The Russian revolutionary, theorist of permanent revolution, organizer of the Red Army, and founder of the Fourth International — expelled by Stalin, exiled across three continents, and assassinated in Mexico in 1940 — and the most potent symbol of the Stalinist betrayal of the Russian Revolution.
Leon Trotsky organized the October Revolution in 1917. He built the Red Army from almost nothing and led it to victory in a civil war against a dozen foreign interventions. He was the second most important figure in the Russian Revolution. Then Stalin outmaneuvered him, stripped him of power, expelled him from the party, exiled him, and spent the next decade having him hunted. The ice axe that finally succeeded in Mexico City in 1940 reached Trotsky after four of his children and most of his close comrades had already been murdered by the Soviet state.