Thirty years ago this month, Russian students, researchers, representatives of a newly formed independent mineworkers’ trade union and political activists gathered in Moscow for a seminar to resurrect the memory of Lev Trotsky.
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Simon Pirani: When Trotskyist travellers met Soviet reality
Picture dated 1937 of Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova in Mexico. Exiled Soviet Jewish communist revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, pseudonym of Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, played a major role in the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and created the Red Army. After Lenin's death (1924), Trotsky was ousted from the Communist Party by Stalin, who opposed his theory of "permanent revolution" and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. He finally found asylum in Mexico, where he was assassinated by one of Stalin's agent Ramon Mercader in Mexico 20 August 1940.
