Trotsky Read online

  Perhaps also the sight of the life led by the impoverished peasants, who came in their hundreds to reap the Bronshteins’ harvest, shocked the future Marxist. Barefoot and dressed in rags, they worked for pennies, and were fed a basic vegetable soup, porridge and bread. They slept in the open and under the ricks when it rained.

  Undoubtedly, one influence on the mind of the young Trotsky was that of school. His first school was a heder, or Jewish primary school. His progress there was mediocre, for he lacked Yiddish, the medium of instruction, and neither the Hebrew alphabet nor the prayer book could have had any meaning for him. Indeed, religious observance was of little more than symbolic importance to the family in general. But he did learn to read and write Russian, and had barely mastered the grammar when he began writing verses which, unlike the poetic efforts of the young Stalin, appear not to have survived.

  In 1888 M.F. Shpentser, a relative of his mother who would later become a publisher in the south of Russia, got the boy into a good state school in Odessa—no simple matter, as a quota operated, according to which Jewish children must not exceed 10 per cent (in some cases 5 or 2 per cent) of the pupils in a school. In his own official file, Trotsky recorded that he had attended St Paul’s High School and was always top of his class.5 Despite the fact that ordinary high schools differed from gymnasia, which also taught Classics, in that they devoted more time to the natural sciences and mathematics, Trotsky managed to read many of the major works of Russian and Western literature. He fell foul, however, of the French teacher, a Swiss called Bernand, and was expelled for a year, an event he apparently regarded as sufficiently important in his revolutionary development to mention in his official record. Rejecting sports and other recreational activities, he excelled in all subjects and remained top of the class, and the ease with which he accomplished this feat was to leave a perceptible mark on his character for the rest of his life. He was extremely self-assured, self-assertive and somewhat condescending towards his schoolmates. His biographer G.A. Ziv, who knew him in those years, later wrote that ‘the key feature of Bronshtein’s personality was that everywhere and always he had to be first, the other facets of his psyche serving only as secondary elements’.6

  Nature had endowed Trotsky with bright blue eyes, thick black hair, regular features, the gift of elegance and a talent for dressing well. He had many admirers and as many detractors, for talent is rarely forgiven, and in time, moreover, the sense that he was exceptional generated in him marked egoistic and egocentric traits. This was underlined by the fact that, even when he was popular, he had no close friends, for friendship demands equality. From childhood on, Trotsky was unwilling to recognize his intellectual equal in anyone, except possibly in Lenin, and even then only after October 1917. Trotsky recalled nothing good of his schooldays, which he characterized as ‘if not black, then grey. I can hardly think of a single teacher whom I might remember with affection.’7 He would often say that there were too many mediocrities in the world, and he did not suffer fools gladly.

  Beyond the confines of the school, however, he met and was influenced by many varied personalities. His cousin Shpentser, in particular, imbued him with a love of books—both their content and the physical process of making them. As a youth Trotsky became familiar with all the stages of book production, and the feel of a book fresh off the press remained a source of intense pleasure throughout his life. As for writing, the pen became and was to remain his chief weapon. Studying literature and the production of newspapers stimulated his interest not only in the Russian classics, but also in Western culture and civilization. In this respect he was not unusual. The Russian Empire was backward in many respects, and this backwardness was felt most acutely by the progressive intelligentsia, which longed for bourgeois democratic freedoms, a liberal order and cultural advance. For the Jewish intelligentsia the Russian Empire was a world of pogroms, discrimination, the Pale of Settlement. Before he ever visited the West, Trotsky had imbibed European culture and values, and his Westernized views would influence his thinking when he later formulated his Theory of Permanent Revolution, or declared that the outcome of the Russian revolution depended on the timing of the world conflagration, or advocated that some aspects of European culture be introduced into Russia.

