Lev Trotskiy

Birthday: November 7, 1879 in Yanovka, Yelisavetgrad uyezd, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire [now Bereslavka, Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukraine]

Birth Name: Lev Davidovich Bronstein

Height: 174 cm

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 Iosif 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. Show less «

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The ol...Show more »

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle "Who does not work shall not eat" has been replaced by a new one: "Who does not obey shall not eat". Show less «

In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had, before the growth of fascism and its v...Show more »

In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had, before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of radicalism of the masses-of the workers and the poorer peasants and farmers, and of the petty bourgeois class. In Italy, after the war and before 1922, we had a revolutionary wave of tremendous dimensions; the state was paralyzed, the police did not exist, the trade unions could do anything they wanted-but there was not party capable of taking the power. As a reaction came fascism. In Germany, the same. We had a revolutionary situation in 1918; the bourgeois class did not even ask to participate in the power. The social democrats paralyzed the revolution. Then the workers tried again in 1922-23-24. This was the time of the bankruptcy of the Communist Party-all of which we have gone into before. Then in 1929-30-31, the German workers began again a new revolutionary wave. There was a tremendous power in the Communists and in the trade unions, but then came the famous policy (on the part of the Stalinist movement) of social fascism, a policy invented to paralyze the working class. Only after these three tremendous waves did fascism become a big movement. There are no exceptions to this rule-fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society. Show less «

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

[His testament, written before his death in 1940] Life is beautiful.

Lev Trotskiy

Lev Trotskiy's FILMOGRAPHY

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