Trotsky
Page 10
Trotsky and his second family—a son, Lev, had been born in 1906 and another, Sergei, in 1908—settled into a modest three-room apartment in Vienna, the most notable feature of which was the heaped newspapers and piled books on every available surface. He maintained his family mostly from his earnings as a journalist. He worked for a long time as a reporter for the radical Kiev newspaper Kievskaya mysl’ (Kiev Thought), but also right up to the revolution he received money from his father. He was therefore much better off than most political émigrés, who were often reduced to beggarly conditions as they tried to find the price of their next meal. Trotsky’s material security enabled him to devote himself to his writing, to be independent, to travel from capital to capital more often than others, to attend seminars and conferences, and so on. He could also develop his interest in art, visiting museums and galleries, and writing articles of professional standard on artistic topics for the Kiev newspaper. He took Natalya to the Vienna Opera, but confessed that his appreciation of music was no better than primitive. The second exile, while it was a lengthy hiatus, was also a time when Trotsky grew in stature as a theorist, journalist, writer and politician.
While analyzing Trotsky’s writings and speeches during his time abroad, I was struck by the absence of (almost) any sign of nostalgia for Russia, any longing to see his father’s house or to revisit the scenes of his childhood. Most people, when cut off from their homeland, yearn for their roots. Memories, scraps of news, old photos—everything carries a special meaning. But neither Lenin nor Trotsky, nor many other revolutionaries, could step onto Russian soil without the risk of being sent straight back to Siberia. The Moscow branch of the Okhrana had issued a warrant for Trotsky’s immediate deportation to hard labour in Siberia should he be apprehended within the Russian borders.93 The memoirs of many Russian revolutionaries of that time reveal frequent attacks of nostalgia for the scent of fresh snow, the crunch of sleigh-runners, the faces of their dear ones, and other memories of home. Trotsky felt no such longings. Perhaps he was one of the first ‘citizens of the world’ for whom home is where they happen to be. The Europeanization of his heart and mind, the gradual absorption of different cultures, and the mental identification of his motherland with the autocracy, generated in him immunity to nostalgia. He was, like his comrades, also a thoroughly political animal in whom there was little or no room for feelings of organic bonds with the land of one’s forefathers, with its songs and customs and the graves of ancestors.
A very rare, if not unique, reference to nostalgic feeling for Russia is to be found in one of Trotsky’s reports from the front in the Balkan wars of 1912-13, published as his ‘Balkan Letters’. As he passed through the Bulgarian province of Dobrudja in 1912, he became painfully aware of its similarity to the steppes of Kherson and of Yanovka, where two years earlier his mother had died, and he had been unable to attend her funeral:
The road is just like a Russian road. Just as dusty as our Kherson road. Hens run out from under the horses’ hooves, as they do in Russia, and the [Ukrainian] horses wear Russian harness, even [the driver’s] back looks Russian … Dusk falls. There is a smell of grass and the dust of the road … It is quiet. One’s feet itch and it feels as though we’re off on our holidays … to Yanovka.94
Such moments of reminiscence are rarely to be found in Trotsky’s writings.
In September 1912 Kievskaya mysl’ had asked Trotsky to write a series on the explosive situation in the Balkans. The pay and conditions were good, the political climate in Europe was calm and ‘Antid Oto’, as he called himself, therefore accepted the offer. He was required to cover two national wars, in each of which both sides were the losers. Lurking in the background were the big powers, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, England and other countries. The bone of contention was Macedonia, then a Turkish province, to which Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece each laid claim. They could only free Macedonia from Turkey, however, if they combined, and the Balkan League was therefore formed. The trigger for the outbreak of war was a Turkish massacre of two Macedonian villages. On 13 October 1912 Bulgaria delivered a note to Turkey, in the name of the League, which amounted to an ultimatum. No reply was forthcoming. Hostilities began and by December Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece had taken most of Macedonia. Turkey asked for an armistice, but peace was not made until 30 May 1913, when a treaty was signed in London. The representatives of the great powers succeeded in dividing the fruits of the conflict in such a way as to satisfy nobody. All the parties began making claims against each other, with the result that in June 1913 hostilities broke out between the erstwhile allies and the Second Balkan War began. Serbia, Montenegro and Greece fought against Bulgaria, and were joined by Romania and the Ottoman Empire. Bulgaria was defeated within a month. A second peace treaty was signed in Bucharest in August 1913, according to which Macedonia was divided between Serbia and Greece, while Dobrudja went to Romania. The war left all the parties dissatisfied and had merely created new sources of tension. It was Trotsky’s task to convey information and to comment on all this to his Russian readers.
