Trotsky was expelled from France in the autumn of 1916, made his way to Spain, where he spent several months, and from there to America, arriving in New York in January 1917. A succinct synopsis of Trotsky’s writings for the revolutionary newspaper New World (part edited by Nikolai Bukharin) during the period January to March, while Trotsky was in the United States, and then again after his return to Russia in early April, has been given by Thatcher[62]. Certainly, until his return to Russia, Trotsky emphasised the international aspect of the world war, and tended to have a perspective in which revolution would break out more-or-less simultaneously in several countries. Lenin, however, saw that the stresses of the war produced uneven responses in the different countries, and correctly deduced that it was much more likely that revolution would break out in one state than do so European-wide.
On his arrival at Petrograd railway station (4 May) Trotsky is reported to have raised the slogans: “Long live an immediate, honest, democratic peace! All power to the Workmen’s Councils! All the land to the people!”[63]. The next day he made his first speech to the Petrograd Soviet and argued that the Provisional Government could not, and should not, last for long, because it would not meet the three basic demands of the masses of the Russian people: peace, land to the peasant, and an end to the food shortages[64]. Trotsky saw the aim of the Provisional Government as the preservation of the power of the bankers, the factory owners and the landowners, with every likelihood of a restoration of the autocracy. He believed power should be taken by the newly-emerged Soviets who would form a revolutionary workers’ government. In this general perspective he was at one with Lenin and at odds with the Old Bolsheviks.
The unity of thought between Lenin and Trotsky was clear as soon as Trotsky addressed the Petrograd Soviet. Advocating the transferral of all power to the Soviets, while continuing to denounce the war, put Trotsky in Lenin’s camp[65]. However, it was Trotsky’s new-found recognition of the indispensability of a revolutionary, disciplined party that placed him unequivocally at Lenin’s side. Trotsky now understood that without the Bolsheviks the Petrograd Soviet lacked the subjective factor necessary to lead a successful revolution[66].
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Thatcher, I. D., Trotsky, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p78-92
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Trotsky, L.D., Trotsky on the Platform in Petrograd www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1918/ourrevo/index.htm
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Trotsky, L.D., Speech in the Soviet Against the Coalition Government in The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology, Dell Publishing Co Inc, New York, 1964, p97
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Nelson, H.W., Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection, Frank Cass, England, 1988, p95
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Knei-Paz, B., The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1978, p228