Trotsky in 1905¶
Core Argument¶
In 1905, Leon Trotsky emerged as the most prominent leader of Russian Social Democracy, a fact attested to by contemporaries across the factional divide. Lunacharsky, a close Bolshevik collaborator of Lenin, recorded that Trotsky’s popularity among the Petersburg proletariat was “tremendous”, and that he alone among the émigré leaders understood how to conduct political struggle on a broad, national scale. Trotsky became chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet after the arrest of the accidental figure Khrustalyov-Nosar, writing most of its proclamations and manifestos. Lenin, despite a moment of evident chagrin at Trotsky’s rising star, acknowledged that Trotsky had “earned it by his brilliant and unflagging work”.
The chapter’s core argument is that Trotsky’s political position in 1905 was fundamentally revolutionary and indistinguishable from Lenin’s on all decisive questions, directly refuting the later Stalinist slander that Trotsky was a Menshevik. The evidence is marshalled from Menshevik sources themselves. Fyodor Dan, writing as a bitter enemy, conceded that after 9 January 1905 Trotsky argued for an armed uprising and a Revolutionary Provisional Government, positions “in complete agreement” with Lenin. Martov, Trotsky’s nominal co-editor on Nachalo, complained that the paper’s line was identical to the Bolsheviks’, savagely attacking the liberal Struve as “an agent of Witte” and declaring the Zemstvo opposition “a counter-revolutionary force”. Martov’s biographer Getzler confirms that Nachalo became “a propagator of Trotskyism rather than of Menshevism”. The paper’s circulation reached 500,000, dwarfing the Bolshevik Novaya Zhizn’, and Kamenev himself admitted the Bolsheviks “do write better in Nachalo than we do”.
The chapter draws on the historical context of the 1905 Revolution, the Petersburg Soviet, and the factional struggle within the RSDLP. It notes that the Petersburg Bolsheviks made a fundamental error in their attitude to the Soviet, losing the majority to the Mensheviks. Trotsky, while maintaining an independent position between the factions, was not a conciliator on principle; his reluctance to join the Bolsheviks stemmed from the sectarian conduct of the local Bolshevik committeemen, not from political disagreement with Lenin. The general upswing of the revolution created an irresistible pressure for unity from the ranks, and both Lenin and Trotsky supported reunification on a principled basis, with the Mensheviks even accepting Lenin’s formula for party membership.
The polemic is directed squarely at Stalinist historiography, which falsely claimed Trotsky “defended the Menshevik idea of the bourgeoisie’s hegemony”. The chapter also refutes the specific slander that Trotsky supported the Menshevik “Labour Congress” idea, showing that his 1906 pamphlet advocated a National Congress of Soviets—a permanent organisation of workers’ power that anticipated 1917. Trotsky’s defence speech at the trial of the Soviet, where he proclaimed the Soviet as “the organised will of the majority calling the minority to order”, is presented as a revolutionary call for armed uprising from the dock. The chapter concludes that the differences between Lenin and Trotsky in 1905—over “conciliationism” and factional unity—were soon swept aside by the revolutionary tide.