Trotsky

Comrade, we have much to discuss.

Trotsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898, being arrested and exiled to Siberia for his activities. In 1902 he escaped to London, where he met Lenin. Trotsky initially sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks in the party's 1903 schism, but declared himself non-factional in 1904. During the 1905 Revolution, Trotsky was elected chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. He was again exiled to Siberia, but escaped in 1907 and lived abroad. After the February Revolution of 1917, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. He helped to lead the October Revolution, and as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I. He served as People's Commissar for Military Affairs from 1918 to 1925, during which he built the Red Army and led it to victory in the civil war. In 1922 Lenin formed a bloc with Trotsky against the growing Soviet bureaucracy and proposed that he should become a deputy premier, but Trotsky declined. Beginning in 1923, Trotsky led the party's Left Opposition faction, which supported greater levels of industrialisation, voluntary collectivisation and party democratisation in a shared framework with the New Economic Policy.

After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky emerged as a prominent critic of Joseph Stalin, who soon politically outmanoeuvred him. Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and from the party in 1927, exiled to Alma Ata in 1928 and deported in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937. In exile, Trotsky wrote polemics against Stalinism, advocating proletarian internationalism against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution held that the revolution could survive only if it spread to more advanced capitalist countries. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936).