By 1902, the Romanov dynasty has been ruling Russia with an iron fist for centuries, and the Russian Revolution is still more than a decade off. In the countryside, millions of peasants live and work in squalor. Life in the cities is little better. And the two men who together will engineer the country’s radical transformation into a Marxist state still live a continent apart.

Leon Trotsky is a young political dissident recently exiled to Siberia when someone hands him a newly published pamphlet. It’s by a 32-year-old Russian revolutionary living in Switzerland, and it’s called “What Is to Be Done?” The pamphlet calls for the creation of a Russian Marxist political party to lead the country’s workers in a violent socialist revolution. The author is Vladimir Lenin.

Trotsky doesn’t yet know Lenin, but he’ll abandon his family and cross a continent to find him. In this first episode of our six-part series on Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, we’ll learn how the roles they fill — Lenin as political operator and strategic mastermind, Trotsky as his loyal, maverick lieutenant — set the stage for the drama and betrayals that will eventually rip these comrades apart.

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