Читать книгу Trotsky in New York, 1917 - Kenneth D. Ackerman - Страница 10

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SAINT MARKS PLACE

“To be a Soviet Commissar one must first have swept the offices of the Novyi Mir.”⁷³

—Morris Hillquit, circa 1920

“His personal life? What should I know about his personal life? . . . Every day Leon Trotsky worked with me, all day long at that desk where you sit. What should I care if he had one wife or two, two children or a dozen? Or that he lived in the Bronx and drank tea? Read his books, find out what he thinks—then you will know Leon Trotsky.”⁷⁴

—Gregory Weinstein, Novy Mir editor, speaking in late 1917

EARLY THE NEXT morning, his first full day in America, Trotsky took the subway, his first chance to rub elbows with the local working class. Before Brooklyn, first he had to spend a day at his new office.

A New York friend doubtless joined him to make sure he didn’t get hopelessly lost along the way. Leaving the Astor House, he would have grabbed the Sixth Avenue elevated train at Forty-Second Street. After seven stops of bone-rattling twists and turns on the screeching rails, watching rooftops and third-story windows sweep by at eye level, Trotsky would have reached West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. From here, West Eighth became East Eighth at Fifth Avenue. It changed names again after Broadway to become Saint Marks Place. At Second Avenue, Trotsky would have passed the garish marquees of the Yiddish theaters and the popular Monopole Café. Back then, this spot began the vast Jewish Lower East Side, which stretched to the East River and south beyond Grand Street toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

After Second Avenue, Saint Marks Place changed personality and became quietly residential. Old four-story brownstones lined the sidewalks on both sides. Near the end of the block came number 77, a modest row house with signs for a dentist’s and a doctor’s office upstairs and mail slots for a few private apartments. Stairs led down to a basement, and by the door hung a sign on a cast-iron railing that said (Novy Mir). Here, hidden in quiet obscurity, beat the robust heart of American Bolshevism.

This is where Trotsky came that morning. Opening the door, he found himself immediately surrounded by all things Russian: Russian voices, Russian smells, Russian papers, Russian posters on the cracked walls. The whole cellar consisted of three cramped rooms and a hallway crammed with desks, cabinets, a telephone, and piles of paper. A plaque of Leo Tolstoy decorated a wall over a fireplace. Thick cigarette smoke clouded the air. Ashtrays overflowed onto the floor, and teacups cluttered any empty space. From a back room came the clicking of a linotype machine and the hum of a small printing press. Three small windows barely peeking above the sidewalk provided the only trickle of daylight.

Novy Mir sold only eight thousand copies each day, eight flimsy pages. The penny apiece it cost on New York street corners and two cents elsewhere didn’t come close to covering expenses: rent, overhead, and the $20 a week it paid a few full-time workers. Most contributors wrote for free. The paper sold advertisements to cover the difference, and it welcomed any capitalist who paid good money. Budweiser beer, Piedmont tobacco, the International Phonograph Company, the American Line shipping company, and even a few local banks all advertised in Novy Mir.

But those eight thousand copies made Novy Mir arguably the most impactful Russian journal in the Western Hemisphere, easily overshadowing the city’s three larger-circulation Russian dailies, Russkii Golos, Russkoe Slovo, and the reactionary Russkaya Zemla. Novy Mir’s readers included Europeans like Vladimir Lenin and Menshevik leader Julius Martov, plus comrades in Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. Its contributors would read like a who’s who of future leaders of post-1917 Bolshevik Russia, starting with Trotsky and Bukharin. The paper’s editorial slant teetered between Bolshevik and Menshevik, though Bukharin’s arrival in October had tipped the balance decidedly toward Lenin’s faction.

Trotsky needed no introductions here. He knew every face in the room. In a few minutes, he and they all chatted away in Russian. They called him Lev Davidovich, or just “comrade.”

