This is a short biography of the founder of the Red Army later out-manoeuvered by Stalin. Leon Trotsky became the leading spokesman of Russian Revolution, and was the founder of the victorious Red Army of 1918-1921, and did more than anyone to create the early soviet state. Yet Trotsky was out-manoeuvred by Stalin in the struggle to succeed Lenin. In the years followed, he developed the first systematic critique of Stalin's dictatorship. In 1929, he and his wife were forced out of Russia, moving from Turkey to France, and finally to Mexico, where he was brutally assassinated by a Spanish communist in 1940.
