Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (* November 7th [greg.] in 1879) is a Russian-Ukrainian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a Marxist (his later first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, had "converted" him), his developments to the ideology are called Trotskyism.
Trotsky helped organize the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, after which he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. He escaped and spent the following 10 years in Britain, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the United States. After the 1917 February Revolution brought an end to the Tsarist monarchy, Trotsky returned to Russia and became a leader in the Bolshevik faction. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he was vitally important for the October Revolution that overthrew the new Provisional Government.
From March 1918 to January 1925, Trotsky headed the Red Army as People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and had a good part of responsibility for the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922.
After the death of Lenin in January 1924 and the rise of Joseph Stalin, Trotsky gradually lost his government positions; the Politburo eventually expelled him from the Soviet Union in February 1929. He spent the rest of his life in exile (in Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico), writing prolifically and engaging in open critique of Stalinism. In 1938, Trotsky and his supporters founded the Fourth International in opposition to Stalin's Comintern.
In the Soviet Union, he was accused to cooperate with "fascists", planning to topple Stalin's regime and dismember the Soviet Union, and sentenced to death in absentia. In March 1939 and May 1940 (involving two girls and two dozen fake policemen), Soviet agents tried to assassinate him, without success. His first wife, their two daughters, and his two Sons from his second marriage to Natalia Sedova (since 1903) already have perished in the Soviet Union, or been killed by Soviet agents.
