New Trotsky exhibition opens in Russia
Released on - Friday,06 November , 2009 -20:58
An exhibition on Leon Trotsky, one of the architects of the 1917 Russian Revolution, opened in Saint Petersburg on Friday -- the eve of the uprising's 92nd anniversary.
Trotsky was the founder of the Red Army, and along with Vladimir Lenin, one of the prime movers in the Bolshevik revolt that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II.
After falling out with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the 1920s, Trotsky was exiled from the USSR and moved to Mexico, where he was assassinated on Stalin's orders in 1940.
One of the exhibits in the "Leon of the Revolution" show is a rough draft of the article reporting Trotsky's murder that appeared in the official Soviet newspaper Pravda, complete with Stalin's handwritten notes.
Other items include documents held for years in the archives of the NKVD -- the forerunner of the KGB, newspapers featuring articles by Trotsky and caricatures of him dating from the 1930s.
"Today Leon Trotsky is almost forgotten, even though he was a real Russian Che Guevara -- a revolutionary who dreamed of global revolution," Alexander Smirnov, organiser of the exhibition at the Museum of Political History, told AFP.