It is not given to every intelligent or even talented person to strike a spark from a crowd, to make the crowd believe in a slogan, or to be able to divert hundreds and thousands of people by a few passionate phrases and to convince them to follow an idea. Trotsky was thus gifted, capable of using theatrical ploys, not as an end in themselves, but in order to make the fundamental truths of the revolution clear to the crowd. He was the orator-in-chief of the revolution. Watching the rare film footage of him, or hearing recordings of his voice, or reading his countless speeches, it seems he was not merely an orator with a God-given talent, but also that he was imbued with a rare inspiration and dedication to the false idea which he fed into people’s minds. When he spoke, he seemed to become intoxicated by words, by the sheer pleasure of his ideas, and aware of his own intellectual power.
Trotsky himself recalled the time of the revolution with pleasure. ‘Life was a whirl of mass meetings,’ he wrote:
When I arrived in Petrograd, I found all the revolutionary orators either hoarse or voiceless. The revolution of 1905 had taught me to guard my voice with care, and thanks to this, I was hardly ever out of the ranks. Meetings were held in plants, schools and colleges, in theatres, circuses, streets and squares. I usually reached home exhausted after midnight; half-asleep I would discover the best arguments against my opponents, and about seven in the morning, or sometimes even earlier, I would be pulled painfully from my bed by the hateful, intolerable knocking on the door, calling me to a meeting in Peterhof, or to go to Kronstadt on a tug sent for me by the navy boys there. Each time it would seem to me as if I could never get through this new meeting, but some hidden reserve of nervous energy would come to the surface, and I would speak for an hour, sometimes two, while delegations from other plants or districts, surrounding me in a close ring, would tell me that thousands of workers in three or perhaps five different places had been waiting for me for hours on end. How patiently that awakening mass was waiting for the new word in those days!37
Sukhanov noted Trotsky’s hectic schedule: ‘Tearing himself from the work in revolutionary headquarters, he would fly from the Obukhovsky factory to the Trubochny, from the Putilov to the Baltic shipyards, from the Riding Academy to the barracks, and seemed to be speaking simultaneously in all places. Every Petrograd worker and soldier knew him and heard him personally. His influence, both on the masses and at headquarters, was overwhelming.’38
Paradoxically, Trotsky, whose knowledge of the life of a worker was only superficial, who had never experienced a day of army life, nor known what it was to be a university student in Russia, could nevertheless fire the imaginations and echo the feelings of worker, soldier and student alike. His opponents even accused him of toying with the masses by disguising himself as a working man. The Socialist Revolutionary M. Gendelman, for instance, predicted that ‘the same working masses who lift the “worker” Trotsky high, will trample on Bronshtein the intellectual.’39 Trotsky’s favourite venue was the Cirque Moderne. He turned the hall into a ‘psychological massage centre’ for thousands of people, urging them on to revolution. He recalled that even his opponents recognized his supremacy in this place, and did not attempt to speak in it. He usually went there in the evenings:
My audience was composed of workers, soldiers, hard-working mothers, street urchins—the oppressed underdogs of the capital. Every square inch was filled, every human body compressed to its limit. Young boys sat on their fathers’ shoulders; infants were at their mothers’ breasts. No one smoked. The balconies threatened to fall under the excessive weight of human bodies. I made my way to the platform through a narrow human trench, sometimes I was borne overhead. The air, intense with breathing and waiting, fairly exploded with shouts and with the passionate yells peculiar to the Cirque Moderne.40
Once, as Trotsky was walking home from a meeting late at night, he heard footsteps behind him. Pulling out his Browning revolver, he whipped round and confronted a young man who, it turned out, had been tailing him regularly. ‘Why are you following me? Who are you,’ Trotsky demanded to know. ‘My name’s Poznansky, I’m a student. Please let me accompany and protect you. As well as friends, you have a lot of enemies.’ ‘Thanks, but I’m not accustomed to having bodyguards. I think I’m protected by the revolution itself!’ ‘Then I can be its representative for your protection.’ Henceforth, when the master orator delivered his speeches, to one side sat Poznansky, taking down his every word in a notebook. From that time until Trotsky was deported from the USSR, Poznansky was at his side, showing not only his capacity for selfless devotion, but also an ability to catch any word of his master’s and to note it down in a form that would be usable in an article. Thanks to such people as Poznansky, as well as Sermuks, Glazman, Butov and other assistants, Trotsky was able to begin collecting his personal archive right at the beginning of the revolution, and could thus publish articles and books, partly based on his speeches. In his final exile he devoted a great deal of effort to preserving his archives, but he could not have imagined in his worst nightmare that his carefully preserved materials, as well as those under the care of his elder son, Sedov, would also be ‘cared for’ by agents of the NKVD. At the end of 1937, for instance, N. Yezhov reported to Stalin that ‘the Trotsky documents being held by Sedov were photographed by an agent in Paris on 7-10 November 1937’.41
