Trotsky is elected chairman of the Petersburg Soviet

After prison and trial, Trotsky was exiled to eastern Siberia. The punishment was part of the empire’s effort to isolate political dissidents, but exile also connected activists across distant regions...

Trotsky escaped Siberia using forged papers and joined the émigré socialist press in Europe. He adopted the name “Trotsky,” borrowed from a prison guard. His escape joined local resistance to...

At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, disputes over membership, leadership, and editorial control produced the Bolshevik–Menshevik division. Trotsky opposed Lenin’s...

The pamphlet criticized Lenin’s conception of party organization and warned that substitution of party leaders for the working class could harden into substitution of a committee for the party and a...

The defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and the January 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre helped unleash strikes, mutinies, and peasant unrest. Trotsky returned clandestinely and entered the...

Trotsky and other Soviet members were arrested as the government crushed the council and the strike movement. The episode became central to Trotsky’s later account of the Soviet as a form of...

In writings developed after 1905, Trotsky argued that in a country with a weak liberal bourgeoisie, workers might lead a democratic revolution and move toward socialist measures, while the outcome...

At the trial of the Petersburg Soviet, Trotsky used the dock to defend the council’s political legitimacy and the right to resist autocracy. The court sentenced him to internal exile and deprivation...

The essay systematized his interpretation of the 1905 Revolution and the idea that democratic tasks in a dependent, unevenly developed society could pass into socialist measures under working-class...

After a 1906 court sentenced him to internal exile, Trotsky escaped en route to the far north and returned to political work abroad. This repeated cycle of arrest and flight reflected both the...