Lev Davidovich Bronstein, popularly known as Leon Trotsky, was a Russian-Ukrainian communist revolutionary, political scholar, and government official. In 1903, he favored Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks during the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party's initial hierarchical split. Trotsky helped organize the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, after which he was again captured and banished to Siberia. After the 1917 February Revolution stopped the Tsarist government, Trotsky got back from New York through Canada to Russia and turned into a leader in the Bolshevik faction. Once in government, Trotsky at first held the post of Commissar for Foreign Affairs and turned out to be directly associated with the 1917-1918 Brest-Litovsk dealings with Germany as Russia pulled out of WWI. From March 1918 to January 1925, Trotsky headed the Red Army as People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and played a significant role in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922. After surviving multiple attempts on his life, Trotsky was killed in August 1940 in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a specialist of the Soviet NKVD. Worked out of Soviet history books under Stalin, Trotsky was one of a handful of opponents of Stalin to not be rehabilitated by either Nikita Khrushchev or Mikhail Gorbachev.
