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factions—
BOLSHEVIKS
and Mensheviks—at the
London Congress in 1903, Trotsky sided with the
Menshevik position. Trotsky returned to St.
Petersburg during the 1905 Revolution and
played an important role in the newly established
St. Petersburg Soviet, a council that expressed
workers' aspirations, eventually becoming its
chairman. He was arrested in 1906 and banished
to Siberia, but again he escaped, this time set-
tling in Vienna. While in prison he worked out
the theory of “permanent revolution,” his signa-
ture contribution to Marxist theory. Trotsky
argued that instead of a working-class revolution
being preceded by a capitalist revolution, as tra-
ditional Marxists held, a revolution in Russia
would trigger socialist revolutions elsewhere in
Europe, which would in turn guarantee the suc-
cess of the Russian revolution.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 and his
outspoken opposition to the war forced Trotsky
to move often. He left Vienna for Zurich, and in
November 1914 he moved to Paris, where he
became one of the editors of
Nashe slovo
(
Our
Word
), the Social Democratic newspaper. He was
arrested by the French police in November 1916
and deported to Spain, from where he traveled
to New York City, arriving in January 1917 to
work with Nikolai
BUKHARIN
and Aleksandra
KOLLONTAI
on the revolutionary newspaper
Novy
mir.
Trotsky's American sojourn was cut short by
the
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
in Russia. He arrived
in Petrograd in May 1917 and, disapproving of
the Menshevik support for the Provisional Gov-
ernment, joined the Bolsheviks in July. Trotsky
was among those arrested by the Provisional
Government in the aftermath of the
JULY DAYS
,
an attempted Bolshevik insurrection. By late
September, with the political pendulum again
favoring the Bolsheviks, Trotsky was released
and quickly named chairman of the Petrograd
Soviet. As a member of the Petrograd Revolu-
tionary Committee, Trotsky was instrumental in
planning the Bolshevik takeover of October 25,
1917 (November 7 by the Western calendar).
As the first Soviet people's commissar of for-
eign affairs, Trotsky conducted negotiations with
Germany to end Russia's involvement in World
War I. He tried to delay a settlement, hoping for
a socialist revolution in Germany, but with Ger-
man troops marching toward Petrograd, Trotsky
was ordered by Lenin to accept German terms
and sign the Treaty of
BREST
-
LITOVSK
, surrender-
ing large portions of Russian territory. Trotsky's
accomplishments as commissar of war were
more substantial. To fight the civil war, he built a
Red Army, often with great ruthlessness, draft-
ing former czarist officers for their expertise,
much to the concern of many revolutionaries.
Although the Bolshevik victory in the civil war
validated Trotsky's organizational gamble, his
other ideas, such as state control of trade unions
and militarization of labor, engendered great
resistance in the Communist Party.
Lenin's death in 1924 left Trotsky without a
major ally and placed him in the middle of a
fierce succession struggle. Resented by many col-
leagues for a brilliance that bordered on arro-
gance, Trotsky proved less nimble at political
infighting than he had been at organizing armies
and was quickly outmaneuvered by his rivals,
especially Joseph
STALIN
. The clash with Stalin
was personal and ideological, the product of a
rivalry that went back to the civil war but also
grounded in differing conceptions of the revolu-
tionary process. While Trotsky supported the
extension of revolution throughout the world as
the best way to ensure the survival of the Rus-
sian Revolution, Stalin advocated the idea of
“socialism in one country.” Ironically, in the late
1920s Stalin co-opted Trotsky's ideas about rapid
industrialization in drafting the system of five-
year plans. In 1925, Trotsky was dismissed from
his post as commissar of war, and the following
year he was expelled from the ruling Politburo of
the
COMMUNIST PARTY
. In 1927, after repeatedly
denouncing Stalin, he was expelled from the
party itself. After a year of internal exile in Alma-
Ata (Almaty) in Central Asia, in 1929 he was
ordered to leave the Soviet Union. Considered a
dangerous revolutionary and pressured by the
Soviet government, Trotsky was refused admis-
sion by several countries, and moved from
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