I never met John Dewey, whose style was a sort of verbal fog and who had written asking me to go to Mexico with him when he was investigating the cause of Trotsky ; ;

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.

" 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.

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

Of these, Trotsky was the most notable one.

It was the power of the center which disturbed Trotsky and his followers.

This was not enough for Trotsky, and he wrote an article in Pravda where he condemned the Soviet leadership and the powers of the center.

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

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.

At the 14th Party Congress ( 18 – 31 December 1925 ) Kamenev and Zinoviev were forced into the same position that Trotsky had been forced into previously ; they proclaimed that the center was usurping power from the regional branches, and that Stalin was a danger to inner-party democracy.

In April 1926 Zinoviev was removed from the Politburo and in December, Trotsky lost his membership too.

The German stance was altered radically after 10 February when Leon Trotsky, despite the weakness of the Bolsheviks ' position, broke off negotiations, hoping revolutions would break out in the German Empire and change everything.

Trotsky, and others believed that the revolution could only succeed in Russia as part of a world revolution, which was in fact shortly after the Russian Revolution spreading in the defeated central powers of Europe.

He was well known for aiding Joseph Stalin in the Military Council ( led by Leon Trotsky ), having become closely associated with Stalin during the Red Army's 1918 defense of Tsaritsyn.

This move was opposed by Anton Pannekoek and Karl Leibknecht within the SPD and by others in the International such as Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, some of whom participated in the ' Paris Commission ' set up by the International.

Radek was part of the Left Opposition from 1923, writing his famed article ' Leon Trotsky: Organizer of Victory ' shortly after Lenin's stroke in January of that year.

Leon Trotsky (, ; – 21 August 1940 ), born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army.

Trotsky was initially a supporter of the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power ( 1927 ), expelled from the Communist Party, and finally deported from the Soviet Union ( 1929 ).

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.

When Trotsky was nine, his father sent him to Odessa to be educated.

As Isaac Deutscher points out in his biography of Trotsky, Odessa was then a bustling cosmopolitan port city, very unlike the typical Russian city of the time.

Trotsky accused the delegates of the 12th Party Congress ( 17 – 25 April 1923 ) of being indirectly elected by the center, citing that 55. 1 % of the voting delegates at the congress were full-time members, at the previous congress only 24. 8 % of the voting-delegates were full-members.

Just before Trotsky's return, the Mensheviks had independently come up with the same idea that Trotsky had: an elected non-party revolutionary organization representing the capital's workers, the first Soviet (" Council ") of Workers.

Trotsky joined the Soviet under the name " Yanovsky " ( after the village he was born in, Yanovka ) and was elected vice-Chairman.

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

Trotsky was elected chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet during the 1905 Russian Revolution.

In 1917, Trotsky was again elected chairman of the Petrograd soviet, but this time soon came to lead the Military Revolutionary Committee which had the allegiance of the Petrograd garrison, and carried through the October 1917 insurrection.

It was during this time that support for the Bolsheviks grew and another of its ' leading figures, Leon Trotsky, was elected chair of the Petrograd Soviet, which had complete control over the defenses of the city, mainly, the city's military force.

On March 25, 1919, the Central Committee elected by the 8th congress appointed a Politburo consisting of Kamenev, N. Krestinsky, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, and with Bukharin, Zinovyev and Kalinin as candidate members.

On September 25, they gained a majority in the Workers ' Section and Leon Trotsky was elected chairman.

Kerensky's order was issued not long after the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet and Trotsky was elected Chairman ( the latter took place on September 26, 1917 Old Style.

For his services his comrades elected him to receive an award from Leon Trotsky.

" The trio — Communist Labor Party founder James P. Cannon, Labor Defender editor Max Shachtman, and Romanian-born former head of the Young Workers League Martin Abern — had been won over to the ideas of Leon Trotsky when Cannon had been exposed to a translation of Trotsky's manuscript " The Draft Program of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals " while a delegate to the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow that summer.

The final compromise proposed by the triumvirate at the Council of the Elders of the 13th Congress after Kamenev read out the text of the document was to make Lenin's testament available to the delegates on the following conditions ( first made public in a pamphlet by Trotsky published in 1934 and confirmed by documents released during and after glasnost ):

During the 1930s and 1940s Joseph Stalin's NKVD carried out numerous assassinations outside of the Soviet Union, such as the killings of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists leader Yevhen Konovalets, Ignace Poretsky, Fourth International secretary Rudolf Klement, Leon Trotsky, and the Workers ' Party of Marxist Unification ( POUM ) leadership in Catalonia.

During the 10th Party Congress ( March 1921 ) Lenin condemned the Workers Opposition, a faction within the Communist Party, for deviating from communism and accused Trotsky of factionalism.

Major figures in the Communist Party such as Trotsky and Red Army leaders, were killed, convicted of participating in plots to overthrow the Soviet government and Stalin.

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.

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.

In Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked within the Swiss Socialist Party, prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution, and wrote a book against the war, The War and the International.

By the end of 1917, Trotsky was unquestionably the second man in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin, overshadowing the ambitious Zinoviev, who had been Lenin's top lieutenant over the previous decade, but whose star appeared to be fading.

Lenin warned that Stalin has “ unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution ”, and formed a factional bloc with Leon Trotsky to remove Stalin as the General Secretary of the Communist Party.

Despite advice to refuse “ any rotten compromise ”, Trotsky did not heed Lenin ’ s advice, and General Secretary Stalin retained power over the Communist Party and the bureaucracy of the soviet government.

After Lenin ’ s death ( 21 January 1924 ), Trotsky ideologically battled the influence of Stalin, who formed ruling blocs within the Russian Communist Party ( with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, then with Nikolai Bukharin, and then by himself ) and so determined soviet government policy from 1924 onwards.

The ruling blocs continually denied Stalin ’ s opponents the right to organise as an opposition faction within the Party — thus, the re-instatement of democratic centralism and free speech within the Communist Party were key arguments of Trotsky ’ s Left Opposition, and the later Joint Opposition.

In 1925, Stalin's policy won the support of the 14th Party Congress while Trotsky was defeated.

The 1927 Party Conference gave official endorsement to the policy of Socialism in One Country, while Trotsky along with Kamenev and Zinoviev ( both now allied with Trotsky against Stalin ) were expelled from the Party's Politburo.

* 1927 – Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union.

In the subsequent power struggle among Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Stalin, Bukharin allied himself with Stalin, who positioned himself as centrist of the Party and supported NEP against the Left Opposition, which wanted more rapid industrialization, escalation of class struggle against the kulaks, and agitation for world revolution.

Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Lev Kamenev at the Second Communist Party Congress, 1919.

** Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev are removed from the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.