by A J Allen
Hadn’t that business of the seventh seat been the first sign? he thought.
He had only been in London four months when Nicolai had written to Georgiy Plekhanov in Geneva proposing that “Pero” should be co-opted onto Iskra’s editorial board. Plekhanov had swiftly wrecked that plan and had never trusted Vera’s “young eagle” after that. Indeed, Jules Martov had later confided that Plekhanov had actively hated him from that day forward, believing him to be an ambitious arriviste, when in truth he had known nothing of Nicolai’s proposal. He had only become aware later how the Editorial Board was split: the old guard of Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, all of whom had been in exile for decades, repeatedly frustrating the plans of the younger members – Nicolai, Martov and Potresov – who had more recently come out of Russia. It was now obvious to him that if he had been co-opted, Nicolai would have assumed that he had at last the majority he craved. Instead, as an unhappy compromise, it was agreed that “Pero” could attend the editorial meetings in an advisory capacity only and, like the Membership question, the issue of the composition of Iskra’s editorial board was deferred to the Second Congress of the Party.
By this point five years had passed since the RSDLP’s first Congress, and there was much dead wood to be cut away and questions to be settled. Whose definition of the Party membership would win: Nicolai’s or Jules Martov’s? What was the programme of the RSDLP to be? What was Iskra’s role? How many people should be on Iskra’s editorial board and who should they be? Everything had been riding on the Second Congress. To insist on the formation of a single revolutionary, conspiratorial party with Iskra as its mouthpiece had been comprehensible, but worrying. Placing all that power in the hands of a small group of people felt unwise, but a child would have recognised that Iskra was the least dysfunctional centre within the Party and that its contributors and supporters amongst the Congress delegates – the Iskraists as they called themselves – would accordingly decide all the main votes. Iskra was the only part of the Movement that knew what was going on; none of the groups back home in Russia had that kind of overview. The problem was that on the vital Membership question the Iskraists themselves were almost evenly split between supporting Nicolai’s fist or Martov’s open palm.
With an impatient shake of the head, Trotsky stepped out away from the draught of the open window and leant against the wall, recalling as he did so how efficiently the Second Congress had reversed Marx’s dictum; it had begun as a farce and repeated itself as a tragedy. It had opened in Brussels – that cul de sac of grandiose impotence and windbaggery – only to be swiftly closed down by the police. Avoiding arrest, the delegates had crossed the English Channel and reconvened the Second Congress in London, where it had quickly degenerated into a political bloodbath. In the end he had parted with Nicolai and, along with the majority of the Congress, had come down on the side of Jules Martov. After many hours of acrimonious debate the membership issue, they believed, was settled by 28 votes to 23 in favour of the wider definition of mass open membership. This was democracy in action. But Nicolai had refused to accept the outcome of the vote. New strategies were formulated by his clique of amongst the Iskraists. The 28 votes had included two “Economists” – who opposed Iskra representing the Party abroad – and five representatives of the Jewish Bund. The revolutionary purpose of the Party would be strengthened, Nicolai’s clique now argued, by the exclusion of the Economists and their bread and butter issues. The Revolution was delayed, so their argument went, and not hastened by the amelioration of workers’ pay and conditions. A vote showed that there was no support for the Economists’ primitive positions, and so they were expelled.
But what was there to do about the Jewish Bund? The Bund represented the largest, the most long lasting and the best organised grouping of politically aware workers within the RSDLP membership. In the immediate aftermath of the vicious pogrom in Kishinev the personal sympathies of many of the Congress delegates had initially been with the Bund.
Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind thy way;
There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.
There had never been the slightest possibility that the Bund’s membership would bow to Party discipline, nor put themselves out for anything that did not advance the cause of their own People. On the contrary, they had come to the Congress with their own agenda, wanting to split the Party into different groupings and to be the sole representative of Jewish workers. With tragic inevitability, the Bund had dug its own grave by being too disputatious, keeping the discussions going until three o’clock in the morning in the hope of wearing the goyim out. Once it had become clear to them that there would be no room for a ‘Jewish Section’ within the Party, that Socialism meant full assimilation and much more besides, the Bund had no choice but to leave the Congress and stay out in the wilderness.
