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.

Trotsky was one of the main contenders for leadership following Lenin's death.

Of these, Trotsky was the most notable one.

Trotsky was the only one in the Politburo who supported Gosplan in its feud with the Commissariat for Finance.

Whereas Trotsky advocated world permanent revolution, Stalin's concept of socialism in one country became primary policy as he emerged the leader of the Soviet Union.

Under the pen name Pero (" feather " or " pen " in Russian ), Trotsky soon became one of the paper's leading authors.

Trotsky temporarily joined the Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in St. Petersburg, and became one of its leaders.

Trotsky was one of the first Bolshevik leaders to recognize the problem and he pushed for the formation of a military council of former Russian generals that would function as an advisory body.

Conversely, Trotsky held that socialism in one country would economically constrain the industrial development of the USSR, and thus required assistance from the new socialist countries that had arisen in the developed world, which was essential for maintaining Soviet democracy, in 1924 much undermined by civil war and counter-revolution.

Stalin felt that in the new situation the policies of his former foes – Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev-was the right one.

This was the position, contrary to that of " Classical Marxism " which by that time had been further illuminated by active life, shared by Trotsky and Lenin and the Bolsheviks until 1924 when Joseph Stalin, who along with Kamenev in February 1917 had taken the Menshevik position of first the bourgeois revolution, only to be confronted by Lenin and his famous April Thesis on Lenin's return to Russia, after the death of Lenin and seeking to consolidate his growing bureaucratic control of the Bolshevik Party began to put forward the slogan of " Socialism in one country ".

That does not, however, lessen the guilt of Leon Trotsky as one of the actors in the revolutionary drama of which Kronstadt was one of the bloodiest scenes.

It adopted a manifesto drafted by Trotsky shortly before his murder and a range of policies on the work of the International, including one calling for the reunification of the then-divided Fourth Internationalist groups in Britain.

Trotsky was also denounced for his theory of permanent revolution which contradicted Stalin's position that socialism could be built in one country, Russia, without a worldwide revolution.

In the 1920s, there was a great debate between Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov on the one hand, and Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev on the other.

Marx and Engels do claim, as does Trotsky, that socialism is impossible in one country, but they also say that ' in all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity ' ( Engels ' The Principles of Communism, Sections 17 and 19 ).

( The revolutionaries thought him no better ; Leon Trotsky, on more than one occasion, levelled high-profile criticism at Thomas.

They were bloodily destroyed or sent into Siberian slavery by Communist troops led in person by the Commissar of War, Leon Trotsky, and by Marshal Tukhachevsky, one of whom was later assassinated, the other executed, by the regime they then saved.

While holidaying in Europe during 1930, he became the first American to visit Trotsky in exile, on an island called Prinkipo in Russian, one of the Princes ' Islands near Istanbul, Turkey.

It had been known that the murderer of Trotsky had been a boyfriend of one of his secretaries, who was introduced to her by a Stalinist agent in France.

They also reject Trotskyism and its " Permanent Revolution " as " hypocritical " by arguing that Leon Trotsky himself had at one time thought it acceptable that socialism could work in a single country as long as that country was industrialized, but that Trotsky had considered Russia too backward to achieve such industrialization – what it later in fact did achieve, mostly through his archenemy Joseph Stalin's Five Year Plans.

The call for a Fifth International expressed the League's view that the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, had degenerated into non-revolutionary fragments since the end of the Second World War and now a new international must be built, with new forces, but one that expressed continuity with the Trotskyist tradition.