Young Trotsky: the Iskra years, 1902-1904

The “state of siege” on which Lenin insisted with such energy requires “full powers”. The practice of organised distrust demands an iron hand. The system of Terror is crowned by a Robespierre. Comrade Lenin reviewed the members of the Party in his mind, and reached the conclusion that this iron hand could be only himself. And he was right. The hegemony of Social Democracy in the struggle for emancipation meant, according to the “state of siege”, the hegemony of Lenin over Social Democracy. – Report of the Siberian Delegation, 1903

When we last saw young Bronstein – now known as Trotsky – he was preparing to take Europe by storm. He had got off to the auspicious start of waking Lenin at an unreasonable hour of the morning to announce his arrival. His journey from his remote place of exile in Siberia to Lenin’s residence in London brought him into the path of a number of prominent Social Democrats, many of whom were instrumental in getting him to his next stop along the route. (In the milieu of Russian social democracy abroad, comrades helped comrades any way they could; this tiny, scattered group of people was necessarily efficient at getting a recent escapee from pillar to post, often providing the means from their own pockets or that of the Party.)

Unfortunately I was unable to find any pictures of Trotsky at this stage in his life. (Hey, come back here!) However, we do have a couple of colourful descriptions from the people he met along his way. The great Jewish socialist Vladimir Medem records in his memoirs that Trotsky was wearing yellow shoes when they met, something he found to be both extravagant and dandyish; his contemporary Petr Garvi described Trotsky as a poseur ready to “mount the scaffold for the sake of a pose”. Both make some less than flattering observations about his personality. And his striking physical appearance was the subject of some rather melodramatic phrases:

He resembled his sister [Olga, who was present at the meeting of Medem and Trotsky]. True, her eyes were dark, his light grey; but both had something about their faces which made them look like birds of prey. It was more striking with him because of his distinctive mouth – large, curved, mordant. It was a terrible mouth. - from Vladimir Medem’s memoirs, trans./ed Portnoy

The cold sparkle of his eyes beneath his pince-nez, the cold metallic timbre of his voice, the cold correctness and sharpness of his speech… finally, the marked care of his appearance, clothes, gestures; all this somehow distanced one from Trotsky, sometimes even repelled one… – Garvi, Memoirs of a Social Democrat, my own translation

Of course, both men wrote their memoirs well after the fact, and their descriptions are undoubtedly coloured by subsequent political clashes; Garvi’s in particular reeks of utter contempt. As we will see in future instalments, this is fairly typical of first-hand accounts about Trotsky. His contemporaries tended to write their memoirs in defeat rather than in the heat of the action, and their accounts are usually heavily skewed: sometimes by allegiance to the man, but more often by resentment, by anger or by the necessity – increasingly urgent after Lenin’s death in 1924 – of dissociating oneself from Trotsky as much as possible.

As for Lenin, his wife Krupskaia alleges in her memoirs that he was enthusiastic about Trotsky’s arrival, and this would seem to be borne out by his initial actions. Not only did Lenin send the young man abroad to raise money for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), he subsequently pushed for him to be co-opted onto the editorial board of Iskra (The Spark), the RSDLP’s illegal paper. The attempt was not successful, but whether Lenin was acting out of avuncular interest or – as is generally thought – in a bid to gain a majority on the editorial board, he clearly saw Trotsky as useful. However, when the RSDLP suffered a sudden and violent schism on the issue of centralisation (and the greater issue of revolutionary action), Trotsky did not side with Lenin. Very far from it.

Trotsky developed a strong antipathy for Lenin and his ideas. Not only did he side with the Mensheviks (or “minority men”, who were in fact a majority at this stage) against centralisation and against aggressive revolutionary action, he went on to launch several written attacks on Lenin. You can see a typically florid example at the head of this piece.

Trotsky and Lenin would reconcile only in 1917, when they came to a sudden accord on revolutionary method and formed what appears to have been a close and efficient working partnership. However, after Lenin’s death and the rise of Stalin, proving one’s loyalty to Lenin became a matter of political (and sometimes literal) life and death. For Trotsky, writing his memoirs from exile, this was an extremely complicated task; his account of the years 1902-1904 is a masterpiece of convoluted and counterintuitive logic which very nearly succeeds in convincing the reader that while Lenin was, of course, utterly right all along, Trotsky was not wrong to oppose him, and that his initial opposition was merely a step along the road to true Bolshevism. It is every bit as uncomfortable and contradictory as it sounds.

The political developments of 1902-1904 would reflect negatively on Trotsky in years to come. But these years also brought him a constant source of love and support in the form of Natalia Sedova, whom he met in Paris on his lecture tour on behalf of the RSDLP (she records that his impression of Paris was that “it looks like Odessa, but Odessa is better”). Although he remained legally married to Alexandra Sokolovskaia, Sedova was soon known as his wife. She stayed with him until his death, and was a zealous guardian of his legacy until her own death in 1962.

Stay tuned for the next instalment, in which we will see how a young revolutionary from the Kherson countryside ended up briefly running St Petersburg. Power! Violence! Chaos! Natty tailored suits! The year 1905 has it all!

Recommended reading:

Tariq Ali, Introducing Trotsky and Marxism, Totem Books, ISBN 978-1840461558

Formerly Trotsky for Beginners (I have a copy of the old version with a beautiful brown-paper cover and Trotsky looking determined with a giant pen). The best general introduction to Trotsky and his time that I can think of. Written with humour, and excellent at giving a clear and simple outline of a frequently complicated life. Not to be sniffed at.

Geoffrey Swain, Trotsky (Profiles in Power series), Longman, ISBN 978-0582771901

A recent biography by a leading authority in Trotsky studies. Clearly structured and accessible to beginners, Swain’s analysis has been the centre of a great deal of controversy due to his openly critical stance on his subject. In this reviewer’s opinion, this controversy reflects very well on this challenging and uncompromising piece of scholarship. Read it, and debate with it.