Trotsky, once the Red Army's architect and a leading Bolshevik theorist, was formally expelled from the Communist Party at the Fifteenth Party Congress, the culmination of Stalin's methodical dismantling of the Left Opposition. Deportation to Kazakhstan followed within weeks, then exile from the Soviet Union altogether in 1929, setting the stage for his eventual assassination by a Stalinist agent in Mexico City in 1940.
By late 1927, the power struggle following Lenin's death in 1924 had decisively turned against Leon Trotsky. Once the fiery organizer of the October Revolution and the founder of the Red Army, Trotsky had spent years warning against the bureaucratic ossification he saw consolidating around Joseph Stalin, forming the Left Opposition with Zinoviev and Kamenev to resist it.
Stalin, however, had spent those same years quietly building control over the party apparatus, packing committees with loyalists and outmaneuvering his rivals through procedure as much as ideology. On November 27, 1927 (some sources cite November 14 for the initial vote, with formal expulsion actions continuing through the Congress in December), Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party altogether at the Fifteenth Congress, a decisive and irreversible blow.
Within two months Trotsky was exiled internally to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan; by 1929 he was expelled from the Soviet Union entirely, beginning a wandering exile through Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico. There, in 1940, an assassin wielding an ice axe, acting on Stalin's orders, ended his life. The expulsion of 1927 marked the definitive triumph of Stalinism over any rival vision of Soviet communism.
Key people: Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin