Trotsky viewed the forthcoming trial as an important opportunity to address a nationwide audience, and he made careful preparation. In his speech, the notes for which are preserved in the archives, he explained the failure of the workers’ rising, and noted that the army had not joined the revolt, despite the soldiers’ meetings that had taken place in a wide range of Russian cities in the European part of the empire, as well as the Caucasus. ‘As a rule,’ he wrote, ‘the leaders were “qualified” soldiers, usually local lads. The majority, i.e. the peasant recruits, sappers or artillerymen, absorbed the new mood slowly. In the end, for both us and the government, it was all a matter of time.’75
The prisoners resolved among themselves to adopt a defiant attitude, to expose the existing order, to speak of the Soviet’s goals of social justice and concern for the workers’ interests, but above all to deny that they had had any intention of using armed force to change the system. Article 126 of the Criminal Code, passed on 26 March 1903, made it plain that anyone found guilty of using explosive devices or weapons in an attempt to overthrow the existing order would be sentenced to eight years’ hard labour or deportation to Siberia.76 To avoid this outcome, when he addressed the court Trotsky tried on the one hand to expose the decay and unpopularity of the tsarist regime, and on the other to show that the Soviet had had no definite plan for an uprising: ‘No matter how important weapons might be, it is not in them that great power resides, gentlemen judges. No! It is not the ability of the masses to kill people, but their own great willingness to die that in our view, gentlemen judges, determines the victory of the popular rising.’77
Trotsky’s mother and father attended throughout the trial. ‘During my speech,’ he later recalled, ‘which she could scarcely understand, she wept silently. She wept more when a score of attorneys for the defence came up to shake my hand … My mother was sure that I would not only be acquitted, but even given some mark of distinction.’78 The fourteen accused members of the Soviet were in the end not sentenced to hard labour, but to a life sentence of exile in the Siberian village of Obdorskoe, on the River Ob beyond Tyumen and above the Arctic Circle, some 600 miles from the nearest railway station and more than 500 from a telegraph point. The day before their departure, on 23 January 1907, the convicts were issued with grey prisoners’ trousers, heavy coats and fur hats. They were also allowed to keep their own clothes. The travel document issued in his name indicates that, apart from his clothes, Trotsky was also given leg-irons and shackle-linings, a fur lining, a pair of trousers, gloves and a bag.79 The shackles were issued only as a warning, and were not generally put on prisoners unless they attempted to escape. Before his departure, Trotsky managed to send a farewell note for publication in the illegal press, ending with the words: ‘We depart with profound faith in the people’s early victory over its age-old enemies. Long live the proletariat! Long live international socialism!’80 The letter was signed (in Russian alphabetical order) by N. Avksentiev, S. Vainshtein-Zvezdin, I. Golynsky, P. Zlydnev, M. Kiselevich, B. Knunyants-Radin, E. Komar, N. Nemtsov, D. Sverchkov-Vvedensky, A. Simanovsky, N. Stogov, L. Trotsky, A. Feit and G. Khrustalev-Nosar.
Trotsky described the journey to Siberia in a short book, There and Back, and also most graphically in his autobiography.81 Even as he was leaving to begin his life sentence he was planning to escape, for despite there being more than fifty gendarmes escorting the fourteen convicts, the regime was a lenient one compared to what would come under Stalin. At the small town of Berezov the party was given a two-day rest, and here, coached by his fellow-prisoner Feit, a trained physician, Trotsky faked an attack of sciatica. He was permitted to remain behind with two guards while the rest of the party continued on its way north, and with the help of a local peasant he made his break. It was a daring escape along the River Sosva and across the boundless expanse of the snow-covered plain. After a trek lasting a week and covering about 500 miles, and with the help of Siberian tribesmen at various tiny settlements, who sold him deer and a sleigh, Trotsky reached the Urals. Posing first as a member of a polar expedition and then as an official, he reached the railway on horseback and at the station was observed with indifference by the secret police as he unburdened himself of the fur coats he had been wearing.
