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 Loseff Lev Loseff Lev Loseff (; birth name Lev Lifshitz; June 15, 1937 – May 6, 2009) was a Russian poet, literary critic, essayist and educator. The son of poet Vladimir Lifshitz, Loseff was born in Leningrad. He attended Leningrad's famous Saint Peter's School and graduated from the journalism department of the Leningrad State University. Loseff immigrated to the U.S. in 1976. He earned a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan and became a professor of Russian literature at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a position he held until his death thirty years later. In