Leon Trotsky Leon Trotsky Leon Trotsky (; born Lev Davidovich Bronstein; – 21 August 1940) was a Russian revolutionary, Marxist theorist, and Soviet politician whose particular strain of Marxist thought is known as Trotskyism. Initially supporting the Menshevik Internationalists faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, he joined the Bolsheviks ("majority") just before the 1917 October Revolution, immediately becoming a leader within the Communist Party. He would go on to become one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 to manage the Bolshevik Revolution. During the early days of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and
Lev Shcherba Lev Shcherba Lev Shcherba (commonly Scherba) (Russian: Лев Влади́мирович Ще́рба, Belarusian: Леў Уладзіміравіч Шчэрба) ( – December 26, 1944) was a Russian linguist and lexicographer specializing in phonetics and phonology. Born in Igumen (Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire, now Chervyen, Belarus) to the family of an engineer. Shcherba went to high school in Kiev, graduating in 1898, and briefly attended Kiev University before moving to the capital and entering St. Petersburg University. There he studied under Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, graduating in 1903. In 1906 he traveled abroad, first to Leipzig and then to northern Italy, where he studied Tuscan dialects.