He escaped from Siberia in 1902 and moved to London, where he befriended Vladimir Lenin. In 1898, he was arrested for revolutionary activities and subsequently exiled to Siberia.
Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism which has become known as Trotskyism.īorn to a wealthy Jewish family in Yanovka (now Bereslavka), Trotsky embraced Marxism after moving to Nikolayev in 1896. Lev Davidovich Bronstein (7 November 1879 – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky ( / ˈ t r ɒ t s k i/), was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and politician.