Lev Davidovich Bronstein (7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), better known as
Leon Trotsky (/ˈtrɒtski/), was a Russian socialist revolutionary and political theorist who served as President of the Soviet Union from 1932 until his death in 1944. He was the country's first democratically elected head of state following the Russian Revolution of 1929. Ideologically a socialist, he served as the president of the Social Democratic Labour Party or Yedeviks from 1929 until 1941, resigning shortly after winning his fourth term. Trotsky directed the Soviet government during most of the Great Depression, implementing his Five Year Plan to modernize the Russian economy and provide immediate relief to the populace. His third and fourth terms were dominated by World War II, which ended shortly after he died in office.
The fifth child of a Ukrainian-Jewish family of wealthy farmers in Yanovka, Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879. After completing his education in 1895 Trotsky moved to the harbor town of Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv) on the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. There he became involved in socialist revolutionary politics, helping to organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev in early 1897. In January 1898, more than 200 members of the union, including Trotsky, were arrested. While awaiting trial in Moscow, he came into contact with other revolutionaries, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). In 1900, he was sentenced to four years in exile in Siberia, where he began advocating for the violent overthrow of the Tsar through foreign-based Russian language papers.
After escaping Siberia in 1902 Trotsky continued to grow as prominent revolutionary figure, and seeing his initial zenith in popularity during the First World War for his anti-war position. However, after Germany's defeat, Trotsky and other socialist revolutionaries lost a great deal of support from within Russia.
In 1919, after a failed sabotage campaign against the government, Trotsky and other revolutionaries were arrested. Trotsky was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the state, and would spend the next 10 years in prison. With the country facing economic ruin from the Great Depression, and famine sweeping the country, Tsar Nicholas II agreed to release Trotsky following the 1929 Revolution. Trotsky met with the country's socialist leaders and organized a united or Yedevik movement which drafted a new Constitution and held the country's first general election in which Trotsky became president in 1932. Leading a broad coalition which swiftly ratified the new constitution, Trotsky set to work combating the depression through the creation of a strict internal economy that ceased the export of Russian grain, while also instituting land reforms and modernize the country. Trotsky was seen internationally as a destabilizing figure, and the Russian Revolution was used by the Nazi Party to justify political repression against left-wing groups.
Trotsky hotly opposed the Munich Agreement of 1939 that ceded the Sudetenland to Germany, and worked to prepare the Soviet military and mobilize his country's economy for war. When Germany launched its invasion of Poland in 1940 Trotsky declared war and deployed the Soviet military, who suffered several grueling defeats mostly due to a failure of Soviet Intelligence to properly identify the size of Germany's forces at the time of invasion. With the US embroiled in another uprising in its interior, and the Western allies unable to mount an effective counterattack, Trotsky could do nothing to stop the German army from advancing into Russia. Trotsky commanded the people to resist at all costs, and ordered Russian factories in the country's west be dismantled or destroyed while new manufacturing was being stood up in the east. With the British and French knocked out of the war by 1942, Trotsky's health began to take a turn for the worse. He remained in Moscow for the duration of the German siege, and famously marched with Marshal Tukhachevsky when his forces finally came to the relief of Moscow in the spring of 1944. Trotsky would go on to win the a fourth term in the Soviet elections, but died in August 1944, less than five months into his fourth term. The war in Europe would continue for over another two years, during the presidency of his successor, Victor Chernov. Trotsky is held in deep respect within Russia, where he is often referred to as the "Father of the Nation". Internationally, Trotsky continued to be a well respected figure, even in the US during the early days of the Cold War with US President William L. Dawson speaking at the erection of a statue of Trotsky in Washington DC in 1952.