Leon Trotsky
Russian revolutionary, Marxist theorist and military commander (Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879–1940), born in Yanovka, Ukraine, into a family of well-off Jewish peasants, a revolutionary activist since adolescence, repeatedly imprisoned and exiled to Siberia by the tsarist regime before fleeing into European exile, where he produced most of his early theoretical work and where, already in 1905–1906, he formulated his famous theory of 'permanent revolution', according to which, in economically backward countries such as Russia, the bourgeois democratic revolution and the proletarian socialist revolution could not be separated into successive stages but had to merge into a single uninterrupted process — a thesis that set him apart both from the Mensheviks and, for a time, from Lenin's Bolsheviks. Returning to Russia after the February Revolution of 1917, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and played a decisive and practically indispensable role in the October Revolution, personally organising and leading the armed insurrection in Petrograd, and later, as founder and commander of the newly created Red Army, led with remarkable military and organisational efficiency the Bolshevik victory in the bloody Russian Civil War against the counter-revolutionary White armies. Stalin's decisive political rival after Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky was defeated in the party's internal succession struggle, expelled from the Communist Party, exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, and ultimately assassinated in Mexico in 1940 by a Soviet agent with an ice axe, in one of the most famous political assassinations of the twentieth century. During his long exile, Trotsky developed his most influential critique of the Stalinist regime in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), where he argued that the Soviet Union under Stalin had degenerated into a 'bureaucratised workers' state', betraying the revolution's original democratic and internationalist ideals in favour of a privileged bureaucratic caste — an analysis that would found the entire subsequent political tradition known as Trotskyism.