Trotsky

by Dmitri Volkogonov

  When a large naval force under Admiral Z.P. Rozhestvensky engaged the Japanese, commanded by Admiral Togo, in the Straits of Tsushima on 14 May 1905, the tsarist fleet suffered a devastating defeat, losing eleven battleships and fifty-eight smaller vessels in a single day. Russia was in a state of shock, and Trotsky immediately rushed out a long proclamation calling for an end to the shameless slaughter. ‘The fleet,’ he wrote, ‘was utterly destroyed. Nearly every ship was sunk, all the crews have either been killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The admirals are either injured or in custody … The Russian fleet is no more. It was not the Japanese who destroyed her, but the tsarist government … It is not the people that need this war! It is the governing clique, which dreams of seizing new lands and wants to extinguish the flame of the people’s anger in blood.’59

  In his Finnish hide-out, Trotsky knew the police were looking for him, but when the general strike of October broke out, he could not restrain himself from returning to St Petersburg. The Bolsheviks had been expecting the strike to occur on the first anniversary of Bloody Sunday, but instead it was triggered by the St Petersburg Council of Workers’ Deputies—the Soviet—headed by a non-party lawyer, G.S. Khrustalev-Nosar, well respected as a workers’ defence counsel. Trotsky was elected Khrustalev-Nosar’s deputy. The Soviet’s first meeting took place on 13 October and Trotsky appeared two days later, at once attracting attention with his energy, passionate speeches and radical proposals. The Soviet’s authority soared. It began publishing a newspaper, Izvestiya (News), which called for an eight-hour day and for recognition of the newspaper as the expression of the workers’ interests. Delegations came to the Soviet at the Institute of Technology and waited for instructions. Tension in the capital mounted. An Executive Committee of the Soviet was formed with three members each from the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), as well as representatives of other organizations. Prominent among the Bolsheviks was Sverchkov, while Trotsky was the dominant Menshevik and Avksentiev the dominant SR. Khrustalev-Nosar supposedly stood above party loyalty, but it would not be long before he joined the Mensheviks.

  The strike-wave rolled further and further afield. The government all but lost its head, but then took a step that visibly slowed down the revolutionary momentum: on 17 (30) October, Nicholas II issued a Manifesto promising constitutional rights. That night crowds carrying red flags emerged onto the streets of the capital and demanded the removal of hated administrators, a general amnesty and punishment of those responsible for Bloody Sunday. The Tsar’s concessions had been interpreted by the crowds as a victory for the people. The rights granted included civil rights based on the inviolability of the person, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and unions, and undertook that no law should be passed without the approval of the State Duma, a body still to be elected on a franchise yet to be defined. In Soviet historiography, the Manifesto of October 1905 has always been dismissed as a cunning move, forced on the Tsar by circumstances. But it is also possible to see it as a major step towards constitutional monarchy and hence a bourgeois democracy.

  Like the Bolsheviks, Trotsky regarded the Manifesto as a half-victory. It gave pause to the liberals and the middle class, as well as to a large part of the intelligentsia which had demonstrated against the autocracy and now feared the possibility of anarchy. Sergei Witte, the prime minister who had earned the title of Count for his brilliant diplomacy at the Portsmouth (USA) peace conference with the Japanese in August 1905, wrote in a frank report to the Tsar that Russia had outlived its present political system and needed a law-governed state, based on the principles of civil liberty.60 He advocated finding an accord between ‘the intellectual tendencies and the new form’ without resorting to force. The Tsar’s October Manifesto made many think again. Parties were formed, patriotism found its voice, as did that of property, and the Russian wagon began to lumber to the right.

  But not everyone in the government shared Witte’s views, and it was those who wanted to crack down with force on the troubles who gained the upper hand, especially the Tsar’s Palace Commandant and close confidant Dmitri Trepov, who advised that no bullets be spared in suppressing the disorders. Lenin, who was still in Geneva, and the Soviet in the capital sensed that the tsarist edifice, though shaken, would withstand the shock: only the cities and only the workers had risen. The government as always would be able to rely on the vast, ignorant mass of the peasantry, especially those in the army. The revolutionaries realized that neither their dream of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, nor their minimum programme—the overthrow of tsarism and the formation of a provisional revolutionary government—would occur.

