Trotsky

by Dmitri Volkogonov

  On 2 August 1914 Austria’s chief of political police, Herr Geyer, hinted to Trotsky that next morning an order might be issued for the detention of Russians and Serbs. ‘Then your advice is to leave?’ ‘The sooner the better.’ ‘Good. I will leave with my family for Switzerland tomorrow.’ ‘Hmm … I should prefer that you do it today.’109 The Austrian authorities began interning Russians (among them Lenin, who was near the Russian—Austrian border at the time), and Trotsky left Vienna for the last time. The exodus from Vienna by the Russian colony was a hasty one. At first most of them, including Trotsky and his family, made for Switzerland, where Lenin—after a quick release from custody—and Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin also took refuge.

  In January 1919, when he was at the peak of his fame, Trotsky would once again be involved in Austrian affairs: as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Soviet Republic, he notified the Moscow Centre for Prisoners of War and Refugees: ‘I have received the following telegram from Tsarev; Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war at Tsarev Camp, Astrakhan province, abandoned to the whim of fate, exhausted by waiting for repatriation, request that you exert your influence on the appropriate Russian authorities to effect their earliest despatch.’110 Using his tremendous authority, Trotsky could help Austrians return home.

  Within three days of the votes for war credits in the parliaments of the belligerents, Trotsky had written an article, ‘The War and the International’, in which he took the same line as Lenin, even though they were still at daggers drawn: peace without indemnities or annexations, and peace to be had only by turning the workers’ bayonets against their own governments. It was here that Trotsky uttered an idea which others found Utopian: in order to prevent further war, the proletariat must form a United States of Europe, and then go on to struggle for the creation of a United States of the World.

  Trotsky liked to prophesy, although many of his prophecies failed to materialize. He was convinced that after the October revolution, even if world revolution was not accomplished within the next few years, at least the revolution in Europe would erupt at once. He was also to be proved wrong about the withering away of small nation states. He was, however, remarkably accurate in the predictions he made about his own country. As early as 1915 he declared that Russia would be able to leave the war only with the aid of revolution. He lived the revolution, waited for it and did all he could to hasten what he called the ‘festival of the oppressed’. His impatience for revolution echoed that of the great anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, fifty years earlier. In a conversation with the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen, Bakunin had said, on hearing that the Poles were unlikely to rise now that the Tsar had freed the Russian peasants, ‘What about Italy?’ ‘It’s quiet.’ ‘And Austria?’ ‘Also quiet.’ ‘Turkey?’ ‘It’s quiet everywhere, and it’s hard to foresee anything.’ ‘What are we to do, then?’ asked a perplexed Bakunin. ‘Surely we don’t have to go off to somewhere like Persia or India to get things going! It’s enough to make you go crazy. I can’t just sit and do nothing.’111

  Trotsky had spent only six weeks in Switzerland when an offer came from Kievskaya mysl’ to go to Paris and view the European conflagration ‘from the Eiffel Tower’. The formalities were quickly arranged. (This was not at all the situation he would face in 1933, when a visa took an inordinately long time. When permission finally came, he remarked to his supporter in Paris Maurice Parizhanin: ‘I was surprised to receive your telegram … I can hardly imagine that the French government would give me a visa when it is seeking friendship with Stalin.’112 By then, the doors of practically every state were being slammed in his face. This letter, by the way, was only one of dozens that were intercepted by the GPU-NKVD and laid on Stalin’s desk.)

  Trotsky stayed for two years in France. At the same time as sending his stories to Kievskaya mysl’, he contributed to the anti-militarist Menshevik newspaper Nashe slovo (Our Word). In Paris he became friendly with one of its leading lights, Antonov-Ovseenko, a friendship that was firm and long-lasting. He also got to know the Bolshevik intellectual and aesthete Anatoly Lunacharsky better, as well as other prominent Bolsheviks who would soon be at the heart of the revolutionary events in Russia. Lenin’s Sotsial-demokrat and the non-factional Nashe slovo, in which Trotsky soon became the driving force, contained articles not only about the war, but also about the unseen, subterranean tremors that were beginning to shake the flagging Russian empire.

