Trotsky, Leon

Russian revolutionary. He joined the Bolshevik party and took a leading part in the seizure of power in 1917 and in raising the Red Army that fought the Civil War 1918–20. In the struggle for power that followed Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin defeated Trotsky, and this and other differences with the Communist Party led to his exile in 1929. He settled in Mexico, where he was assassinated at Stalin's instigation. Trotsky believed in world revolution and in permanent revolution (see Trotskyism), and was an uncompromising, if liberal, idealist.

Trotsky was isolated by Stalin, who used the opposition to Trotsky's belief that socialist revolution had to be exported by the USSR to the rest of the world, as well as the personal feud between Trotsky and Grigory Zinovyev, head of the communist International, to oust him. Trotsky was left without support and lost his power in the party. Trotsky had been described as capable but arrogant by Lenin, and it was this perceived arrogance and intellectual capacity that made him unpopular with many of the other Bolshevik leaders after Lenin's death in 1924. Stalin was then able to use Trotsky's ideas for the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union through five-year plans, despite attacking the idea when Trotsky promoted it before his exile from Russia.