  None of the social democratic leaders doubted that the dictatorship of the proletariat would come in due course. An enormous crowd gathered at St Petersburg University on 30 October to listen to various speakers. The Bolsheviks viewed the Manifesto as a great victory. Trotsky, introduced as ‘Yanovsky’, soon captured the crowd’s attention and declared: ‘Citizens! Now that we have our foot on the neck of the ruling clique, they promise you freedom. Don’t be in a hurry to celebrate the victory, it is not yet complete. Is paper money worth as much as gold? Is the promise of freedom the same as freedom itself? What has changed since yesterday? Have the gates of our prisons been flung open? Have our brothers come home from savage Siberia?’ He concluded: ‘Citizens! We are strong. We must defend liberty with the sword. The Tsar’s Manifesto is nothing but a piece of paper. Today they gave it to you, tomorrow they will tear it into bits, as I do now!’ Waving the text of the Manifesto to right and left, Trotsky demonstratively shredded it, letting the wind carry the pieces away.61 The crowd was highly impressed by this new and unknown tribune of the revolution.

  The peasants did not support the workers, nor was it possible to mobilize them. On the whole, the army remained loyal, and the workers were virtually without arms. The liberal intelligentsia were terrified by the scale of the workers’ uprising. In hoping for a lasting revolutionary front, the social democrats had expected the impossible. Trotsky was peremptory and unjustifiably harsh in his condemnation of the intellectuals, especially the academics, whom he accused of doing whatever dirty work the government asked of them: ‘There is no police action the professors are not willing to carry out.’62 With the uncompromising attitude which was his hallmark, he lambasted the middle classes, the liberals, the university professors and the fellow-travellers of the revolution. The tides of some of his articles convey their flavour: ‘Professors Play Political Concierge’, ‘Professors’ Newspaper in Smear Campaign’, ‘Kadet Professors as Peasant Spokesmen’.63 ‘The revolution,’ he wrote, ‘has left the Philistines [the bourgeoisie] without a newspaper, it has extinguished the electric light in their apartments and painted on their walls a fiery message of some new vague but great ideas. The Philistines wanted to believe, but did not dare. They wanted to rise up, but could not.’64

  Trotsky’s antipathy to the liberals was a function of his radicalism, and he was frequently excessively harsh in his attacks, even on occasion suggesting that the liberals deserved as much hatred as tsarism. In the draft preface of his book on the 1905 revolution (published in German in 1907) he wrote: ‘The author is in no way trying to hide from the reader his hatred of the tsarist regime, that vicious combination of the Asiatic knout and the European stock market, or his contempt for Russian liberalism, that most insignificant and spineless of political parties in the world gallery.’65 For the Russian Jacobins, a liberal professor was no better than a policeman.

  Recognizing that the revolution was beginning to flag, the Soviet passed a resolution, proposed by Trotsky, calling for an end to the October strike. Armed vigilante groups began forming in order to prevent pogroms and to defend demonstrations and labour newspapers, as well as the Soviet itself. As Trotsky began to emerge as the leading figure in the Soviet, a degree of rivalry developed between him and Khrustalev-Nosar who, having no party affiliation, lacked strong convictions on many issues. S
everal years later, Trotsky wrote two devastating pieces on Khrustalev, going so far as to mention reports in the bourgeois press that he had been arrested in Paris for theft:

  Khrustalev shone with a dual light, one for the party, the other for the masses. But both lights were reflected, coming from somewhere else. Khrustalev’s own rise in no way corresponded to the visible rôle he was called upon to play, and even less to the legendary popularity claimed for him by the popular press. Georgi [Khrustalev-]Nosar’s own fate was deeply tragic. Morally unstable, he was crushed by history which heaped burdens on him beyond endurance. His romantic image was fabricated by the fantasy of the bourgeoisie, fed by the press. He has smashed that image into smithereens, and himself with it.66

  Trotsky’s judgement of his erstwhile comrade may well have been accurate, but it was unworthy of him to kick the man when he was down. Savagery towards his rivals was one of his less attractive traits.

