Читать книгу Trotsky in New York, 1917 - Kenneth D. Ackerman - Страница 8

1

MONTSERRAT

“Sunday, January 13: We are nearing New York. At three o’clock in the morning, everybody wakes up. We have stopped. It is dark. Cold. Wind. Rain. On land, a wet mountain of buildings. The New World!”¹

—Leon Trotsky, aboard the steamer Montserrat, on reaching America

SATURDAY NIGHT, JANUARY 13, 1917:

Music played in New York City the night Trotsky’s ship entered the harbor. It had nothing to do with Trotsky or his ship. It was just New York.

The New Amsterdam Theater on West Forty-Second Street featured Ziegfeld’s Follies that night. The show, The Country Girl, included sixty beautiful Ziegfeld Girls with big eyes, pink cheeks, and long legs. They dressed like Caribbean birds while dancing, singing, and kicking up their feet to tunes of a marimba band. Also on the bill were Senegalese acrobats, new singing sensation Eddie Cantor, spritely Fannie Brice, and comedian Will Rogers showing off his cowboy rope tricks.

Broadway was enjoying a golden age in 1917. A few blocks away, George Gershwin, the eighteen-year-old musical prodigy, led the pit orchestra for Miss 1917, a new revue featuring original songs by Jerome Kern, including “In the Good Old Summertime” and “Dinah.” Laughter erupted across the street at the theater run by George M. Cohan, Broadway’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Cohan’s latest production was Captain Kidd, Jr., a comedy farce about three bumbling misfits who embarrass themselves searching for lost pirate treasure on old Cape Cod. Over on Fifty-First Street, Al Jolson packed the Winter Garden with his schmaltzy revue of ragtime, dance, and comedy skits, ten years before The Jazz Singer.

For sheer spectacle, you couldn’t beat the Manhattan Opera House’s live production of Ben-Hur, in which 350 actors shared the stage with fifty horses. At Reisenweber’s restaurant on Columbus Circle, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, with its funny-faced, frog-throated piano player Jimmy Durante (“That’s not a banana, that’s my nose”), filled the house with a new sound they called jazz.

Further downtown, vaudeville drew big crowds with its eclectic mix of acrobats, musicians, jugglers, trained animals, and comedians, rising unknowns with names like George Burns, the Marx Brothers, and Buster Keaton.

All this, plus piano sonatas at Carnegie Hall, operas at the Metropolitan, and the ballet. And this didn’t even start on all the immigrant places.

New York in 1917 had dense, bulging neighborhoods that smelled and sounded like foreign countries, and each of these also had its own music. Almost two million New Yorkers in 1917 had come from across the ocean: 480,000 Russians, 340,000 Italians, 145,000 Poles, 200,000 Germans, 200,000 Irish. Jews comprised the bulk of the Eastern Europeans. Including their American-born children and grandchildren, they totaled well over a million. The Lower East Side, Germantown, Little Italy, Little Russia, and Little Poland; each spoke its own language, read its own newspapers, and drank in its own saloons and cafés. The Yiddish-language (Jewish Daily Forward or Forward), with its circulation more than two hundred thousand, rivaled even the New York Times.

Second Avenue below Tenth Street belonged to the Yiddish theaters: Kessler’s at Second Street, Thomashefsky’s at Houston Street, and more. A few blocks over, neighborhoods changed and gave way to German beer gardens, polka halls, Irish saloons, and Italian trattorias, each louder, more boisterous than the next.

New York at that moment lived like no other place on earth. Certainly not Europe. Europe in January 1917 remained trapped in a slow-motion agonizing hell. The world war had entered its third year, having already killed more than 10 million soldiers and civilians. France and England, Russia and Germany, Austria and Turkey; each would lose a million young men or more. They killed and died in gruesome new ways: via poison gas, flamethrowers, artillery bombs, submarine torpedoes, and trench warfare, plus starvation and disease. Europe’s great cities, Paris, London, and Vienna, all turned dark, increasingly populated by widows, gripped with hunger, or ruled by military edict.