  High school, first in Odessa and then in the neighbouring city of Nikolaev, gradually distanced Lev Bronshtein from his family. When he visited the farm in Kherson, where his father was now doing so well, he felt stifled by the narrowness of this little world, dominated as it was by the constant struggle for success, profit, advantage. He was developing a powerful, flexible, sharp mind, ever seeking to understand the new and the unfamiliar, and he brought it to bear on the contrast between what he saw in the city and what greeted him on his returns to the countryside. Trotsky spent his childhood and adolescence in a petty bourgeois milieu, and although later he would throw off the mentality of acquisition and consumption, some of the traits which he had inherited would resurface in later years.

  Like many middle-class revolutionaries at the early stages of their political lives, Trotsky was capable of rapid, sometimes very dramatic, shifts of direction. Thus, he came to Marxism soon after vehemently rejecting it as a teenaged Populist.* Having collaborated with the Mensheviks at one time, after the revolution he called for the harshest measures against them. He was, perhaps, one of the first proponents of the Red Terror which he would later condemn. Though a lifelong Marxist, he retained some elements of middle-class revolutionary-mindedness, spontaneity and fanaticism. He was, however, utterly consistent in his total rejection of Stalinism, a fact chiefly motivated by personal considerations.

  Trotsky’s family could not of course have created the revolutionary in him, but it gave him an insight into petty bourgeois life, permitted him to obtain an education, and supported him financially right up to the revolution. In this respect, his position was greatly preferable to that of the majority of revolutionaries. Thanks to his versatility, moreover, he also had access to a variety of other sources of financial support; from lecturing, grants from charities and earnings from journalism.

  As Trotsky’s involvement in the revolutionary movement deepened in the late 1890s, his ties with his family weakened. David Bronshtein, according to his son, became harsher as he became richer, the burdens on him growing heavier as his business expanded, and his children became more of a disappointment to him.8 The main disappointment was that none of his four children wanted to carry on the business. The elder son, Alexander, acquired an education and worked as an engineer in the sugar industry, continuing to do so after the revolution. After Trotsky was deported in 1929 Alexander publicly disowned him, but he was nevertheless exiled internally, then arrested, and finally, on 25 April 1938, shot. Trotsky’s elder sister Liza died of natural causes in 1924. His younger sister Olga married the leading Bolshevik Lev Kamenev. Trotsky maintained the closest relations with her as long as he was in the Soviet Union. Branded the sister of the chief ‘enemy of the people’, however, she had little chance of survival. Arrested in 1935 and shot in 1941, she outlived her two young sons, who were shot in 1936.

  Trotsky’s mother died in 1910, after writing to him that she did not expect to see him again. He was outside Russia at the time and could not attend her funeral. The fate of most of his family, like his own, was a tragic one. For Olga Grebner, the wife of his younger son Sergei, Trotsky had been like a leper: ‘He brought misery to everyone he came in contact with,’ she told me. In his ‘supplementary statement’ of 24 August 1934 on the death of his elder son Lev Sedov, Trotsky wrote: ‘Yagoda [head of the security organs] caused the premature death of one of my daughters, and drove the other to suicide. He arrested my two sons-in-law who simply disappeared without trace. The GPU arrested my younger son, Sergei … and he then disappeared.’9 Sergei perished in 1937, his elder son was murdered in Paris in 1938, and most of his relatives, even distant ones, would be liquidated in due course.

  The Path of Revolution

  T
rotsky loved mathematics, whose abstract world fascinated him with its mystery, its logic and its inexhaustible possibilities. He dreamed of studying it at Novorossiisk University, and might have become a scientist, but the only ‘universities’ he was to attend were those of the Russian prison system. His revolutionary career began when he left high school, aged seventeen.

  He was staying with relatives whose two grown-up sons had taken up socialist ideas. Although he was ever-open to new ideas, Lev expressed indifference for ‘theoretical utopias’ and was amused by the brothers’ assertion of ‘the historic value of socialism’, preferring instead to study his textbooks. Once he had been drawn into argument by his cousins, however, the socialist way of thinking would stay with him for the rest of his life, and ideological, political struggle would become his raison d’être.