  During the revolution Trotsky flourished. He succeeded in altering the line of the Menshevik newspaper Nachalo (Beginning), so that even Zinoviev, never one of his warmest admirers, was able later to write: ‘When Nachalo was taken over by [Trotsky and Parvus] they gave it quite a Bolshevik character.’67 Trotsky’s utterances in the press had an air of assurance, firmness and determination: ‘The Soviet of Deputies declares: the Petersburg proletariat will fight its ultimate battle with the tsarist government not on the day of Trepov’s choice, but when it suits the organized and armed proletariat.’68 He gave the impression that this was not his first revolution, and his manner greatly impressed the workers.

  When Trotsky was in exile some three decades later, and being hunted down by Stalin’s killers, an attempt was made to use his actions as a young revolutionary against him, and the name of Khrustalev-Nosar was resurrected for the purpose. A report to Stalin and Voroshilov from Beria and Yezhov, dated 28 October 1938 and possibly the last such report signed by Yezhov, declared that in the preface of a book by Khrustalev-Nosar entitled From the Recent Past, ‘Trotsky-Bronshtein is named as having been an agent of the tsarist Okhrana since 1902.’ The report further indicated that Khrustalev had been executed in 1919 in Pereyaslavl ‘on Trotsky’s direct orders, with the aim of removing this witness to his collaboration with the Okhrana’. The search for evidence against Trotsky had, according to this report, discovered that the Nizhni Novgorod soviet had initiated an investigation on 30 March 1917, and that Trotsky, Khrustalev and Lunacharsky—who died in 1933—had been named there as Okhrana informers. Finally, Beria and Yezhov claimed that they had found a report from the Quartermaster-General of the Imperial Army Staff Headquarters, dated 30 March 1917, numbered 8436, and addressed to the Provisional Government, to the effect that ‘a military agent in the USA had cabled that Trotsky had sailed from New York on the SS Christiania Fjord on 14 March, and that, according to British intelligence, Trotsky was in charge of peace propaganda in America, paid by the Germans and by persons sympathetic to them’.69

  Stalin evidently found the whole concoction either unconvincing or of insufficient value, and it was not used against Trotsky. It has proved impossible to find Nosar’s book, but it is known that his relations with Trotsky turned bad soon after their first meeting. The Soviet security organs, or NKVD, may well have suspected Nosar’s involvement with the tsarist police and thought to implicate Trotsky by means of this crude fabrication.

  In his fifty-two days in the Petersburg Soviet, Trotsky showed himself to be an uncompromising revolutionary leader. Soviet history depicted him as having split the labour movement and ignored the peasantry and army, but in its prejudice failed to take account of the circumstances in which Trotsky was acting. What may become clear to historians is usually unclear to the participants in historical events, when the pressure of necessity may exceed that of reflection. Trotsky made his mistakes in action. He himself rated the experience of 1905 highly. In 1919, commenting on events in Germany in an article entitled ‘The Creeping Revolution’, he wrote:

  The Russian working class, which has achieved its revolution, received an invaluable inheritance from the previous epoch in the form of a centralized labour party. The Populist movement [of the 1870s], the terrorist campaigns of the People’s Will [of the 1880s], the underground agitation of the first Marxists [of the 1890s], the revolutionary demonstrations in the early years of the century, the October general strike and the barricades of 1905, the revolutionary ‘parliamentarism’ of the Stolypin era [1906-14] which was closely linked to the underground, all this prepared a large pool of revolutionary leaders.70

