Lev Bronstein took the name Trotsky from a fake passport he used to escape from Irkutsk in Siberia in 1902. It was the name of one of his former jailors. Exile in Siberia was not like normal prison. It was entombment in a vast and murderous wilderness. Doors on exile settlements were often not locked because there was nowhere to go and no avenues for escape that did not risk certain death. Starvation kept people where the Czar put them, at the meanest end of a frozen three thousand mile government breadline.
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Petulant youth. Picture taken by the Secret Police shortly after he cut the arms off his glasses, freeing his ears from 'the tyranny of ocular support'. |
On the night of his escape he made a dummy of himself out of pillows and sacking cloth filled with straw. The dummy was successful and it passed the nightly inspection of the guards. People often became listless and bed bound in Siberia and it was not unusual for a guard to be slack when taking roll call. Being a guard in Irkutsk was a form of punishment in itself. [i]
His baby daughter, Zina, rumbled Trotsky’s escape the next day. She jumped up on her father’s bed in her morning excitement and received the shock of her life. Trotsky and his first wife had decided to keep his escape attempt from their child because they feared she would become upset and tip off the authorities with a tantrum. She was a sensitive child and ill suited to shoulder her part of the sacrifices her parents had chosen to make for the global proletariat revolution.
Although Trotsky abandoned his first family he would eventually become, if not exactly the father of the Russian Revolution, a very important uncle. This has led many historians, including Winston Churchill, to conclude that it may not be possible to lead a revolution while changing nappies and reading bedtime stories to young children although Mohammed and the great Bolivar are said to have managed all three by their most zealous followers.
Trotsky never fully reconciled with his daughter. She never forgave him for the stunt with the dummy and he often grumbled to friends in letters that it was much ‘easier to diagnose the turmoil in the collective mind of the German petty bourgeoisie than to penetrate into the pain-laden recesses of Zina’s personality’. [ii]
Zina eventually committed suicide in Berlin in 1933. She was suffering from depression. Not only was her relationship with her father psychologically scarring but when Stalin seized control of Russia she was punished for being Trotsky’s daughter. Her first husband was sent to Siberia, her second husband died in a gulag in Siberia (Stalin, ever the over-achiever had to outdo the Czars by adding the Gulag work camps to Siberian exile). She was only allowed to leave the country under the punishing condition that she could only take one of her two children. She chose the boy. The girl was held by Stalin and in a show trial she was forced to admitting to being a Menshevik and once calling Uncle Joe a ‘poopy-pants’. She was shot out of a canon into a pit of dancing bears behind the Kremlin.
When Trotsky escaped Siberia he made his way to London and hid out with the Lenin's who were living in small rooming house in Kings Cross disguised as a German couple called ‘Richter’. [iii] Lenin made a big show of parading up and down the street in lederhosen on a daily basis to maintain the disguise. Trotsky felt this was unnecessary and this led to their first breach.
Writing under the pen-name ‘The Pen’ in the revolutionary newspaper The Spark he began to gather a following with a blunt but populist style that excited both agricultural peasants and young army conscripts alike. He spent the next five years traveling around Europe arguing with Marxists about Marxism and agitating people to revolution. On several occasions the agitating consisted of sneaking up on working men and women and poking them in the ribs while they brushed their teeth.
Working with such luminaries as Plekhanov, Akselrod, Zasulich, Martov, Potresov, Parvus, Lenin, Dr. Mandelberg and Viktor Adler he rose to prominence in the Soviet party calling for the overthrow of the Czar.
On January 22, 1905, great masses of workers in St. Petersburg, led by the priest Gapon, marched to the Winter Palace to submit a petition in which they set forth their grievances and appealed to the Czar to help improve their lot. The men, their wives and children were met by government troops who shot and sabred them. Thousands were killed and wounded. The day has become known in Russia as ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Further strikes and protests followed with the Russian peasantry leading the charge with the cry ‘Give Us Land’.
Lenin was hard at work trying to organize the opposition against the Czar and his ministers. Trotsky was living in Finland since the military police was mobilized against him and he didn’t want to end up back in Irkutsk. He spent his time writing articles in support of the workers and itching to get into the action. He describes this time in his autobiography:
‘At the end of September I moved still farther into the Finnish interior and took up my quarters in the woods on the shore of a lake, in an isolated pension, Rauha. This name in Finnish means “peace.” The huge pension was almost empty in the autumn.