The records of the police’s efforts to recapture him were discovered in 1922 among the papers of the Okhrana in Nikolaev. When it was suggested to Trotsky that this material be given to the Museum of the Revolution ‘as a document of enormous historical value’, his secretariat replied that they wanted it ‘for the biography of the leader of the proletarian revolution’.82 He was already preening himself before the mirror of history.
Having arrived back in St Petersburg, Trotsky was reunited with Natalya Sedova, who helped him escape to Finland, where he found Lenin and Martov living in neighbouring villages. He gained the impression that the Mensheviks were ‘recanting the mad acts of 1905’, while ‘the Bolsheviks were not recanting anything, and were getting ready for a new revolution’. Martov ‘as always had many ideas, brilliant and subtle ones, but he had not the one idea that was more important than any other: he did not know what to do next’. Lenin, meanwhile, ‘spoke approvingly of my work in prison, but he taunted me for not drawing the necessary conclusions, in other words, for not going over to the Bolsheviks. He was right in this.’83
It is noticeable in his autobiography that whenever possible Trotsky tries to minimize his differences with Lenin, repeating time and again that although he was not in the Bolshevik camp, he had nonetheless abandoned the Mensheviks. This was not in fact so. Up until 1917 Trotsky was in virtually permanent opposition to Lenin, at times conducting veritable war, and was none too fastidious in his choice of insults. Indeed, he adopted the same abusive tone towards Lenin as the latter used against his own opponents, accusing him of ‘reckless demagoguery’, ‘lack of mental agility’ and, as a philosopher, being ‘beyond help’.84 The tendency to descend to mud-slinging was a trait common to most of the Russian revolutionaries.
While essentially a leftist in outlook, Trotsky also harboured reformist ideas which to a great extent can be explained by the company he kept when in exile in the West. In due course he would come to mix his radicalism with his reformism, and this dualism would last until the tumultuous events of 1917.
After a short and extremely cool meeting with Lenin, Trotsky retired to the tucked-away village of Oglbu, and then, with the help of contacts in Helsinki given to him by Lenin, a false passport and some gold coins from his father, he made his way to Stockholm.
The Viennese Chapter
Trotsky spent the next ten years abroad, seven of them in Vienna and the rest in Switzerland, France, Spain and, finally, the United States. Throughout this period he collaborated with Austrian and other European social democrats. Vienna represented a long pause in the hectic life of the advocate of permanent revolution, but it reveals much of interest about his character. Stalin was right when he pointed out that Trotsky’s strength emerged when the revolutionary tide was rising and that his weakness showed when the revolution was receding. Trotsky was a man of action. Condemned to a long period of passive waiting, he concentrated on journalism and on maintaining ties with Russian émigrés and Western social democrats, whether organizers or Marxist theorists. Even the Fifth Party Congress, held in 1907 in London, failed to inspire him with renewed energy.
It was at this congress that the first meeting took place between Trotsky and Stalin, although Trotsky later claimed he could not recall having noticed the taciturn Georgian, then bearing the alias ‘Ivanovich’, who for the entire three weeks of the meeting uttered not a single word to the assembly. And this despite the fact that the congress debated and banned any further bank robberies for the benefit of the party—the notorious ‘expropriations’—such as those carried out in the Caucasus by Bolshevik-sponsored gangs. As Trotsky would later repeatedly recall, Stalin had been directly implicated in these affairs, as had the Bolshevik leadership around Lenin. In a 1930 article
entitled ‘On Stalin’s Political Biography’ he wrote: ‘In 1907 Stalin took part in the Tiflis bank raid … One wonders why the official biographies are too cowardly to mention this?’85 The General Secretary evidently had his own views of the bank robberies, but he never divulged them.
