Background of leon trotsky

Answer 1

Leon Bronstein was born in the Southern Ukraine on October 26, 1879, the son of a Jewish farmer. He moved to Odessa at age 9 to live with relatives and attend a prestigious private school. After graduation, he entered Odessa University. Leon was attracted to radical politics. The level of violence and discontent began to rise along the Russian countryside, brought on largely by Russian failure in the Russo-Japanese war and Bloody Sunday. "He was drawn into an underground socialist circle and introduced to Marxism"- Encyclopedia Britannica. Trotsky was soon organizing the Southern Russian Workers Union, which led to his first arrest and exile to Siberia."Though Trotsky was forced into exile, the unripeness of the authoritatian form of government spared his life for fifteen years."- Paul Mattick. While in exile, Leon married Alexandra Sokolovskaya, a Marxist radical who bore him two daughters. Leon escaped two years later and left his family behind. From then on, Leon assumed the last name Trotsky.

He went to England where he met Vladimir Lenin, instigator of the Communist Revolution. Trotsky attended the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party where he broke from Lenin.

Lenin's faction of the RSDP was the Bolsheviks, or majority; the other half was the Mensheviks or minority. Trotsky harshly criticised Lenin's committee policy as a slippery slope to Dictatorship. Lenin's idea of forgoing democracy in order to ensure equality was emblematic of his philosophy that the end justifies the means. Simply put, all that matters is that the goal is achieved, no matter how one arrives at it.

This break would lead to long years of estrangement between the two. In Paris, Trotsky met Natalia Sedova; although they were never married, they lived together until Trotsky's Death. They had two sons - Lyova and Sergey. In 1905, Trotsky traveled to St. Petersburg to play a major role in a revolutionary attempt. Trotsky was a hero to the revolutionists, but the revolution soon collapsed. Trotsky was arrested, but he managed to escape before arriving at Siberia for imprisonment.

The Trotsky family then moved to Vienna where he lived until the first World War erupted in 1914. They then moved to Paris. Trotsky wrote articles and edited a newspaper, condemning the imperialist war. The Germans were striving for world domination by force, which Trotsky was wholly against. He felt that communist domination could only work if workers worldwide voluntarily threw off the shackles of their oppressors. Instead, the Soviet Union later would invade Eastern Europe, aggressively overthrowing governments and instituting puppet regimes.

Trotsky then bounced around from France to Spain to New York; no government would let him stay for long. During this period, Trotsky was equally critical of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, but during the war he drifted back to Lenin's side.