But not America. Not New York. Here, the music played. Just two months earlier, in November 1916, Americans had reelected Woodrow Wilson as their president largely because, as the slogan went, “He Kept Us Out of War.” Meanwhile, America grew rich lending money and selling weapons to the warring powers, particularly the Entente Allies: England, France, and Russia.

Yes, the war caused its problems. Some Americans expected that they too would inevitably join the fight against Germany. In New York they held parades and urged preparedness: a bigger army and military training. German submarines sank ships on the high seas, and increasingly Americans found themselves targets.

On May 7, 1915, a German sub had fired two torpedoes at the British-flag RMS Lusitania, a Cunard liner carrying almost two thousand passengers and crew. The strike had sunk the vessel and killed 1,198, including 128 Americans. Protests had erupted but never reached the breaking point. The Lusitania, after all, had carried ammunition in its cargo, making it fair game under rules of war, at least so argued the Germans. After the sinking, Germany had ordered its submarines not to attack passenger ships without prior warning. Thus far they had mostly complied.

Just as nerve-shattering to Americans were the big explosions, at least forty since 1914. With American factories producing huge stocks of weapons and ammunition, mostly for Britain and France, accidents proliferated. More than sixty men had died, and each explosion fed talk of sabotage.² Just that weekend, a massive blast at the Du Pont powder plant at Haskell, New Jersey, had killed an estimated twenty-one men and demolished 150 houses, breaking windows in five states.

Still, most Americans saw no reason to enter Europe’s war. How could Germany ever attack the United States from across the ocean? The idea sounded idiotic. Just weeks earlier, on December 18, 1916, President Wilson had challenged the warring European countries yet again to stop the carnage and publish their conditions for peace talks. Americans applauded. But the gesture had produced only finger-pointing among the Europeans.

Peace in America protected not just music and riches but also freedom. In early 1917, America had no secret police or internal spies like Russia. It had no censors like France or England. Plenty of New Yorkers, especially immigrants, openly backed Germany in the war, and nobody doubted their loyalty. The Metropolitan Opera could produce Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring Cycle) in the original German and nobody complained. Any night in New York, one could stop by Cooper Union or Beethoven Hall to hear an anarchist like Emma Goldman, a socialist like Eugene Debs, a birth control activist like Margaret Sanger, or a pacifist like Ilya Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist’s son then lecturing in the United States. A socialist sat in the United States Congress. People could mock politicians as much as they liked.

And then there were the newspapers, millions of copies flooding the city each day. Huge steam presses cranked them out in a dozen languages, often thick with cartoons, fashions, sports, and society gossip. The biggest, William Randolph Hearst’s New York American (originally Morning Journal) and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, vied for top circulation, but the newsstands brimmed with competitors, the Times, the Tribune, the Sun, the Herald, the Globe, the Call, each with its loyal following, plus weeklies like McClure’s and the Outlook. New York supported four daily papers in Russian, six in Yiddish, three in German, and more in other languages.

Amid all the noise that Saturday night, January 13, 1917, a few people knew that Leon Trotsky was coming. Trotsky was a celebrity in some circles. One small Russian-language newspaper called Novy Mir (New World), published in Greenwich Village, proudly touted its connection to a small international band of Russian leftists calling themselves Bolsheviks or Mensheviks, depending on who controlled the editorial desk that week. It claimed Trotsky as one of its own and had announced his travel plans on its front page. A few other socialist newspapers repeated the news.

But these interested circles existed almost entirely inside the immigrant neighborhoods of New York City. Otherwise, especially across the Hudson, no one in America had ever heard of Trotsky. They didn’t know his name, his face, or his place in the world. Other than the port inspectors, no one noticed his ship’s entry into the harbor that night. Instead, New York enjoyed its music, its busy streets, its crowded stores, its noisy theaters, its teeming tenements, its busy churches and synagogues, its sweatshops, its subways, its boxing matches, its horse races and skating rinks, life lived intensely in a thousand flavors.