Gregory Gdaly Weinstein, an old friend from Europe and now Novy Mir’s editor in chief, sat at the largest desk.⁷⁵ Trotsky knew Weinstein from having shared the excitement of the 1905 uprising in Saint Petersburg. Born in Vilna and a public schoolteacher at the time, Weinstein had ended up, like Trotsky, getting arrested, jailed in Brest-Litovsk, and sentenced to four years of “penal servitude” in Siberia, prison slave labor rather than simple exile. He escaped after ten days, reached Paris and then Switzerland, where he earned a degree at the University of Geneva. Then he moved to New York.

Weinstein hardly looked the radical fugitive. Mild mannered with a slight frame and scraggly beard, he had what one friend called a “humorous way of meeting embarrassing situations—he would simply smile them away.”⁷⁶ He was trained as a statistician, and even the United States government had trusted Weinstein enough to once hire him to study conditions at Ellis Island. He had also applied for a job doing charity work for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).

Bukharin sat at another desk and, near him, twenty-six-year-old Grigorii Chudnovsky, one of Trotsky’s protégés from Paris and his newspaper there, Nashe Slovo. Chudnovsky, like Bukharin, had joined the revolutionary cause as a teenager during the 1905 Saint Petersburg uprising. Like the others, Chudnovsky had won himself a tsarist arrest and Siberian exile and had escaped. Most recently, he had left Paris for Copenhagen, then made his way to America and Novy Mir. Natalya described Chudnovsky as “an overgrown boy with a bad complexion and somewhat curly hair, a student who was perhaps too talkative for our taste and quick to flare up.”⁷⁷ Trotsky himself considered him “impressionable and hot-headed.” But here, in New York, he was a friendly face in a foreign country.⁷⁸

Others scampered in and out, but these four now comprised the paper’s core staff: Weinstein, Bukharin, Chudnovsky, and Trotsky. And what a rarified group they made: four escaped jailbirds, convicted Russian radicals, veterans of Siberian exiles and the failed 1905 Soviet uprising, all now marooned in America until . . . when? The end of the world war? The revolution? And if revolution never came? Their profession in the meantime: to theorize, proselytize, and lay groundwork for achieving their life’s goal of overthrowing the tsar and establishing socialism. It was good steady work.

Weinstein gave Trotsky a desk in a corner—no private offices here—surrounded by mountains of papers and manuscripts. They quickly came to terms. Weinstein would pay Trotsky $20 each week. Trotsky would deliver two or three columns, plus he could write more for any other newspaper he pleased and give all the speeches he wanted. Already Trotsky planned to contribute to at least three others: the Call, the Volkszeitung, and the Forward. For Weinstein, it was a bargain. With Trotsky, he got not only a celebrity writer but someone who actually could help him run the newspaper—someone who understood publishing, deadlines, and budgets, the need to fill column inches with catchy prose.

Trotsky dashed off a quick column for the next morning’s edition titled “” (Long Live Struggle!), mostly a spoof of his adventures on the Montserrat. For the first time, New Yorkers would see the soon-common byline H. .⁷⁹

But more important that first day, two other newspapers had asked to interview Trotsky. These weren’t ignorant American English speakers who knew nothing about their movement but rather the two leading voices of American socialism, the Forward and the New York Call. These were people Trotsky actually cared about.

Weinstein didn’t bother to clean the office for these guests. The Yiddish-language Forward sent both a reporter and a photographer for the job. The photographer asked Trotsky to step outside onto Saint Marks Place for the picture, the street making a nicer background than the cluttered basement. Trotsky ignored the cold and took his coat off for the photo, appearing in suit, vest, and tie. Forward readers wanted to see this man’s face, this Trotsky, this Russian Jew who defied the tsar. The large bulk of New York’s immigrant Jews, who now packed the Lower East Side, making it the most densely populated place on earth, had come fleeing violence and organized anti-Semitism from a Russian Empire that still included Poland and Ukraine.

Hatred of Romanovs, Cossacks, and tsarist bureaucrats ran thick here. The Forward would put Trotsky’s photo on its front page.

The Forward in 1917 held a unique place in both this neighborhood and America as a whole, largest by far of New York’s half dozen Yiddish newspapers and also the largest daily socialist publication in the country. The Forward’s founder, Abraham Cahan, a Russian himself, had come to New York in 1882 and become fluent in English. He considered himself second to none in launching American socialism. His paper had backed Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, in every race he ran since 1900.

