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Childhood and family (1879–1895)

Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein to David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847–1922) and Anna Lvovna (née Zhivotovskaya, 1850–1910) on 7 November 1879, the fifth child of a wealthy Jewish landowner family in Yanovka, Kherson governorate, Russian Empire (now Bereslavka, Ukraine). His father, David Leontyevich, had lived in Poltava and later moved to Bereslavka, as it had a large Jewish community. Trotsky's younger sister, Olga, who also grew up to be a Bolshevik and a Soviet politician, married the prominent Bolshevik Lev Kamenev.

Some authors, notably Robert Service, have claimed that Trotsky's childhood first name was Yiddish Leiba. The American Trotskyist David North said that this was an assumption based on Trotsky's Jewish birth, but, contrary to Service's claims, there is no documentary evidence to support his using a Yiddish name, when that language was not spoken by his family. Both North and political historian Walter Laqueur wrote that Trotsky's childhood name was Lyova, a standard Russian diminutive of the name Lev. North has compared the speculation on Trotsky's given name to the undue emphasis given to his having a Jewish surname. The language spoken at home was not Yiddish but a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, known as Surzhyk. Although Trotsky spoke French, English, and German to a good standard, he said in his autobiography My Life that he was never fluent in any language but Russian. Raymond Molinier wrote that Trotsky spoke French fluently.

When Trotsky was eight, his father sent him to Odessa to be educated. He was enrolled in a Lutheran German-language school (School of the Lutheran St. Pauls Cathedral, of Black Sea Germans, which admitted students of other faiths and backgrounds,) which became Russified during his years in Odessa as a result of the Imperial government's policy of Russification. Trotsky and his wife Natalia later registered their children as Lutheran, since Austrian law at the time required children to be given religious education "in the faith of their parents". Odessa was then a bustling cosmopolitan port city, very unlike the typical Russian city of the time. This environment contributed to the development of the young man's international outlook.