The more than seventy articles he sent from the front comprise the sixth volume of his collected works. Most of them are brilliantly lucid and informative, revealing as plainly as anything else he wrote his mastery as a writer. He was not an unbiased chronicler, however. He blamed the Balkan situation on the negative role played by ‘the hand of tsarism’ and its Pan-Slavist ideology. It was inconceivable to him that Russia could have any legitimate interest in ‘this Pandora’s box’, despite the competing claims of the great powers in the area. At first, his reports expressed sympathy for the South Slavs, but as he saw their hope of Russian help grow, his tone began to change, and he suddenly started defending the Turks, who were facing defeat. This at once drew a howl of protest in Sofia, Belgrade, Kiev and St Petersburg. When he wrote about the allies’ ‘bestial’ treatment of the Turks, the Bulgarians banned him from visiting the front. Trotsky’s hostility towards the Slavophiles mounted as he recognized the interference from the Russian capital. In ‘Open Letters’ to the Bulgarian poet Petko Todorov and the leader of the Russian liberal party (the Constitutional Democrats), the historian Paul Milyukov, Trotsky defended his view of the war from an internationalist, rather than nationalist, position. It is also true that on several occasions, his understanding of the causes of the senseless slaughter was superficial.
Trotsky returned to cover the Second Balkan War and again defended the underdog, except that now it was the Bulgarians, and he had to write about the atrocities of the new victors. Reporting the war as an act of ‘anti-civilization’, Trotsky also attempted to give his own views as to the best arrangement for the Balkans when the conflict was over. As early as 1909 he had written: ‘Only a unified state of all the Balkan nationalities on democratic-federative principles—like Switzerland or the North American republic—can bring internal peace to the Balkans and create the conditions for the mighty development of its productive forces.’95 During the war itself, he often expressed what he plainly knew to be a virtually Utopian idea. He pointed out the irony of a world in which, although ‘we have learned to wear braces, write clever leading articles and make Milka chocolate; when it comes to deciding on how to get several tribes to live together on Europe’s abundant peninsula, we are powerless to find any other means than mass mutual destruction’.96 The idea of a Balkan federation would be resurrected by Stalin after the Second World War, with the sole result of spoiling relations between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.