And that is how it is done, reflected Trotsky. When the vote goes against you, you chip away at the opposition, exploiting the known fissures in its ranks and then call for a new vote. That is how a majority of 28 becomes a minority of 21, and is branded ‘menshiviki’. Democracy, once again, in action. Nicolai, as the leader of the new majority, takes over the Central Committee, Iskra becomes the Central organ of the party and its editorial board is reduced to three members: Nicolai, Plekhanov and Martov.
He was certain that, in the final scene, Nicolai intended that only he would remain, supported by his own gang of Party diehards. It was Robespierre all over again.
Nicolai must have known that I could never go along with him, he thought, not all the way. He must have done. Or did he think that I would follow meekly like a lamb? Was his opinion of me so low after those months together in London? Had he just thought, “Oh well, Trotsky isn’t with me, but it doesn’t matter. In the final analysis I can do without him. Meanwhile he too can be a ‘useful idiot’.”
His mind filled with bitter thoughts, Trotsky walked slowly across the floor of the straw strewn loft and stared into the darkness of the rafters. For the first time, the realisation of the level of contempt that his mentor must have felt for him dawned upon him. It made him feel physically frail. Nicolai Lenin had taken him in, all right. Yet, for all his cleverness, in the end Nicolai hadn’t been able to dispense with Plekhanov and Martov. Dear, doddering Plekhanov had invited all his old comrades back onto the Central Committee and it was Nicolai who had eventually been driven out instead. Hah! So there it was. Iskra and, by extension, the whole Party, controlled by Moderates dedicated to everything that Nicolai opposed. The Party torn apart, collapsing like a pack of cards, and it was all Nicolai’s fault.
Trotsky smiled up at the darkness above him, his mood lifting as he considered how this last reversal must have burned beneath Nicolai’s skin.
But I don’t feel sorry for him, he told himself. Axelrod was correct, for once. Nicolai was guilty of rank Jacobinism. What was worse, he couldn’t see it. There is a part of his character, a core of monomania that prevents him from recognising what he had done that was so wrong. Perhaps it is his age.
How old was Nicolai? Thirty-seven? Thirty-eight? He looked far older. Behind his back, it was Nicolai Lenin, not Georgiy Plekhanov, that everyone referred to as “the Old Man”. And he lived on his nerves. In the months before the Second Congress Nicolai had been as ill as a dog; his condition made worse because Nadhezda Krupskaya had panicked and called in a useless physician.
Perhaps he is scared of never seeing his life’s work amount to anything, thought Trotsky. As if that mattered!
And then there was Nicolai’s terrible rigidity in thought, word and deed. Even his recreational reading (such as it was) reflected it. Nicolai had no time for writers like de Maupassant or Flaubert; Knut Hamsun (but only Hunger) and Maxim Gorky were his meat. Trotsky had even begun to suspect that he was impotent until Natalya had hinted otherwis
e. A lunge for power: that’s what it had been about; foolishly conceived but brilliantly executed. It was absurd to believe that you could defeat Autocracy with a party restricted only to those who slavishly agreed with you. It would be nothing more than a Counter-Autocracy. It was hard to tell which was worse for the People: the prospect of eternal defeat or the threat of victory on such terms. What horrific children would such a Party spawn?
Go down that road, thought Trotsky, and you’re lost forever.
He gave a sigh of despair. Vera Zasulich had said that it would take a generation to repair the damage that had been done to the Party in the fortnight of the Second Congress. At the time he had dismissed her words as characteristically melodramatic, but now her estimate seemed correct. He wondered how much he had personally helped Nicolai in his machinations. He should have stood up to him sooner; that much was obvious. Whatever role he had played, he would not take the blame for what had happened to the Party. The Soviet’s arrest, maybe – he had been privy to Parvus’s article repudiating the foreign debts – but not the wrecking of the Russian Social Democratic Party. That had been all Nicolai’s doing, not his. Until his eyes had been opened at the Second Congress he had been loyal to Nicolai and Nicolai had repaid him by abusing his trust.
