Trotsky, Leon (1879–1940)

Trotsky’s chief claim to attention is as the leader of the Russian Revolution who opposed the consolidation of the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union and sought to dissociate the classical Marxist tradition from that regime and its official ideology. In doing so, however, he developed a version of Marxism which sought to give proper place to the ‘subjective factor’ in history, and at the same time to integrate Marx’s social theory into a broader, dialectical theory of nature.