BACK ABOARD THE Montserrat, the Trotskys looked like any nice, respectable young family. Papa Trotsky made a fine impression in his suit, tie, pince-nez glasses, and neatly trimmed mustache. “Trotzky is a young man,” a typical newspaper description of the period went. “Tall, well-built, and rather handsome.”³ People who met him noticed mostly his eyes, sharp and deep behind ever-present glasses, and his voice, nasal and usually dominating the talk, a “geyser of speech” as one put it.⁴

Natalya Sedova, the attractive woman at his side, stood a few inches shorter, with dark hair, large eyes, stylish coat. Two young sons—Leon (or Lyova) and Sergei, ages eleven and nine—scampered behind them. Seeing them together strolling the decks, who could imagine the truth about these polite, well-dressed people? They didn’t look like radicals or troublemakers. They didn’t act like revolutionaries expelled or barred from five different countries: Russia, Austria, Germany, France, and Spain. But they were.

On boarding the Montserrat in Barcelona, all 340 passengers had been required to give their names and backgrounds for the official manifest. For Trotsky and his family, this occasion had required a well-rehearsed, creative performance designed to avoid questions.

Asked his name, he told them Zratzky, or at least that’s how the ship’s officer wrote it down, probably confused by the Russian accent.⁵ Asked his occupation, he gave “author.” This last part was true. Since last leaving Russia ten year earlier, Trotsky had earned his living editing small Russian-language newspapers, cranking out pamphlets, and writing about politics. In fact, his writing, particularly his wartime accounts from the French and Balkan fronts, had earned him European-wide fame. No, he told the ship’s officer, he was no anarchist, no polygamist, and never lived in an almshouse. Yes, he could read and write. Yes, he was born in Russia, near a tiny village called Yanofska, where his father owned a farm. Yes, he had good health, was not deformed or crippled, and had no identifying marks. All true.

He didn’t start the serious lying until asked if he had even been to prison. Trotsky said no, and so they recorded it in the manifest. That, as they say, was a doozy.

In fact, Leon Trotsky had a long and intimate history with prisons. It formed part of his celebrity, his calling card. Trotsky was just eighteen years old when tsarist police jailed him the first time. From his father’s farm, the family had sent Trotsky for schooling in Odessa on the Black Sea. Here, he grew enamored with underground politics. After his studies, he moved to the nearby town Nikolaev, where he helped organize an illegal workers’ union. Police ultimately broke the union and arrested some two hundred members and leaders, including young Trotsky, whom they sentenced to four years’ exile in Siberia. He escaped after two, hiding in a hay wagon to cross the frontier under a false name. Then he left the country to join the socialist movement abroad.

They arrested him again in late 1905. This time, Trotsky, living in Switzerland and already well-known as a socialist writer, had snuck back into Russia on hearing of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Saint Petersburg, in which tsarist soldiers had shot down nearly a thousand peaceful protesters. The incident sparked protests across Russia, and Trotsky joined the brewing uprising in Saint Petersburg, ultimately leading the Saint Petersburg Workers Soviet (Council) in its stand against the regime. When police again crushed the revolt and arrested the participants, Trotsky used his public trial—a group trial of fifty-two leaders—as a platform to denounce the government. This made him a national figure while earning him his second conviction and Siberian exile. He again escaped, traveling almost a thousand miles across frozen Siberian wilderness hidden in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.

These jailings had occurred long before, in 1901 and 1906, before Trotsky had matured into a leading journalist, but he had more recent ones too. Just within the past two months, he had been arrested in Paris and imprisoned in Spain, and he remained subject to arrest in Russia, France, and Germany. But to the steamship officials on the Montserrat that day, he said not a word about any of this. So far, so good.

Natalya came next. Asked her name for the manifest, she gave it as Natalya Sedova, and they entered it that way beneath his. But then she changed her mind. She had the ship’s officer cross out the “Sedova” and replace it with ditto marks under his “Zratsky.” She gave her occupation as “his spouse.” This too was a lie.

For starters, Sedova in fact was her real name. It came from her father, a well-off factory manager near Kharkov, though both her parents had died when she was about eight years old. And yes, Natalya was the mother of Trotsky’s two sons and his companion the past fifteen years. But no, they had never married. Trotsky had a wife still living in Russia whom he had never divorced. He also had two daughters with her. Trotsky’s first wife had been a friend from his teenage years, a fellow Marxist arrested with him in the 1898 Nikolaev union crackdown. They had married behind bars awaiting sentence, and the two daughters were born during their exile in Siberia. When Trotsky escaped from Siberia in 1902, he left them behind.

