Russia
Lev Trotsky
1879–1940 Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, 1917–1918
Trotsky had been chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in 1905 and the organizer of the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917. As commissar for foreign affairs he took over the Brest-Litovsk talks in January 1918, where he hoped to delay and turn the negotiations into propaganda for revolution in Germany. His gamble, "neither war nor peace," failed when Germany resumed its advance, and he resigned the post after the treaty. He then became commissar for war and created the Red Army that won the Civil War. He lost to Stalin in the struggle for Lenin's succession, was exiled in 1929 and was murdered in Mexico by a Stalinist agent in 1940.