Lev Davidovich Bronstein took the name Trotsky when it was on the passport he used to escape from Siberia in 1902. He had been exiled there in 1898, at the age of nineteen, for his revolutionary activities in the last dreadful days of the tsars. In exile, he met and married Alexandra Sokolovskaya but then married again in Paris in 2003 to Natalya Sedova. It is an unfortunate fact (arguably the result of historical forces beyond the control of participants) that the need for equality of the sexes was always relegated behind class struggle in Communist revolution.
Trotsky had been born into a Russian Jewish colonist family on the Steppes and benefited from education and some refinement from his family background. He went on to become the leading theoretician of the Russian revolution, with a depth and breadth of learning that marked him out from his comrades, particularly Lenin and Stalin. It was this knowledge and intelligence that saw him characterised as arrogant and unwilling to listen to lesser thinkers and, hence, marked him out for ultimate persecution. Alternatively, it was his innate arrogance that prevented him from achieving the heights that would otherwise have been available to him. There are always at least two ways at looking at history.
Trotsky was initially a leading proponent of the Menshevik faction, which favoured a democratic approach to the forthcoming Communist Revolution which was opposed to Lenin's Bolshevik approach which insisted that it would only be through armed action that the Revolution would be brought into fruition. Despite this characteristic ideological difference, Trotsky was brought into the Communist leadership and eventually established himself as second only to Lenin. He had been entrusted with the commanding the military resistance to the White Faction during the Russian Civil War and had successfully managed this, although at the cost of recruiting the military expertise of former Tsarist officers, at the risk of being accused of diluting ideological purity. Even so, the sheer force of his brilliance enabled him to retain his position.
However, this could not last forever. When Lenin's illness in 1922 brought about the need for a resolution to the issue of succession to the leadership, Trotsky found himself facing a suddenly united front in the form of the Stalin-Kamenev-Zinoviev troika. The struggle was lengthy and intense but Trotsky was doomed to failure, resulting from character flaws according to many of his biographers or to ideological differences according to other schools of thought. Subsequently, he was chased from Turkey to Norway to Mexico, before his assassination by the Spanish Communist Ramon Mercader in 1940 with the famous pickaxe. From 1936-8 a series of show trials in the Soviet Union had highlighted Trotsky as the principal devil and it is assumed that the assassination was at the result of Stalinist urging.
