Trotsky critiques socialist support for national war aims

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...

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...

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...

Aboard a ship from New York, Trotsky was removed by British authorities and held in a Canadian internment camp with German prisoners. Russian émigrés protested, and the Russian Provisional...

Trotsky returned to a city shaped by workers’, soldiers’, and sailors’ soviets and a Provisional Government that continued the war. He entered a political field transformed by mass action and the...

After armed demonstrations by workers and soldiers, the Provisional Government arrested Trotsky and other Bolsheviks. He defended the demonstrators against charges of German conspiracy, while...