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His date of birth in the Gregorian calendar is November 7 – the same day as the Soviet revolution of 1917Events January 2 The Royal Bank of Canada takes over Quebec Bank. January 22 World War I: President Woodrow Wilson calls for "peace without victory" in Europe. January 25 The Danish West Indies is sold to the United States for $25 million January 25 Anti-. Since the Julian calendar was replaced in 1918, his date of death is that of the Gregorian calendar. He was born in Yanovka , Kherson Province , Ukraine, the son of a farmer, David Bronstein, of Jewish background.
He was first introduced to Marxism in 1896, whilst at school in Nikolayev studying mathematics. He was first arrested in 1898 while working as an organizer for the South Russian Workers' Union . He was sentenced to two years in prison. During this time, he married his first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya . In 1900 he was sentenced to four years in exile in Siberia, where his first two daughters were born. He escaped from Siberia, taking the name Trotsky from a former jailer in Odessa, and proceeded to London to join Vladimir Lenin, then managing editor of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party newspaper Iskra.
He attended the Second Congress of the RSDLP in London in the summer of 1903, and in the internal dispute which split the party, sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin. Although his allegiance to the Mensheviks was short-lived, the damage to his relationship with Lenin lasted for the next 14 years.
By 1905, he had returned to Russia. He was elected Chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies . His involvement in the October general strike and his support for that armed rebellion led to his conviction and sentence to exile for life. In January 1907, he escaped en route to exile and once again made his way to London, where he attended the Fifth Party Congress . In October, he moved to Vienna, where he edited a Social Democratic paper called Pravda, which was smuggled into Russia. It was one of numerous short-lived revolutionary Pravdas and had no connection with the official paper of the CPSU (see Pravda).
As war approached, Trotsky moved to neutral Switzerland, then France. He was deported from France and was living in New York City when the February 1917 Russian Revolution removed the Tsar. He returned in May of that year to Russia as a supporter of the Bolshevik position, formally joining the faction a few months later. Trotsky was actively involved in efforts to overthrow the Provisional Government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky and was Chair of the Revolutionary Military Committee that planned and implemented the October Revolution.