The audience at the Cirque Moderne in 1917, Trotsky noticed, was made up mostly of soldiers and sailors, and he therefore conducted his ‘conversation’ with them on the war. They told him: ‘The war is destroying us. Every day we suffer more heavy losses. There’s no bread, no firewood or coal. Things are getting worse by the day. The situation at the front is unbearable. The troops in the trenches are not properly clothed, shod or fed. They see no end to the war, no way out.’ According to these ‘delegates from the front’, the troops were saying that if peace was not signed by 1 November, they would end the war their own way. ‘We need peace. This government is incapable of giving us peace. The question of a fourth winter campaign and the blood of Russian soldiers will be decided, as it was before, by the stockmarkets of London and New York, and not by the Russian people.’
The audience waited for Trotsky to offer the solution: ‘We must address the people and the armies directly and propose an immediate armistice on all fronts.’ Only a genuinely revolutionary regime could make such an approach, ‘a government based on the army, the navy, the proletariat and the peasantry—the All-Russian Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies’.42 Trotsky urged his audience to support the Social Democratic parties if they wanted to get back to their villages and their families. They should not believe the conciliators and fake revolutionaries in the Provisional Government. Only the Bolsheviks could give them peace, land and bread. After the meeting, Poznansky typed up the speech—with some judicious editing by its author, who was all too aware that the Provisional Government still held power—and it was duly printed in the press.
These big meetings were also an opportunity for Trotsky to catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of his two daughters, Zina, now aged sixteen, and Nina, a year younger. He met their mother, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, only two or three times in the entire time he was back in Russia until his exile in 1929, although during the worst periods of hunger and privation he was able to give his first family some assistance.
Mass meetings were not the only venue for Trotsky to employ his prodigious oratorical talent. He was also highly effective at congresses and plenary sessions of party bodies, as well as in meetings of soviets and committees. At a session of the Petrograd Soviet he raised the question of the Military Revolutionary Committee, on which the youthful SR Lazimir produced a report. Formal decisions had already been taken that this body should be created, with sections for defence, supply, communications, a workers’ militia, an information bureau, despatch room and command-post.43 The Provisional Government was now insisting on transferring the most revolutionized troops from the capital to the front, and Lazimir proposed th
at the Committee should decide how many to keep in Petrograd, as well as maintain contacts with the forces of several districts outside the capital, take measures to supply the revolutionary units with arms and provisions, protect the population from pogroms and safeguard the revolutionary order in the city.
The Mensheviks Broido and Astrov, as well as the SR Ogurtsovsky, expressed doubts about the Committee. Broido—who would be one of Stalin’s assistants in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities for a while after the revolution—denounced the Committee as a Bolshevik device for seizing power, which would be ‘the funeral of the revolution’. The Mensheviks, he declared, would therefore not join the Committee. Trotsky replied: ‘Never before have we been so far from Broido and his party, and the Menshevik tactics so disastrous, as is now the case. They say we are forming a headquarters for the seizure of power. We make no secret of it, all the representatives from the front who have spoken here have all declared that if there isn’t an armistice soon, the troops will abandon the front.’44 It was on such occasions that Trotsky was seen to be not merely an effective debater, but also capable of expressing a clear and precise radical political position. For this he earned the tide ‘the Danton of the Russian revolution’.