A marked feature of Trotsky’s reportage from the Balkans was its strong note of pacifism, a doctrine he would be strongly opposing only a few years hence. Echoing the resolution of the Zimmerwald Conference held in Switzerland in September 1915, when radical social democrats from the belligerent countries of the First World War voted to oppose the conflict, he would write: ‘The workers must reject the Utopian demands of both bourgeois and socialist pacifism. The pacifists are planting new illusions in the place of the old ones and
are trying to recruit the proletariat in the service of these illusions.’97
At the time, however, the pen of Antid Oto (and L. Yanov, another pen-name) was producing ‘Utopian illusions’ one after another, as what he saw conflicted with his intellectual analysis of the war, its causes and its remedies. His notes include an essay that recognized this fact:
I went to the Balkan war believing it to be not only probable but also possible. But when … I realized that many people I knew—politicians, editors and university teachers—were already guarding the frontier, standing at the front line rifle in hand, and that they would be the first to kill and be killed, then the war, which I had so easily speculated about in my thoughts and my articles as an abstraction, seemed to me unbelievable and impossible.98
He described a scene at a small railway station in Serbia:
we met a transport of prisoners—190 Turks and Arnauts. They got them out of the wagons and took them off to the town, to the barracks or the prison. It was not the first picture of grief and human degradation I had seen in my life, and especially here in the Balkans. But I had never seen such as this. One hundred and ninety wounded, mutilated, sick men, clad in rags and tatters with the last remnants of human clothing somehow wrapped round their miserable bodies. Many still had shreds of footwear, others had rags clinging to their feet. It was cold and raw, but about a third of them were completely barefoot. These prisoners … were the most accurate picture of war, whether it’s a defensive or offensive war, colonial or national. Any honest and intelligent artist must put this picture on his canvas. It will be far more horrible than any of Vereshchagin’s symmetrical horrors or those of Leonid Andreev.99
In another report, dated Belgrade, 28 September 1913 and signed L. Yanov, he wrote:
The women of the East are human beasts of burden, their unwashed breasts hanging out of their blouses, carrying their babies, sacks tied to their backs and over their arms, as they struggle to get onto the train, pushing their bundles along in front of them with their knees. Behind them are peasants, blackened forever by the soil and the sun, gnarled, bow-legged, bent low … The young women are dressed in flea-ridden sarafans. Hunched, black-clad old women with goitres are leaning on staves and sitting on a bench for three, four or five hours at a stretch, silent and still. What awful, enduring patience they have!100
Trotsky’s ‘Balkan Letters’ were those of a politician and journalist who had looked into the seething cauldron of the Balkans. He of course did not know that within a decade he would be engulfed in another war, not as a chronicler, but as one of the chief actors in a long and bloody drama. Antid Oto’s miniatures drew the veil from the awful face of war, but while condemning it, in his theoretical reflections he continued to speak of the ‘lifelessness of the humanistic, moralistic view of war’. He still believed that war could be uprooted by war. At the time, perhaps, no one could know how Utopian this idea really was. It was not pacifism that had the capacity to become a future world trend, but it was war that would displace men’s reason by force and that would be forever seen as true history.
In Ahasueras’s Footsteps
I met Trotsky’s daughter-in-law, Olga Grebner, in 1989, in the aptly-named Leningrad old people’s home ‘Veterans of the Scene’. Several times she referred to Trotsky as ‘Ahasueras’. According to ancient legend, the Jew Ahasueras was condemned to eternal wandering as punishment for having given Christ succour during a short pause on the way to His crucifixion. It had never been Trotsky’s intention to bear a cross, even one the son of a Jewish settler in Russia might have been burdened with. Yet for most of his life he was to carry the cross of suffering and glory, disappointment and unquenchable hope, all as punishment for his love of the revolution.
In 1913, his Balkan assignment completed, Trotsky returned not to his own home but to Austria, where his family awaited him. Despite having many admirers and followers, and despite his great popularity, Trotsky had few friends. Among these was Semen Lvovich Klyachko, a Russian socialist who had lived abroad for more than forty years and who would die less than a year before the February 1917 revolution. Klyachko left little trace of his activities on the revolutionary movement because, Trotsky wrote, ‘he had all the abilities necessary to attain great prominence in politics, except that he hadn’t the necessary defects’.101 Trotsky was fond of Klyachko not only for his gentle character and exceptional mind, but also for his ‘cosmopolitan’ qualities. Klyachko had been his own man in the social democratic organizations of New York, London, Vienna, Paris, Berlin and Rome. If it had not been for the revolution of 1917, Trotsky might also have remained a ‘citizen of the world’. Klyachko’s cosmopolitan attitudes impressed Trotsky, who loved to think in terms of the world revolution. After her husband had died, Anna Konstantinovna Klyachko was one of the first people Trotsky wrote to when he entered his last exile in 1929:
We are living on the island of Prinkipo, where I was once supposed to have attended a world conference at the invitation of Lloyd George. Although nothing came of Lloyd George’s initiative, geographically speaking it wasn’t a bad idea; one has complete isolation from the rest of the world and beautiful scenery. The view from our windows on all sides is of improbable beauty. The only drawback is the mosquitoes which appear at night, despite the cold spring.102
Back in Vienna, Trotsky threw himself once again into the world of party discord, the party by now being firmly and permanently divided into two camps. Attracted as before by Bolshevik radicalism, Trotsky was drawn by his personal sympathy for the Mensheviks, and thus he stuck to his previous position. He expected a new revolutionary wave to rise and tried to keep up his contacts with his former comrades in the St Petersburg Soviet. One such was Dmitri Fedorovich Sverchkov, with whom Trotsky started a chess match by correspondence.103 In May 1922 Sverchkov, then deputy chief of the Petrograd railway system, would ask for Trotsky’s protection, and would give a lengthy account of his own past support for the now-powerful member of the Politburo and military chief of the Republic. Sverchkov wrote to Trotsky that in the summer of 1917, when Trotsky was arrested by the Provisional Government,
the newspapers were baying for harsh retribution and I was afraid you might be shot. I was then a right-wing Menshevik and fiercely opposed to the Bolsheviks. Earlier, in 1909 in Paris, during a Central Committee plenum, I had learned from Martov, Dan and others about the way the Bolsheviks had commandeered the inheritance which the factory-owner Shmidt had left for the RSDLP.* In 1917 Martov, whom I believed without reservation, talked about the deceptions used by the Bolshevik Centre in order to use the inheritance without dividing it up with the other faction of the party … A lot of very harsh words were said at that time at Menshevik gatherings about the Tiflis expropriations and the laundering by Bolsheviks abroad of the stolen 500-rouble notes. I believed it all because Martov and co. and Shmidt’s relatives—his sister and her husband whom I met in Paris—talked about it with such certainty.
Sverchkov went on to say that in 1917 he had written all this down in a letter to the Ministry of Justice and in return ‘asked them to release you on my own cognizance. In my letter I contrasted you with the Bolshevik Centre, and in order to protect you and also to gain the Kerensky government’s confidence in myself, I spoke all the more harshly about the Bolsheviks.’ He then mentioned that a major publication about the Bolshevik demonstration of July 1917 was about to come out and that it would include his letter to the Kerensky government: ‘The publication of this letter will make my work extremely difficult, if not impossible, as it will be used to discredit my speeches and destroy my authority.’ Trotsky was not concerned now with Bolshevik practices of the past and was content to instruct his assistants, Butov and Sermuks, to make a few phone calls in order to save Sverchkov’s position.104
On 28 June 1914, the day Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, Trotsky wrote a piece for Kievskaya mysl’ giving his impressions of the scene in Vienna: ‘The large area in front of the War Ministry wa
s packed. And this was not “the public”, but the real people, in their worn-out boots, with fingers gnarled. There were young people and schoolchildren, but there were also many adults and not a few women. They waved yellow and black flags in the air, sang patriotic songs, someone shouted “All Serbs must die!”’105 Trotsky perceived that nationalistic, chauvinistic and patriotic passion had already overturned arguments based on reason, morality and simple self-preservation, but even he could not know that within a month, at the beginning of August, the majority of European social democrats would capitulate before the militarism of their own governments and vote for war credits. ‘I did not expect the official leaders of the International, in case of war, to prove themselves capable of serious revolutionary initiative,’ he would later recall. ‘At the same time, I could not even admit the idea that the Social Democrats would simply cower on their belly before nationalist militarism.’106 The declaration of war and mobilization had, he wrote, ‘somehow wiped off the face of the earth all the national and social contradictions in the country. But it is nothing more than a historical postponement, a sort of political moratorium. New redemption dates have been written on the promissory notes, but they will still have to be paid.’107 From that time until the end of his life, Trotsky was hostile to the social democrats. He would later write: ‘The way things have turned out, one can say with complete objectivity that during the imperialist war German social democracy turned out to be the most reactionary fact in world history.’108 The only path left to him was that which led to the radicals, that is, the Bolsheviks.