Welcome to Russian History Retold.

Episode 353, Leon Trotsky Revisited, Part 2.

Last time, we cover the life and times of Leon Trotsky up until about 1905.

Today, we wrap up the two-part series, covering his life from the 1917 Russian Revolution

until his assassination by Ramon Mercator in 1940 in Mexico.

In the beginning of 1917, when things were getting kind of crazy in St. Petersburg,

Leon Trotsky was actually in New York City with his wife and two sons.

The trip back to Russia, when he heard of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, was a harrowing one.

The family boarded the SS Christiane Fjord on March 27th.

The ship went up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to get inspected as World War I was still raging,

and they wanted to make sure that the ship wasn't

carrying anything that would make it a target for German U-boats.

While in Nova Scotia, Trotsky and a number of other Russian emigres were arrested and detained,

without charges. British authorities would release him in late April, allowing him to make it to Russia

with his family in May, arriving in Petrograd after Vladimir Lenin made it there the previous

month. Trotsky would be made chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, eventually becoming the head of

the military revolutionary committee and one of the heads of the

October Revolution.

Trotsky would write in his diary in 1935, quote, had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg,

the October Revolution would still have taken place on the condition that Lenin was present and in command.

If neither Lenin nor I had been presenting Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution.

With the Zargonne and the provisional government in power, Trotsky and Lenin believed that an armed revolution was in order.

...