This pamphlet was written in 1914 during Trotsky’s two month stay in Zurich. He had arrived there rather hurriedly from Vienna which he left on the evening of August 3rd, the day Germany declared war against France. It was published serially in Russia in Martov’s Paris paper Golos from November 1914 onwards. Issued in German under the title Der Krieg und die Internationale, it earned him a prison sentence in absentia in Germany.

An English edition was published in America under the title The Bolsheviki and World Peaceby Boni & Liveright, New York, 1918 (With an introduction by Lincoln Steffens.)

In February 1918, the International Socialist Review, published by the Socialist Party of America, reproduced Trotsky’s Preface with the following note:

Comrade Trotsky was preparing an article for the Review when the revolution came up in Russia, compelling him to drop everything and return. Review readers will appreciate our disappointment and later on our joy in reading the inspiring record our comrade has made during the past few months.”

With regard to the booklet, the editors wrote:

Every revolutionary socialist in America will want to read and re-read his new book entitled The Bolsheviki and World Peace.

This issue of the Review proved to be the last, for the administration of President Wilson barred the magazine from the post and compelled it to cease publication.[1]

President Wilson had, however, already read the booklet by calling for the proof sheets from the publishers. Some of Trotsky’s phraseology (which would sound fine and liberal) he used in his own peace program: No reparations, self-determination of nations, United States of Europe, etc. Trotsky heard of this from Charles Boni himself, in 1931, when the publisher visited Trotsky in exile at Prinkipo.[2]

Much of Trotsky’s prolific literary output during the war years remains untranslated into English. We gather that these writings fill many of the volumes of his collected works in Russian.[3]

This does not mean that his views were different from those of the Bolsheviks. Zinoviev wrote in reference to this booklet that it posed the question correctly on all fundamental issues.[4]

  1. International Socialist Review, N.Y. Summer 1956, p. 106 (p. iii)

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  2. Alfred Rosmer: Trotsky in Paris During World War 1, New International, Sept-–Oct. 1950, p. 270. (p. iii)

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  3. Gankin and Fisher: The Bolsheviks and the War, Stanford 1940, p. 747 (p. iii)

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  4. Leon Trotsky: The Stalin School of Falsification, p. 152 (p. iv)

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