When Was Leon Trotsky Born
Where Was Trotsky Born
Trotsky Born
Where Was Leon Trotsky Born

Trotsky was born in 1877, and was forty when the Russian revolution broke out. With Lenin he shared in organising the movement that led to the establishment of the Soviet regime. When Lenin died. Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was a Soviet revolutionary whose version of Marxist thought is known as Trotsky-ism. He grew up in a Ukrainian-Jewish family in what is now Ukraine. He fought against the Russian Tsar and was arrested for these activities.

Trotsky was born and raised during the period which saw many of the ghastly pogroms that swept the Ukraine area. To Trotsky, like many of the Jews, a solution must be found that would prevent such deliberate pillaging and wanton killings. He developed an intense dislike of injustice and tyranny.
He was born Lev Bronstein and learned to speak Russian, French, German and Ukrainian at a young age. He is portrayed by Richard Burton in the 1972 film The Assassination of Trotsky. He was married to his second wife, Natalia Sedova, from 1903 until 1940, and they raised four kids together. His brother-in-law was Bolshevik.
Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879 in Yanovka, Ukraine, then part of Russia. His father was a prosperous Jewish farmer. Trotsky became involved in underground activities.

Religion

Trotsky was born Jewish but became atheist to reconcile with his Marxism.

Political Views

That's easy--Marxism.

Leon Trotsky was born in what’s now Ukraine in 1879 in a relatively wealthy Jewish household. He was assassinated in Mexico by a Soviet agent in 1940.

Trotsky is a Marxist. To many Marxists, the philosophy is comprehensive, encompassing everything from a philosophy of society, history, religion, aesthetics, politics to economics–and possibly even more.

Religion is not something Marxists are too fond of. There are hundreds of quotes from Marxists about religion. Here’s one of Trotsky’s:

Religions are illogical primitive ignorance. There is nothing as ridiculous and tragic as a religious government.¹

Not only was he opposed to religion in government and thought that religion was, as Marx put it, “the opiate of the masses,” he was simply an atheist.

His own kind of communist

Trotsky was–politically, economically, and socially–a communist. He was instrumental in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia which installed a Communist government for the next 72 years.

He was a champion of the proletariat, and enemy of the bourgeois. But even though he was a very high-ranking member of Russia’s communist party–barely losing out as leader to Joseph Stalin–he had his own unique ideas on Communism, ideas that resulted in his exile from Russia and eventual assassination, but also ideas that garnered him many followers even to this day.

For one, Trotsky realized that Democracy was important and was critical of the Russian communist bureaucracy and fascist leanings. He opposed the fascist governments of Germany and Spain during his time and urged Stalin to wage war on Nazi Germany–which he eventually did. Of fascism, he said:

Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.²

If you’re a communist, that’s a pretty big insult.

For his high position, Trotsky seemed to never lose his idealistic streak. Where Lenin and Stalin abused their power in Russia, Trotsky continued to push for a true government of the workers rather than one ruled by elite party members–which Russia quickly became. He said:

Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.³

And they certainly remained with Trotsky until the end.

Leon Trotsky. Conservapedia. [↩]
Leon Trotsky. Brainyquote. [↩]
Leon Trotsky. Brainyquote. [↩]

Other interesting profiles

The Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent on August 21, 1940. Many today who are interested in socialism know little or nothing about him. And yet Trotsky was a key leader of the only successful working-class revolution in history—the 1917 October Revolution. In the face of poverty and military attack from imperialist governments, the revolution began to degenerate, giving rise to an oppressive state bureaucracy under Joseph Stalin. Trotsky’s campaign against bureaucratism led to Stalin forcing him into exile, and to the hounding and murder of many of Trotsky’s collaborators, supporters and family members. Here we reprint a pamphlet written in August 1970 by Duncan Hallas, originally published by the International Socialists in Britain. At the end, we offer a list of books worth reading by and about Trotsky.

In May 1940 Leon Trotsky wrote an article entitled Stalin Seeks My Death. It was an accurate forecast. Three months later, on 20 August, the Stalinist agent Ramon Mercador, alias Frank Jacson, drove an icepick into Trotsky’s brain in Coyoacan, Mexico.

The assassination was the last of the wholesale murders by which the Stalinist bureaucracy destroyed the Bolshevik old guard. Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, was shot. Zinoviev, President of the Communist International in Lenin’s day, was shot.

Bukharin and Piatakov, “the most able of the younger members of the Central Committee,” according to Lenin’s Testament, were shot. Rakovsky and Radek both perished. Tens of thousands of old party members disappeared for ever in Arctic “labor camps.” The militants who made the October Revolution were practically annihilated.

Only one of the leading figures of the years of revolution and civil war survived. Joseph Stalin, the man Lenin proposed should be removed from office as General Secretary, now ruled Russia more despotically than Ivan the Terrible had ever done.

Trotsky’s final verdict on these events was written in the year before his death.

Stalinism had first to exterminate politically and then physically the leading cadres of Bolshevism in order to become that which it now is: an apparatus of the privileged, a brake upon historical progress, an agency of world imperialism.

The hopes of the October Revolution had been buried by the Stalinist terror. There had been no simple counterrevolution. The landowners, capitalists and courtiers of Tsarist times had not recovered their possessions. Stalin founded no dynasty and the leading members of the bureaucracy acquired no legal title to the “public” property. Yet the working people, the officially proclaimed “ruling class,” were deprived of all political rights, even such minimal rights as they had won under Tsarism.

The trade unions had become a machine for disciplining the workforce. And what a discipline. On 28 December 1938, Stalin signed a decree which laid down that “workers or employees who leave their jobs without permission or are guilty of grave offences against labor discipline are liable to administrative eviction from their dwellings within 10 days without any living quarters being provided for them.” The conditions of a 19th century company town were imposed on the workers in the “workers’ state”!

The same decree abolished the right of a worker to a paid holiday after five and a half month’s employment and dealt with bad time-keeping as follows: “A worker or employee guilty of coming late to work, of leaving for lunch too early or returning too late or idling during working hours is liable to administration prosecution.” Managers failing to bring prosecutions “are themselves made liable to dismissal or prosecution.” All this, of course, applied to “free” workers. For the really obstinate offenders there were the labor camps.

Big inequalities in wages were introduced. There was no question of negotiation, of course. Incentive payment schemes became general.

The privileged bureaucrats and managers got bigger and bigger differentials plus the familiar fringe benefits—cars, houses in the country, free holidays in the Crimea and so on. As Stalin said, “We must not play with phrases about equality. This is playing with fire.”

Out of the first successful nationwide workers’ revolution had grown a society that reproduced the inequalities and oppression of capitalism and was ruled by an iron dictatorship, a dictatorship not of the working class but over the working class.

The whole of the latter part of Trotsky’s political life was spent in fightin

Trotsky Born