Trotsky is arrested after the July Days

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...

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...

The Interdistrict (Mezhraiontsy) group, with Trotsky among its leading members, joined the Bolshevik Party at its Sixth Congress. The convergence brought together activists who had previously differed...

While jailed, Trotsky urged joint defense against General Kornilov’s attempted counterrevolution. The episode showed temporary cooperation between political forces otherwise divided, and the central...

The Provisional Government released Trotsky and other imprisoned Bolsheviks after the failed Kornilov coup. His renewed political activity came amid growing Soviet support for peace and transfer of...

As Bolshevik influence grew among workers and the garrison, the Soviet elected Trotsky chairman. The institution’s strength reflected delegates’ response to demands for peace, land, and bread, not...

The committee organized the defense of the Soviet and coordinated garrison units. Trotsky helped lead it as the Bolsheviks contested the Provisional Government; the MRC became the operational center...