Josh Ireland

Exactly, this is the first sign that these are people that could justify anything to themselves and to anyone else in the name of what they're doing.

And so he leaves this wife and two daughters who he will barely see again for the rest of their lives.

and then begins a sort of peregrination across Europe.

And one very significant meeting he has during this period is with Lenin, who is the leader of the Social Democratic Party in Russia.

They meet in London for the first time.

So all of them are in exile, either in Siberia or sort of dotted around Europe.

So over the next 10 years, Trotsky will be in Paris where he meets his second wife,

life partner.

He refers to his wife, but they never marry.

He's in Vienna.

I mean, this is an extraordinary time.

They're printing newspapers.

They're writing screeds.

there's a man called Stolipin who seems to be writing the foundations of the empire and I think the thing they all had trying to reconcile is that they are Marxists so they have absorbed everything that Karl Marx has said the sort of iron laws of the world so they think revolution is going to happen and they think it's going to come from the working classes

And it's only a matter of time.

But until it happens, they have to wait.

And what they do while they wait is really is write articles, smoke, argue, read, think.

I mean, Trotsky meets his new partner.

I think the odd thing about Trotsky is he's sort of

Like all interesting people, like a man of deep contrasts, you know, he's a man who believes in this sort of beautiful future where people are liberated to be creative and make beautiful art, but also thinks that, you know, if you're going to have a revolution, it has to be sort of drenched in blood.