ABSTRACT
Given his later idealisation of the working class and fear of peasant reaction, it is ironic that Trotsky was the son of a rich peasant, what the Russians term a ‘kulak’. However, his father, David Bronstein, was no usual kulak: he was a Jew and stemmed from one of the relatively few Jewish families which, early in the nineteenth century, had been allowed to buy land in what was then termed ‘New Russia’ and is now southern Ukraine. He grew up at Yanovka, the small estate purchased by the Bronsteins in spring 1879. It was an isolated spot. The nearest post office was 15 miles away, the nearest railway station 25. Although the farm had seen better days, it was well equipped, with three barns and open sheds, as well as a machine shop, stables and a cow shed. Most important of all for a kulak, there was an engine-powered mill; Trotsky’s father could not only store his grain until the market price was right, but hire out his mill to his neighbours. Wheat made David Bronstein rich and the young Trotsky wanted for little. He was, he recalled, ‘the son of a prosperous landowner [and] belonged to the privileged class rather than to the oppressed’.1
