Trotzky has been a fighter in the ranks of the revolutionary army of Russia for twenty years.  As early as 1900 his activities as a Socialist propagandist among students had landed him in prison in solitary confinement.  In 1902 he was exiled to eastern Siberia, whence he managed to escape.  During the next three years he lived abroad, except for brief intervals spent in Russia, devoting himself to Socialist journalism.  His first pamphlet, published in Geneva in 1903, was an attempt to reconcile the two factions in the Social Democratic party, the Bolsheviki and the Mensheviki.  He was an orthodox Marxist of the most extreme doctrinaire type, and naturally inclined to the Bolshevik view.  Yet he never joined the Bolsheviki, preferring to remain aloof from both factions and steadfastly and earnestly striving to unite them.

When the Revolution of 1905 broke out Trotzky had already attained considerable influence among the Socialists.  He was regarded as one of the ablest of the younger Marxians, and men spoke of him as destined to occupy the place of Plechanov.  He became one of the most influential leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet, and was elected its president.  In that capacity he labored with titanic energy and manifested great versatility, as organizer, writer, speaker, and arbiter of disputes among warring individuals and groups.  When the end came he was arrested and thrown into prison, where he remained for twelve months.  After that he was tried and sentenced to life-exile in northern Siberia.  From this he managed to escape, however, and from 1907 until the outbreak of the war in 1914 he lived in Vienna.

The first two years of the war he lived in France, doing editorial work for a radical Russian Socialist daily paper, the Nashe Slovo.  His writing, together with his activity in the Zimmerwald movement of anti-war Socialists, caused his expulsion from France.  The Swiss government having refused to permit him to enter Switzerland, he sought refuge in Spain, where he was once more arrested and imprisoned for a short time.  Released through the intervention of Spanish Socialists, he set sail with his family for New York, where he arrived early in January, 1917.  Soon after the news of the Russian Revolution thrilled the world Trotzky, like many other Russian exiles, made hasty preparations to return, sailing on March 27th on a Norwegian steamer.  At Halifax he and his family, together with a number of other Russian revolutionists, were taken from the ship and interned in a camp for war prisoners, Trotzky resisting violently and having to be carried off the ship.  The British authorities kept them interned for a month, but finally released them at the urgent demand of the Foreign Minister of the Russian Provisional Government, Miliukov.