Leon Trotsky in a Mexican prison for the murder. Stalin presented Mercader with an Order of Lenin in absentia. Trotsky's ideas formed the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that opposes the theories of Stalinism. He was written out of the history books under Stalin, and was one of the few Soviet political figures who was not rehabilitated by the government under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879, the fifth child of a Ukrainian-Jewish family of wealthy farmers in Yanovka or Yanivka, in the Kherson governorate of the Russian
Lev Davidovich Belkind Lev Davidovich Belkind Prof. Lev Davidovich Belkind (; (August 27, 1896, Myrhorod – November 16, 1969) was a Soviet scientist, engineer and historian; author of numerous publications on the history of science and technology. His academic activity is associated with the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (Technical University) (), where he has founded the department of Lighting Engineering () in the Physics-Energy Faculty () in 1932. In 1937, he became the first dean of the faculty of Electro-Physics upon its formation (). Later he has headed the department of History of Engineering () Fluent in Russian, English, French and German, and