The theory, developed by Trotsky, argued that in countries like Russia with 'uneven development,' the bourgeoisie was too weak to lead a democratic revolution [citation:11]. This role would fall to the proletariat, which would then establish a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' allied with the peasantry [citation:1]. This workers' state would not stop at democratic tasks but would immediately and continuously push towards socialist transformation—hence, the 'permanent' character of the revolution [citation:1][citation:11].

Trotsky passionately argued against Stalin's theory of 'socialism in one country,' insisting that a socialist revolution in Russia could only survive as part of a chain of revolutions across Europe and the world [citation:11]. He saw Stalin's approach as a betrayal of internationalism and the core tenets of Marxism [citation:15]. This fundamental disagreement on revolutionary strategy was the central ideological conflict between the two.

As the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and a key organizer of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, Trotsky was central to the revolution's success [citation:13]. He later served as Commissar for Foreign Affairs and, most crucially, as the founder and commander of the Red Army, leading it to victory in the brutal Russian Civil War [citation:8][citation:14].

After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky lost the power struggle to Stalin, who used his position as General Secretary to build a bureaucratic apparatus [citation:14]. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, and eventually given asylum in Mexico [citation:14]. In 1940, he was assassinated there by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent, who struck him in the head with an ice pick [citation:4][citation:9][citation:14].

Trotsky came to see Stalinism as a 'betrayal' of the 1917 Revolution [citation:10]. In his final works, like *The Revolution Betrayed*, he argued that the Soviet bureaucracy had crushed the democratic elements of the revolution and was creating a new, oppressive class system, reversing the socialist project [citation:5]. His critique of the bureaucratic system became a foundational text for later anti-Stalinist leftist thought.