" The decision to negotiate peace with the Germans was only reached when Lenin threatened to resign, which in turn led to a temporary coalition between Lenin's supporters and those of Trotsky and others.

In the evening of 18 February 1918, Trotsky and his supporters in the committee abstained and Lenin's proposal was accepted 7 – 4.

They and their supporters accused Trotsky of various mistakes and worse during the Russian Civil War and damaged his military reputation so much that he was forced to resign as People's Commissar of Army and Fleet Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council in January 1925.

While Trotsky remained firm in his opposition to Stalin after his expulsion from the Party and subsequent exile, Zinoviev and Kamenev capitulated almost immediately and called on their supporters to follow suit.

They and their supporters accused Trotsky of various mistakes and worse during the Russian Civil War and damaged his military reputation so much that he was forced to resign as People's Commissar of Army and Fleet Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council in January 1925.

While Trotsky remained firm in his opposition to Stalin after his expulsion from the Party and subsequent exile, Zinoviev and Kamenev capitulated almost immediately and called on their supporters to follow suit.

Trotsky was sent into internal exile and his supporters were jailed.

Historically, the Fourth International was established in France in 1938: Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union, considered the Comintern or Third International to have become " lost to " Stalinism and incapable of leading the international working class to political power.

Furthermore, Trotsky and his supporters harshly criticised the increasingly totalitarian nature of Joseph Stalin's rule.

Trotsky and his supporters had been organised since 1923 as the Left Opposition.

Eventually Trotsky was sent into internal exile and his supporters were jailed.

In the early 1930s, Trotsky and his supporters believed that Stalin's influence over the Third International could still be fought from within and slowly rolled back.

According to the historian Mario Kessler, Stalin's supporters turned to anti-semitism to whip up sentiment against Trotsky ( as Trotsky was a Jew ).

Trotsky and his supporters underestimated Molotov, as did many others.

In May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, commonly known as the Dewey Commission, was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials.

Leon Trotsky and his supporters roundly criticised the Popular Front strategy.

Bordiga was, along with his supporters, expelled from the PCd ' I for taking the defense of Leon Trotsky in 1930.

Central in the party leadership from 1923 to 1925 but pushed aside due to the influence of the Communist International ( Comintern ), the Cannon group became in 1928 supporters of Leon Trotsky.

In 1938, Trotsky and his supporters founded a new international organisation of dissident communists, the Fourth International.

As a result of the Russian Revolution and the Winnipeg General Strike, a number of the SPC's supporters became attracted to Bolshevism and the ideas of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

At the 15th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in December 1927, Joseph Stalin attacked the left by expelling Leon Trotsky and his supporters from the party and then moving against the right by abandoning Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy which had been championed by Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Ivanovich Rykov.

Originally, the battle lines were drawn between Trotsky and his supporters who signed The Declaration of 46 in October 1923, on the one hand, and a triumvirate ( known by its Russian name troika ) of Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin and Politburo chairman Lev Kamenev on the other hand.

Trotsky and his supporters were joined by the Group of Democratic Centralism.

Leon Trotsky at first supported the Mensheviks, but left them in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

" Trotsky did face a problem however: he had previously disagreed with Lenin on several matters.

To make matters worse, Stalin began espousing his policy of socialism in one country – a policy often viewed, wrongly, as an attack on Trotsky, when it was really aimed at Zinoviev.

* 1937 – In Moscow, 17 leading Communists go on trial accused of participating in a plot led by Leon Trotsky to overthrow Joseph Stalin's regime and assassinate its leaders.

Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein () on 7 November 1879, in Yanovka () or Yanivka (), in the Kherson guberniya of the Russian Empire ( today's Bereslavka (; ) in the Bobrynets Raion, Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukraine ), a small village from the nearest post office.

Two months into his imprisonment, the first Congress of the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labor Party ( RSDLP ) was held, and from then on Trotsky considered himself a member of the party.

Trotsky left the Mensheviks in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Trotsky later maintained that he had been wrong in opposing Lenin on the issue of the party.

Trotsky and other Soviet leaders were tried in 1906 on charges of supporting an armed rebellion.

While on route to exile in Obdorsk, Siberia, in January 1907, Trotsky escaped at Berezov and once again made his way to London, where he attended the 5th Congress of the RSDLP.

Trotsky moved to France on 19 November 1914, as a war correspondent for the Kievskaya Mysl.

After initial hesitation, the Russian foreign minister Pavel Milyukov was forced to demand that Trotsky be released, and the British government freed Trotsky on 29 April.

After an unsuccessful pro-Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd, Trotsky was arrested on 7 August 1917, but was released 40 days later in the aftermath of the failed counter-revolutionary uprising by Lavr Kornilov.

After the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky was elected Chairman on 8 October.

After the success of the uprising on 7 – 8 November, Trotsky led the efforts to repel a counter-attack by Cossacks under General Pyotr Krasnov and other troops still loyal to the overthrown Provisional Government at Gatchina.

Also, Stalin polemicized against Trotsky on the role of peasants, as in China, whereas Trotsky's position was in favor of urban insurrection over peasant-based guerrilla warfare.

Trotsky believed that the Russian revolution needed to be spread all over the globe's working class, the proletarians for world revolution ; Stalin insisted on consolidating Bolshevism in Russia and industrialization, " socialism in one country.

British historian Isaac Deutscher, in his biography of Trotsky, says that on being faced with the evidence " only the blind and the deaf could be unaware of the contrast between Stalinism and Leninism ".

Frustrated with continued German demands for cessions of territory, Leon Trotsky, Bolshevik People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs ( more or less Foreign Minister ), and head of the Russian delegation, on February 10, 1918, announced Russia's withdrawal from the negotiations and unilateral declaration of the ending of hostilities, a position summed up as " no war — no peace ".

Denounced by other Bolshevik leaders for exceeding his instructions and exposing Bolshevist Russia to the threat of invasion, Trotsky subsequently defended his action on the grounds that the Bolshevik leaders had originally entered the peace talks in the hope of exposing their enemies ' territorial ambitions and rousing the workers of central Europe to revolution in defense of Russia's new workers ' state.

* January 23 – In Moscow, seventeen leading Communists go on trial, accused of participating in a plot led by Leon Trotsky to overthrow Joseph Stalin's regime and assassinate its leaders.

Dzerzhinsky died of heart failure on 20 July 1926 in Moscow, immediately after a two-hour long speech to the Bolshevik Central Committee during which, visibly quite ill, he violently denounced the United Opposition directed by Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev.

Ironically, this latter phrase was coined by Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in November 1917, using it against his opponents ( the Mensheviks ) and suggesting that communism was the future ; the irony may not have been lost on Reagan's speech writers.

With Trotsky on the sidelines, the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin triumvirate finally began to crumble in early 1925.