The historical and political legacy of Leon Trotsky

On August 21, 1940 Leon Trotsky, the co-leader of the October Revolution and founder of the Fourth International, died of wounds inflicted by an agent of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. His assassination marked the climax of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s campaign of political genocide directed against an entire generation of socialist workers and intellectuals who prepared and led the 1917 October Revolution and created the foundations of the first workers’ state. Stalin’s terror ranks among the worst crimes of the twentieth century.