Russian Jewish revolutionary. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, in Yanovka, South Ukraine. He studied at Odessa and in 1898 he was arrested as a Marxist and exiled to Siberia. He escaped in 1902, joined Lenin in London and was president of the St Petersburg Soviet in the abortive 1905 revolution.

He then worked as a revolutionary journalist in the West, returning to Russia in 1917 when he joined the Bolsheviks and played a major role in the October Revolution. In the Civil War he was commissar for war and created the Red Army.

After Lenin's death in 1924 his influence began to decline. He was ousted from the party by Stalin, who opposed his theory of "permanent and global revolution", exiled to Central Asia in 1927 and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929.

He continued to agitate as an exile and was sentenced to death in his absence by a Soviet court in 1937. He finally found asylum in Mexico, where he had a short relationship with frida kahlo, but was assassinated by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish Communist, in 1940. The Soviet government denied any responsibility and Mercader was convicted and imprisoned.

Richey Edwards said about this song (revol, or: 'lover' when read backwards): 'All those lines like 'Brezhnev married into group sex' are just analogies really. It's trying to say that relationships in politics, and relationships in general, are failures.'