Trotsky Page 5
Why did the eighteen-year-old Trotsky need a marriage which he would later try to depict as virtually fictitious? Perhaps because, in all his writings, he felt the need to invoke noble, moral motives and decency, whereas his first love and first marriage had been short-lived. He could hardly fail to mention the relationship in his autobiography, but to invoke their ‘work’ as the reason for staying with a woman who ‘lacked personal ambition’ was acceptable to him.
The story of Trotsky’s first marriage suggests unadorned pragmatism, an urge to free himself from a burden in order to move on to higher things. In fairness to Trotsky, for a long time he attempted (not very energetically) to retain the link with his wife and children. Following his deportation to Turkey in 1929, his elder daughter, Zina, visited him (his younger daughter, Nina, had died the previous year). Alexandra had hoped that being with her father would help Zina to cope with her emotional problems, but she felt like a stranger in his house. It was decided that she needed treatment in Berlin, and Trotsky did his utmost to obtain it for her. After a course of therapy, however, he wrote to Alexandra in Moscow that she ‘should be thinking about a room’ for Zina to come back to. A few weeks later, however, he was faced with the sad task of informing his first wife of their daughter’s death.
It is true that when Alexandra was in trouble in 1935, and was exiled merely for being Trotsky’s first wife, he frequently talked about her, his daughters and his grandsons to his second family, and was worried about what would happen to them. He recorded in his diary on 2 April 1935, having just heard that Alexandra had been deported to Siberia:
I don’t think [she] has been politically at all active during the last few years, both because of her age and the three children on her hands. Several weeks ago in Pravda, in an article devoted to the fight against ‘remnants’ and ‘dregs’, the name of [Alexandra] was also mentioned—in the usual hoodlum manner—but only in passing; she was accused of having exerted a harmful influence—in 1931!—on a group of students—I think of the Institute of Forestry. Pravda could not discover any later crimes. But the very mention of her name was by itself an unmistakable sign that we must expect a blow in this direction too.
Three days later, after much agonized talk about the fate of his younger son Seryozha, Trotsky wrote: ‘N[atalie, his second wife] has thought more about A[lexandra].L. than about Seryozha: it may be, after all, that Seryozha is not in any trouble, but A.L. at sixty years of age has been sent somewhere to the far north.’19
Deep in Siberian exile at the turn of the century, as he describes in colourful detail in his autobiography, Trotsky set about establishing a programme of work. He carried on with his education, and also took his first successful steps in journalism. He dropped his first revolutionary alias, ‘Lvov’, in favour of ‘Antid Oto’, and articles over this signature began appearing in the local newspaper Vostochnoe obozrenie (Eastern Review). He was willing to write on any topic—the Siberian village, the position of women in Siberia, the local authorities and the role of local government. He wrote essays on Nietzsche, Gogol, Uspensky and Herzen. He was invariably categorical in his judgements—in a piece on a popular writer, entitled ‘The History of Literature, Mr Boborykin and Russian Criticism’, he wrote: ‘Mr Boborykin has written a book on the European novel … but, strange to relate, no one, apart from the author, can understand it.’20 This was a style Trotsky would carry with him throughout his life: peremptoriness and an unwillingness to compromise on his values, a lack of fear of saying exactly what he thought to anyone, a readiness to go against established norms. It was this approach that made him many supporters. But it created still more enemies.
He managed to send a number of articles abroad, where Russian émigré circles noticed the literary talents of the unknown correspondent. Also unknown to them was the fact that these works were not the result of long and painful labour, but the fruit of rapid composition, sudden inspiration when thoughts seemed to fly onto the page. Trotsky did not suffer from the common complaint of writers, for whom, as Simon Nadson put it, ‘there is no greater torture than the torture of finding a word’. He wrote quickly, sharply, emphatically. Some of the pieces he wrote as a young man show an obvious desire to dazzle with erudition, to cite the latest literary and scientific authorities or the classics, often for no obvious reason. And exile in Siberia gave him plenty of time and opportunity to engage in literary study.
