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Talk:Leon Trotsky

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Former featured article candidateLeon Trotsky is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. For older candidates, please check the archive.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
January 27, 2006Featured article candidateNot promoted


First Name

His first name was Laiba (Лейба), spelling "Leiba". It was meget typical jewish name at that time. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Juliachristensen7 (talk • contribs) 10:19, 8 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

His first name was Lev, yet the article is titled Leon and refers to him throughout by this name. There may be a good reason for this, but none is given. An explanation is required.182.247.184.52 (talk) 01:00, 12 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Directly taken from the text:"Until this point in his life, Trotsky had used his birth name—Lev or Leon Bronstein." In other words, his name was both Lev and Leon. Special:Contributions/86.185.41.57 27 April 2017 (missing signature added manually).
“Lev” is the Russian transliteration of “Лев”, while “Léon” is the French translation (just like “Peter” is the English translation of “Piotr”). That was very common, as Russia was still using the French transliteration rules in its passports, and “Léon” was naturally translated in English as Leon.
Furthermore, a strong reason to use the current spelling is that he often signed his name “Léon Trotsky” (he even used it in his passport) when not using the cyrillic alphabet (notice the French accent on “Léon”, which is not that surprising when you know that he was fluent in the language — and even less surprising when you know that he spent many years in France). He also sometime signed “Leon Trotsky” even if “L. Trotsky” was far more common, but he obviously would have no problem with the current spelling in Wikipedia if he was still alive. You can also notice that Léon and lion are very similar, and actually they are related as they used to be leo in French and English (in Russian and most slavic languages, “лев“ still also means “lion”, so you just learned a very common slavic word).
I don't know why he sometime used the accent and sometime he didn't (except of course when he was in the USA), nor why that spelling is not even mentionned in the article even if he used it, but it is a minor point compared to the radical change to “Lev”, which is far less known in the occident and never used by him in the latine alphabet. Here some images of his signature (note that you can't trust Google for the frequency usage of his signature with an accent, as it seems unable to distinguish them and to under-represent the version with the accent — of course, the signatures in cyrillic are the most common one).
— 184.163.78.39 (talk) 19:12, 28 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The Yiddish name Leib is accompanied with the Hebrew name Arye - meaning lion. The Jewish name is given at circumsision on the 8th day after birth, when the child is exactly 1 week old, and the Jew is then called with that name to the Torah later on, at their Bar Mitzva. So his "Jewish name" was Arye Leib. Thus Leon is not a "change" of the name from Lev - the Russian pronuciation of the Yiddish name, but rather the way he was called in Russian and French where he lived and in the languages he spoke.
Similarly the name Moses is poronounced Moshe in the original Hebrew, Eugene is pronounced Yevgeny in Russian but Yoojeen in Romanian, and George is pronouced Jorj in English Yurgen in Swedish and Khorkhyay in spanish, while originally it is a mispronunciation of the Hebrew Yossef, pronounced Joseph in English, and Yozef in German. The name Jacob is even worse: Originally Ya'akov in Hebrew, Yanki in Yiddish (Yanki Doodle is Jacob David in Yiddish), Yakob in Swedish, Yago in Spanish, Zhaak in French, Jack in the US, and Koby or Jecky in modern Hebrew.פשוט pashute ♫ (talk) 09:36, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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idea to raise the article's status to Featured article

Dear Contributors, I have provided great images and think that we can raise the article to Featured Article easily. In order to do it, everything in the main body of the article has to be properly cited. Could you help?--Armenius vambery (talk) 11:54, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Russian?

Trotsky was born in bred in Ukraine. He clearly was not Russian. This should be amended. He should either be referee to as a Soviet or as a Ukrainian.

The lede says "Russian revolutionary". He was born in 1879 in the Russian empire and sought revolution to overthrow it. There was no "Soviet" prior to 1922. Softlavender (talk) 10:42, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Gandhi was born in the British Empire therefore he was British not Indian. See how ridiculous this argument is? Trotsky lived in the Soviet Union and was a Soviet citizen, therefore he was a Soviet.80.111.16.75 (talk) 10:47, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"Many anti-Communists, anti-semites, and anti-Trotskyists have noted Trotsky's original surname..."

This is sort of a meaningless (if true) sentence to put in Leon Trotsky#Childhood and family (1879–1895). It doesn't have anything to due with Trotsky's childhood, or with any factual dispute among historians. Everyone agrees it is his name, and that it is has a Jewish/German origin. I guess I understand what's trying to be said, it's like the people who overemphasized Barack Obama's middle name, but I don't think this is the best way to treat this in the article. By contrast, the discussion about his given name is more pertinent, as historians seem to have an actual disagreement about that.--Pharos (talk) 18:09, 29 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, it doesn't add anything to the article other than to continue the Service/North dispute over Trotsky. Service and North both only speculate, with scant sourcing on both sides, as to what Trotsky was called in his childhood, by whom, and the origin of those pet names. Removal of this section wouldn't detract from the article, but its continued existence detracts from the flow and the merit of the article.

ComradeScientist (talk) 03:45, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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