Today is the 105th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the 143rd birthday of comrade L.D. Trotsky, one of the revolution’s leaders and the founder of the Soviet Red Army.

“The workers’ state must be taken as it has emerged from the merciless laboratory of history and not as it is imagined by a ‘socialist’ professor, reflectively exploring his nose with his finger. It is the duty of revolutionists to defend every conquest of the working class even though it may he distorted by the pressure of hostile forces. Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones.”

- Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism (1939/1940)

Photo: V.I. Lenin and L.D. Trotsky with comrades in Red Square on the second anniversary of the October Revolution, November 7, 1919.