Video: 'Rise of Josef Stalin' (Trotsky expelled from party at 10:12)

(Saturday, November 12, 1927) — Josef Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union today as Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party.

Stalin would later force Trotsky into exile and ordered his 1940 assassination. Zinoviev was executed on Stalin’s orders in 1936.