Became a revolutionary in 1896. Later worked with Lenin on Iskra in 1902. He broke with Lenin the next year over the nature of the revolutionary party and aligned himself with the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. He broke with the Mensheviks in 1904 and tried during the next decade to reunite the factions of the RSDLP. In the 1905 revolution, he was the leader of the St. Petersburg Soviet and developed the theory of Permanent Revolution. In 1915 he wrote the Zimmerwald manifesto against the war.
Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and was elected to its central committee. Shortly following Trotsky helped organize the October Revolution.
In 1923 Trotsky formed the Left Opposition and for the ensuing decade battled the reactionary wave of Stalinism sweeping through the Soviet Union. The opposition was unsuccessful, and Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and the Comintern, and exiled to Turkey in 1927.
Lenin, Founder of the Soviet Republics
LENIN, VLADIMIR ILYICH ULYANOV, founder and guiding spirit of the Soviet Republics and the Communist International, the disciple of Marx, the leader of the Bolshevik part...
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until 1953. Stalin's increasing control of the Party from 192...
The Russian Revolution of 1917
The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 was initiated by millions of people who would change the history of the world as we know it. When Czar Nicholas II dragged 11 m...