But Cahan also had good business sense and had built the Forward into a powerhouse, combining socialism with worldly advice to Jewish immigrants. With its two hundred thousand–plus circulation, rivaling any English-language daily in the city besides Hearst’s American or Pulitzer’s World, the Forward had grown rich and recently moved into its own new skyscraper, a ten-story building that towered over the Lower East Side from its perch on East Broadway, facing Seward Park.

Normally, newspapers this big affiliated with one of the country’s dominant political parties, the Democrats or Republicans. But Cahan knew better. His Forward readers had no love for either. In 1917 New York’s Democratic Party was still controlled by Tammany Hall, the venerable organization rife with corruption and limited room for greenhorn Jews. True, Tammany had backed a few labor-reform laws after the ghastly 1911 fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory had killed 146 employees, mostly young women, a tragedy traced to locked doors, rotted fire hoses, and other safety lapses.⁸⁰ But Tammany had come late to the cause, and Republicans, for their part, had little room for left-wing views that immigrants either brought from the Old Country or learned working in sweatshops.

For Trotsky, this should have been the friendliest possible interview. But as he sat down with the Forward reporter (the paper didn’t print a byline, so we don’t know his name), the conversation took an odd turn. Could Comrade Trotsky speak to us in Yiddish? It seemed only natural for a Jew speaking to a Jewish newspaper. Yiddish, after all, was the street language of Jewish shtetls across Europe and now the dominant tongue of the Jewish East Side with its Yiddish theaters, Yiddish cafés, Yiddish street signs, Yiddish books, and Yiddish newspapers.

But no. To their apparent surprise, Trotsky demurred. He knew a few words and phrases, he conceded, but little beyond that. For all his fluency in Russian, German, and French, Trotsky had never mastered his own people’s language. In fact, Trotsky had grown up on a farm, not in a shtetl. His parents at home spoke Russian and Ukrainian, barely practiced religion, and gave him only bare minimum religious schooling. In Vienna, Trotsky had enjoyed frequenting two popular cafés where they spoke Yiddish as much as German, the Café Central and the Café Arkadian, where he enjoyed haggling over politics, drinking tea, and playing chess. But he never knew enough Yiddish to give a speech or write an article in it.

The Forward reporter took this down politely, putting it this way: “[Trotsky] had even applied himself once to the study of Yiddish in order to be able to understand Jewish revolutionary literature [and] even had a greater desire to master Hebrew, but unfortunately he had no time for that.” As a result, his knowledge was “not deep. We don’t tell you this as something to be proud of. We only pass over the facts.”⁸¹ Trotsky tried to make a joke of it. “I have never sweated like now when I am under the crossfire of masters of the [journalistic] trade,” he told the reporter, “not even when the political police would give me the third degree.”⁸² After that, they changed the subject.⁸³

Just as curious was his performance with the New York Call. The Call too had a special place in New York City, as the semiofficial arm of the Socialist Party, giving it a prominence beyond its fourteen-thousand-copy circulation. It was a staple for political opinion leaders. The Call apparently brought a translator so that Trotsky could chat away comfortably in Russian, and it took a photograph of him for its front page. Trotsky sat at his desk, they at his side, as they peppered him with questions. This time, though, the talk turned to politics, and Trotsky chose to jump right in with a slam at his new country.

“I do not like to criticize a nation that extends the hospitality that the United States has afforded me,” he told them, “but”—a significant but—“it does not seem possible that President Wilson’s efforts toward peace and intervention in the European war can bring results.”⁸⁴ Why? Because America was capitalist and ruled by its moneyed class, which had no interest in stopping the gravy train of rich wartime weapons contracts. Woodrow Wilson’s meddling in Europe looked two-faced, Trotsky went on, like “the smug, middle class merchant who exploits the poor on weekdays and then goes to church on Sundays, piously asking absolution for his sins.”

