Leon Trotsky (The German Century)

Leon Trotsky ( Russian: Лев Дави́дович Тро́цкий; born Lev Davidovich Bronstein; 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940) was a Marxist revolutionary and theorist, and a Soviet politician who engineered the transfer of all political power to the Soviets. Trotsky initially supported the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks just before the 1917 October Revolution, and immediately became a leader within the Communist Party. He was, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov, one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 to manage the Bolshevik Revolution. During the early days of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army, with the title of People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1923).

After the death of Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky became the head of state in the Soviet Union. Trotsky reformed the nation to suit the Marxist ideals. Under Trotsky, the Soviet Union transformed into a state based on orthodox Marxism and Bolshevik-Leninism, which supported the proletariat, proletarian internationalism, and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working class self-emancipation and mass democracy.

In 1933, after four years of the Great Depression, the Soviet Union funded socialist rebellions and uprisings across Europe, North America and Southern Africa. Trotsky himself personally supported the unrest in Germany and Austria. These events would lead to the Second World War. which cost millions of lives. Trotsky died in the February of 1955 at the age of 75 years, he remains a highly controversial figure. Books written by Trotsky throughout his life are currently banned in the member states of the European Alliance and many other sovereign states around the world.