Stalin, for his part, could not have failed to notice the slim young man with blue eyes, long hair and pince-nez who addressed the congress with such self-assurance and who was invariably surrounded by other delegates during the intermissions. Trotsky used the opportunity of the assembly to air aspects of his theory of permanent revolution, emphasizing in particular that a prerequisite was an alliance of the workers and peasants. Despite the closeness of these notions to those of Lenin, Trotsky’s old ties to the Mensheviks still held him back. He voted for resolutions proposed by both wings of the party, to such an extent that it seemed peace had been declared between himself and Lenin. The writer Maxim Gorky, who was present at several sessions, did his best to enhance the truce, but in vain. Trotsky was too committed to his own independence, his unorthodoxy and originality, and evidently felt that he could maintain his star image better by cutting across party lines. Lenin’s remark in a letter to Gorky after the Congress that Trotsky’s behaviour could often be explained by his need to show off was quite justified.86
After the Congress Trotsky returned to Vienna, where he and Sedova settled down. Fluent in German and French, less so in English, this most ‘European’ of Russian revolutionaries soon felt at home. He quickly re-established contact with Parvus, who had been exiled with him to Siberia in 1906 and who had similarly escaped. It was Parvus who originated the idea of permanent revolution, a fact Trotsky acknowledged in recognizing the debt he owed to this remarkable personality, of whom more will be said in a later chapter.
Trotsky never lost his warm feelings for Parvus, whose role in the revolutionary movement was to become so controversial. It was Parvus who in 1907 introduced him to the ‘Marxist Pope’ of the Second International, Karl Kautsky, a meeting Trotsky later described:
A white-haired and very jolly little old man with clear blue eyes greeted me with the Russian ‘Zdravstvuyte’ [‘Hello’]. With what I already knew of Kautsky from his books, this served to complete a very charming personality. The thing that appealed to me most was the absence of fuss, which, as I later discovered, was the result of his undisputed authority at that time, and of the inner calm which it gave him … One got little conversation with Kautsky. His mind was too angular and dry, too lacking in nimbleness and psychological insight. His evaluations were schematic, his jokes trite.87
Trotsky was nonetheless impressed by the sheer scale of Kautsky’s thinking, and when the meeting was over Trotsky felt that everyone there was a head shorter than the little old man. During the First World War, however, which radically altered alignments among the social democrats, Trotsky would write in quite different terms about Kautsky, all traces of his admiration gone:
Kautsky’s entire authority was based on the reconciliation of opportunism in politics with Marxism in theory … On its very first day, the war brought the dénouement, the exposure of the entire falseness and rottenness of Kautskianism … ‘The International is an instrument of peace, not war …’ Kautsky clung to this vulgarism like a lifebelt … pushing Marxism towards Quakerism and crawling on all fours before [President] Wilson.88
Trotsky collected notes on all his meetings and, if the occasion arose, would then compose brief thumbnail sketches for publication, usually in unflattering terms, if other social democrats were concerned. It should be noted, however, that many, if not most, of the leaders of both wings of the Russian party shared his lack of delicacy when it came to personal criticism. They were all steeped in politics, and moral considerations came very low in their order of priorities. The Vienna interlude was also one of personal development, during which Trotsky greatly broadened his knowledge. He attended meetings connected with a wide range of interests, including Freudian psychoanalysis. Of this he wrote in January 1924 in a letter to the great physiologist Ivan Pavlov:
During the several years that I spent in Vienna I came into quite close contact with the Freudians, I read their works and even attended some of their meetings … In essence, psychoanalysis is based on the idea that psychological processes are the complex superstructure of physiological processes … Your theory of conditioned reflexes, it seems to me, embraces Freud’s theory … The sublimation of sexual energy, a favourite sphere of Freudian teaching, is the construction of conditioned reflexes on the sexual base.89
Psychoanalysis was only one of many fields of intellectual exploration in which Trotsky indulged himself in those years, and intellectual curiosity remained with him all his life.
