Which revolutionary wrote that Women's Day would inaugurate the 1917 revolution?

Leon Trotsky wrote that Women's Day would inaugurate the 1917 revolution. In his account, 23 February on the Julian calendar—8 March in the Gregorian calendar—was International Women's Day in Petrograd, where textile workers began striking and demonstrating.

Trotsky's remark referred to the February Revolution, not the later Bolshevik-led October Revolution. The protests demanded bread and peace amid wartime shortages, food insecurity, and opposition to Tsarist rule. They expanded into a mass strike across the city.

The demonstrations helped bring down the monarchy: Tsar Nicholas II abdicated seven days later, and the provisional government granted women the right to vote. A common mix-up is treating Trotsky's quotation as a prediction made before the protests; it was a retrospective description of how unexpectedly Women's Day became the revolution's opening moment.