In his report on the activities of the Military Revolutionary Committee, Trotsky told the Petrograd Soviet that the government’s efforts to transfer troops from the capital had been frustrated, and he declared that the Committee was now guided by the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’: ‘This slogan is going to become reality in the next phase, the phase of meetings of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Whether it will lead to an uprising or an action will depend not only and not so much on the Soviets, as on those who are still holding onto state power against the will of the people.’ Speaking with total assurance, he went on:
There is a half-regime which the people don’t believe in and in which it doesn’t believe itself, since it is internally dead. This half-regime is waiting for a historical broom to sweep away the genuine power of the revolutionary people … If this ephemeral regime makes a mad attempt to resuscitate itself, the popular masses, organized and armed, will repel it decisively … If the government tries to use the twenty-four or forty-eight hours left to it to stab the revolution in the back, we declare that the vanguard of the revolution will answer blow for blow, and steel for iron.45
Asked how he felt about having Left SRs in the Military Revolutionary Committee, Trotsky replied that only two of the five members were from that party, and that there were no differences of principle among them. When he was then asked the Soviet’s attitude to the municipal government, which was opposed to its purposes, he replied almost without thinking, ‘We’re going to disperse the city Duma.’ It was, however, also observed that Trotsky had to bluff and improvise in reply to the questions of whether bridges linking the centre of the city to the working-class suburbs would be closed, how the matter of food distribution would be handled, and whether an uprising would be supported by troops at the front. Even so, he did it with aplomb.
The closer the date of the uprising approached, the more Trotsky was called upon to speak; and he did so probably more often than any other revolutionary leader at the time. To a huge and ‘ecstatic’ gathering on 22 October, he promised: ‘if you support our policy to bring the revolution to victory, if you give the cause all your strength, if you support the Petrograd Soviet in this great cause without hesitation, then let us all swear our allegiance to the revolution. If you support this sacred oath which we are making, raise your hands.’46 A forest of hands was his answer.
Naturally, Trotsky’s demagogic fireworks alarmed the more moderate fellow-travellers of the revolution, to say nothing of those further to the right. Gorky described them as outrageous,47 while Milyukov in later years defined the bulk of the revolutionaries, including Trotsky, as state criminals.48 It was only to be expected that this would be the view of a representative of the regime that was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. As for the final verdict of history, many decades would have to pass before it was pronounced.
Trotsky’s emphasis on the importance of the Soviets, and his relatively lesser stress on the Bolshevik party, was of great significance. Indeed, as he was to be accused subsequently, he recognized that the Soviets had a much broader social base than any single political party could claim. In fact this was an unobtrusive way of making revolution by a party into one by the people, while working to realize the resolution of 10 October passed by the secret session of the Central Committee calling for an armed uprising. It was from that moment that one can count Trotsky as a true Leninist. A member of the Bolsheviks for barely two months, within two weeks of the uprising he had become a member of the first Politburo of the Central Committee alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov. Thus he was to witness the dissension among the party leadership when Zinoviev and Kamenev voted against the armed uprising.
This notorious meeting of the Central Committee took place on 22 October at the apartment of the Menshevik Sukhanov, a sworn opponent of an armed uprising. Sukhanov himself was absent, and it was his wife, a Bolshevik, who had arranged the session, which was to last ten hours, without his knowledge.49 A few days later, Kamenev and Zinoviev published their opposition to the Central Committee’s decision in Novaya zhizn’. They wrote that they were not the only Bolsheviks who felt that to launch an armed uprising ‘only a few days before the Congress of Soviets would be impermissible and fatal for the proletariat and the revolution … To stake everything on an uprising in the next few days would be an act of desperation. Our party is too strong and has before it too great a future to take such steps.’50 Kamenev and Zinoviev would frequently repent this act in public. Their statement of October 1917 would hang over their heads like a curse.
