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Leon Trotsky
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Leon Trotsky (born Leon Davidovich Bronstein, 1879), was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was ... among the first members of the Politburo. Upon the death of Vladimir Lenin, Trosky became the premier of the Soviet Union. He led his country through World War II and the Japanese War. He and American President Joe Steele shared a deep emnity that they were able to put aside during their fight against Nazi Germany, but became enemies again after the war when the two rival countries divided up Japan.
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Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (alternative English spelling: Bronshtein) on November 7, 1879, in Yanovka, Kherson Province of the Russian Empire (today's Ukraine), a small village 15 miles (24 km) from the nearest post office. He was the fifth child of a wealthy but illiterate Jewish farmer, David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847–1922) and Anna Bronstein (d. 1910). Although the family was ethnically Jewish, it was not religious, and the languages spoken at home were Russian and Ukrainian instead of Yiddish. Trotsky's younger sister, Olga, married Lev Kamenev, a leading Bolshevik.
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In 1917 Leon Trotsky moved to New York City, but he soon heard of a Revolution in Russia. Immediately returning, Trotsky became part of the Bolshevik party with Lenin. In September Trotsky helped Lenin plan a takeover in which Lenin became the most powerful individual in Russia with Trotsky being the second. In 1918 when a Civil War broke out, Trotsky became the chairman of the Soviet Union. Trotsky ... became the commissar of war and was given the task of organizing the military. He created the Red Army, which proved to be very successful.
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In 1902 Leon Trotsky escaped from Siberia, made a round of various cities to acquaint himself with the situation of the revolutionary movement, and finally crossed the Austrian frontier. This was not an easy task, for the high-school boy who was in charge of the underground railway for revolutionary fugitives nearly balked when he found out that his charge was a political opponent. This political purist belonged to the Socialist-Revolutionist [Their official name was "Socialists-Revolutionists." They are usually referred to as "Social Revolutionists," or, in abbreviation as "Esers."] Party and was accordingly a mortal enemy of all Social-Democrats, such as Trotsky. The Socialist-Revolutionists were the successors of the terrorist "Will of the People" of twenty years before. They placed their hope for the success of the Revolution in the terrorist activities of their fighting organization, and in the pressure of the intelligentsia and the peasantry. Like their predecessors of the early eighties, they were at bottom "Liberals with a bomb," and as the party of the peasantry, they were rivals for power of the Social-Democratic Labor Party, representing that section of the revolutionary intelligentsia whose strength lay chiefly in the support of the industrial workers.
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Leon Trotsky was born in 1879 at Ianovka in the Ukraine. His parents were Jews and his original surname was Bronstein. Trotsky was a highly intelligent pupil at school though his intellectual arrogance meant that he had few good friends. He got involved in revolutionary groups while still a teenager and was arrested at the age of 19 for writing and printing revolutionary literature and for helping to organise a strike. Trotsky was kept in solitary confinement for three months and then sent to Siberia. He escaped from prison and fled to London where he joined up with Lenin and other revolutionaries in October 1902.
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Leon Trotsky was born in 1879, and his childhood fell in the period when that heroic band of terrorists, mistakenly called "Nihilists," was bleeding to death under the counterblows of the Tsarist authorities. He was eight years old, when Lenin's older brother, Alexander Ulianov, was tried and executed for an attempt on the life of the Tsar -- -the last effort of the terrorist struggle which had begun nearly a decade before. From the ashes of "populism" -- both in its vaguely anarchist aspect of the early seventies and in its terrorist and purely political aspect of the late seventies and early eighties -- a new revolutionary ideology began to take shape in the minds of the Russian intelligentsia. This was Marxism, and it emphasized the inevitability of capitalist development and of class struggle of the industrial workers, as preliminary conditions for the overthrow of the Tsarist system. George Plekhanov, a former "populist," became the theoretical founder of the Marxist school in Russia and the teacher and spiritual father of generations of Russian intellectuals. It was he who launched the henceforth famous war-cry -- "the revolution in Russia will succeed as a working-class revolution, or it will not succeed," calling on the Russian workers to accomplish in Russia the counterpart of the French bourgeois revolution, since their own bourgeoisie was too weak for the task.
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Leon Trotsky