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 * This page has been set up to educate Year 12 students on the 1917 Revolution in Russia as part of 'Part III: Personalities in the Twentieth Century' from the HSC Modern History Syllabus.**

> //People do not make revolutions eagerly any more than they do war. There is this difference, however, that in war compulsion plays the decisive role, in revolution there is no compulsion except that of circumstances. A revolution takes place only when there is no other way out. And the insurrection, which rises above a revolution like a peak in the mountain chain of its events, can be no more evoked at will than the revolution as a whole. The masses advance and retreat several times before they make up their minds to the final assault.// ---Trotsky, //The History of the Russian Revolution//

Leon Trotsky was a Communist theorist, prolific writer, leader in the 1917 Russian Revolution, the people's commissar for foreign affairs under Lenin (1917-1918), and then head of the Red Army as the people's commissar of army and navy affairs (1918-1924). Exiled from the Soviet Union after losing a power struggle with Stalin over who was to become Lenin's successor, Trotsky was brutally assassinated in 1940.