  Khrustalev-Nosar was arrested at the end of November 1905 and a new presidium was elected, consisting of Trotsky, Sverchkov and Zlydnev, with Trotsky the recognized leader. By now, however, it was plain that the government had gone on to the offensive, and the revolutionary floodwaters began to recede. One of the Soviet’s last decisions—inspired by Alexander Helphand-Parvus—was to call on the population not to pay any taxes until the government had fulfilled all its economic and political promises. This provided the government with the excuse to arrest the entire Soviet leadership on 3 December. The Soviet under Trotsky’s chairmanship was actually discussing calling for a new general strike when the police burst in. The building had been surrounded and the officer-in-charge had begun reading his orders, when Trotsky interrupted him: ‘Please don’t interfere with the work of the Soviet. If you wish to speak, kindly give your name and I will ask the assembly if they wish to hear you.’ The officer was lost for words. Trotsky took advantage of the hiatus by calling on the next speaker. He then asked the officer to say his piece and the order was heard in deathly silence, after which Trotsky announced in a matter-of-fact voice: ‘There is a proposal to take note of the gendarme officer’s statement. And now you may leave the meeting of the Soviet Workers’ Deputies.’ The officer departed in a state of complete confusion. Trotsky then proposed that the Soviet members prepare themselves for arrest by destroying documents that might be used to incriminate them, and also by breaking any weapons they might possess. Almost at once, the hall was invaded by a company of gendarmes and the members seized, although not before Trotsky managed to cry out: ‘See how the Tsar carries out his October Manifesto! See!’

  Trotsky’s actions during the revolution and his behaviour at his trial convincingly demonstrated that an outstanding personality had arrived on the political scene, one for whom the revolution was the highest value. Characteristically, his actions were the more unpredictable, decisive and inspired, the more critical the situation. He never doubted the high purpose of his life and never regretted his choice of vocation. Six months before his death, he wrote in his will: ‘If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.’71 He saw the failure of the 1905 revolution as no more than a historical rehearsal.

  Trotsky used the twelve months of incarceration from December 1905 to January 1907, which he spent first in the Kresty prison and then the Peter-Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, to good effect, exploiting to the full the lenient conditions allowed to political prisoners. He wrote numerous articles and proclamations which he gave to his wife, who, like the rest of his family and other comrades at large, could visit him twice a week, and which she in turn handed over to the legal and illegal press for publication. His cell, according to eyewitnesses, resembled nothing so much as the study of a busy academic, with books and magazines and newspapers piled and strewn everywhere. Trotsky also tried to maintain the tenuous link with his first family by writing several times to his first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya. On 17 May 1906, for instance, he wrote:

  Dear friend,

  Haven’t you received my last letter? I sent it to your father’s address. It was mostly about my views of the two factions (as you had asked me) … My situation is unchanged. The trial has been postponed to 19 October. I
sit in solitary confinement and get three to four hours’ exercise a day … My parents brought me a photograph of the girls—I wrote to you about it. They are both wonderful in their own way. Ninushka has such a face—frightened and yet slyly inquisitive at the same time. And Zinushka’s is so thoughtful. Someone here managed to put a smudge on Zinushka’s face. If you have a spare picture, please send it. So, they’ve dissolved the Duma. I took a bet that it was going to be a hooligan government, and I was right …72

  One of his articles, entitled ‘Peter Struve in Politics’, aroused a good deal of interest for the vehemence with which it lambasted the liberals as fellow-travellers, but not allies, of the revolution. But the chief product of this period was a long article entitled ‘Results and Perspectives’, in which for the first time he expounded his concept of the permanent revolution. It was an idea that would in time become the chief weapon to be used against him, namely that ‘accomplishing the socialist revolution within national limits is impossible … The socialist revolution is becoming permanent in a new and broader sense of the word: it will not be complete until the triumph of the new society has taken place throughout the entire planet.’73 We shall return to this theory in due course. For the moment, suffice to say that, while today it may seem hopelessly outmoded, at the time its significance lay in pushing out the national limits of the movement and offering high ideals to the proletariat.

  Recognizing that the revolution had foundered on the ancient rocks of the autocracy, that it had struck at St Petersburg and Moscow and a few other cities, but not acquired nationwide dimensions, Trotsky nevertheless believed that the rehearsal had succeeded. In his elegant, easily read handwriting, he wrote: ‘1905 opened with events that created an irrevocable divide between the past and the present. They drew a line in blood below the era of the springtime—the childhood—of political awareness.’74 Without childhood there can be no maturity, and Trotsky never forgot the value of the political education he and others received in the first Russian revolution, which permitted them to leave their ‘childhood’ behind.