Trotsky was born in Yanovka, Ukraine. He studied at Odessa and become an ardent disciple of Karl Marx in his youth. In 1896 Trotsky joined the Social Democrats and two years later he was arrested as a Marxist and exiled to Siberia. Four years later he escaped and reached England by means of a forged passport in the name of Trotsky.

In London Trotsky met Lenin and other Russian Revolutionary thinkers and collaborated in publication their journal of Iskra (Spark). When the party split in 1903, he became a Menshevik, prophesying that Leninist theory would result in a ome-man dictatorship. In the abortive 1905 revolution Trotsky was appointed president of the St. Petersburg Soviet, but after the uprising ended he was again exiled to Siberia, and managed once more escape.

Trotsky worked then as journalist in Vienna, and become editor of Pravda (Truth). With the outbreak of World War I he moved to Zürich in 1914 and then to Germany, where he was imprisoned for opposing the war. During World War I Trotsky led the internationalist wing of the Mensheviks. In 1915 Trotsky moved to Paris, editing the socialist weekly Nashe Slovo, but he was expelled from France as a result of his pasifist propaganda. After a short stay in the United States as the editor of Novy Mir, Trotsky returned to Russia in 1917. He joined the Bosheviks in St. Petersburg and established the magazine Vperied (Forward). Trotsky was arrested for a short time by Aleksandr Feodorovich Kerenski's provisional government, but after release he played a major role in the October Revolution.

At the conference in Brest-Litovsk in 1918 Trotsky was leader of the Russian delegate. He was then made the Russian Civil War commissar for war (918-25) and created in this post the Red army. From 1919 to 1927 he was member of Politburo

After Lenin's death in 1924 a schism broke out in Communist ranks. Trotky's influence began to decline and Stalin removed Trotsky from the commissariat for war.

From 1925 to 1926 Trotsky held relatively minor administrative post, before he was ousted from the party by Stalin. In 1927 Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata, in Kazakstan, where he devoted himself to writing his memoirs and bitter pamphlets. The 'combined opposition' of Trotsky, Grigory Zinoview and Lev Kamenev was unsuccessful and in 1929 Trotsky was totally expelled from the Soviet Union. During the following years Trotsky lived in Turkey, France, Norway and finally found asylum in Mexico, where he was invited by the socialist artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957).

In Mexico Trotsky continued his attacs on Stalin's leadership and the 'degeneration' of the political system in the Soviet Union. Trotsky regarded the dictatorship he and Lenin had established as justified because it was exerciced in the interest of the proletariat, and so was quite different from Stalin's dictatorship, because it acted only in its own interests.

During the Great Purge (1934-38), a wave of terror by which Stalin aimed at eliminating the opposition, Trotksy was accused of espionage. A supposed family friend, Jacques van den Dreschd, wounded Trotsky mortally on August 21. 1940 with an ice pick.

See also: Isaac Babel have depicted Jews in Odessa and the Russian Civil war his novel Red Army (1926). Vienna after the turn of the century attracted several intellectuals and writers. Café Central near Palais Frestel was Trotsky's Peter Altenbeg's, Robert Musil's, Kraftt-Ebbing's and Alfred Adleräs favorite place among others.

Film: The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), dir. by Joseph Losey, starring Richard Burton, Alain Delon, Romy Schneider.

For further reading: Three Who Made a Revolution by B.D. Wolfe (1948); The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 by Isaac Deutscher (1980); The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-29 by Isaac Deutscher (1980); The Propher Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940 by Isaac Deutsher (1980)

Permanent revolution: Trotsky argued from his experience in 1905 that Russian bourgeois was too weak to carry through the coming revolution which would have to be taken over by the proletariat. The proletariat would then be deserted by the peasantry, who would join the mass of small owners opposing the socialist revolution. Since the proletariat in Russia was a minority, it would not be able to maintain itself in power unless it could rely on the help from a socialist revolution in the West. The revolution in Russia would touch off a conflagration in the rest of Europe.

Important: Victor Serge's Vie et mort de Léon Trotsky (1973)

Selected works:

• DEFENCE OF TERRORISM, 1920
• LENIN, 1924
• LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION, 1925
• MOYA ZHIZN', 1930 - MY LIFE
• ISTORIYA RUSSKOY REVOLYUTSII, 1931-33 HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (3 vols.)
• THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED, 1937
• THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION, 1937