Lev Trotskiy(1879-1940)
- Actor
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.
