Born Lev Bronstein--he adopted the name Trotsky--in southern Ukraine, he became active in socialist causes at an early age and was exiled to Siberia in 1898. Four years later he escaped, eventually arriving in London, where he met Vladimir Ilich Lenin and became a leading spokesman for the fledging Russian workers' party.

Trotsky participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution, which resulted in a second arrest and deportation to Siberia. Again he escaped, this time to Vienna, where he became the editor of the socialist newspaper Pravda. During WW1 he lived in Paris, an outspoken opponent of the war and the intense nationalism it fostered in opposition to his desire for an internationalist workers' movement. He returned to Russia in 1917 to join Lenin in the Bolshevik triumph over the Menshevik faction of the revolutionary movement during the 1917 Russian Revolution. During the Russian Civil War, he served as minister of war, building the various units of the Red Army into a unified fighting force. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Trotsky lost the power struggle to succeed him (he had been Lenin's choice) to Joseph Stalin.

In 1927-28, he was expelled from the Communist Party and sent into exile. Eventually he settled in Mexico, where in 1940 he was assassinated by one of Stalin's agents. During his exile he was a prolific writer and powerful opponent of Stalinism. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), he analyzed Stalin's regime as one in which a small bureaucracy, governed by a dictator, had usurped the function of a true workers' socialism. He also criticized the Soviet government's failure to respond to the growing threat of Nazism. History appears to have vindicated his position on both issues.

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