Assassination of Leon Trotsky

Date: August 20, 1940 • Location: Moscow, Russia

In Mexico City, exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded with an ice axe by Ramón Mercader. He dies the next day.

Lev Davidovich Trotsky, better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist. He was a key figure in the 1905 Revolution, the October Revolution of 1917, the Russian Civil War, and the establishment of the Soviet Union, from which he was exiled in 1929 before his assassination in 1940. Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were widely considered the two most prominent figures in the Soviet state from 1917 until Lenin's death in 1924. Ideologically a Marxist and a Leninist, Trotsky's ideas and beliefs inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.