  Although it was a radical newspaper, Kievskaya mysl’ was in favour of waging the war to a victorious conclusion, and Trotsky therefore had to resort to circumlocution in his pieces. It willingly published articles against Germany and, more reluctantly, that were critical of the Entente. It was possible to write more freely in Nashe slovo, however. Every day Trotsky went to the Café Rotonde, where he could sit and read the major European newspapers and talk with Martov, Ryazanov, Lunacharsky and others. News about events was harder to come by than the bad wartime coffee. The war was dividing old allies among the socialists and putting them on opposing sides of the barricades. When he heard that Zasulich, Potresov and Plekhanov supported the war, Trotsky was shocked.

  During this time, Trotsky strengthened many of his old ties with French socialists, especially Alfred Rosmer who was to remain a friend for the rest of his life. In September 1919 Trotsky wrote to Rosmer and other leaders of the French Communist Party, Loriot and Donat, to encourage their activities:

  Despite the blockade, with which Messieurs Clemenceau and Lloyd George and others are trying to throw Europe back to the barbarism of the Middle Ages, we are closely following your work from here, watching the growth of the ideas of revolutionary communism in France. I am personally delighted every time I hear that you, my dear friends, are standing in the front rank of the movement that must give rebirth to Europe and all mankind. The harsher the triumph of militarism, vandalism and social treachery of bourgeois France, the more severe the rising of the proletariat will be, the more decisive its tactics, the more complete its victory … We know that the cause of communism is in firm hands. Long live revolutionary proletarian France! Long live the world socialist revolution!113

  After a long interval, Trotsky met Lenin again in September 1915 at the Swiss mountain village of Zimmerwald, where thirty-eight delegates from belligerent and neutral countries had gathered to hammer out a common position on the war. In effect, they had symbolically crossed the barbed wire in order to show the solidarity of their hatred for the war. Calling for the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war, Lenin’s position was the most revolutionary among the delegates, and also the most tragic in its consequences. Trotsky took a different line, calling for an end to the war ‘without victors or vanquished’. Although Lenin did not acquire a majority, the Zimmerwald Conference witnessed the revival of the radical wing of the socialist movement as the precursor of the Third (Communist) International.

  Meanwhile, Trotsky’s affairs encountered difficulties. In Marseilles, where shipments of new ‘cannon-fodder’ from Russia arrived, a riot erupted among the Russian troops. It was savagely put down, and several of the arrested soldiers were found to be in possession of copies of Nashe slovo with anti-war articles by Trotsky. The reaction came swiftly: the newspaper was closed down and Trotsky was ordered out of the country. Protests by émigré and socialist friends were to no avail. Trotsky was afraid the French authorities might hand him over to the Russian government as an act of allied solidarity, and asked for permission to go to either Switzerland or Sweden. On 30 October 1916 he was ordered to leave France, and two gendarmes turned up to escort him to the Spanish border.114 Within days of arriving in Spain, Trotsky was arrested by the Madrid police as a ‘known anarchist’. After several weeks in gaol, where he kept up a barrage of protest against his treatment, he succeeded in having himself, his wife and children put on board an old passenger ship, the Monserrat, bound for the USA. ‘Farewell, Europe!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Though not quite: this Spanish ship is part of Spain, its passeng
ers are part of Europe, most of them her outcasts.’115

  While he was on board the Monserrat, Trotsky wrote to many of his friends in various countries. To Alfred Rosmer he wrote: ‘For a long time I watched through the mist as that old scoundrel, Europe, slipped further away …’ He stood with his wife and sons at the rail of the ship as it passed the towering cliffs of Gibraltar, thinking they were leaving Europe forever.

  * Populism, made up of vaguely socialist, peasant-oriented ideas, dominated a large section of educated Russian youth in the 1870s-1890s.

  * See B. Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, Oxford, 1978, for a masterly analysis of Trotsky’s views on Jewishness and Zionism.

