Revolution betrayed: The tragic death of Leon Trotsky

Born on 7 November 1879 to a Jewish farming family in Yanovka, Ukraine, Lev Davidovich Bronstein spent his early years among the Ukrainian peasantry, where he had received private tutoring before he entered school in Odessa.

His parents, David and Anna Bronstein, who supported his education, saw him eventually enrol at St. Paul’s Realschule.

There, he encountered radical political ideas that challenged the authority of the Tsarist state and led to his first arrest in 1898.

During his second exile in Siberia around 1902, he had adopted the alias “Trotsky,” and soon after his escape from exile in Siberia, he began to contribute to revolutionary publications and to travel through Western Europe. 

By 1903, Trotsky had become an increasingly visible and confident voice within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

After refusing to join either the Bolsheviks or Mensheviks, he attempted to reconcile the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and he maintained contact with Lenin and others as he shaped debates on party structure and revolutionary purpose.

During his years abroad, he continued to sharpen his theories about revolution and earned a reputation for powerful public speaking and editorial skill, along with a strong sense of independent judgement.

During the failed 1905 revolution, Trotsky returned to Russia and took on the leadership of the St Petersburg Soviet, where he directed strikes and large protest actions at the age of 26.

Arrested again by the Tsarist police, he was sentenced to exile in Siberia, from which he escaped once more and resumed his political activity overseas.

In 1906, he published “Results and Prospects,” which introduced the core ideas behind his theory of Permanent Revolution.

Over the next decade, he regularly denounced the war between European empires and predicted that only revolution could end the cycle of exploitation and imperial conquest. 

Eventually, following the February Revolution of 1917, Trotsky returned to Russia, merged his Mezhraiontsy faction with the Bolsheviks in July 1917, and joined them as their ranks swelled in Petrograd.

He became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and played a key role in the organisation of the Military Revolutionary Committee, which directed the seizure of power.

By October, he had become one of the chief organisers of the armed insurrection that seized the Winter Palace and overthrew the Provisional Government.

After the revolution, Lenin placed him in charge of negotiations for peace with Germany, and Trotsky reluctantly agreed to the severe terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 after negotiations began on 22 December 1917.

During the negotiations, he briefly attempted a strategy he called “neither war nor peace,” which sought to delay an agreement without renewing hostilities.

Then came his most significant contribution, which was the creation and leadership of the Red Army.

During the Russian Civil War, Trotsky travelled by armoured train to all major fronts, where he reorganised retreating units and issued strict orders that restored discipline among discouraged recruits.

He appointed former Tsarist officers as military experts, and he ensured political loyalty through commissars.

Without his intervention, the Bolsheviks may not have survived the attack on many fronts carried out by White armies and foreign troops, along with internal rebels.

By 1920, the Red Army had grown to nearly five million men, though its numbers declined significantly by the war's end.

After Lenin’s death in January 1924, the balance of power shifted within the Communist Party, and Trotsky had no loyal party apparatus behind him and found himself at risk politically.

Stalin controlled key appointments as General Secretary and formed alliances with other senior Bolsheviks, and he began removing Trotsky’s allies from influential posts.

Gradually, the man once hailed as the “co-leader” of the revolution became an increasingly sidelined figure inside the movement he had helped to build. 

By 1927, Trotsky had been expelled from the Politburo and the party itself, accused of factionalism and sabotage.

As his influence declined, the press denounced him as a traitor, and his name became linked to foreign enemies and conspiracies.

In 1929, he was forced into exile and boarded a train out of the USSR, and he left behind the revolution which he had defended with words and weapons.

Initially, Trotsky settled in Turkey, where he lived under armed guard on Büyükada Island near Istanbul.

There, he wrote My Life and The Permanent Revolution. He later completed The History of the Russian Revolution during his time in France, a work which defended his role and condemned the Soviet bureaucracy that had replaced working-class control.

Later, he moved to France, where constant watching and threats continued, before he relocated to Norway, which offered temporary asylum but placed him under house arrest in 1936 during a serious dispute between governments prompted by the first of the Moscow show trials.

France had expelled him in 1935 under pressure from Stalinist diplomats and political tensions. 

Eventually, he received an offer of asylum from Lázaro Cárdenas, who was Mexico’s left-leaning president.

In 1937, Trotsky finally arrived in Mexico City and moved into a heavily guarded house in Coyoacán with his wife Natalia.

