The first episode begins in May 1940, on the outskirts of Mexico City, when a group of Mexican Communists dressed as policemen attack Trotsky's house.

Trotsky decides to leave a political testament of how a man from an oppressed minority managed to successfully overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish a new social order.

Each episode of the series then explores a period in his life as an emerging leader of the Communist Revolution who then lost his new power to Stalin.

[15] The series has been criticized for numerous historical inaccuracies in its depiction of Trotsky as a megalomaniacal leader who masterminded the October Revolution, invoking many of the antisemitic tropes used by the anti-communist White movement during the Russian Civil War.

Facing the criticism, Konstantin Ernst, the general producer of the series, insisted that they were aiming to weave a fictionalized narrative around the basic facts of Trotsky's biography rather than making a documentary.

[19] The series has also been criticized by RFE/RL journalist Luke Johnson for "taking contemporary Russia’s anti-revolutionary ideology global" and for being a vehicle for Russian state propaganda, "unmistakably align[ed] with the Kremlin worldview", critical of "Western decadence" and foreign "interference" in Russian domestic affairs.