  * Trotsky and his first wife, Alexandra, had separated by 1903. It is not known when—or even if—he married Sedova. Their sons were always called Sedov, rather than Trotsky, and common-law marriages were normal among revolutionaries.

  * Where Russia was fighting and losing a war with Japan.

  † The mutiny on the battleship Potemkin would enter the canon of revolutionary legends, and be immortalized in Eisenstein’s film of 1925.

  * Two young Bolsheviks were given the task of marrying Shmidt’s two daughters in order to secure the money. See Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, for a fuller account.

  2

  The Madness of Revolution

  ‘The sea was very rough at this time of the year, and our boat did everything to remind us of the frailty of human life. The Monserrat was an old tub little suited for ocean voyages. But during the war the neutral Spanish flag lessened the chances of being sunk. The Spanish company charged high fares, and provided bad accommodation and even worse food.’1 Standing on deck and staring at the grey horizon, Trotsky must have wondered what he was to do with himself in the country where, in his view, ‘the heart is ruled by the moral philosophy of the dollar’.

  His sons went to school in New York and quickly learnt English. They had already acquired French in Paris and German in Vienna, and were growing up in a cosmopolitan environment and shared their father’s life. Trotsky spent two months giving lectures in New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere. He met Nikolai Bukharin, Alexandra Kollontai and Grigori Chudnovsky, as well as a few other revolutionaries, but he had barely found his feet among his compatriots when exciting and at first incomprehensible news began arriving from Russia. It was reported from Petrograd that on 15 March two members of the Duma, Alexander Guchkov and Vasili Shulgin, had visited the Tsar in his headquarters at Pskov and accepted his abdication in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Michael. The Duma members had done their level best to save the monarchy, as was made clear by the leader of the liberals (Kadets), Paul Milyukov, who was reported as saying: ‘We cannot leave the question of the form of our state structure open. We are thinking of a parliamentary and constitutional monarchy.’ When Trotsky read this he flung the newspaper down in disgust and cried: ‘The Kadets have crawled into the prompter’s box and are chanting their old line!’ His wife was more philosophical: ‘Lyova, what would you expect?’ Later, when he was back in Russia, Trotsky would learn that Michael had said he would only accept the crown if it were the will of the people, as expressed in a constituent assembly, and since neither the early convocation of such a body, nor indeed Michael’s own safety, could be promised by the members of the Provisional Government, Michael had followed Nicholas’s example and abdicated. Three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty came to an end, and Russia was without a monarchy.

  But what of the socialists? Where was Lenin? How would relations between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks be affected? Meanwhile, the news was dizzying. Could it really be true that the Red Flag was flying over the Winter Palace? Meetings that Trotsky attended in New York were triumphant. He was almost never at home. Having heard the news of the February revolution, he at once determined that his place was back in St Petersburg, now named Petrograd, and on 27 March, together with his family and some other Russians, he boarded the Norwegian steamer Christiania Fjord, bound for Europe.

  When the ship was searched at the Canadian port of Halifax, the Trotsky family and a number of other Russian passengers were arrested. While in detention they learned that the British government had reported that Trotsky was travelling to Russia at the expense of the German government and with the intention of overthrowing the Provisional Government. Indeed, after his arrival in Petrograd the local newspapers continued to print this story. The issue remained controversial for decades, and conclusive proof was not available until the early 1990s, when access was finally obtained to Lenin’s archives. These revealed that the Bolshevik Party had been covertly receiving large sums from the German government, with which they financed their propaganda among the troops and workers following the February revolution. But as early as 1917 well-informed observers were in no doubt that the Bolsheviks owed a great deal to financial aid from Germany, funnelled into Lenin’s coffers by various channels and under different names.

  After several protests against Trotsky’s arrest appeared in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, the Provisional Government felt compelled to cable Halifax and request the release of the interned Russian citizens, and within three weeks, on 18 May, Trotsky was in Petrograd, as yet unsure which wing of the party he would join. All he was sure of was that he would join the revolution.