His Siberian exile became for Trotsky, in his countless reminiscences, one of the peaks of his personal service to the revolutionary cause. In February 1923, at the behest of his friend Max Eastman, Trotsky wrote an account of his exile:
We shared an apartment with a Polish shoemaker called Mikshei. He was a wonderful comrade, attentive, caring, a great cook, except that he drank, and the more he drank, the more he wanted to. We divided our time between domestic chores and reading. We cut firewood, swept, washed the dishes, helped Mikshei in the kitchen. We read all manner of things: Marx, socialist writings, world literature. There was journalism: I began writing for Vostochnoe obozrenie. I kept my literary writing for the night. Often until 5 or 6 a.m. I retained this habit into later life, my Vienna period … On one occasion they wouldn’t hand over my mail at the post office. I protested furiously. They fined me three roubles. I heard about this at Verkholensk, whence I was soon to escape. So my fine was never paid, along with my many other debts to tsarism.21
Not for nothing did Krzhizhanovsky, Lenin’s agent in Samara, nickname Trotsky ‘The Pen’. He would record practically every meeting he ever had, all his conversations, speeches and appearances. It would be hard to find another Russian revolutionary who wrote so much, in such detail and so eloquently about himself. It is hard to accept his assertion in the preface to his memoirs that he had become accustomed ‘to viewing the historical perspective not from the standpoint of my personal fate’.22 On the contrary, a feature of his rich literary output is his tendency, however unwitting, to discern manifold historical events precisely through the prism of his own personality. He added that no one had succeeded in writing an autobiography without writing about themselves, and that is so. But he also wrote a great deal about himself, even when he was not writing his autobiography.
Ust-Kut boasted a small library which had been built up by exiles. Of all the books he found there, Trotsky was most impressed by a two-volume collection of Gleb Uspensky, whose tales and essays he at first approached with distrust, only to find he could not put them down. When the paraffin ran out and the lamp finally failed, he felt as if he had been living in one of Uspensky’s Russian villages, with its pain, its burdens and its ignorance. Later, when Trotsky’s ‘Westernism’ also embraced literature, he still retained a special place for Uspensky. He marked in the writer’s diary a passage which read:
… the whole village laboured for one manor house. Without excuse or protest, the village had to work day in, day out, year in, year out. The squire, who owned the village, could change from good to bad, but this meant nothing to the village, the same work was expected whether the squire was a conservative, a liberal or even a radical, in a word, whoever took up residence in the manor house. Whoever lived there, they demanded the same thing: work, work which filled most of the day, most of the year, all one’s life—work not for oneself … All this resulted in a perfectly defined ideal for the being called a peasant.23
Uspensky became Trotsky’s model for the pieces he himself wrote on village life in Siberia, a way of life that soon palled for a personality eager to find room for self-expression and to become known. Ust-Kut and Verkholensk became detestable, and Trotsky felt cramped by the miserable hovels along the single muddy street. When his writing began to attract attention he felt the need for a bigger stage. Trotsky heard in 1902 that two or three of his pieces had somehow reached Iskra, the social democratic paper edited by Lenin, and that they had made a good impression. He decided he could remain no longer in Siberia, but must get to Petersburg, to Moscow, to the capitals of Western Europe, where
he felt he was needed. After much agonizing, he finally told Alexandra that he planned to escape. She did not object, although one can imagine what it must have cost her: she would have to remain behind in the depths of the Siberian taiga with two infants, her second baby having just arrived, and with little hope of reunion with her husband. But in her eyes Lev was a genius, and was destined to become famous. She thought she was being true to the revolutionary cause by sacrificing him in the name of her ideals. She would sacrifice everything in due course: her husband, her daughters, her sons-in-law, grandchildren, and finally herself.
Trotsky obtained permission from the local authorities on 20 February 1902 ‘to travel on for one day to Irkutsk, and not to stop anywhere en route without compelling reasons’.24 At Irkutsk he told friends of his plan to escape, and that summer he duly carried out his plan. Alexandra’s words of farewell as he left her were: ‘Go, a great future awaits you.’ Escape turned out not to be at all difficult. He was concealed in a cart under a load of hay and set off back to Irkutsk, where he was given clothes and a passport, in which for the first time he used the name, chosen it seems haphazardly, by which the world would come to know him. ‘Trotsky’ was the name of one of the warders in Odessa prison, an impressive and handsome figure of a man.
