Leon Trotsky

Communist leader. He was chief theorist, a leader in both the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions alongside V. I. Lenin. As commissar for foreign affairs, Trotsky arranged the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. He next became head of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, which resulted in the deaths of over a million White Army soldiers and Cossacks, upon orders from V. I. Lenin.

He was the only leader in the October Revolution of 1917 to be fully Jewish.

Wanted to put the deposed Tsar Nicholas II on trial in late July 1918, but the Russian Civil War and military intervention by the Allied Powers made this impossible. He later defended the murder of the Romanovs - the Russian royal family - as a necessary measure, to demonstrate to the world that there was no going back.

He had Russian peasants and workers forcibly conscripted into the Red Army, but he proved to be a poor military leader and the Russian invasion of Poland in the 1920s was repulsed by Polish forces under Marshal Józef Pilsudski, with very heavy Russian losses.

Trotsky and his arch-rival Joseph Stalin struggled for power after Lenin's death in 1924.

Stalin eventually stripped Trotsky of his influence by 1929, and expelled him from Russia in 1936. Trotsky spent the rest of his life in exile, living in the home of Mexican communist artist Diego Rivera in Mexico.

Denounced the Vyacheslav Molotov-Joachim von Ribbentrop Pact, which resulted in the Soviet-German invasion of Poland in September 1939.

Is portrayed by Richard Burton in Mordet på Trotskij (1972); Daniel Massey in Stalin (1992); and Geoffrey Rush in Frida (2002).

The title of the multiple Academy award-winning movie Life Is Beautiful (1997) is based on one of Trotsky's notes to his wife while he was in exile in Mexico, knowing that he was about to be killed by Joseph Stalin's assassins.

As of 2012, his great-granddaughter Nora Volkow was Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Bethesda, MD.