On October 3, 1908, the first issue of Pravda appeared in Vienna, a Russian-language paper aimed at workers back home, produced by emigres including Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe and Matvey Skobelev. It was printed in Leipzig. It was smuggled in. It came out irregularly, about 22 issues over two years, and it folded in 1910 when the editorial board fell apart.
Trotsky had just escaped from Siberia for the second time. He had been president of the St Petersburg soviet in 1905, had been arrested in December of that year and sentenced to internal exile, and he had got off the sled at Berezovo in the Urals in January 1907. He edited the paper from Vienna, where he had moved in October 1907, and paid for it partly with money from his father-in-law and partly with contributions from workers' groups.
The point of the paper was to argue against the Bolsheviks without quite saying so. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party had split in 1903 into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, and Trotsky spent the years from 1904 to 1917 holding a position between them, arguing that the party should be a mass organisation rather than a conspiracy. Pravda was that argument in print, and it was read in Russia more widely than its circulation suggests.
The name causes confusion. In 1912 the Bolsheviks started their own daily called Pravda in St Petersburg, which ran under a series of changed names to dodge the censor until 1914 and became the party's official organ in 1918. That is the Pravda people mean. Trotsky's Vienna paper is the other one, and he complained about the theft of the title for the rest of his life.
The Vienna paper had a small circulation. It left no organisation. Trotsky's later career did not: he was commissar for foreign affairs after October 1917, negotiated Brest-Litovsk, built the Red Army that won the civil war, lost the struggle for the succession to Stalin, was exiled in 1929 and was killed in Mexico in 1940 by an agent of the NKVD.