Natalya certainly knew about the prior marriage. She had met Trotsky later that same year in Paris, where she had come as a student and joined the local group of young Russian socialists. One day, a dashing young speaker named Lev Davidovich came to visit them, telling exciting stories of his recent adventures in Siberia and his daring agitation in Russia. Just twenty years old, Natalya was smitten. As she explained it, “It just happened that one day the two of us were standing together looking at Baudelaire’s tomb in the Montparnasse Cemetery . . . and from that time on, our lives were inseparable.”⁶ Marriage or not didn’t matter. He became her husband in fact if not law.

Natalya lied again when she told the ship’s officer she had never been to prison. But this was a small lie. She had been jailed only once. Russian police had arrested her eleven years earlier, in 1905, for attending an illegal May Day workers meeting near Saint Petersburg. The judge sentenced her to six months at the nearby Dom Predvaritelnogo Zakluchenyo, what Natalya later called “un tres bon prison” (a very nice prison), since it had electric lights and separate cells for inmates.⁷ Years later she still had warm memories of the prison mistress there announcing, “Your bath is ready, Madame Sedova.”⁸

She and Trotsky both lied about their birthdays for the manifest, declaring themselves ten years younger than their actual ages, thirty-seven and thirty-four. And the boys lied too, about their names, calling themselves Leon and Sergei Zratsky. In fact, neither son had taken their father’s last name. Both had taken their mother’s name, Sedov.

For Leon Trotsky and his family, all this was nothing new. Over the years, he and Natalya had often traveled using false identities or forged papers, sneaking across borders to avoid police. Many Russian radicals adopted aliases. “The very character of their work compelled them to hide their names,” one contemporary explained.⁹ “I suppose I’ve had fifteen or twenty names myself,” said another. “Sometimes a fellow will come up to me and hail me by some name and I have to think a minute before I remember it was once mine.”¹⁰

Trotsky himself wasn’t really named Trotsky or Trotzki or Zratsky either. Nor Lvov, Yanofsky, Vikentiev, nor Arbuvov, other names he’d called himself.¹¹ His actual family name, Bronstein, was one he hadn’t used in fifteen years. He had adopted Trotsky in 1902 during his first escape from Siberia. The name actually belonged to a jail guard.

So now, in a pinch, to satisfy the steamship officers on the Montserrat and the American customs officials who used the ship’s manifest, the Trotskys made themselves look on paper like any nice, normal family. No questions. No problems.

The Montserrat was an old ship. Its coal-powered engines dragged its 4,377-ton carcass across the water as slow as an old freighter, managing top speeds of fourteen knots and usually far less. It took the ship seventeen days to cross the ocean from Barcelona to New York. Storms ravaged the Atlantic that month. Rough seas and freezing gale winds made the ship roll and pitch. Passengers got seasick. Meals sat untouched. For passengers below deck in steerage, nausea and stale air made the stench unbearable. Trotsky complained about what he called this “wretched little Spanish boat” that “did everything to remind us of the frailty of human life” and practiced what he called “transport barbarism.”¹²

To make things worse, German submarines patrolled the waters off the Spanish coast. In the three weeks before the Montserrat sailed, they had sunk two American-flag merchant ships, the Coruna and the Columbian, plus the Italian-flag Palermo. The Palermo had carried fifty-two Americans and a cargo of two thousand horses and mules. Two of the Palermo crewmen, Frank Carney and Dan O’Connor, hitched rides back home to New York aboard the Montserrat and happily shared their stories. As they described it, the Germans had attacked the Palermo while they were sleeping, sunk the ship with torpedoes and artillery guns, and then left them to row their tiny lifeboat across twenty-five miles of open ocean.¹³ One American horse trainer died in the incident.

It is easy to picture nervous Montserrat passengers hearing this and spending their days searching the horizon for periscopes. Normally the Montserrat carried twelve hundred passengers and a crew of eighty on its transatlantic crossings, including a thousand poor souls stuck below in steerage. But wartime and winter left most of the cabins empty this time. The entire ship now held barely four hundred people, including crew.

