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 Pitaevskii Lev Pitaevskii Lev Petrovich Pitaevskii ( ; born 1933) is a Russian theoretical physicist, who made contributions to the theory of quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, low-temperature physics, plasma physics, and condensed matter physics. Together with Evgeny Lifshitz and Vladimir Berestetskii, Lev Pitaevskii has also been the co-author of a few volumes of the influential Landau–Lifschitz "Course of Theoretical Physics" series. His academic status is professor. Pitaevskii was born on January 18, 1933, in Saratov. He graduated from Saratov State University in 1955. In 1958 he joined the staff of the Institute of Physical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In