Now, he realised with surprise, I have a new loyalty – to Natalya and our son Lev.
The sudden recognition as to how profoundly his feelings had altered shocked him and made his scalp crawl with anxiety. Shaking his head violently, he tried to clear his thoughts.
What is happening to me? he asked himself. Here in this pig house, leaning on this balustrade, my loyalties are like a weathercock swinging with the change of wind. Is this the start of my political collapse?
The failing sunlight had left the upper storey now in half darkness. He began feeling his way along the balustrade until he had reached the top step of the stairs. In the pen below him, one of the pigs defecated with a loud splattering noise. The stench was almost unbearable. Pinching his nose between his thumb and forefinger, Trotsky began carefully to descend the ramshackle flight of steps.
This is even worse than London, he thought.
Chapter Fifteen
Saturday 10th February 1907
Berezovo
Leonid Kavelin watched Irena Kuibysheva over the rim of his cup as she daintily licked the cream from her spoon. Coming to the dining room of the Hotel New Century had been her idea, as were the drinks they were now enjoying. In the latest in a series of moves and countermoves she had cleverly insisted that he order coffee for himself.
“But why?” he had asked. “I would far prefer tea.”
“Because,” she had said, leaning back in her seat, “I think I should like the taste of coffee on your tongue.”
Inevitably, when the waiter had come to take their order he had ordered a coffee and she had ordered chocolate, forcing them both to wait while her cup was being prepared to Fyodor Gregorivich’s special recipe. Her ruse had momentarily annoyed him. He told himself that she could not expect him to sit nursing his small cup of Turkish bitterness while she lapped up the crème from the top of her drink but, as always, her gentle teasing had brought him round. His current trial did not worry him. He was confident that she shared his appreciation of their situation. Outwardly they were enjoying a brief encounter; inwardly they were competing for dominance: she for control of his heart, he for possession of her body. Neither of them, he was certain, entertained any illusions that the situation was otherwise, or pretended they had any permanent claim upon the other. Once their invisible match had been concluded they would move on.
Looking up, Irena caught his eye and grinned.
“Oh, Lyonya! Why are you looking so unhappy? You have got exactly what you asked for, and so have I.”
“I look unhappy,” he explained patiently, “because I now have to wait for you to finish a drink that is possibly three times as long as mine.”
“Well, I think that our drinks suit us both,” she said cheerfully. “Yours is hot, powerful and intense, like you, while mine is milky and leisurely and comforting.”
He smiled at her, amused by the mental image she was trying to imprint on his mind.
It is so true, he thought. A man will chase a woman until she has caught him.
Irena had been leading him a dance for the past four weeks. To some extent he had enjoyed the experience. Her tearful confessions of unhappiness and yearning for sympathetic company, her breathless sighs and flustered resistance to his advances had more recently given way to capricious embraces in ill lit passageways that had almost bewitched him. For all his worldly experience – and, by common consent, he was the shrewdest business man in Berezovo; even cannier than Irena’s rich husband – he had been delighted by her sly stratagems. The novel experience of being consistently outwitted had been entertaining but it was now time to bring matters to a head. Illya Kuibyshev was expected to return any day. If their affair was to be consummated, further delay should be avoided.
“How long are you going to take over that?” he asked her testily.
“Don’t be so impatient. Good boys have to wait,” she advised him, adding, “just for that I might have another cup.”
“In that case,” he said, beckoning to their waiter, “I shall order a proper drink.”
“Don’t!” she pleaded quickly.
He waved the waiter away.
“Don’t be such a Tartar,” she said with a moue. “You mustn’t rush me.”
Leonid Kavelin reached inside his jacket pocket and brought out a slim gold cigarette case.
If he could not drink, he reasoned, there was no reason why he could not smoke.
Without offering the case to Irena – it was unthinkable that she should smoke in a public room – he took out a cigarette and lit it using a match from the small embossed box thoughtfully placed beside the table’s ashtray.