Alexandra was unable to keep her husband’s escape secret for long. Within two days a cable was on its way from Verkholensk to the governor of the province, with a copy to the police chief: ‘Yesterday, Leiba Bronshtein went absent without leave. Twenty-three years old, five foot ten, dark brown hair, goatee beard, wears spectacles. According to his wife, Bronshtein left for Irkutsk. Signed Police Superintendent Ludvig.’25 A fuller description would soon appear in the records of the Okhrana:
Bronshtein, (Lev) Davidov, also Nikolai Trotsky and Yanovsky, deprived of all rights, son of a colonist, Russian [i.e. a Russian subject], writer. Arrested in 1898 in connection with the ‘South Russian Workers’ Union’ case in Odessa. Exiled for four years under open surveillance. Went into hiding from Verkholensk on 21 August and was placed on wanted list No. 5530 on 1 September 1902.26
Trotsky stopped for a week at Samara, where Iskra’s Russian base was located, and a week later continued towards London. Travelling on his false passport, he crossed into Austria illegally, managing to reach Vienna before running out of funds. There he located Victor Adler, the founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party. He later described Adler as a man with a face so expressive that he was not merely good, but was too good not to find mitigating circumstances for one’s sins. When Adler opened the door of his apartment, Trotsky greeted him with, ‘I am Russian …’ to which Adler replied, ‘You don’t have to tell me, I already had time enough to guess.’27
Early one morning in October 1902, Trotsky made his way to the one-room flat occupied by Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya at the London address given to him in Zurich by Pavel Axelrod, one of the editors of Iskra and a venerated figure in the social democratic movement. He knocked, as instructed, three times. Krupskaya came to the door and called out, ‘It’s The Pen!’ While she was paying off the cabbie, Trotsky was already showering Lenin with news from Russia. Lenin, ten years Trotsky’s senior, saw in the young firebrand someone who might open a new chapter in the Russian revolutionary movement. Now, virtually trapped in his bed as Trotsky pulled his chair closer, Lenin listened as the young man talked and talked, gesticulating and barely taking breath, singing like a bird that has just been released from its cage.
European Bivouac
Trotsky spent about a third of his life in exile, and each spell would have its own political and moral tone. If the second ‘bivouac’ in Turkey (February 1929 to July 1933) was to be ‘the long wait’, and the third in Mexico (January 1937 to his death in 1940) an ‘exile of embitterment’, then his first was one of ‘enthusiastic discovery’. These three phases of his life lie at the base of his ideas on ‘permanent revolution’ and the role of the Fourth International.
Emigration had long figured in the political and intellectual life of Russia. When Nicholas Berdyaev became an émigré in 1922 he asked himself: ‘What Russian ideas have I brought with me to the West?’ and replied: ‘I have brought awareness of the conflict between personality and world harmony, between the individual and the social, a conflict which cannot be resolved within the confines of history.’28
The young Bronshtein brought with him a thirst for knowledge and the riches of European culture. This was where he must preserve his identity and adapt to the new social and intellectual milieu. The Russian intelligentsia in those days existed as it were in two dimensions: one located in Russia, nearby, familiar, but in which it was difficult to realize one’s ideas of free thinking; the other in Western Europe, with its tradition of greater political and intellectual tolerance. Western Europe was more than a source of high culture for the Russian intelligentsia. It became a place where ideas and initiatives were generated and sent back to Russia in the hope of accomplishing revolutionary changes there. Russian intellectuals had always possessed an unusually high order of spirituality and faith in eternal ideals. Many of them had gone to Europe intending no less to serve their motherland than to save themselves.