A Swedish writer was staying there during these last days with an English actress, and they left without paying their bill. The proprietor rushed after them to Helsingfors. His wife was very ill; they could only keep her heart beating by means of champagne. I never saw her. She died while the proprietor was still away. Her body was in a room above me. The headwaiter went to Helsingfors to look for her husband. There was only a young boy left for service. A heavy snow fell. The pine-trees were wrapped in a white shroud. The pension was like death.
The young boy was away down in the kitchen, somewhere below the ground. Above me the dead woman was lying. I was alone. All in all, it was “rauha” peace. Not a soul, not even a sound. I wrote and walked. In the evening, the postman brought a bunch of St. Petersburg papers. I opened them, one after another. It was like a raging storm coming in through an open window. The strike was growing, and spreading from town to town. In the silence of the hotel, the rustling of the papers echoed in one’s ears like the rumble of an avalanche. The revolution was in full swing…
I demanded my bill from the boy, ordered horses, and left my “peace” to meet the avalanche. That same evening I was making a speech in the great hall of the Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg.’[iv]
Trotsky got back to Russia just in time to see everything fall to pieces. The Czar made some concessions to the people and the workers lost their stomach for strike and revolution in the face of a cold winter.
The Czar arrested Trotsky and sent him to jail in the Peter and Paul Fortress to await a trial. Due to a bureaucratic error, for the first two weeks he was put in the Peter and Paul Cake Shop where he gained five pounds licking the frosting off the giant Peter and Paul spoon.
When he was eventually transferred to jail in the Fortress, he was much more of a celebrity than in his previous incarceration and his supporters managed to smuggle books and writing materials into his prison cell. He relished the time in jail and over his life he often remarked that his time in jail were key in allowing him to develop his ideas in a way that he doubted he ever would have been able to do in the busy world where he had argue about Marxism with obstreperous Marxists and avoid Lenin and his lederhosen.
“Trotsky’s prison cell,” wrote fellow prisoner D. Sverchkov in At the Dawn of the Revolution, “soon became transformed into a sort of library. He was supplied with all the new books that deserved attention; he read them all, and the entire day, from morning until late at night, he was occupied with his literary work. ‘I feel splendid,’ he would say to us. ‘I sit and work and feel perfectly sure that I can’t be arrested. You will agree that under the conditions in Czarist Russia, that is rather an unusual sensation.’”
It was during this second spell in jail that he developed his concept of ‘Permanent Revolution’ which pictured a way for socialist utopias to occur in societies that had not achieved advanced capitalism, a key stage Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles had identified in their best selling murder mystery, The Communist Manifesto.[v]
Trotsky urged the proletariat to join forces with the peasantry to bypass the rule of the bourgeoisie. On the scales of an election the vote of one peasant weighed as much as the vote of one worker. In revolutionary situations this equality is illusory. A thousand railway men on strike are politically more effective than a million scattered villagers. Therefore, the role of modern social classes is determined not by numbers, but by social function. Democracy is but an illusion drawn in the minds of the illiterate by the political class. Only by engaging directly in revolutionary activity can the power relationship between the classes be redrawn.
After a month long court case the Czar had him sent once more into exile in Siberia.
This time he escaped with the help of a drunken Zyrianin who drove him on a Reindeer slay over the impossibly vast snowy desert from Beriozov to the Ural Mountains:
‘Early in the journey the drunken driver had a way of falling asleep frequently, and then the deer would stop. This promised trouble for both of us. In the end he did not even answer when I poked him. Then I took off his cap, his hair quickly froze, and he began to sober up.’[vi]
He had no idea how the man determined the direction of travel and found help in the remote villages of the exiled Skoptsy, the Christian sect who practiced self castration and mastectomy in an effort to get closer to God by being less distracted by sex than other penis and breast carriers.
Trotsky brought back a number of jokes from the Skoptsy that are still in circulation today, such as:
"What do you call the bit of skin at the end of a penis?"
- "A Man."
When he made it back to St Petersburg every one was so surprised they didn’t know how to react. Lenin had already escaped to Finland and had donned the lederhosen once more and was plotting the next stage of the revolution with his large and clinical brain.
In October of 1908 Trotsky began to publish another newspaper called Pravda (the truth) with A.A. Joffe. It was written to appeal to the mass of workers and was smuggled into Russia either across the Galician frontier or by way of the Black Sea.
For the next nine years the uncle of the revolution floated in various degrees of poverty around the edges of Europe meeting with Marxists and fighting for and then against the Bolshevist bloc who were prone to acts of terrorism to push on the revolutionary cause. Many letters and postcards were sent and received. Books bought in better times were pawned to feed his growing second family with his second wife Natalya.