Trotsky’s young sons, Leon and Sergei, seemed the only ones in the family actually to enjoy the cruise. Braving the cold, they ventured outside to explore the Montserrat stem to stern, counting the ship’s decks and cabins and getting to know the sailors and other passengers. Like kids anyplace, they marveled at the ocean, the ship’s engines, its huge smokestacks, the birds and fish, the salty smell and roaring waves.

The boys spoke no Spanish. As sons of Leon Trotsky, their unusual language skills reflected the family’s unique odyssey. They’d learned Russian from their parents. Leon, the older son, was actually conceived in a Russian prison during his father’s imprisonment after the abortive 1905 Saint Petersburg uprising. Tsarist police had held Trotsky in the notorious Peter-Paul Fortress awaiting trial, and it was during one of Natalya’s conjugal visits that she became pregnant with Leon. When the Russian court sentenced Trotsky to lifelong exile in Siberia, Natalya stayed behind in Saint Petersburg to give birth alone. Then, after he escaped, Trotsky quickly reunited the family in Finland and moved them to safety in Austria. As a result, Sergei, the younger son, was born in Vienna in 1908. The boys learned smatterings of German and French from attending public schools in Vienna and Paris, following Papa’s various places of refuge.

The Spanish sailors on the Montserrat enjoyed playing with the young Trotsky sons and befriended them, using slang and sign language to communicate. One day the boys told their parents a strange story. “Do you know, the fireman is very nice,” they reported back to Papa. “He’s a Repubicker.”

“A Republican?” Trotsky asked, curious at the strange term. “How could you understand him?”

“Oh, he explains everything fine.” The boys then told Papa the latest piece of sign language the sailors had taught them. “He said ‘Alfonso!’” The fireman had been telling the boys about Spanish king Alfonso XIII, widely hated among the country’s poor. Alfonso had sat on the Spanish throne for thirty-two years. The boys went on: “He said ‘Alfonso!’ and then went ‘Poff-Piff.’” Sergei and Leon then drew their fingers across their necks, as if cutting a man’s throat with a knife.

That, they said, was what the sailors wanted to do with Alfonso.¹⁴

“Oh, then he is certainly a Republican,” Trotsky laughed, apparently pleased with these new friends of his young sons. Natalya gave the boys Malaga grapes and other delicacies from their first-class cabin to share with the friendly sailors.¹⁵

Why were they on this ship at all? Three months earlier, Trotsky and his family were living in Paris in a small apartment on rue Oudry near the Place d’Italie, a pretty spot on the Left Bank with trees, grass, and a small fountain. Trotsky had settled in France in 1914 at the start of the world war after Austria, their home up till then, had forced them to leave. As Russians, they would have been considered alien enemies. Germany had gone further and indicted Trotsky in absentia over an antiwar tract he had written, convicted him of treason, and threatened to arrest him if he entered the country. That left Switzerland as a refuge, where many émigré Russian radicals fled, or France.

Trotsky tried Switzerland but picked France. He enjoyed the French cinema, French novels (which he read in the original language), and the cafés. A favorite became the Rotonde in Montmartre, rich with artists and writers surviving on handouts and cheap coffee. In Paris he had Russian friends and could mingle with leading French socialist politicians, including legislators and cabinet ministers. In Paris Trotsky coedited a small Russian-language newspaper called Nashe Slovo (Our Word), a platform for his socialist, antiwar, anti-tsarist views.

French military censors sometimes harassed him, often prompted by complaints from the Russian embassy. Russia, after all, was France’s ally in the war, and the Russians resented Trotsky’s anti-tsarist articles, particularly the ones he arranged to have smuggled back home. Trotsky haggled with the censors, and sometimes they forced him to publish a blank page or two, but his tabloid survived long enough to produce 213 editions between January 1915 and October 1916.

