Trotsky, Leon (1879–1940)

Leon Trotsky, a prominent Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist, was born in the Ukrainian village of Yanovka to a family that was ethnically Jewish but not religiously observant. His birth name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein; Trotsky was one of numerous aliases he used as a member of Russia's revolutionary underground. A major figure in the founding of the Soviet Union, he was also a prominent politician of the Russian (later Soviet) Communist Party. Having lost a power struggle with Joseph Stalin and his allies in the mid-1920s, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, deported from the Soviet Union in 1929, and assassinated in Mexico by an agent of Stalin in 1940. Trotsky's ideas on history, political strategy and tactics, and his critiques of Stalinism form the basis of Trotskyism, a branch of Marxist-Leninist political theory. An active if controversial fighter for the social, economic, and political emancipation of the world's proletariat, Trotsky spent nearly half of his adult life in prison or exile for his political activism.

Lev was the fifth child of prosperous but illiterate peasants who valued education for their son. When he was 9 years old, his father sent him to Odessa for schooling. Trotsky first became involved in revolutionary activism in 1896 after moving to Nikolaev to complete his studies. His activism began in the South Russian Workers' Union, and using the alias “Lvov,” he spread Marxist ideas among workers and students. In January 1898, he was arrested for revolutionary activities against the czarist autocracy, spent the next 2 years in prison awaiting trial, married Marxist activist Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, and was sentenced in 1900 to 4 years in exile in Siberia, where his wife gave birth to two daughters. Not without a sense of humor, he escaped from Siberia to London in the summer of 1902 using a forged passport as “Trotsky,” the name of his former jailer in Odessa. It became his primary, but not only, revolutionary pseudonym: For instance, he assumed the name Pero (Russian for pen or quill) when he wrote for Iskra, the organ of the Marxist-oriented Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). While in London, Trotsky met the Russian revolutionary Natalia Sedova, whom he married in 1903. They had two sons and remained companions until Trotsky's death.

At its August 1903 party congress in London, the RSDLP split in two factions, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Trotsky and most of the Iskra editors supported the Mensheviks, but Trotsky broke with the Mensheviks in September 1904 over political strategy and remained an “at-large” socialist activist working to heal the breach between the different RSLDP factions until 1917 when he threw his lot in with the Bolsheviks. In the following years, Trotsky developed his theory of permanent revolution, which argued that liberal democratic revolutions that institute political and social rights and democratic parliamentary government could only be achieved in countries with delayed capitalist development and a weak middle class (like Russia) by continuing that bourgeois revolution into a proletarian one for economic, social, and political democracy.

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