Trotsky was in New York and writing for another newspaper, Novy Mir (New World) when the first world war broke out and the full force of the long built communist revolution was unleashed in Petrograd and swept through the country. Trotsky headed home and arrived just in time to be made General of the Red Army by Lenin. His first task was to chase down the Czar and defeat the White Army of loyalists still protecting him.
The White Army published cartoons depicting him as giant red Jewish devil relaxing over a pile of skulls on the battlements of the Kremlin in an effort to inspire a counter-revolution based on the latent anti-Semitism of the peasantry. It didn’t work.
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Trotsky as seen by the White Army, a double strut of battlement is conveniently positioned to hide his demonic penis, the showing of which would have made the whole thing ridiculous - much like the hiding of the Jesus penis in ecstatic crucifixion iconography. |
Trotsky wanted the Czar caught alive but when the red army finally captured him it was with a too small force to successfully transport the royal family Bolshevik territory. As The White Army rallied they took the decision to kill the whole family rather than let them escape.
The victory of the revolution brought on a tsunami of mass public drunkenness, which was frightening to behold. The orgy lasted many weeks and threatened to paralyze the country completely. Antonov Ovseenko, commander of the Petrograd garrison, wrote one of most well known accounts of the time in his memoirs:
‘Here and there crowds of ruffians, soldiers mostly, broke into wine cellars and pillaged wine shops. The few soldiers who preserved discipline were worn out by extra guard duty. Exhortations were of no avail. The cellars of the Winter Palace presented the most awkward problem… The Preobrazhensky regiment got completely drunk while on Palace guard duty. A relief regiment was dispatched in haste but they could not withstand the temptation either. They were followed by mixed guards hand picked from all the remaining regiments for their morality. They got drunk too. Members of senior Soviet committees were sent. These too, succumbed. Men of the armored brigades were ordered to disperse the crowds. Everyone swayed backwards and forwards on drunk, jelly legs. At dusk the mad bacchanals spread. The gay slogan: ‘Let us finish off these Czarist remnants!’ took hold of the crowd. We tried to stop them by walling up the entrances. They climbed through the windows. Someone had an idea to flood the cellars with water. The fire brigades sent to do this got themselves drunk before they could complete the task. The whole city was infected by drinking madness. Only after an intense effort was this alcoholic lunacy overcome…’ [vii]
The month long looting of the Winter Palaces wine cellars has been said to have led to the ‘longest hang over in history’.
Lenin and Trotsky and the other leaders of U.S.S.R. moved into the Kremlin. They had succeeded in their revolution but could not agree on how to build a socialist utopia. The country was too large and backward and uncooperative. Europe looked warily on, worrying about their own working class and fearing the contagion of socialism might spread. Trotsky argued the bourgeoisie needed to be rehabilitated since they were the only ones with the intellectual skills needed to run the nation effectively. Hardliners like Stalin held this against him as a weakness and treason against the workers’ victory.
Modernization and collectivization led to endless bloody sacrifices and internecine fighting. Lenin once gave Trotsky a wedgie during a sixteen hour meeting to discuss the proposed and forced collectivization of the Kulaks.
'I'll collectivize your Kulaks!' screamed Lenin, much to the delight of the rest of the assembly.
This led to another breach.
Stalin slowly gained power, coiling himself around the apparatus of the Soviet like a boa constrictor. He became the chief secretary and began rigging elections and building his power base.
Trotsky was too busy writing books and articles and arguing with Lenin to see what was happening and by the time Lenin had died and his will calling for Stalin to be removed from office was discovered, it was already too late. The will was hushed up by Stalin’s enforcers, Trotsky was doomed to follow a series ever more tightening wedgies both real and metaphorical. Towards the end he became so disenfranchised he appeared clownish. Boris Bajanov, Stalin’s secretary, witnessed it first hand:
‘The meeting ended with Trotsky being ordered to make a public statement admitting and apologizing for crimes against the workers’ state. Trotsky jumped from his seat and tried to slam the door of the throne room at the Kremlin. The hall door is massive, Trotsky pulled it with all his strength, but it was dead slow to open. In his fury he did not notice and made repeated attempts to bang it shut. Thus instead of witnessing a dramatic gesture indicating a historic breach, we watched a sorry figure struggling with a door.’[viii]
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Moscow Pride, 1936. |
It was a strange time in Russia. Gay Pride marches swept through the streets carrying large portraits of Stalin’s friends. This is one of Dzerzhinsky who delivered a long a violent speech in a high pitch scream against Trotsky in the Kremlin and then died of a heart attack in the lobby before the eyes of the Central Committee. [ix]
Stalin had Trotsky sent into exile and then expelled from Russia completely. No country other than Turkey would take Trotsky in, so fearful they were of the great revolutionary and former leader of the Red Army. For the first four years of exile he was housed on the island of Prinkipo, the largest of the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul. His living conditions were adequate but frustrating.
