Leon Davidovich Trotsky (November 7, 1879 – August 21, 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. An influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, Trotsky served as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and the People's Commissar of War and was the founder and commander of the Red Army. He was also a founding member of the Politburo, the central policymaking and governing body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Following a power struggle with Joseph Stalin in the 1920s, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union. Ramon Mercader assassinated Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of the Communist theory of Trotskyism, which remains a major school of Marxist thought theoretically opposed to Stalinism and Maoism.
Before the 1917 Revolution
Childhood and family (1879-1896)
Trotsky was born in Yanovka, Kherson Province, Ukraine on November 7, 1879. He was the fifth child of a wealthy but illiterate Jewish farmer, David Leontyevich Bronstein and Anna Bronstein (d. 1910). Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, named after an uncle who would, later that month, attempt to blow up the imperial railway carriage. Although the family was ethnically Jewish, it was not religious, and the languages spoken at home were Russian and Ukrainian instead of Yiddish.
When Trotsky was nine, his father sent him to school in Odessa. He was enrolled in a historically German school, which became increasingly Russified during his years in Odessa due to the government's policy of russification. While a good student, even in his youth Trotsky was rebellious, organizing a protest against an unpopular teacher in the second grade.
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