of 1905. He fled into exile, returning to Russia after the overthrow of the czarist regime in March 1917. He joined Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik (later Communist) Party in time for its seizure of power in November 1917.
Commissar for foreign affairs in Lenin's revolutionaary government, Trotsky negotiated peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. He became commissar for war, facing large-scale civil war in which the Bolshevik regime was threatened by White (counterrevolutionary armies and foreign forces. Trotsky transformed the small Red Army - evolved from revolutionary workers' Red Guard units - into a mass regular army. Employing former czarist officers to take command as "military specialists", he reimposed formal discipline and hierarchy of ranks. Between 1918 and 1920, conscription swelled the ranks of the Red Army to five million troops, far more than could be adequately supplied or equipped. Nonetheless, the Red Army won the civil war, thanks in no small measure to Trotsky, who toured the fronts delivering fiery speeches and ordering the execution of deserters.
In October 1919, he organized the last-ditch defense of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) against the White general, Nikolai Yudenich, at one point mounting a horse to round up retreating troops and turn them back to face enemy tanks. He was sceptical about the invasion of Poland in 1920, which led to defeat, but by then faced opposition within the communist leadership. After a long struggle against Joseph Stalin, Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and assassinated by one of Stalin's agents in Mexico in 1940.