The outbreak of the revolution of 1905 found Trotsky in Geneva. He returned to St. Petersburg, via Kiev, in February of that year, and after several weeks as deputy chairman, on 26 November 1905 was elected chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet. Trotsky and most members of the Soviet were arrested and imprisoned by the tsarist authorities on 3 December 1905. The following year, on 3 November 1906, he was again exiled to Siberia (this time for life), but again managed to escape (on 7 February 1907) and made his way to Europe. He settled in Vienna and worked for the reuniting of the RSDLP through his prodigious journalism and other writings, being elected to the party Central Committee in January 1910. From September 1912, he worked as a war correspondent for the Ukrainian newspaper Kievskaia mysl′ (“Ukrainian Thought”), covering the two Balkan Wars. After the outbreak of the First World War, as an enemy national, he fled Vienna for Switzerland and then (from 19 November 1914) settled in Paris, where from January 1915 he edited the internationalist Nashe slovo (“Our Word”) and supported Lenin’s (defeatist) stance on the war. Consequently, in September 1916 he was obliged to leave France and went, via Spain, to the United States, settling in New York from 13 January 1917. There, alongside N. I. Bukharin and A. M. Kollontai, he edited the newspaper Novyi mir (“New Life”) and contributed articles to the Yiddish Der Forverts (“Forwards”). He returned to Russia following the February Revolution (being briefly detained, en route, at Halifax and Amherst, Nova Scotia, by the British authorities), arriving in Petrograd on 24 April 1917.
Trotsky was immediately co-opted onto the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and, disgusted by the Mensheviks’ participation in the Provisional Government, soon joined the Bolsheviks (along with many of his followers in the so-called Inter-district Group of the RSDLP, such as A. V. Lunacharskii and V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko). On 3 August 1917, he was elected to the party Central Committee (even though he was currently in prison, as a consequence of his part in the alleged coup of the July Days); having been released from the Kresty prison on 2 September 1917, in the aftermath of the Kornilov affair, he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (12 September 1917). In that capacity, he founded (and from 8 October 1917 chaired) the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which would prepare, organize, and lead the October Revolution. (On 6 November 1918, none other than J. V. Stalin wrote in Pravda: “All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky.”) In particular, Trotsky has been credited with resisting Lenin’s call to seize power before the meeting of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 25 October 1917, although others would argue that his key act came in the two or three days before that date, when he secured the support, or neutrality, of a majority of the units of the Petrograd Garrison, and during the following week, when he masterminded the Red Guards’ defeat of the Kerensky–Krasnov Uprising around Petrograd.
In the days following the October Revolution, Trotsky also sided firmly with Lenin against other members of the Bolshevik leadership who wanted to give in to the demands of the powerful railway workers’ union, Vikzhel′, for the creation of an all-socialist, coalition government. With the creation of the (initially all-Bolshevik) Sovnarkom, he was appointed People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs (26 October 1917), in which capacity he was responsible for conducting most of the negotiations with the Central Powers following the armistice of 13–14 November 1917. Now recognized as second in command within the party, Trotsky resisted V. I. Lenin’s demands that a treaty (no matter how injurious to Russia) should be signed immediately. He instead dragged out the negotiations, in order to reveal the rapacious nature of the imperialist enemies of the Soviet state and thus provoke (he hoped) revolution in Western Europe. When this tactic of “neither war nor peace” failed, and the Germans renewed their advance during the Eleven-Days War (18 February 1918), Trotsky reluctantly abstained in a vote in the party Central Committee, allowing Lenin’s faction to win and to move toward signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). On 13 March 1918, soon after the treaty was signed, Trotsky resigned his post and became People’s Commissar for Military Affairs (14 March 1918–6 July 1923) and chairman of the Supreme Military Council (14 March–2 September 1918), adding the post of People’s Commissar for Naval Affairs to that portfolio in April 1918. (The People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs and the People’s Commissariat for Naval Affairs were formally merged on 6 July 1923, with Trotsky serving as People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs to 26 January 1925). The post of commander in chief was then abolished, and Trotsky gained full control over military policy.
Having seen the army collapse before the German advance in February 1918, and having witnessed even the most trusted Red Guards and units of Baltic sailors (led by P. E. Dybenko) fleeing from the enemy at Narva, Trotsky immediately began issuing decrees that would transform what was left of the old army and the irregular units of Red Guards into a regular army, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. Ably supported by his deputy, E. M. Sklianskii, he was responsible also for establishing its early command structure; encouraging the use of military specialists; establishing the role of military commissars; the transformation from the volunteer principle to the principle of universal military training (Vsevobuch) and forced conscription; and building a network of military-educational institutions, culminating in the Red Military Academy, that would train a new generation of Red commanders. During the summer and early autumn of 1918, Trotsky’s presence on the Eastern Front, the orders that he gave, and his insistence on the strictest of discipline (including the execution of deserters) has been credited with saving the revolution from defeat at the hands of the People’s Army of Komuch and the Czechoslovak Legion. Such policies, however, were not universally popular, and Trotsky’s trust in military specialists, in particular, would earn him the distrust of Stalin and K. E. Voroshilov during the Tsaritsyn affair.
On 6 September 1918, Trotsky was made chairman of the new Revvoensovet of the Republic, while Jukums Vācietis took over the command of the army. Trotsky spent much of the next two years touring the various Red fronts in his personal armored train (Trotsky’s train), becoming the very symbol of Bolshevik militarism. In March 1919, he made concessions on the role of military commissars and military specialists that appeased the Military Opposition, and in July of that year he overcame a crisis when his opponents removed Vācietis, purged the membership of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, and reversed Trotsky and Vācietis’s decision not to pursue the defeated forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak across the Urals but to concentrate forces on the Southern Front. On 5 July 1919, Trotsky tendered his resignation as War Commissar, but the Politbiuro, the Orgbiuro, and the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) unanimously rejected it and forced him to reconsider.