He went no easier on the Europeans. Why do France and Germany keep fighting? “They fear the day of reckoning,” Trotsky told them. With peace, “they must give accounting to their subjects for the wastage of human life and money.” And the result? After the war, “social unrest will eclipse anything the earth has ever seen. The workers will demand a heavy accounting of their masters, and the future alone can tell what forms their protests will take.”⁸⁵

Only the United States, still a noncombatant, fell outside Trotsky’s grim prophesy, at least so long as it stayed out of the war. The reporter from the Call seemed not at all surprised by the diatribe. He knew the socialist line. He read Novy Mir.

Late in the day, they finished setting up the next morning’s Novy Mir, sent it to the printer, and then set out for Brooklyn and the dinner meeting that night at Ludwig Lore’s apartment. Trotsky’s new colleagues Bukharin and Chudnovsky joined him for the ride, and two other Novy Mir contributors would meet them there. One was a fellow Russian named V. Volodarsky coming in from Philadelphia. The other, coming from New Jersey, was Alexandra Kollontai. They all knew Kollontai from Europe, their elegant comrade from Saint Petersburg. They spoke to her often. These days she was the only one, it seemed, who still got along well with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

ALEXANDRA MIKHAILOVNA KOLLONTAI came from aristocratic stock. Born in Saint Petersburg in 1872, she was the daughter of a Russian general, with Cossack military officers decorating the family tree. But her father taught her liberal ideas. He favored a constitutional monarchy over an absolute tsar and sent her to Western Europe for schooling. At home, the family spoke French and English, and Finnish to the servants. Alexandra married a young military student and had a son with him, Mikhail (Misha), born in 1894, but the marriage collapsed and she left her husband to travel and raise the son on her own.

A generation later, in the 1930s, after Kollontai became world famous as Bolshevik Russia’s foremost women’s advocate, its people’s commissar for social welfare, and its ambassador to Norway, she often would be fingered as the inspiration for Greta Garbo’s character in the 1939 film Ninotchka. But the real Comrade Kollontai was far more formidable than any fictional movie character.

She first joined the socialist underground on a European trip, agreeing to smuggle letters from radicals in Switzerland to allies back home. Back in Saint Petersburg, she joined the local Bolsheviks. But her real initiation, the shock that glued her to a lifetime cause, came on January 5, 1905, the day she witnessed Bloody Sunday. Kollontai had decided that day to join the crowd, behind militant Russian Orthodox priest Father Georgy Gapon, that marched on the Winter Palace to ask Tsar Nicholas II for a constitution. Kollontai later described the scene, how she stood watching the tens of thousands of neatly dressed peasants carrying crosses, religious icons, and portraits of the tsar himself, whom they still worshipped as God’s appointed leader. She recalled the white snow, the brilliant sun, the hours of waiting, then her surprise as gunshots rang out, soldiers on horseback charged with drawn swords, and bodies began to fall. She ran for safety with the others. Before it was over, the soldiers had killed an estimated five hundred unarmed, peaceful marchers, including women and children, the spark that set off a year of strikes, protests, and demands for reform.⁸⁶

Seeing the massacre, Kollontai had immersed herself in the subsequent turmoil. She volunteered to raise money for strikers and served the local Bolshevik organization as its treasurer. In October workers declared a general strike in Saint Petersburg. More than two hundred factories joined the protest, led by the workers themselves through a unique new body called the Saint Petersburg Workers Soviet. Bolshevik and Menshevik leaders ridiculed the idea, but not Kollontai. She joined friends from a local factory to attend one of the soviet’s first meetings. Here she met the soviet’s articulate young leader, the man called Trotsky.

Trotsky had spent much of 1905 hiding in nearby Finland. After returning to Russia in January with a false passport, he had retreated after Natalya had been arrested and police began looking for him too. But hearing about the general strike, he rushed to Saint Petersburg, started speaking out at meetings of the soviet, and soon won himself a leadership post as deputy to the chairman. Kollontai met Trotsky, heard him speak, and saw how he mesmerized the crowd. She appreciated how he, unlike other party functionaries, “instinctively grasped [the soviet’s] significance, outlining with graphic clarity the tasks of this new organization of workers unity.”⁸⁷

Trotsky would lead the soviet in different capacities for fifty-two days, making himself one of the most visible radicals in the country. In late October, Tsar Nicholas II issued a manifesto promising constitutional rights, but Trotsky denounced it as a fraud. Police arrested the soviet’s chairman in November, so it tapped Trotsky to take his place. To win public support, Trotsky pressed for an eight-hour workday and called on citizens not to pay taxes until the government kept its political promises. As government crackdowns grew increasingly violent, Trotsky moved that they end the general strike.

