Biography

Communist leader. He was chief theorist, a leader in both the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions alongside Vladimir Lenin. As commissar for foreign affairs, Trotsky arranged the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. He next became head of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, which resulted in the deaths of over a million White Army soldiers and Cossacks, upon orders from Vladimir Lenin. He had Russian peasants and workers forcibly conscripted into the Red Army, but he proved to be a poor military leader and the Russian invasion of Poland in the 1920s was repulsed by Polish forces under Marshal Józef Pilsudski, with very heavy Russian losses. Trotsky and his arch-rival Joseph Stalin struggled for power after Lenin's death in 1924. Stalin eventually stripped Trotsky of his influence by 1929, and expelled him from Russia in 1936. Trotsky spent the rest of his life in exile, living in the home of Mexican communist artist Diego Rivera in Mexico. There he was writing and preaching revolution, until he was assassinated by Spanish communist Ramon Mercader, an assassin sent to kill Trotsky by Stalin, in 1940.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Keath Graham <keath@webtv.net>

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein near Elisavetgrad in the Ukraine in 1879, Leon Trotsky became a revolutionary while a student in Nikolayev and was sent to a prison camp in Siberia in 1897 for joining a Marxist labor union. After five years he escaped, and under the alias of Leon Trotsky (which he borrowed from one of his jailers) he joined the exiled Vladimir Lenin in London, England. After a brief return to Russia in 1905, and another arrest he fled to the USA, where he lived in New York for 10 years. When the Russian Revolution broke out in March 1917, resulting in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, Trotsky returned home with a group of communists. He assumed a position of leadership among the Bolsheviks in the Soviet revolutionary council. In October of 1917, he played a key role in the engineering of Lenin's overthrow of the ruling moderate provisional government. Appointed the first Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Trotsky quickly negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, ending Russian involvement in World War I and enabling the Bolsheviks to use the Army against its own people in the Civil War. Becoming the Commissar of war, Trotsky organized a Communist Red Army of more than five million men and embarked on a long and bloody Russian Civil War that lasted from 1918 to 1921 against the White Army for control of the country. Although Trotsky had no formal military training, he proved a master of total warfare, attacking the Whites' economic as well as military bases. He initially teamed up with Joseph Stalin in mass executions of opponent officers, Cossacks, workers, and farmers. By the end of 1921 he had crushed all opposition to Lenin's rule. After the death of Vladimir Lenin in early 1924, Trotsky became involved in a power struggle with Joseph Stalin, which eventually resulted in Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist party in 1929, and exile to Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, in the South of Soviet Union. After the Mexican government granted him a residence permit, Trotsky with wife and children was placed on a Norwegian steamer to Mexico in December of 1936. Trotsky was assassinated at the home of Mexican communist artist Diego Rivera near Mexico City on August 20, 1940. The assassination was described in details in the memoirs of another Mexican communist artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, who assisted the Spanish communist Ramon Mercader that actually killed Trotsky with an axe. Mercader was tried and imprisoned for 20 years for the murder of Trotsky.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Matthew Patay