Trotsky writes on Balkan federation and national self-determination

The congress brought Bolshevik, Menshevik, and national-socialist delegates together amid disputes over party unity, armed struggle, and the empire’s nationalities. Trotsky advocated reunification,...

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...

As European socialist parties backed their governments, Trotsky opposed the war and analyzed it as a struggle among imperial powers. His internationalist position connected European war to colonial...

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...