Trivia

The title of the multiple Academy award-winning movie Life Is Beautiful (1997) is based on one of Trotsky's notes to his wife while he was in exile in Mexico, knowing that he was about to be killed by Joseph Stalin's assassins.

Was the basis for the character Snowball in George Orwell's novel "Animal Farm".

Great-uncle of William Bronston.

Uncle of film producer Samuel Bronston.

Was murdered by Ramón Mercader, a covert Russian agent who befriended him while he lived in exile in Mexico.

Is portrayed by Richard Burton in The Assassination of Trotsky (1972); Daniel Massey in Stalin (1992); and Geoffrey Rush in Frida (2002).

Wanted to put the deposed Tsar Nicholas II on trial in late July 1918, but the Russian Civil War and military intervention by the Allied Powers made this impossible. He later defended the murder of the Romanovs - the Russian royal family - as a necessary measure, to demonstrate to the world that there was no going back.

Denounced the Vyacheslav Molotov-Joachim von Ribbentrop Pact, which resulted in the Soviet-German invasion of Poland in September 1939.

He was one of the few Soviet political figures who was never rehabilitated by the Soviet administration.

He was the only leader in the October Revolution of 1917 to be fully Jewish.

As of 2012, his great-granddaughter Nora Volkow was Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Bethesda, MD.

Brother-in-law of Lev Kamenev.

Mentioned in the songs "No More Heroes" by The Stranglers and "Revol" by Manic Street Preachers.

Trotsky has Mexican descendants. His grandson Esteban Volkov has lived in Mexico since he was 13 and started a new life there where he married and had four daughters. "Mexico was an absolute change, it was full of colour, full of sun, so unlike Europe," he says. "I began going to school by myself, on foot. No-one at school knew who my family was," Esteban would state.

Was smeared by the Soviet regime since the mid-1920s.