The Life And Death Of Leon Trotsky

• published: 16 Mar 2015
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Leon Trotsky[a] (Russian: Лев Дави́дович Тро́цкий; pronounced [ˈlʲef ˈtrot͡skʲɪj] ( listen); born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein; 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 -- 21 August 1940) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army. Trotsky was initially a supporter of the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the 1917 October Revolution, and eventually became a leader within the Party. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army as People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918--23). He was also among the first members of the Politburo. After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power in 1927, expelled from the Communist Party, and finally deported from the Soviet Union in 1929. As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile in Mexico to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, in the late 1930s, Trotsky opposed Stalin's non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler. He was assassinated on Stalin's orders in Mexico, by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born Soviet agent in August 1940.[2] Most of his family members were also killed in separate attacks. Trotsky's ideas were the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who were not rehabilitated by the government under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. In the late 1980s, his books were released for publication in the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (Russian: Лев Давидович Бронштейн) on 7 November 1879, in Yanovka (Russian: Яновка) or Yanivka (Ukrainian: Янівка), in the Kherson guberniya of the Russian Empire (today's Bereslavka (Ukrainian: Береславка; in the Bobrynets Raion, Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukraine), a small village 15 miles (24 km) from the nearest post office. He was the fifth child of eight of well-to-do Jewish farmers, David Leontyevich Bronshtein (1847--1922) and his wife Anna Bronshtein (1850--1910). The family was Jewish but reportedly not religious. The language spoken at home was a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian (known as Surzhyk). Trotsky's younger sister, Olga, married Lev Kamenev, a leading Bolshevik. When Trotsky was nine, his father sent him to Odessa to be educated. He was enrolled in a German school, which became Russified during his years in Odessa, consequent to the Imperial government's policy of Russification. As Isaac Deutscher notes in his biography of Trotsky, Odessa was then a bustling cosmopolitan port city, very unlike the typical Russian city of the time. This environment contributed to the development of the young man's international outlook. Although Trotsky stated in his autobiography My Life that he was never perfectly fluent in any language but Russian and Ukrainian, Raymond Molinier wrote that Trotsky spoke French fluently. Revolutionary activity and exile (1896--1902) Trotsky became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896 after moving to Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv). At first a narodnik (revolutionary populist), he was introduced to Marxism later that year, which he originally opposed. During periods of exile and imprisonment, he gradually became a Marxist. Instead of pursuing a mathematics degree, Trotsky helped organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev in early 1897. Using the name 'Lvov', he wrote and printed leaflets and proclamations, distributed revolutionary pamphlets, and popularized socialist ideas among industrial workers and revolutionary students. In January 1898, more than 200 members of the union, including Trotsky, were arrested. He spent the next two years in prison awaiting trial. Two months into his imprisonment, on 1 -- 3 March 1898, the first Congress of the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) was held.[8] From then on Trotsky identified as a member of the party. While in prison, he married Aleksandra Sokolovskaya (or Sokolovskaia) (1872--1938), a fellow Marxist. While serving his sentence, he studied philosophy. In 1900 he was sentenced to four years in exile in Ust-Kut and Verkholensk in the Irkutsk region of Siberia.