‘The floor of our old and dilapidated villa was painted with such queer paint in the spring that even now, four months later, tables, chairs, and our feet keep sticking to it…’[x] – the Archives 15July 1933.
Trotsky stayed here for four years, fearful of the day when he knew the KGB under direct orders from Stalin would come to take his life.
In letters he complained constantly of the need for better secretaries and ones that were bilingual and could plumb the insane, obscure depths The Third International had taken Marxist theory.
Being Trotsky’s secretary was a thankless task. Glazman, Butov, Blumkin, Sermuks, Posnansky, Klement and Wolf all died in his service, killed by Stalin as they went out to buy paperclips and dispatch Trotsky’s articles to the dwindling anti-Stalin communist press.
Trotsky applied to get travel visas to safer countries, far from Stalin’s reach but was turned down everywhere. British socialists petitioned the government on his behalf but were turned down by the fearful Labor government of Ramsey MacDonald.
Churchill, obviously still smarting over the defeat of his anti-Bolshevik ‘crusade of fourteen nations’ invasion of Russia (1918–1920), wrote a triumphantly mocking essay calling him: ‘The Ogre of Europe’. ‘Trotsky whose frown once meted death to thousands, sits consulate, a bundle of old rags stranded on the shores of the Black Sea.' After a while Churchill had second thoughts and when he included the essay in his book Great Contemporaries, he replaced ‘bundle of old rags’ with ‘Trotsky- a skin of malice.’[xi]
Stalin and the rest of the world’s leaders were so successful into turning Marxism and the Russian communism into the insane project of a murderous dictator that young people who in the 1930’s faced executioners with the cry ‘Long Live Trotsky!’ often had no more inkling of his real life and ideas than sand crabs. [xi]
Trotsky eventually made it to Mexico by the outbreak of the Second World War. Stalin was growing more murderous and unhinged by the year. In an almost endless series of show trials everyone who had ever met Trotsky was forced into making outrageous confessions against him.
When he arrived in Mexico he had been expelled from Russia, Turkey, France and Norway. He wasn’t expecting a warm welcome but he was met at the port by the artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frieda Kahlo who were active communists. They had not been contaminated by Stalin’s propaganda and knew only of Trotsky’s glories and so they rolled out the red carpet red carpet.
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Frieda Kahlo (centre). |
Kahlo, a tortured enigmatic and hirsute cripple, enchanted Trotsky and they embarked on an affair right under the nose of Diego and Trotsky’s long suffering second wife, Natalya.
Trotsky’s time in Mexico wasn’t all sleeping around with artists however. He worked hard to clear himself of the continuous slander of Stalin’s propaganda. He suffered as friends and family were killed across Europe. He became a collector of cacti. [xiii] He tried to defend the American Communist Party from the inquiry of the Dies Committee which was the forerunner of McCarthyism. He negotiated the sale of his archives to Harvard for a ridiculously small sum. He waited for the assassination attempt he knew was coming. If the assassins didn’t come he expected to die from his high and ever rising blood pressure.
In 1940 Mexican painter David Siqeiros led a commando attack on Trotsky’s house. Siqeiros was a Stalinist who had led a garrison in the Spanish Civil War. Trotsky hid under the bed with his wife as they fired over two hundred rounds into the room and then left, dropping a bomb. Amazingly, nobody was hurt in the attack. [xiv]
Trotsky was so calm after the attack that the Chief of the Mexican police, Colonel Salazar, instead of tracking down the culprits instead launched an investigation trying to prove that Trotsky had planned the whole thing himself:
“He was in pajamas, over which he had slipped a dressing gown. He greeted me with friendliness and a surprising calm and I asked him if he suspected anybody,
‘I most certainly do!’ he replied in very decided tone of voice. ‘Come…’
He put his right arm about me and led me towards the rabbit hutches. With sparkling eyes and sly smile he stopped and glanced around him (as if) to make sure that we were alone. Placing his right hand near his mouth to make the confidence more secret he said in a low voice and with deep conviction:
‘The author of the attack is Joseph Stalin the leader of the U.S.S.R.’”[xv]
Colonel Salazar eventually realized Trotsky was telling the truth, but only after he had been killed by an assassin sent by Stalin.
