Quick questions on Trotsky and the 1905 Revolution: HSC Modern History Personality

Bloody Sunday (9 January 1905, Old Style) reached Trotsky in Geneva. He left immediately for Munich and arrived back in Russia in February 1905 using a false passport. He worked underground first in Kiev with the Mensheviks, then in St Petersburg, where he produced articles and pamphlets under the pen name "Yanovsky" (after the family farm).

The Soviet of Workers' Deputies was formed on 13 October 1905 in the printing workers' strike committee at the Technological Institute, St Petersburg. The body coordinated factory and workshop delegates of the city's striking workers; within days it had 562 deputies from 147 factories. The Soviet was a workers' parliament with no established theoretical basis (it predated Lenin's 1917 theorisation of soviets as organs of state power).

The October general strike (10-21 October 1905) paralysed the railways, the post, the schools, the factories, and large parts of the state administration. On 17 October 1905 Sergei Witte secured the October Manifesto from Nicholas II: a constitutional concession promising civil liberties and a legislative Duma. The Soviet's response, drafted by Trotsky, accepted the Manifesto as a victory but refused to disband: the Manifesto was "a paper guarantee" and the autocracy remained.

Through the 50 days of the Soviet's existence (13 October to 3 December 1905) Trotsky drafted most of its political documents. The Soviet:

On 2 December 1905 the Soviet issued the Financial Manifesto, calling on citizens to withdraw bank deposits, refuse to pay taxes, and demand wages in gold rather than paper. The aim was to break the autocracy's credit. The next day (3 December 1905) the Free Economic Society building was surrounded and the entire Executive Committee, including Trotsky, was arrested. Trotsky's only resistance was to pause his speech, smile at the troops, and rule the meeting closed.

Trotsky and 51 codefendants were tried before the St Petersburg Judicial Chamber from 19 September to 2 November 1906 on charges of armed insurrection. Trotsky used the courtroom as a political platform. His defence speech (4 October 1906) was published almost immediately as a pamphlet and became one of his best-known early texts. The verdict was loss of civil rights and lifetime exile to Obdorsk in northern Siberia.

From the Peter and Paul Fortress and the city prison, Trotsky wrote his major theoretical essay Results and Prospects, published in mid-1906. The essay argued:

He did not; the Soviet emerged from the printing workers' strike committee. He shaped it as vice-chair and chair.

The Manifesto was a promise. The Fundamental Laws (April 1906) hedged the promise. Trotsky was right about the paper guarantee.

The text is the theoretical product of 1905 and is the basis of Trotsky's later disagreement with Stalin.