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.

During his trip in Russia, Chiang met Leon Trotsky and other Soviet leaders, but quickly came to the conclusion that the Russian model of government was not suitable for China.

Leon Trotsky criticised this view, stating " our rules represent ' organisational nonconfidence ' of the party toward its parts, that is, supervision over all local, district, national and other organisations ... the organisation of the party takes place of the party itself ; the Central Committee takes the place of the organisation ; and finally the dictator takes the place of the Central Committee.

On 10 July 1929, Radek alongside other oppositionists Ivar Smilga and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, signed a document capitulating to Stalin., with Radek being held in particular disdain by oppositionist circles for his betrayal of Yakov Blumkin, who had been carrying a secret letter from Trotsky, in exile in Turkey, to Radek.

Trotsky and other Iskra editors attended.

Trotsky spent much of his time between 1904 and 1917 trying to reconcile different groups within the party, which resulted in many clashes with Lenin and other prominent party members.

The most serious disagreement that Trotsky and the Mensheviks had with Lenin at the time was over the issue of " expropriations ", i. e., armed robberies of banks and other companies by Bolshevik groups to procure money for the Party, which had been banned by the 5th Congress, but continued by the Bolsheviks.

Within the RSDLP, Lenin, Trotsky and Martov advocated various internationalist anti-war positions, while Plekhanov and other social democrats ( both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ) supported the Russian government to some extent.

* 1908 – The Pravda newspaper is founded by Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and other Russian exiles in Vienna.

In preparation for peace talks with the representatives of the German government and the representatives of the other Central Powers, Leon Trotsky appointed his good friend, Adolph Joffe, to represent the Bolsheviks at the peace conference.

On November 10, 1917, three days after the Soviet seizure of power during the October Revolution, the executive committee of the national railroad labor union, Vikzhel, threatened a national strike unless the Bolsheviks shared power with other socialist parties and dropped the uprising's leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, from the government.

On October 29, 1917 ( Julian calendar ), immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power during the October Revolution, the executive committee of the national railroad labor union, Vikzhel, threatened a national strike unless the Bolsheviks shared power with other socialist parties and dropped Lenin and Leon Trotsky from the government.

Sometime in 1918, while Ukraine was under German occupation, the rabbis of Odessa ceremonially anathematized ( pronounced herem against ) Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other Jewish Bolshevik leaders in the synagogue.

This belief, or the fervor with which Mao held it, separated Mao from the other Chinese Communists and led Mao onto the path of what Leon Trotsky called, " Messianic Revolutionary Nationalism " which was central to his personal philosophy and is demonstrated in his long-standing hostile relationship with ComIntern.

Isolated from each other, and faced with political developments quite unlike those anticipated by Trotsky, some Trotskyist organizations decided that the Soviet Union no longer could be called a degenerated workers state and withdrew from the Fourth International.

The list of Trotskyist internationals shows that there are a large number of other multinational tendencies that stand in the tradition of Leon Trotsky.

In the United States Dwight Macdonald broke with Trotsky and left the trotskist Socialist Workers Party, by raising the question of the Kronstadt rebellion, which Trotsky as leader of the Soviet Red Army and the other Bolsheviks had brutally repressed.

Trotsky advocated proletarian revolution as set out in his theory of " permanent revolution ", and believed that a workers ' state would not be able to hold out against the pressures of a hostile capitalist world unless socialist revolutions quickly took hold in other countries as well.

By early 1928 Trotsky and other leading members of the Left Opposition had been sentenced to internal exile.

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.

The most well-known writer in the Yiddish Forward was Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize in literature although other well known Socialist literary and political figures, such as Leon Trotsky and Morris Winchevsky have also written for it.

Cárdenas was not as left-wing as Leon Trotsky and other socialists would wish, but still Trotsky described the Cárdenas's government as the only honest government in the world.