In addition to the censors, French military intelligence also kept an eye on Trotsky, suspecting him of being pro-German. They noticed, for instance, how Nashe Slovo barely mentioned Germany’s sinking of the Lusitania. In 1915 French military police spotted Trotsky at the French war front near Belgium, snooping around the trenches, an area off-limits to foreign journalists. They followed him back to his room at the Hotel Parisien in Le Havre, confronted him there, and, as they put it, “immediately invited [him] to leave” and return to Paris.¹⁶ After that, they began monitoring his mail and his friends, noting the many registered letters from Switzerland and Russia and his notoriety as a self-proclaimed socialist revolutionary. In a July 1915 report, they claimed that Trotsky’s newspaper had received money from a Romanian revolutionary named Rakovsky, a suspected Austrian spy.

All this, to French authorities, made Trotsky an “etranger comme suspect au point de vue national”¹⁷ (suspicious alien from a national viewpoint), a designation likely to cause trouble.

With her common-law husband gallivanting around Paris and the battlefront, Natalya was left to run a household with two small children under wartime stringencies. She remembered these Paris years in depressing terms. “We lived in a densely populated district. Walks through Paris were our only amusement,” she wrote later. “There was so much mourning [for soldiers killed on the front] that black had become the latest fashion; even the streetwalkers wore black.” As for her husband’s newspaper, she described it as a constant struggle to stay solvent. “Nashe Slovo was run on the devotion of a few militants who contributed their labor as well as what little money they could spare,” she wrote. “Payment for paper and printing was a daily worry.”¹⁸ She recalled her husband often staying up past midnight to write articles, then dropping them off at the printer the next morning when he took Sergei to school.

Despite all these tensions, French authorities mostly left Trotsky alone. They let him enjoy his cafés, his leftist friends, and his travels. They even gave him a passport in 1915 to leave France altogether for a trip to Switzerland. Here, Trotsky would attend a small conference of socialists in the resort town of Zimmerwald that would cast a long shadow over the future. Beyond everything else, it would feature the last major pre-1917 clash between Trotsky and his then-leading rival in the small world of Russian émigré socialists, the intense bearded man who would lead the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin.

TODAY, A CENTURY later, Americans mostly think of Lenin and Trotsky together, as the inseparable coauthors of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, famous partners in crime. Modern Russians see them differently, swayed unavoidably by the bloodstained later efforts of another rival, Joseph Stalin, to vilify Trotsky, kill thousands of his backers, and literally erase him from the country’s history. For Russians today, Trotsky is a vague blank figure, largely missing from civics books.

But the lives of these two men, Lenin and Trotsky, grew so intertwined in the years around 1917 that it is near impossible to explain one without the other. And in 1915, two years before their famous collaboration, the state of the Lenin–Trotsky relationship was clear to anyone who looked: Already the two most prominent figures in Russian émigré socialism, they despised each other, or at least acted that way.

Trotsky had first become aware of Vladimir Lenin in 1902 during his first exile in Siberia. Copies of Lenin’s magazine Iskra (Spark) and his pamphlet “What Is to Be Done?” reached him there. Trotsky read the tracts and became a convert. Lenin, nine years older than Trotsky, had already established himself as leader of the emerging Russian Social Democratic Party. He had built Iskra into both a tabloid and a movement, with followers across Europe and Russia. Trained as a lawyer, a veteran of Russian jails and Siberian exile like Trotsky himself, Lenin as a teenager had seen tsarist police hang his older brother, Alexander, for joining an antigovernment plot. A friend described Lenin around 1915 as “the lean, tallish man, with large fierce eyes and large, sensual, irregular mouth, perched on the platform like a ‘bird of prey.’”¹⁹

Trotsky, after his escape from Siberia in 1902, decided he must meet this Lenin and become his protégé. As the story goes, it took Trotsky weeks to secretly cross Siberia and Europe, meeting members of the anti-tsarist underground along the way, including a two-month stop in Paris. He reached London, where Lenin had set up operations, and took until well past midnight to finally locate Lenin’s apartment at 10 Holford Square near King’s Cross. Trotsky left his cab driver unpaid at the curb, came inside the apartment house unannounced, bounded up the stairs oblivious to the late hour, and knocked three times loudly at the door, the signal for strangers. When Lenin’s wife, Nadezhka Krupskaya, got out of bed to answer it, she found a disheveled young man excitedly telling her of his journey. She woke her husband, who recognized the stranger as the young writer he had recently heard about, and said, “The Pen has arrived!”