Finally, on December 3, police came and arrested all the remaining soviet leaders in one clean sweep. But the drama didn’t end there, and Kollontai had a ringside seat for the finale. The tsarist government decided to place fifty-two leaders of the Soviet on public trial as a single group, an attempt to discredit them all. The weeks-long proceeding became a public spectacle. Threatened with eight years of hard labor and a lifetime exile in Siberia, the defendants chose Trotsky to speak for them in open court on the most serious charge against them, that of insurrection, or threatening violence against the Russian state.

Trotsky’s chance to address the court came on October 4, 1906, and he gave a memorable speech widely reported at the time. Rather than deny the charge, he embraced it to denounce the regime. He quoted recent disclosures that tsarist officials had planned anti-Jewish pogroms to distract attention from the workers movement. He then asked the court what it meant to oppose the existing “form of government”:

And if you tell me that pogroms, the arson, the violence . . . if you tell me that Kishinev, Odessa, Bialystock [places where recent violence had killed several hundred Russian Jews] represent the “form of government” of the Russian Empire, then—yes, then I recognize, together with the prosecution, that in October and November we were arming ourselves against the form of government of the Russian Empire.⁸⁸

It was perhaps the most admirable moment of his life to that point. The court cleared the defendants of insurrection but sentenced Trotsky and a dozen others to lifetime exile in Siberia, leading to Trotsky’s second escape.

Alexandra Kollontai, having seen this drama play out in her city, became a Menshevik for the next decade, until the world war. She kept contact with Trotsky, writing occasionally for his Paris newspaper Nashe Slovo. She was living in Berlin in 1914 when war broke out. As a Russian, she had to flee. She landed in Sweden but soon found herself in trouble again, this time arrested for antiwar agitation and expelled from the country. Finally she settled in Norway, where she helped build a network to smuggle messages between radicals into and out of Russia. It was in this process that she became a friend and pen pal to the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

As pen pals, Kollontai and Lenin argued at first over pacifism and disarmament. She supported both; Lenin thought the ideas nonsense. She wrote a propaganda pamphlet called “Who Needs War” that ultimately would be translated into multiple languages and would reach millions of German and Russian soldiers on the front, urging them not to fight. But even more important, Kollontai decided to back Lenin on his proposal for the watershed 1915 Zimmerwald conference, helped him refine it, and persuaded Norway’s delegation to support him, earning her wings as a Bolshevik. “For it is completely clear now that no one is fighting the war as effectively as Lenin,” she wrote.⁸⁹ When the chance came to help Lenin in America, she jumped at it.

It was Ludwig Lore, editor of the New Yorker Volkszeitung, who invited Kollontai to visit the United States for a four-month speaking tour in 1915. Their common friend Karl Liebnecht, a German socialist, had recommended her to Lore as a speaker, and Kollontai was thrilled. “This is so incredibly good that I am gasping with joy and am afraid to believe it,” she told one friend on receiving the invitation.⁹⁰

Lore, for his part, had no regrets. Traveling third class to save money, he and Kollontai crisscrossed the country that year, from New York to San Francisco, Denver to Milwaukee, giving ten speeches to packed halls in Chicago alone. He saw her dazzle crowds whether she spoke English, German, French, Russian, Finnish, or Norwegian. “A very lively and emotional personality,” one critic wrote after watching her address more than a thousand rowdy leftists in New York “with fiery improvisation . . . wit and animation.”⁹¹

Along the way, she and Ludwig Lore became friends, sharing hours together on trains, waiting for meetings, grabbing quick dinners at cheap hotels. Her “attractive and polished exterior at once betrayed her aristocratic origin,” Lore wrote admiringly about Kollontai. She was “a simply friendly creature, too intensely interested in the ‘revolution’ to care what she ate or wore.”⁹² By the time they finished, Kollontai had addressed some 123 meetings in eighty cities.