  His political development was accelerated when his cousins introduced him to Franz Shvigovsky, a Czech who cultivated an orchard for a living and who had formed something of a commune with Populist friends. Trotsky later recalled how, as a seventeen-year-old, he used to visit this ‘undefined radical’ and read Mikhailovsky, Kareyev, John Stuart Mill, and ‘an atrociously printed copy of the Communist Manifesto’. He remembered that only Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya, a midwifery student from Odessa six years his senior, was reading Marx’s Capital: ‘In 1896-97 I was an opponent of Marx (whose works I didn’t read).’10 It was from Alexandra that Trotsky first heard an argued case for Marxism. He hated losing a debate, but he had nothing substantial to oppose to Alexandra’s cool, balanced arguments. Relying on logic and intuition alone, he managed to maintain his dignity. She would smile as he tried vehemently to expose the ‘inconsistency of Marxism’, sensing perhaps that Populism was closer to his outlook, as he had not absorbed the iron ‘determinism’ to be found in Marxism. Given his self-assurance, he was more at home with a theory that advocated ‘critically thinking personalities’, brilliant heroes who could rise above the mob, idols capable of raising the masses to great causes. His attacks on Marxism were youthful outbursts against a dry theory of which he knew nothing.

  There was in the young Trotsky a streak of revolutionary romanticism. He was an advocate of the personal principle, a pioneer for moral reasons. Sokolovskaya’s arguments, nevertheless, gradually eroded his self-confidence and caused him intellectual confusion. Soon political debate became suffused by a sudden rush of feeling between the antagonists, despite their deep differences of ‘doctrine’. Out of vanity and in a spirit of contrariness, Trotsky decided to ‘destroy Marxism’ publicly. He filled his first article with epigrams, quotations and venomous shafts, and later wrote that ‘luckily it was not published, and no one, including me, was any the worse for it’. It was to have been the basis of a play he planned to write with Alexandra’s brothers, the central theme of which would be the conflict between the Marxists and the Populists, but this, too, came to nothing.

  When he went home on vacation in 1897, Trotsky shocked his parents by making seditious remarks about the Tsar: ‘You see, father, at the first audience he gave to the nobility he declared, “I shall uphold the principles of autocracy as firmly and unflinchingly as my unforgettable late father …”’

  ‘Quite right,’ responded David Bronshtein.

  ‘But then the Tsar went on to declaim, in his excited state, that the men of the zemtsvo [locally elected self-governed assembly] “must give up their senseless dreams”! “Senseless”! and the word in the text of his speech was ‘groundless”.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘The Tsar shouted the words “senseless dreams” so loudly that the Empress, who doesn’t know much Russian, asked one of the grand duchesses what he’d said, and was calmly told, “He says they’re all idiots.” And Utkin, the governor of Tver province, was so badly shaken by the Tsar’s shouting, he dropped the gold tray he was carrying. “A bad sign for the coronation,” whispered the old retainers, as they watched Vorontsov-Dashkov, on his knees, picking up the gifts.’11 He added: ‘The world you and the rest of society are living in has gone sour. It’s all got to be changed. We’ve got to get rid of the Tsar and achieve freedom! Yes!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ his father exploded. ‘You’d better think again! It’s not going to happen for 300 years! Where did you get these ideas? Don’t you ever go near that layabout Shvigovsky again!’

  The argument led to a temporary rift, and Lev, feeling himself liberated, refused his father’s financial support. After a few months in Shvigovsky’s commune, the ‘rebel’ made peace, but in practice his law-abiding parents’ authority over him was now a thing of the past, and most of his actions were carried out against their wishes. His radicalism, and that of his friends, meanwhile deepened. They were much affected by the news in 1897 that a student called Vetrova had burned herself to death in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. Although the reasons for this act never became clear, to the members of the ‘orchard commune’ it was plainly a protest against the autocracy. Ziv recalled that Lev suggested he join a workers’ union which he and his friends had organized, and which had decisively rejected Populist ideas. ‘It’s purely social democratic’ ‘Who belongs?’ Ziv asked. ‘The avant-garde of youth: revolutionary-minded students and workers!’12 The South Russian Workers’ Union was named in honour of a body that had been dispersed by the police a quarter of a century earlier.

