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 Lvovich Tolstoy Lev Lvovich Tolstoy Count Lev Lvovich Tolstoy (; 1 June (Old style: 20 May) 1869 – 18 October 1945) was a Russian writer, and the fourth son of Leo Tolstoy. Lev Lvovich, whom his father once called "Leo Tolstoy, Junior" was a fairly well known and respected belletristic author and playwright in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Although he had enjoyed good relations with his parents, by the 1890s Lev Lvovich had come to doubt his father’s religious and moral teachings, eventually becoming an ardent monarchist and Russian patriot. While living in exile after the Russian Revolution in Sweden, he became a vocal