Trotsky’s image and his intellect seem to embody the indisputable fact that Russia lay between Europe and Asia—that it was Eurasian. The majority of the Russian population at that time bore more Asiatic and Slavonic than Western and European characteristics. The issue was not one of different levels of civilization, so much as a capacity for absorbing and synthesizing different cultures. In Russians like Axelrod, Dan, Parvus and Plekhanov, who lived for many years in Europe, national elements of consciousness were gradually displaced by cosmopolitan elements. They felt at home everywhere. While they may readily have accepted universal human values, however, they lost something else, without which it was impossible fully to feel the pain, the suffering and the hopes of their own motherland. For Trotsky, the European experience enhanced his ability to view the revolutionary aims in his own country through the prism of the international socialist movement.
In Vienna Trotsky was active mostly among the Mensheviks, and was therefore viewed by his Western friends as a centrist. He wrote more often than any other Russian socialist for Kautsky’s monthly Neue Zeit, in which he explained for Western social democrats the split between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, which they found hard to understand and in which they were reluctant to interfere. In this respect, Trotsky seemed to them to be serving a conciliatory, rational and attractive role. For instance, he organized a conference of various Russian organizations in August 1912. Eighteen voting delegates, ten consultative delegates and five guests turned up from Menshevik groups and the Jewish Bund, but the exchange of recriminations that occupied much of the time resulted in nothing emerging from the meeting. As was always to be expected on such occasions, there was a police informer present who duly submitted his report to the Moscow Okhrana in October 1912.90
Among the German social democrats Trotsky was closest to Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Franz Mehring, although he also socialized with their ideological opponents, a fact that put the radicals on their guard. For his part, he put personal feelings before ‘unity’ or ‘solidarity’. When in 1916 Mehring celebrated his seventieth birthday, Trotsky associated the name of Rosa Luxemburg with his congratulations: ‘Mehring, Luxemburg and I are on the same side of the trenches that run throughout the entire capitalist world. In Franz Mehring and Rosa Luxemburg we celebrate the nucleus of the revolutionary German opposition to which we are bound indissolubly as brothers in arms.’91
Of Karl Liebknecht Trotsky wrote in different terms:
expansive, easily aroused, he stands out in sharp relief against the background of the orderly, faceless and indistinguishable party bureaucracy … Liebknecht has always felt a semi-stranger in the house of German social democracy, with its internal regularity and its constant readiness to compromise … His genuine and deep revolutionary instinct has always steered him, through the inevitable zigzags, onto the right path.92
Trotsky wrote about virtually everyone he ever met; not the dry, colourless sketches typical of other political commentators, but vivid portraits that brought his subjects to life. The time he spent in Vienna among so many interesting and original intellectuals could not but enhance the development of his own mind, help to refine his political judgement and broaden his erudition. People who witnessed him giving speeches testify that he co
uld think on his feet, shape images instantly, define trends, identify essentials. He did not learn his speeches in advance, but would create them as he spoke, always producing something new and original. He could hold the attention of the leaders of the Second International or St Petersburg workers or soldiers of the 2nd Nikolaev Regiment with equal effect. It was a talent that derived from an amazing ability to absorb ideas and also to enter the minds of his audience. Whether friendly or hostile, no one could long remain neutral towards Trotsky. He was universally regarded as an extraordinary, larger-than-life figure.
During this second exile in the centre of Europe, when his interests revolved around the Russian factions, European parliamentarism and new trends in German social democracy, Trotsky was nonetheless for ten years in the revolutionary ‘provinces’. Although a virtually professional critic of the parliamentary system, he seems not to have noticed that in Russia, thanks to the 1905 revolution, a Russian form of parliament had been born. The Bolshevik boycott of the First and Second State Dumas, as well as their active participation in the Fourth, provided ample food for thought about the use the working class might make of parliamentary methods of struggle. All this passed Trotsky by, not so much because of geographical distance as because of his sceptical attitude to the Russian parliament as such. He was not unique in this. The Bolsheviks also despised the parliamentary system. At the Second Comintern Congress in March 1920, Lenin would say that the task facing Communism was ‘the destruction of parliamentarism’. In general, his second exile cut Trotsky off from revolutionary events in Russia, both legal and illegal.
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