  The Revolutionary Flood

  After an absence of ten years, Trotsky was back on his native soil. He was greeted by friends at Petrograd’s Finland Station, where a short speech was delivered by Moisei Uritsky, an old friend of Menshevik days and a collaborator on Nashe slovo. Trotsky’s sons gazed around in amazement at this strange place, where people spoke Russian on the street and wore scarlet ribbons on the lapels of their greatcoats, indicating their support for the February revolution. Trotsky was among the last of the well-known exiles to return. He wasted no time and, once the family was established in a one-room apartment, he went to the Smolny Institute, a former college for the daughters of the nobility where the Petrograd Soviet was now in session. As the president of its predecessor of 1905, it was a natural thing to do.

  When he arrived the meeting was being chaired by the Menshevik Nikolai Chkheidze, whom he knew well. The members of the Soviet gave Trotsky a cool reception. Neither the Menshevik majority nor the Bolshevik members were sure which side was going to benefit from Trotsky’s arrival—nor was Trotsky himself yet sure which way he would jump. His record of 1905, however, assured him a nonvoting seat on the Executive Committee, and there he sat, listening with growing surprise as his new colleagues debated which portfolios to accept in the Kerensky government that was being described in the press as ‘the symbiosis of ten capitalists and six socialists’. (The first, predominantly liberal, composition of the Provisional Government had proved to be unviable, and at this moment efforts were being made to bring socialists from the Soviet into it, in the hope that further disorder and disruption could be averted.) Although Trotsky had been following events as closely as possible while abroad, he now found himself faced with new questions to which he had no immediate answers. Asked to speak by his former pupil Matvei Skobelev, he tried to say something in general terms about the revolution. ‘We see,’ he began, ‘that Russia has opened a new era, a new era of blood and iron, a struggle no longer of nations against nations, but one of the oppressed classes against their rulers.’2 The Menshevik leader Irakli Tsereteli and the Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov, both advocates of continuing the war to a victorious conclusion, showed their anxiety. They saw danger for themselves in Trotsky’s line.

  Trotsky was aware of Lenin’s ‘April Theses’, embodied in an article in Pravda of 20 April 1917, in which he had criticized Plekhanov for his chauvinistic ‘defensism’. There Lenin had also formulated a position for which Russia was not yet ready: ‘Not a parliamentary republic—returning to that from the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies would be a step backwards—but a republic of Soviets of workers’ and poor peasants’ deputies from a
ll over the country, from the bottom up.’3 Rejection of the parliamentary principle, in a country where the first shoots of democracy had barely appeared, would in due course damage the very idea of socialism itself. Trotsky was used to Lenin’s harsh tone of voice, but Plekhanov surprised him by the sharp, crude, uncompromising note he adopted. Trotsky hardly recognized the style of his old mentor in Plekhanov’s article ‘Lenin’s Theses and why Delirium can Sometimes be Interesting’, especially in such phrases as ‘Lenin never was strong on logic’, ‘the reporter of Edinstvo [Unity] was quite right to describe Lenin’s speech as delirious’, ‘Lenin’s first thesis was written in a world of fantasy where there are no dates, no months, but only the devil knows what.’

  Trotsky, who had written a number of articles on Plekhanov—and who would write another on him when he died in 1918, in which he would give him his due as a theorist, but also describe him as a ‘conciliator’ and ‘nationalist’, both terms of abuse in the Russian Marxist canon—was surprised by the old man’s categorical tone. Plekhanov had after all embodied social democratic values in their most developed form. He had ended his article on Lenin:

  I firmly believe that … in Lenin’s calls to fraternize with the Germans, for the overthrow of the Provisional Government, the seizure of power and so on and so forth, our workers will see them just for what they are, namely, a crazy and extremely harmful attempt to sow anarchist disorder in the Russian Land. The Russian proletariat and the Russian army will not forget that if they do not immediately and severely rebuff this … attempt, then it will tear out the young and tender sapling of our political freedom by the roots.