On 20th August of 1940 a young man who had been introduced as a potential supporter managed to get a private meeting with Trotsky to discuss an article he had written on French Marxism. As Trotsky read the article he pulled out an ice-pick from his raincoat and hacked it down hard into his skull. It did not kill him immediately and they fell together onto the floor in a struggle. Bodyguards burst into the room and Trotsky was rushed to hospital where he died the next day. At the funeral many people remarked that a man carrying a raincoat in the hot Mexican summer should not perhaps have been granted a private interview.
Trotsky’s final words, said to his wife Natalya on his deathbed were:
“I do not want them to undress me… I want you to undress me.”[xvi]
His final written statement, Trotsky’s Testament, written just a few months before his death now adorns the inside of pizza boxes from The Worker Pizza Co:
Trotsky's Testament
By Leon Trotsky
My high (and still rising) blood pressure is deceiving those near me about my actual condition. I am active and able to work but the outcome is evidently near. These lines will be made public after my death.
I have no need to refute here once again the stupid and vile slander of Stalin and his agents: there is not a single spot on my revolutionary honour. I have never entered, either directly or indirectly, into any behind-the-scenes agreements or even negotiations with the enemies of the working class. Thousands of Stalin's opponents have fallen victims of similar false accusations. The new revolutionary generations will rehabilitate their political honour and deal with the Kremlin executioners according to their deserts.
I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to me through the most difficult hours of my life. I do not name anyone in particular because I cannot name them all.
However, I consider myself justified in making an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.
For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. 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. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.
Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
L. Trotsky
February 27, 1940
Coiyoacan.
All the possessions remaining after my death, all my literary rights (income from my books, articles, etc.) are to be placed at the disposal of my wife, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. February 27, 1940, L. Trotsky.
In case we both die [The rest of the page is blank.]
March 3, 1940
The nature of my illness (high and rising blood pressure) is such - as I understand it - that the end must come suddenly, most likely - again, this is my personal hypothesis - through a brain haemorrhage. This is the best possible end I can wish for. It is possible, however, that I am mistaken (I have no desire to read special books on this subject and the physicians naturally will not tell the truth). If the sclerosis should assume a protracted character and I should be threatened with a long-drawn-out invalidism (at present I feel, on the contrary, rather a surge of spiritual energy because of the high blood pressure, but this will not last long), then I reserve the right to determine for myself the time of my death. The 'suicide' (if such a term is appropriate in this connection) will not in any respect be an expression of an outburst of despair or hopelessness. Natasha and I said more than once that one may arrive at such a physical condition that it would be better to cut short one's own life or, more correctly, the too slow process of dying ... But whatever may be the circumstances of my death I shall die with unshaken faith in the communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion.
[i] As Solzhenitsyn wrote in a letter to the Irkutsk tourist board in 2006, ‘I would rather be a spore of mold in the dankest corner of the foulest kitchen in Kiev than be a bejeweled king in Irkutsk’. The Complete Letters of Alesksandr Solzhenitsyn, Volume 5, Minsk University Press, 2010, p1873.
[ii] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Outcast, London, New York, Oxford University Press, 1963, p150.
[iii] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Armed, New York, Oxford University Press, 1954, p57.
[iv] Trotsky, Leon, My Life, Chapter 13: ‘The Return to Russia’.
[v] The Communist Manifesto sat at the top of the Times bestseller list from its publication in 1848 right up to the Crimea War. It still remains popular beach reading today due to its thumping plot and many cunning twists. For who killed the workingman? Why the owners and controllers of the means of production of course.
[vi] Trotsky, Leon, My Life, Chapter 15: ‘Trial, Exile, Escape’.
[vii] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Armed, New York, Oxford University Press, 1954, p322.
[viii] Bajanov, Boris, Avec Staline dans le Kremlin, Paris, 1930. p76-77.
[ix] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Unarmed, New York, Oxford University Press, 1959, p279.
[x] Trotsky, Leon, The Trotsky Archives, Harvard, Letter dated 15July 1933.
[xi] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Outcast, London, New York, Oxford University Press, 1963, p19.
[xii] Ibid p124.
[xiii] ibid p448.
[xiv] Ibid p487.
[xv] Salazar, Leandro, Murder in Mexico, Secker and Warburg, 1942.
[xvi] Deutscher, Issac, The Prophet Outcast, London, New York, Oxford University Press, 1963, p508.
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