Krupskaya described the friendship that blossomed between her husband, Lenin, and the brilliant, outgoing young stranger, Trotsky. “Leaving them together I went to see to the cabman and prepare coffee! When I returned I found Vladimir Ilyich still seated on the bed in animated conversation with Trotsky on some rather abstract theme.”²⁰ Over the next few days, Lenin took him on long walks through London, showing him the sights. “This is their Westminster” or “their British Museum,” he told Trotsky. They spoke about Russia, about socialism, and about Lenin’s plans for Iskra, both the magazine and the movement. Lenin decided to nurture the young man’s talent. He included Trotsky on Iskra’s small board of editors, despite objections from some older members, and sent him on propaganda fund-raising missions to Europe.

However, this budding friendship between the older Lenin and his protégé Trotsky lasted only a few months and came to a quick end. The very next year, 1903, they had a falling-out, part of a larger, major split within Iskra and the Social Democratic movement that would leave Trotsky and Lenin on opposite sides: the famous schism between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

The rupture occurred at a 1903 party conference that started in Brussels but moved to London after Belgium police began harassing delegates. Typically, it was Lenin who started the argument. And just as typically, it was Lenin who won the key vote and seized the chance to call his faction Bolsheviks (Russian for “majority”), even though most people in the group actually disagreed with him. As Bolsheviks, Lenin and his followers insisted that socialism could be achieved in Russia only by a party tightly controlled by a tiny leadership elite, its members limited to active revolutionaries serving as vanguard of the working class. Workers could not be trusted to do it themselves.

Years later, dedicated Bolsheviks would honor Lenin by giving the concept a deeper, more profound aura, a distinction “between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft,’ the ‘workers’ and the ‘talkers,’ the ‘fighters’ and the ‘reasoners’—between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks—which was [Lenin’s] great psychological contribution to the science of revolution,” as one put it.²¹ But in 1903, most people, even his friends, saw it more narrowly.

Opposing Lenin at the 1903 conference was Lenin’s friend and Iskra cofounder Julius Martov, another Russian émigré. Martov, more bookish and soft-spoken, argued the opposite point, that socialism, like any political movement, could succeed only if backed by an open, inclusive mass movement. His group became known as Mensheviks (Russian for “minority”), even though it had more people on its side.

Trotsky attended the 1903 conference and, much to Lenin’s chagrin, sided squarely with Martov. Trotsky at the time shared a London apartment with Martov and other friends and happily turned his acid pen to their defense. Trotsky ridiculed Lenin’s entire concept of “dictatorship of the proletariat” as amounting to “dictatorship over the proletariat,”²² a pinnacle of concentrated power with Lenin the self-appointed dictator.

Lenin and Trotsky never healed the wound over this argument. By 1915 their rivalry had become a high-profile, seemingly permanent fixture in émigré Russian politics, complete with name-calling and finger-pointing. Among other things, Trotsky had called Lenin a “terribly egocentric person,” a “master-squabbler,” and a “professional exploiter,” preoccupied with “bickering” and power mongering.²³ Lenin, for his part, called Trotsky a “cur,” a “judas,” “always evasive, cheating, posing,” his views “vacuous and unprincipled,” his writing littered with “puffed up phrases” to support “absurd” arguments.²⁴

Trotsky later claimed to find the whole Bolshevik–Menshevik quarrel petty, which irritated his Menshevik friends as well.²⁵

The 1915 Zimmerwald conference, called originally by Swiss socialists, was intended to bridge this gap and address a new crisis created by the world war. Its attendees included a who’s who of socialist celebrities, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike, including many destined to become top figures of the post-1917 Russian communist government: Trotsky, Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev (future Politburo member and Comintern chairman), Karl Radek (future vice commissar of foreign affairs), and others.