In spite of the distance from Moscow, he remained under threat from Stalinist agents, who by then had already assassinated several of his family members and followers, including his son, Lev Sedov, in 1938.

Each murder narrowed his circle of trust, yet he refused to stop writing or abandon his cause.

Within his compound, Trotsky maintained regular contact with socialist activists around the world and launched the Fourth International in 1938.

Its purpose was to revive revolutionary Marxism outside the tight control of Stalinist rulers.

Early supporters included James Cannon and Pierre Naville. Although Natalia Sedova initially supported his work, she later pulled back from the Fourth International.

He denounced the Moscow show trials and the secret police terror that had swept through the USSR, and he presented Stalin as a dictator who had hijacked the revolution for personal and bureaucratic gain.

At the heart of their disagreement was a clash between two visions of socialism’s future.

Trotsky believed that the revolution in Russia could not succeed in isolation and required a wave of revolts in advanced capitalist countries.

His theory of Permanent Revolution stated that socialism must be international and ongoing, or else risk failure and defeat.

He considered the Russian working class too small and the economy too backward to sustain socialism alone. 

Stalin took the opposite position. He argued that socialism could be achieved “in one country” and declared that the USSR could modernise its industry and expand agriculture, and at the same time defend itself without waiting for foreign revolutions.

His slogan appealed to many within the party who sought order and recovery after years of upheaval, and his promises of stability allowed him to secure support across key institutions.

Accordingly, Trotsky accused Stalin of betraying the revolution. In speeches and essays, he argued that a new small ruling group had taken control of the party, and they silenced dissent and used police repression to protect their privileges.

He warned that the loss of inner-party democracy and the suppression of trade unions, alongside the rise of the secret police, all pointed to the creation of a bureaucratic dictatorship in the place of proletarian rule.

Eventually, Stalin moved to silence any dissent permanently. During the Great Terror, thousands of Old Bolsheviks were arrested and tortured, then executed.

Many were accused of Trotskyism, even if they had never met him. The purges wiped out almost every surviving revolutionary who had helped bring down the Tsar, and Trotsky’s name became a justification for murder.

Historians estimate that between 700,000 and 1.2 million people were executed during this period.

He was also denounced and accused during the Moscow show trials, though he was not formally tried in absentia.

His removal from official histories and photographs, along with revolutionary memory, had become nearly complete by the end of the 1930s.

By the time he reached Mexico, Trotsky had already survived several assassination attempts, and he knew that further attacks were inevitable.

In May 1940, a group of men armed with submachine guns stormed his home and sprayed it with bullets while he and his wife were asleep.

They survived when they hid under their bed, but the experience left no doubt that Stalin’s agents would not stop until he was dead. 

Two months later, the NKVD put a plan into action involving Ramón Mercader, a Spanish communist trained in spying and operating under the alias “Jacques Mornard.”

He secured access to Trotsky’s household by forming a relationship with Sylvia Ageloff, a trusted member of the inner circle.

Over time, he won the confidence of the staff and appeared to be a harmless admirer seeking Trotsky’s editorial guidance.

His mother, Caridad del Río Hernández, a committed communist, also helped organise and support the operation.

On 20 August 1940, Mercader arrived at the compound and used the excuse of discussing a political article he had written.

Once inside the study, as Trotsky read the document, Mercader produced an ice axe and struck him in the head.

The blow failed to kill him immediately, and Trotsky, bleeding heavily, cried out and fought back long enough for guards to seize the attacker.

As they dragged Mercader from the room, Trotsky told them not to kill him, and he insisted that the world needed to understand who had ordered the attack. 

He died the following day, on 21 August, after doctors failed to save him, and his funeral was held in Mexico City and drew a large crowd of supporters and onlookers.

Mercader was sentenced to twenty years in prison and released in 1960, and upon arrival in the Soviet Union, he later received the Order of Lenin in 1961 and was celebrated as a hero by the regime that had planned the assassination.

In the end, Trotsky died far from the revolution he had once led, silenced by the same forces he had warned would destroy it from within.

Yet his writings, which people kept and shared after his death, continued to influence generations of socialist thinkers and dissidents, as well as critics of repressive rule.

The struggle that defined his life did not end with the blow of an assassin’s axe, and his name survived the regime that tried to erase it.

Today, Trotsky’s grave lies in the garden of his former residence in Coyoacán, which is now the Museo Casa de León Trotsky.