LEON TROTSKY (November 7, 1879 - August 21, 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was a Marxist revolutionary, theorist, and Soviet politician. Initially supporting the Menshevik Internationalists faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, he joined the Bolsheviks just before the 1917 October Revolution and became a leader within the Communist Party. He rose to become one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917, to manage the Bolshevik Revolution. During the early days of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union, he served first as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army, with the title of People’s Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He became a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918-1923). In 1927 Trotsky was removed from power, expelled from the Communist Party, exiled to Alma-Ata, and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. He continued to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union from exile, but was assassinated on 20 August 1940 by Ramón Mercader, a secret agent, and died the following day, aged 60. MAX SHACHTMAN (September 10, 1904 - November 4, 1972) was an American Marxist theorist. He evolved from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL-CIO President George Meany. He broke with Trotsky in 1939 to found the Workers Party-Independent Socialist League (1940-1958). From 1958, he was a leading figure in the Socialist Party, the author of The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist States (1962) and an intellectual influence on the civil rights movement of the 1960s.