“What will you say when Ivan Tarpelovich returns?” he asked casually.
Irena shrugged.
“I will tell him that I have missed him and that I have been incredibly bored.”
“You should have children. They would keep you occupied.”
Irena frowned.
“Children? Here in Berezovo?” she said. “Good God, no!”
“Or at least a pet,” Kavelin went on. “You should ask him to bring you back a pet.”
“A pet!” Irena exclaimed, laughing. “Really? Can you see me with a pet?”
“Yes, I can. A borzoi,” he said, adding cruelly, “you could pretend to be a proper lady.”
Irena looked at him, momentarily wounded by his words. Raising her half empty cup of chocolate to her lips she took a sip while she considered her response.
“A dog? Yech!” she said with distaste, setting her cup down. “I detest dogs. Great big stupid creatures, always following you around, slobbering all over you and ruining your clothes.”
“You wouldn’t want a dog?”
“No, decidedly not. A wolf, perhaps.”
“A wolf?”
“Yes! A whole pack of them, to hunt down predatory men like you.”
“Truly?” he asked with a wry smile.
“No not really,” she admitted. “A cat, perhaps.”
“Ah, a cat,” said Kavelin, nodding in agreement. “Yes, I would like to see that. Poor Ivan Tarpelovich, coming home to find two pussies in one house.”
“Oh, please don’t be crude,” she said quietly.
“You can’t really want a cat,” Kavelin continued. “It would be too independent. You wouldn’t be able to put it on a leash and parade it around the town.”
“Is that what I would want to do?” asked Irena.
“Yes, I believe so,” replied Kavelin. “In fact, I know so.”
“If you insist. Yes, possibly so. And I could because, you see, it would be a big cat. A tiger.”
“A tiger?”
“Yes,” she said, lowering her voice.
Leaning forward, she began sm
oothing out a wrinkle in the linen tablecloth with her hand. “And when Illya was away,” she continued in a confidential whisper, “at night I would lie naked with it in front of the fire, stroking its fur, feeling its taut muscles under its stripes and watching the firelight flickering over our resting bodies.”
“That is an extraordinary image,” Kavelin whispered in reply. “But aren’t you at all afraid that it might hurt you?”
“Oh no,” she told him, with a definite shake of her head. “Not the tiger I am imagining because I would ensure that it had been fully fed first before I lay down beside it. And once it had eaten I would give it peppermint lozenges to keep its breath sweet, so that it would come to associate peppermints with security and contentment.”
“And what, precisely, would you be feeding it on?” enquired Kavelin softly.
“Why, the population of Berezovo of course. Starting, I think, with its wives.”
Laughing, Kavelin sat back in his chair, freed from her spell by this alarming admission.
“You have it all worked out,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray.
“Yes. All I have to find now is the tiger.”
“Well, I wish you luck.”
“Ah, luck,” sighed Irena. “You surprise me. Do you really believe in Madame Luck?”
“I believe I am fortunate to be here with you,” he said.
“Oh, Lyonya, Lyonya…” sighed Irena, feigning exasperation. “You have such a silver tongue. Whatever am I going to do with you?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t we go upstairs to the lounge and discuss it?” suggested Kavelin with a broad smile.
Irena pursed her lips as if deep in thought and then nodded her agreement.
“Oh, but I think we ought to go higher than the mezzanine, don’t you?” she suggested.
Sitting in his office Fyodor Gregorivich, proprietor of the Hotel New Century, admired the open canteen of cutlery on his desk. The chest contained the pride of the cutler’s art; the best that his money could buy. He recalled how his uncle had regarded its purchase as further evidence of his extravagant tastes and had damned his unfitness to take over the running of the hotel. It was true that its contents, being reserved for very special events (Easter, of course, and for politically significant wedding parties), were rarely used, yet he had never had cause to regret the expenditure. On such occasions its quality more than repaid the cost of its original price for this was the Number One canteen, the crème of the hotel’s cutlery; brought out only for the most expensive meals and his most favoured guests.