Having lost his power struggle with Joseph Stalin following Lenin's death, Trotsky was stripped of Communist Party membership, exiled internally to Alma-Ata, and finally deported from Soviet territory entirely, expelled to Turkey. His removal marked Stalin's consolidation of total control over the Soviet state and began Trotsky's decade of wandering exile that ended with his assassination by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940.
Trotsky had been the Bolshevik Revolution's most brilliant orator and organizer, the man who built the Red Army from scratch and led it to victory in the civil war. But Lenin's death in 1924 set off a succession struggle in which the seemingly colorless party bureaucrat Joseph Stalin outmaneuvered him through patient control of party machinery and alliances that Trotsky, arrogant and politically clumsy, failed to counter.
By 1927, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and exiled to Alma-Ata in Soviet Central Asia, a remote posting meant to silence him. He continued smuggling out writings criticizing Stalin's bureaucratic dictatorship, prompting Stalin to order his complete removal from Soviet territory. On this date, Trotsky boarded a ship bound for Turkey, beginning an odyssey that would take him through France, Norway, and finally Mexico.
Exiled and stateless, Trotsky continued writing prolifically, founding the Fourth International to rival Stalin's Comintern and denouncing what he called the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Stalin never stopped viewing him as a mortal threat; in 1940 an NKVD assassin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull in his fortified Mexico City compound, closing the final chapter of the Bolshevik old guard's destruction.