A particularly powerful group of revolutionary Marxist intellectuals in emigration around the turn of the century included Lenin, Plekhanov, Martov, Potresov, Dan, Axelrod and Vera Zasulich, all of them in one way or another making a mark on the theoretical preparation of the revolutions of 1917. It was to this revolutionary Mecca that Trotsky, barely twenty-three years old, came in the autumn of 1902. He had been drawn by the possibility of contributing to Iskra, the social democratic newspaper edited by two generations of revolutionaries: the ‘oldies’ (stariki), consisting of Plekhanov, Zasulich and Axelrod, and the ‘young ones’, Lenin, Martov and Potresov. Lenin at once saw in Trotsky ‘a man of exceptional abilities, staunch, energetic, who will go further’.29 Trotsky began writing at once. In November 1902 Iskra published his first article. He wrote for the newspaper about strikes and revolutionary traditions, exile and the Second International. He also contributed to other newspapers. His range was exceptionally wide, hinting perhaps at dilettantism. The archives contain a large number of his manuscripts, published and unpublished—there is even one entitled ‘On Somnambulism’.
At Lenin’s suggestion, in March 1903 Trotsky was co-opted onto Iskra’s editorial board with a consultative vote. His relationship with the highly educated Iskra group left its mark on him. He was especially attracted to Zasulich, Martov and Pavel Axelrod, to whom he dedicated his first major work, a 1904 article entitled ‘Our Political Tasks’. By this time relations between Trotsky and Lenin had become strained, as he revealed in the article, in which he was as negative about Lenin as he was positive about Axelrod, of whom he wrote: ‘he is the true and watchful guardian of the interests of the proletarian movement … a genuine proletarian ideologist … Axelrod doesn’t write in the form of “articles”, but mathematically concise formulae, from which others, including Lenin, compose their own numerous articles.’30
Trotsky moved into the house in Holford Square, King’s Cross, where Lenin, Martov and Zasulich were living. They met several times a day to discuss the news as well as the articles they were writing. Trotsky could not conceal his admiration for Vera Zasulich, who had become famous throughout Russia in 1878 when a jury had acquitted her of the attempted assassination of General Trepov, the governor-general of St Petersburg. A brilliant, rebellious nihilist, her reminiscences fired the imagination of the young revolutionary. She belonged to the generation of Russian revolutionaries for whom radicalism was part of their nature. Trotsky declared that she was for him ‘a legend of the revolution’. These were not empty words. Trotsky thought in radical categories. He never favoured half-measures.
At first, Trotsky’s relations with Martov were excellent. Martov was a brilliant journalist with a talent for graphic, deep analysis of the most complex issues, and Trotsky genuinely admired him. But soon after
the October revolution he would write of his former idol: ‘Martov is undoubtedly one of the most tragic figures of the revolutionary movement. A gifted writer, an original politician, a shrewd Marxist intellectual … he will go down in the history of the workers’ revolution as a big minus … Martov became the most refined, subtle, elusive, perceptive politician of the dull-witted, vulgar and cowardly petty-bourgeois intelligentsia.’31 For Trotsky, evaluation of another’s position was more important than their personal relations, and the independence of his own ideas on any subject was pre-eminent. This was something the editors of Iskra would soon discover, notably at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party.
Without standing on ceremony, Trotsky scrutinized the members of the Iskra board, people who had become legends for many revolutionaries. The leading figure among them was Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, a frequent visitor to London from Switzerland, where he normally resided. In the West since January 1880 and noticeably cut off from Russia, Plekhanov was nevertheless regarded as ‘the father of Russian Marxism’. Theoretical soundness, rigorous logic, encyclopaedic knowledge and an eloquent pen had made him a genuine master of the doctrine. He greeted Trotsky with caution, if not outright hostility, and his initial guardedness soon grew into a firm dislike which he retained to the end of his days. He was totally against Trotsky being co-opted onto the editorial board, and was studiedly cold when they met. Isaac Deutscher suggested that this antipathy derived from the fact that they were both excellent writers and sharp-witted debaters with a tendency to histrionics, and each had a high opinion of himself.32 But while Trotsky’s star was plainly rising, Plekhanov’s was waning. Trotsky was the youthful enthusiast, Plekhanov the ageing sceptic. When Plekhanov came to London, Zasulich told him that Trotsky was a genius, to which Plekhanov sourly replied, ‘I shall never forgive him for it.’