Leon Trotsky (November 7, 1879 - August 21, 1940) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist. He joined the Bolsheviks prior to the 1917 October Revolution and was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918-20). He became a leader within the Party, and was among the first members of the Politburo. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army as People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power in 1927, expelled from the Communist Party, and finally deported from the Soviet Union in 1929. As the head of the Fourth International, he continued in exile in Mexico to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, in the late 1930s, he opposed Stalin's non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler. He was assassinated on Stalin's orders in Mexico, by Ram籀n Mercader, a Spanish-born Soviet agent in August 1940 at the age of 60. According to James Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (USA), Trotsky's last words were "I will not survive this attack. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before.