Vladimir Lenin had quickly grasped the opportunity presented by Kollontai’s American trip and urged her to go. It was a chance for her to raise money, spread propaganda, and basically be his eyes and ears in the New World. As soon as she told Lenin about the invitation in early 1915, Lenin jumped on the bandwagon. “We have built not a few hopes on that trip,” Lenin wrote to her from Switzerland, including first and foremost “securing financial help which is extremely important to us for all those urgent matters.”⁹³

Kollontai agreed. “On my trip to the States I want to spread your ideas as widely as possible,” she wrote back. “I’ve no time for myself now.”⁹⁴

Americans had money, everyone knew that, and Lenin hoped to tap some of it. But he had no idea what Americans thought, where they stood on big issues, or if they even knew about his Bolshevik ideas. He peppered Kollontai with questions. “And what is Eugene Debs? Occasionally he writes in a revolutionary manner. Or is he another milksop, a la Kautsky?” Lenin asked, referring to Karl Kautsky, a German socialist who in 1914 had refused to oppose German war funding.⁹⁵ But usually Lenin just stuck to the main point: “Concerning money, I saw with regret from your letter that so far you have not succeeded in collecting anything for the Central Committee”—that is, for Lenin’s committee.⁹⁶ Beyond all the fund-raising, Kollontai in fact had met in Chicago with left-wing publisher Charles Kerr to ask if he would publish Lenin’s latest pamphlet, “Socialism and War,” but Kerr had declined.

Back in Norway after the trip, Kollontai learned that her son, Mikhail, now twenty-two years old, had moved to Paterson, New Jersey, to take a job at a car factory. Having not seen him in more than a year, she decided to board a ship back across the ocean in August 1916, this time to be with him. Once in New Jersey, she started visiting New York and involved herself again in causes, such as the growing movement among immigrant housewives protesting sky-high food costs, and she began writing occasional articles for Novy Mir.

Now, in January 1917, Alexandra Kollontai sat on a train, making the long commute from Paterson, New Jersey, to New York City on a cold winter afternoon. On reaching the city, she would first have to fight the crowds at Penn Station, squeeze herself into a grimy, packed subway car, and ride it all the way out to Brooklyn, all for a simple dinner party. Normally, she would have ignored the invitation. But the invitation had come from her favorite American, Ludwig Lore, who had asked that she join a meeting at his home over dinner to discuss the future of American socialism.

Kollontai loved spending time with Lore and his wife, Lily. Lily’s German cooking alone made the trip worthwhile, and Lily had even translated a novel Kollontai had written. And Kollontai understood why Lore considered her essential to this meeting. During her 1915 speaking tour, Kollontai had gotten to know America far better that any of the other Russians, most of whom never set foot outside New York or, at best, Philadelphia. In Chicago Kollontai had shared a stage with Eugene Debs, the party’s leading personality and three-time (to that point) presidential candidate. She adored Debs. “I almost hugged him I felt so happy,” she wrote after the event. She met “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), whom Socialist Party leaders had recently expelled for espousing sabotage as a tactic in labor strikes. In Los Angeles she had joined a group mourning Joe Hill, a popular IWW organizer recently executed for a Salt Lake City murder, widely considered framed.

Kollontai enjoyed meetings Americans. “They come up and say, ‘a splendid speech,’” she gushed. “It’s just what we want; more revolutionary spirit in the movement.”⁹⁷

Like many young activists, she grew to despise the American Socialist Party’s establishment leaders, conservative older men, as she saw it, preoccupied with elections and piecemeal reforms—crumbs from the capitalist table—instead of revolution. “I am suffocated with such things,” she complained.⁹⁸

She, like the others, had heard that Trotsky had come to town and wanted to see him, but she was suspicious as well. Kollontai knew perfectly well how much Vladimir Lenin distrusted Trotsky. Anyone who read the acid back-and-forth polemics saw the bad blood that existed. As a result, she would have a larger assignment this night at Ludwig Lore’s dinner table: to keep an eye on Trotsky and to keep Lenin informed. If nothing else, she needed to take good notes.