most of what I've learned of Trotsky was from my school history class, which when mentioning that he was closer to Lenin than Stalin, and that Lenin wrote a letter warning of Stalin's influence; that framing placed Trotsky in a better light. But what's weird was that my school was a private British international school, which had ideological reasons to smear the communists, but didn't do the Red Scare bit. But since I've grown-up, therefore becoming an anarchist 😎 I agree that Trotsky was very ideologically similar to Stalin; to his detriment.