Trotsky denounces the First World War as an imperialist conflict

In essays later collected with his account of 1905, Trotsky interpreted the workers’ council as an institution that could unite strike coordination and political authority. This was his...

Trotsky began publishing Pravda, seeking a mass readership among workers inside the Russian Empire. The paper’s title was later reused by Lenin’s separate Bolshevik newspaper; they were not the same...

At the Vienna meeting of Russian social democrats, Trotsky worked to reunify a party fractured by factional conflict. The effort exposed the limits of organizational unity when leaders disagreed...

His Balkan correspondence covered wars among states emerging from Ottoman rule and the region’s competing national projects. Read decolonially, the dispatches show both his attention to imperial...

Trotsky argued that Balkan workers should oppose chauvinist state competition and seek a voluntary federation. The proposal challenged imperial and nationalist domination, but its internationalist...

Written at the outbreak of world war, the pamphlet argued that the conflict arose from imperialist rivalry and rejected national defense as a justification for socialist support of belligerent states....

The article argued that peace required independent working-class action rather than diplomatic bargains among imperial powers. Wartime censorship and exile shaped its circulation. Month-level date...

In polemics during the war, Trotsky opposed treating Russia or the Allied states as progressive defenders of smaller nations. He linked the European front to imperial competition, though colonized...

Trotsky joined socialists from across Europe who opposed the war and issued an internationalist manifesto. The gathering was small compared with mass antiwar movements, but it helped preserve links...

French police expelled Trotsky for his antiwar activity. Spanish authorities then moved him onward; the episode shows how wartime states policed transnational radicals even when they were foreign...