Quick questions on Trotsky early life and Marxist formation: HSC Modern History Personality

Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born on 7 November (Old Style 26 October) 1879 at Yanovka, a 250-desyatin farm in Kherson province, the fifth of the eight children (five surviving) of David Leontievich Bronstein and Anna Bronstein. David Bronstein was a prosperous but illiterate Jewish farmer who had moved south from Poltava under the rural Jewish settlement policy of Alexander II. The family spoke a mixture of Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. Trotsky's memoir treats his father as an industrious, taciturn man; the household was not religiously observant.

In 1888, aged nine, Trotsky was sent to live with his cousin Moisei Filippovich Shpentzer in Odessa to attend the St Paul Realschule, a German-language Imperial school whose entrance quota for Jewish pupils was small and competitive. He stood near the top of every class. The Shpentzer household, urban and literary, introduced him to Pushkin, Goncharov, Goethe, and Schiller. Odessa itself, a cosmopolitan port with a large Jewish population, broadened the rural boy from Yanovka.

In 1896 Trotsky moved to Nikolayev for his final school year. He joined a populist discussion circle around Franz Shvigovsky, a Czech gardener. In 1897 he converted to Marxism through the influence of Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya, a Marxist six years his senior whom he initially debated and then married in 1899. With Sokolovskaya and a small group of comrades, Trotsky founded the South Russian Workers' Union in late 1897.

The Union was infiltrated by an Okhrana agent in late 1897. Trotsky was arrested at Shvigovsky's flat in January 1898 and held in the Nikolayev, Odessa, and Moscow Butyrki prisons. He used the long pretrial detention to read intensively. In 1900 he was sentenced administratively to four years' exile in Eastern Siberia and sent to Ust-Kut on the Lena River.

In August 1902 Trotsky escaped from Siberia using a forged passport bearing the name Trotsky (the name of one of his Odessa jailers). He left Sokolovskaya and the two daughters in Siberia; the marriage effectively ended, though they remained friendly correspondents. Trotsky travelled west via Samara, Vienna, and Zurich to London, where he arrived in October 1902 and met Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). Lenin co-opted the 22-year-old Trotsky to the editorial board of Iskra; Trotsky wrote regularly under the pen name "Pero" (The Pen).

The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) met in Brussels and London in July-August 1903. The decisive dispute was over Article 1 of the Party Statutes: whether a Party member was someone who recognised the programme and worked under Party direction (Lenin), or someone who recognised the programme and cooperated under Party guidance (Martov). Trotsky sided with Martov and the future Mensheviks on the organisational question.

In Paris in 1903 Trotsky met Natalia Ivanovna Sedova, a Russian Marxist student. They became life partners in 1904 (Trotsky was never formally divorced from Sokolovskaya). Sedova would be at Trotsky's side through revolution, civil war, exile, and assassination.

He was outside both factions from 1903; he joined the Bolsheviks formally in July 1917.

Trotsky was on the editorial board in 1902 and 1903; he broke with Lenin at the Second Congress.

The Yanovka background, the Realschule quota, the south-Russian milieu are all part of why Trotsky was outside the existing party leaderships in 1903.