c-span: who was leon trotsky? >> guest: leon trotsky was the great bolshevik leader who, a rival in the beginning with stalin for power and who was then deposed and then finally assassinated by stalin's henchmen, as we used to say. c-span: why would he be somebody you would follow? what was so strong about him? >> guest: he was a socialist, he was a marxist, he was unlike stalin. he was an intellectual. he was a man of great quality, and at the same time he was anti-stalinist and he was against what was happening in the soviet union, so that made him a rather attractive figure for us. it was all a wildly utopian dream, and even at the time, as i say, we took it with a certain sense of frivolity. we weren't totally serious about it. it was intellectually very stimulating, and we actually read marx, for example, and we had very heated debates about the meaning of this or that marxist dogma. c-span: what were your families like at that time? >> guest: we both came from immigrant families, both very poor, both struggl