Just ask Joe Stalin.............he wasn't even Russian............but from Georgia......................not to be confused with the American state of Georgia............where Savannah is in..........

Leon Trotsky

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"Trotsky", "Trotski", "Trotskiy" and "Trotskii" redirect here. For other uses, see Trotski.

Leon Trotsky
Trotsky in 1921
People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs of the Soviet Union
In office 13 March 1918 – 15 January 1925
Premier	Vladimir Lenin Alexei Rykov
Preceded by	Nikolai Podvoisky
Succeeded by	Mikhail Frunze
People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR
In office 8 November 1917 – 13 March 1918
Premier	Vladimir Lenin
Preceded by	Mikhail Tereshchenko
Succeeded by	Georgy Chicherin
President of the Petrograd Soviet
In office 8 October – 8 November 1917
Full member of the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th,11th, 12th, 13th, 14th Politburo
In office 10 October 1917 – 23 October 1926
Personal details
Born	Lev Davidovich Bronshtein 7 November 1879 near Yelizavetgrad, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire(now in Ukraine)
Died	21 August 1940 (aged 60) (assassinated) Coyoacán, DF, Mexico
Citizenship	Soviet
Political party	RSDLP SDPS CPSU
Spouse(s)	Aleksandra Sokolovskaya Natalia Sedova
Children	Zinaida Volkova Nina Nevelson Lev Sedov Sergei Sedov
Signature

Leon Trotsky^[a] (/ˈtrɒtski/;^[1] Russian: Лев Дави́дович Тро́цкий; pronounced [ˈlʲɛf ˈtrotskʲɪj] ( listen); born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein;^[b] 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940) was a Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army.

Trotsky initially supported the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the 1917October Revolution, and eventually became a leader within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (bolsheviks). He was, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev,Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov, one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution.^[2] During the early days of the RSFSR and the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army with the title ofPeople's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1923). He also became one of the first members (1919–1926) of the Politburo.

After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and against the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was removed from power (October 1927), expelled from the Communist Party (November 1927), and finally exiled from the Soviet Union (February 1929). As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. On Stalin's orders, he was assassinated in Mexico in August 1940 by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born Soviet agent.^[3]

Trotsky's ideas formed the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that opposes 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.

Contents

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• 1 Before the 1917 Revolution
  • 1.1 Childhood and family (1879–1895)
    • 1.1.1 Trotsky's birth name
  • 1.2 Education (1888–1895)
  • 1.3 Revolutionary activity and imprisonment (1896–1900)
  • 1.4 First marriage and Siberian exile (1900–1902)
  • 1.5 First emigration and second marriage (1902–1903)
  • 1.6 Split with Lenin (1903–1904)
  • 1.7 1905 revolution and trial (1905–1906)
  • 1.8 Second emigration (1907–1914)
  • 1.9 World War I (1914–1917)
• 2 After the Russian Revolution
  • 2.1 Commissar for Foreign Affairs and Brest-Litovsk (1917–1918)
  • 2.2 Head of the Red Army (spring 1918)
  • 2.3 Civil War (1918–1920)
    • 2.3.1 1918
    • 2.3.2 1919
    • 2.3.3 1920
  • 2.4 Trade union debate (1920–1921)
  • 2.5 Trotsky's contribution to the Russian Revolution
  • 2.6 Lenin's illness (1922–1923)
  • 2.7 Left opposition (1923–1924)
  • 2.8 After Lenin's death (1924)
  • 2.9 A year in the wilderness (1925)
  • 2.10 United Opposition (1926–1927)
  • 2.11 Defeat and exile (1927–1928)
• 3 Exile (1929–1940)
  • 3.1 Moscow show trials
  • 3.2 Fourth International
  • 3.3 Dies Committee
• 4 Final months
  • 4.1 Assassination
  • 4.2 Epilogue
• 5 Contributions to theory
  • 5.1 Permanent Revolution
  • 5.2 The United Front
• 6 Trotsky in art
• 7 Selected works
• 8 See also
• 9 Notes
• 10 References
• 11 Further reading
• 12 External links

Before the 1917 Revolution

Childhood and family (1879–1895)

8-year-old Lyova Bronshtein, 1888

Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (Russian: Лев Давидович Бронштейн) on 7 November 1879, in Yanovka (Russian: Яновка) or Yanivka (Ukrainian: Янівка), in theKherson guberniya of the Russian Empire (today's Bereslavka (Ukrainian: Береславка; 47°53′34″N 32°17′25″E) 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 farmers, David Leontyevich Bronshtein (1847–1922) and his wife Anna Bronshtein (1850–1910). The family was of Jewish origin but reportedly not religious.^[4] The language spoken at home was a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian (known as Surzhyk).^[5]

Trotsky's younger sister Olga, also grew to be a Bolshevik and Soviet politician, who married the prominent Bolshevik Lev Kamenev.

Trotsky's birth name

Much attention has been given to Trotsky's original name by anti-Communists, anti-Semites, and anti-Trotskists, who stressed his original surname, Bronstein, and its political and historical significance.^[6][7]

Some authors, notably Robert Service, insist that Trotsky's childhood first name was Leiba. David North remarks that this is an apparent attempt to emphasize Trotsky's Jewish origins, that there is no documentary evidence to support this (contrary to Service's false claims), and that this is highly improbable, since the family did not speak Yiddish.^[6] Both North andWalter Laqueur^[7] in their books stress that Trotsky's childhood name was Lyova, a standard Russian diminutive of the name "Lev".

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