Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov)
The architect of the 1917 Bolshevik coup and the man who tried to turn Marx’s theory into state practice. A brilliant organizer and thinker, Lenin became the Soviet state’s first ruler. He survived an assassination attempt in 1918 (shot by Fanny Kaplan) and suffered strokes in the following years; he died in 1924, leaving a leadership vacuum and a testament that warned about Stalin’s rising power.
Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein)
The commander of the Red Army and the Revolution’s silver-tongued strategist. Trotsky pushed permanent revolution — the idea that socialism only survives if it keeps spreading. After Lenin’s death he lost the political chess match to Stalin, was expelled, exiled, and finally murdered in Mexico in 1940 by Ramón Mercader with an ice axe. Trotsky died still convinced the revolution had been betrayed.
Stalin (Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili)
The bureaucrat who became dictator. Stalin used the General Secretary post to stack the party with loyalists, then methodically crushed rivals. He argued for socialism in one country, industrialized the USSR at brutal cost, engineered mass purges, forced collectivization that starved millions, and ruled with absolute paranoia from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. He won. The revolution’s moral claims lost.
In short: Lenin lit the fuse; Trotsky wanted an international fire; Stalin burned the house down and kept the keys. If history’s a brutal theater, Lenin was the playwright, Trotsky the actor who stayed true to the script, and Stalin the director who rewrote the ending into a horror show.