Alongside Lenin
All of Stalin’s efforts notwithstanding, there can be no argument about the fact that Trotsky was perceived—by admirers and detractors alike—as second only to Lenin in the revolution. Rabochaya gazeta of 6 November 1917 published an unsigned article entitled ‘The Beginning of the End’ which declared: ‘Lenin’s and Trotsky’s programme means the intensification of the terror and the deepening of the civil war. A return to freedom and civil peace are the slogans of yesterday’s friends and today’s enemies. The “socialism” of Lenin and Trotsky is based on the “military revolutionary committee” and the bayonets of the Petrograd and Kronstadt garrisons.’51 In his newspaper Novaya zhizn’, Gorky repeatedly published attacks on the two leaders. On 7 November the paper declared: ‘Lenin, Trotsky and their fellow-travellers are already poisoned by the toxin of power, as demonstrated by their shameful attitude to freedom of speech, freedom of the individual and all the rights for which [the democrats] struggled. These blind fanatics and unscrupulous adventurers are racing at breakneck speed towards something they call “social evolution”, but they are in fact on the path to anarchy, the ruin of the proletariat and the revolution.’52
Novaya zhizn’ put forward the view that the Bolshevik seizure of power was little more than an unfortunate episode, and that things would soon return to their proper place. For example, the philosopher and economist Vladimir Bazarov, who had been both a founding member of the Bolshevik faction and a philosophical opponent of Lenin, wrote that the Bolsheviks’ intention to divide the democratic camp would destroy the revolution:
Naturally, however, the terrible president of the Smolny republic, N. Lenin, who is obsessed by the maniacal notion of a ‘Soviet’ state, will never see this elementary truth. This elementary truth will never be recognized by the excellent L. Trotsky and the phalanx of revolutionary conquistadors who are attached to him and who are playing the leading rôle in contemporary Bolshevism. Experience has shown the Leninist obsessions to be incurable. As for the conquistadors, they have not the least concern for the institutions they have created. Their psychology is simple: the day, even if only the hour, is mine, and I will look beautiful in a classically revolutionary p
ose with the stamp of Robespierrean tragedy on my brow.53
The Mensheviks and liberals hoped that the Bolsheviks would not last long, and it seemed likely that their hopes might be fulfilled. Lenin and his comrades, however, saw further than their critics. For as long it was still possible—no later than December 1917, when the Bolshevik political police, the Cheka, was formed—the liberal press attacked the new regime, while the non-Bolshevik revolutionary parties condemned the dispersal of the Pre-Parliament, the arrest of the socialist ministers and the dictatorial measures adopted by the radicals, and viewed Lenin’s regime as ‘an enemy of the people and the revolution’.54
It is worth noting that while it was the losers who first employed the ominous term ‘enemies of the people’, resurrected from the lexicon of the French revolution, as early as 28 November 1917 Lenin chaired a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars—his new government—which passed a decree, tabled by him, ‘on the arrest of leading members of the central committee of the party of enemies of the people [Constitutional Democrats] and their trial by revolutionary tribunal’. Ironically, the only member of the government to vote against this decree was Stalin,55 perhaps as a sign from a relatively unnoticed member of the team that he too wished to be heard.
The report on the state of affairs was given at that meeting by Trotsky, who outlined the situation in Petrograd, described the counter-revolutionary movement that was beginning to take shape in the Don region and the Urals, and described the links between the Kadets and General Kaledin’s forces, concluding that the Kadet central committee was the centre of counter-revolution and calling on ‘all the labouring and exploited’ to take up arms.56 This was the death-knell for the Kadets’ political activity in Russia. The Left SRs and Menshevik-Internationalists were, it seems, prepared to collaborate with the Bolsheviks on social issues, the Left SRs in particular making their cooperation last until the summer of 1918, although neither they nor the Bolsheviks made any special efforts to preserve it. The Bolshevik intention to hold a monopoly of power soon came to dominate their behaviour. Trotsky, who before the coup had declared that ‘the minority will not be hurt’, now supported Lenin’s objection to allowing the ‘conciliators’ into the Soviet government.
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