Who was Leon Trotsky? What did he do?
Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879, in a well-off middle-class peasant Jewish family in the rural town of Janovka in the Ukraine, then part of the czarist Russian empire. After an early start as a Narodnik (Populist) he was won over to Marxism by the woman who was to become his first wife, Aleksandra Lvovna Sokolovskaja, and joined the Russian Socialdemocratic Workers Party (RSDWP), founded in 1895 by Lenin . At the 1903 Congress of the RSDWP, where two factions led by Lenin (Bolsheviks) and Martov (Mensheviks) clashed, Trotsky sided with the Mensheviks. In 1905, at the time of the first Russian revolution, he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of workers and peasants deputies. For his role he was tried and sentenced to deportation in Siberia. His views on the program of the Russian revolution were expressed in his perspective of a “permanent revolution”.
