Trotsky reportedly borrowed his famous name from an Odessa jailer
Lev Bronstein escaped Siberian exile in 1902 hidden under a load of hay, and emerged with a new identity. The surname he chose, Trotsky, was reportedly that of a guard in the Odessa prison where he had been held. He kept it for life, through revolution, power, exile and assassination in 1940.
He came from a wealthy Jewish farming family in the village of Yanovka, in what is now Ukraine; his parents could not read. At eight he was sent to Odessa, a cosmopolitan port, to attend a German-language Lutheran school. Trotsky was a gifted mathematician whose father hoped he would become an engineer, but as a teenager in Nikolayev he drifted into radical politics. At first he rejected Marxism, until Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, who later became his first wife, won him over.
In 1897 he left Odessa University to help organise the South Russian Workers' Union, writing and printing leaflets under the name Lvov. Arrested in January 1898 with over 200 others, he spent two years moving between prisons, reading Lenin in Moscow. He and Aleksandra married in jail and were exiled together to the Baikal region, where their two daughters were born and where he began writing for Iskra, a revolutionary newspaper published in London.
After his escape, he reached London and joined the paper's editors, among them Lenin, Julius Martov and Georgi Plekhanov. Writing as Pero, meaning pen, he quickly became a leading contributor. Lenin wanted the 23-year-old on the editorial board, partly to break a six-member deadlock, but Plekhanov blocked full membership. When the party split in 1903 over how tightly it should be organised, Trotsky first backed Martov's Mensheviks, then declared himself independent of both factions in 1904.
His later career made him, with Lenin, one of the two most prominent figures of the early Soviet state. He chaired the Saint Petersburg Soviet in 1905 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin outmanoeuvred him: expulsion from the Politburo and the party followed, then deportation in 1929. From Turkey, France, Norway and finally Mexico, he attacked Stalin's idea of socialism in one country. Unlike many of Stalin's rivals, he was never rehabilitated by later Soviet leaders, though the anti-Stalinist left abroad embraced him.
Source: Leon Trotsky
