Trotsky: Five Key Facts

Prison guard's name

On November 7, 1879 in southern Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born into a wealthy Jewish family of farmers.

While in Odessa pursuing his studies he joined the revolutionary movement and was arrested and deported to Siberia.

He escaped in 1902, leaving behind his wife and two children, and began his first emigration, taking refuge initially in London on a fake passport under the name "Trotsky", which he took from a prison guard in Odessa.

In London he met another political exile and fellow Marxist -- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin. The two men clashed at first but would later join forces in Russia for the revolution.

Life in exile

Trotsky lived a very peripatetic life, residing in several countries in Europe and the United States.

After London he went on to Munich and then Geneva with Natalia Sedova whom he met in Paris and would become his second wife.

Trotsky was back in Russia in 1905 during its first revolution and there he joined the first "Soviet", or Council of Workers in Saint Petersburg, where he was again arrested and deported for life to Siberia.

And again he escaped to begin his second emigration, which took him to Vienna, Zurich, Paris and the United States, from where he travelled back to Russia for the 1917 revolution.

After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky was ousted by his rival Joseph Stalin and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929.

He went to Turkey, France and Norway, before taking refuge in Mexico, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

Red Army founder

In the years after the 1917 revolution, while civil war raged in Russia between the "red" Bolsheviks and the "whites" who opposed the new regime, Trotsky founded the Red Army.

In less than three years it counted some five million men, compared with the Red Guards who had no more than a few thousand volunteers.

Trotsky mobilised the troops by travelling thousands of kilometres (thousands of miles) in an armoured train across the vast country, using his talents as a speaker to inspire soldiers while not hesitating to have deserters and opponents shot.

Permanent revolution

While Stalin pursued "socialism in one country", Trotsky championed "permanent revolution" worldwide.

In 1938 in Paris he founded the revolutionary organisation known as the Fourth International, intended as an alternative to the Third International installed in Russia under Stalin.

Its aim was to create a new world socialist party true to Lenin's ideas and that would spread the revolution.

For decades afterwards, a wide range of parties and groups have called themselves Trotskyist.

Death by ice pick

By the time Trotsky took refuge in Mexico in 1937, Stalin's purges --  which saw Soviet citizens deemed hostile to the regime executed, incarcerated and exiled in vast numbers -- had started.

On May 24, 1940, Trotsky escaped an assassination attempt when a commando stormed his home in Mexico City and machine-gunned the bedroom where he slept with his wife.

Three months later, on the night of August 20, Ramon Mercader, a Spanish communist working as an agent for the Soviet Union, visited Trotsky's home under the pretext of showing him an article.

While Trotsky sat at his desk, engrossed in reading, Mercader plunged an ice pick into his head.

Trotsky died the next day in a hospital in Mexico City. He was 60 years old.