Leon Trotsky & wife – Mexican passport 1936

The Revolutionary’s Awakening

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on November 7, 1879, in Yanovka, Ukraine—then part of the Russian Empire—Leon Trotsky was the son of a prosperous Jewish farmer. Despite his privileged background, he became drawn to radical politics in his youth. By his teenage years, he was deeply involved in underground revolutionary circles, advocating for the oppressed. His activism soon led to his arrest, imprisonment, and exile to the frozen wilderness of Siberia.

But exile could not hold him. Trotsky orchestrated a daring escape and spent much of the next 15 years in European exile, moving through intellectual and political circles in cities like Vienna, Paris, and London. There, he debated socialist theories and helped shape the revolutionary ideas that would later shake the world.

A Revolution Divided

In 1903, a schism fractured the Russian Social Democratic Party. Lenin led the radical Bolsheviks, while Trotsky initially sided with the more moderate Mensheviks. It was during this period that he formulated his theory of “permanent revolution”—the belief that socialist revolutions could not succeed in isolation but had to spread internationally.

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