  Lev Bronshtein, now known by the alias of Lvov, and his friends organized several small circles among the dockworkers of Nikolaev, at which they read newspapers, pamphlets and consciousness-raising proclamations. The work of the ‘Union’ was to copy and duplicate social democratic texts for distribution among the workers on the wharves and in other workplaces. Its leaders had little experience, and their attempts at secrecy were primitive. The group was easily penetrated by police agents, and on 28 January 1898 Bronshtein, Shvigovsky and others were arrested. Writing to the Party historian, Nevsky, on 5 August 1921, Trotsky recalled that ‘it was the workers in the prison who made me a Marxist, above all Ivan Andreyevich Mukhin’.13 From Nikolaev prison Trotsky was moved first to Kherson and then to Odessa. He describes his ‘grand tour’ of Russia’s gaols in his autobiography. He was in Odessa prison for about two years while his case was being investigated. There was no trial. He and three others were sentenced to four years in exile, while the rest, including Sokolovskaya, were given shorter terms. Trotsky then spent about five months in Moscow transfer prison and three at Irkutsk in Siberia. He did not waste a single day of his imprisonment, constantly seeking to improve his mind. Much later, when asked what was his favourite pastime, he replied, ‘Intellectual activity: reading, thinking and, perhaps, writing.’14

  While they were in the Butyrki prison in Moscow, Trotsky and Sokolovskaya requested permission to get married from the prison authorities, who had no objection, and the couple informed their parents. Alexandra’s were not opposed, but the Bronshteins would have none of it. Trotsky wrote to Alexandra at this time and the letter has been preserved in the archives. For the rest of his life Trotsky remained sensitive on this matter, which was understandable enough, considering the feelings of his second wife. In 1922, when he learned that the Party’s historical journal Proletarskaya revolyutsiya intended to publish his personal correspondence with Alexandra, he wrote to the editor: ‘I’m not dead yet; people I corresponded with are still alive, so don’t exert yourself to turn us into historical material for Istpart [the special commission on the history of the party and the revolution]. If Istpart has a different view, I’m prepared to take the matter to the Politburo. Until the Politburo discusses the matter, please don’t publish.’15 His wishes were complied with.

  It now seems reasonable, seventy years later, to lift that ban. On the eve of their marriage, he wrote to Alexandra:

  Shurochka,16 I have a whole lot of news for you (however uninteresting). I met my mother the day before yesterday. The meeting ended in a complete rift—which is really for the best, don’t you think? This time I cou
nter-attacked and things became rather nasty. I turned down their help. I just got a letter from your father: what a nice man! He’s not angry that I’ve broken with my parents, he seems pleased … He says it removes the issue of material inequality … I’m sitting so close to you now that I can almost feel your presence. Next time you go downstairs for exercise, say something, as I’m bound to hear you. Try, Sashenka! I’m finding it hard … I want to hear your voice and I want to see you … What if they won’t let us get married? It’s impossible! There have been times (hours, days, months) when suicide seemed the most decent way out. But I hadn’t got the nerve … The Siberian taiga will be the test of our civic sensibilities. Anyway we’ll be happy there! Like the gods on Olympus! I’ve repeated this to myself so many times, and I still want to keep on repeating it …17

  In less than three years Trotsky would abandon Alexandra in the depths of Siberia with their two tiny daughters, never to return to his first family again, and blaming ‘fate’ for the separation.

  Trotsky’s personal correspondence makes it plain enough that he married Alexandra for love, and yet in his autobiography he devotes no more than half a paragraph to the event, and even tries to give the impression that it had been dictated by revolutionary expediency:

  As well as I can remember, it took about three weeks before we came to the village of Ust-Kut. There I was put ashore with one of the women prisoners, a close associate of mine from Nikolaev. Alexandra Lvovna had one of the most important positions in the South Russian Workers’ Union. Her utter loyalty to socialism and her complete lack of any personal ambition gave her an unquestioned moral authority. The work that we were doing bound us closely together, and so, to avoid being separated, we had been married in the transfer prison in Moscow.18