The resolutely neutral Switzerland served as the site for a meeting of socialist anti-war activists. The socialist movement grew out of Industrial Revolution, when the economic structures throughout the developed world changed radically, and the socialists held organized meetings start from 1900 in Paris. By the time of the Swiss meeting, socialist agenda changed to include not only equality and workers’ rights, but also the war engulfing Europe.

On this day, September 5, in 1915 the first of an eventual three Zimmerwald Conferences began. Delegates from Russia, Bulgaria and Poland attended, as did representatives of the warring Western Europe states, France and Germany.

Among the notables participating in the discussions were the exiled Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolutionary party in Russia, and his second-in-command Leon Trotsky. Their conference manifesto stated “the war which has produced this chaos is the outcome of imperialism, of the attempt, on the part of the capitalist classes of each nation, to foster their greed for profit by the exploitation of human labor and of the natural treasures of the entire globe.”