Leon Trotsky

Lev Davidovich Bronstein, known to history as Leon Trotsky, was born into a wealthy but illiterate Jewish farming family in Yanovka, then part of the Russian Empire, on 7 November 1879. A Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist, he became a central figure in the 1905 Revolution, the October Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War. Alongside Vladimir Lenin, he was one of the two most prominent leaders of the Soviet state from 1917 until Lenin’s death in 1924. His Marxist and Leninist beliefs later inspired the school of thought called Trotskyism.

Trotsky’s revolutionary path began in 1896. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898, was arrested and exiled to Siberia, but escaped to London in 1902, where he first met Lenin. During the party’s 1903 schism, he sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin’s Bolsheviks, though by 1904 he declared himself non-factional. In the 1905 Revolution, he was elected chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet, was exiled again, and escaped in 1907 to live abroad. After the February Revolution of 1917, he joined the Bolsheviks and became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. He helped lead the October Revolution and, as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, taking Russia out of World War I. From 1918 to 1925, he served as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, building the Red Army and leading it to victory in the civil war. In 1922, Lenin proposed Trotsky become deputy premier, but he declined. From 1923, Trotsky led the Left Opposition, advocating for greater industrialisation, voluntary collectivisation, and party democratisation within the New Economic Policy.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky became a prominent critic of Joseph Stalin, who outmanoeuvred him politically. Expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and the party in 1927, he was exiled to Alma Ata in 1928 and deported in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937. In exile, he wrote polemics against Stalinism, promoting proletarian internationalism over Stalin’s “socialism in one country.” His theory of permanent revolution argued that revolution could only survive by spreading to advanced capitalist nations. In *The Revolution Betrayed* (1936), he called the Soviet Union a “degenerated workers’ state,” and in 1938 he founded the Fourth International as a rival to the Comintern. Sentenced to death in absentia at the Moscow show trials in 1936, he was assassinated in Mexico City on 21 August 1940 by Ramón Mercader, a Stalinist agent.

Under Stalin, Trotsky was written out of official history and never politically rehabilitated by later Soviet leaders. In the West, he became a hero of the anti-Stalinist left for defending a more democratic, internationalist socialism against Stalinist totalitarianism, and for his intellectual contributions to Marxism. While his wartime actions—such as defending the Red Terror and suppressing the Kronstadt rebellion—remain controversial, scholarship ranks his leadership of the Red Army highly, and he is credited with major involvement in the Soviet Union’s military, economic, cultural, and political development.

Trotsky’s early life shaped his internationalist outlook. He was the fifth child of David Leontyevich Bronstein and Anna Lvovna Zhivotovskaya. His younger sister Olga also became a Bolshevik and married Lev Kamenev. The family spoke a mix of Russian and Ukrainian, not Yiddish, and his childhood name was Lyova, a Russian diminutive of Lev. At age eight, he was sent to Odessa for education, attending a Lutheran German-language school that admitted students of various faiths. Odessa’s cosmopolitan port environment broadened his perspective. He excelled in science and mathematics, was a voracious reader, and was often disciplined for reading non-curriculum books in class. He later became fluent in French, English, and German, though he said he was truly fluent only in Russian and Ukrainian.