Aleksandra Sokolovskaya

He was at this stage a sort of esthete or narodnik and a doctrinaire anti-Marxist.

Trotsky argued fiercely with the group's Marxist, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, once saying, I can't imagine how a young girl like you can stand that dry, narrow, impractical stuff.

Her response was, I can't imagine how a person who thinks he is logical can be contented with a head full of vague, idealistic emotions.

In 1896, as part of an invitation to a New Year's Eve party, Sokolovskaya was congratulated on having converted Trotsky to Marxism.

He, at that point in his life, was very much not a Marxist.

He thought Marxists were dumb, and he wasn't afraid to say so, including to a woman named Alexandra Sokolovskaya, who was to become his first wife.

[laughs] This is, like, uh, me flexing on a, a v- very strange little, like, niche of information, but students majoring in hard sciences being involved in, like, on-campus groups for, for socialism or for Marxism seems very odd today.

It's not a rare thing that a student who is studying science would find their way into these, like, really interesting conversations, as is portrayed in, and now we're mentioning for the second time this episode, a Christopher Nolan film.

He was not yet a radical, but he joins, uh, one of the social democratic parties, which at that time was still not something you could do under the tsar, and he is arrested.

Apparently meets somebody named Trotsky there, is sent to his first exile.

While in prison, he marries Alexandra Sokolovskaya.

An interesting thing, though she was not Jewish, and Trotsky had no affinity for Judaism, is that a Jewish chaplain did officiate their wedding in his prison cell.

In reality, it was six or seven young people drinking tea and arguing about the future.

Here he met Alexandra Sokolovskaya, a young woman whose calm certainty infuriated him.

She was a Marxist.

He immediately positioned himself against her.

Trotsky spent months in solitary confinement in Kherson Prison, a stone cell so cold that ice formed on the walls, with lice for company and watery soup for sustenance.

They transferred him to Odessa, where he spent a year and a half reading the Bible in four languages and attempting a materialist history of Freemasonry.

In nineteen hundred, they moved him to Moscow's transfer prison, where, in a ceremony between cells, he married Alexandra Sokolovskaya, the woman he'd once cursed for her dryness.

Together, they were exiled to Siberia for four years.