The problem they faced was this: Up until 1914, socialists, as a basic element of their creed, all pledged their belief in the solidarity of the international working class. This, they claimed, could always be counted on to prevent wars among nations. Why should workers in France or Germany pick up guns to kill each other, they argued, when their common enemy was the bourgeoisie? But the outbreak of world war in 1914 shattered this belief system. Instead of opposing the war, workers in Germany and France were among the first to join the war hysteria sweeping their countries and enlist in their respective armies. Worse still, leading socialist politicians across Europe, including elected members of parliaments, one after another abandoned their principles to support their national war efforts.

Lenin and Trotsky both considered this betrayal unforgivable and considered these “social patriots”—their derisive term for the turncoat socialist leaders—cowards and scoundrels. Denouncing “social patriot” traitors became just as important to them as opposing the war itself.

But faced with this immediate problem, Lenin came to Zimmerwald with a more aggressive idea, stunning in its counterintuitive boldness. Lenin proposed that socialists must reject peace for its own sake. Instead, he argued, the world war had created an opportunity. Instead of peace, they must demand the defeat of their own countries. Russians must support defeat of Russia, Germans defeat of Germany, British defeat of Britain. These defeats would discredit the capitalist ruling classes and set the stage for revolution. The world war must be transformed into smaller civil wars in each country, leading to victory for the working class.

Trotsky actually agreed with Lenin on most of this bold concept. He detested “social patriots,” and his exposure to the French and Balkan battlefronts had already convinced him that the war had destroyed public faith in governments, setting the stage for uprisings. But Lenin’s defeatism—insisting that socialists make themselves traitors in their own countries—seemed needlessly confrontational. And Lenin’s call for national civil wars could hardly attract the support of war-weary Europeans. Even the assembled socialists at Zimmerwald found it excessive. This was no way to achieve unity.

Trotsky ended up working with moderate delegates to forge a compromise, a manifesto calling for peace without victories or annexations. Lenin thought it much too weak but, finding himself outnumbered, voted for it anyway. Two later Zimmerwald conferences, with Trotsky absent, would produce manifestos much closer to Lenin’s original idea. Still, the split between “Zimmerwald left” (pro-Lenin) and “Zimmerwald right” (anti-Lenin) added an entire new layer of division to the already fractured movement.²⁶

After Zimmerwald, Lenin returned to his own wartime refuge in Switzerland, like everyone else, to wait.

BACK IN PARIS, Trotsky finally reached the end of his rope with French officials in mid-1916, when Russia decided to send a small navy squadron to the French port of Marseilles. Mutiny broke out on one Russian ship, the Askold, where Russian soldiers murdered one of their officers. When police searched the murderers, they found some carrying copies of Trotsky’s newspaper Nashe Slovo.

Russian diplomats, long irritated at Trotsky’s anti-Russian articles, now insisted he be expelled from France. Trotsky complained bitterly. He claimed that a Russian agent provocateur had framed him by placing the copies of Nashe Slovo on the soldiers. Besides, Trotsky argued, French censors had approved the newspaper edition. He asked political friends, including high-ranking socialist ministers, to intervene, but to no avail. After a few weeks, the French interior minister, Louis Malvy (who himself would be exiled from France in 1918 on charges of treason), bowed to Russian pressure and issued the expulsion order. “On 30 October [1916] the [Paris] Prefect invited me, pointed out that my time of grace had long ago run out, and suggested my going to Spain,” Trotsky confided in a letter to a friend. “I refused,” he said.

“Then what is left for us to do?” the police prefect asked.

“Cart me out in your own way,’” Trotsky told him, meaning at the prefect’s expense.²⁷

Sure enough, that night, a pair of plainclothes French detectives came to the apartment on rue Oudry and took Trotsky away, leaving Natalya and the boys behind. They escorted him under arms to the Spanish border—no hearing, no formal charges, no day in court.

Things went no better in Spain. Trotsky spoke no Spanish and found the country, as he put it, “lazy,” “provincial,” and corrupt.²⁸ He spent his first few days wandering the coastal town of San Sebastian, where, as he later recounted, “I was delighted by the sea but appalled by the prices.”²⁹ In Madrid, he spent days at the famous Prado Museum, discovering masterpieces by painters Rembrandt, Hieronymus Bosch, and Jan Miel. But this leisure ended abruptly. Spanish police, acting on a tip from the French, soon arrested him. They stuck him in jail first in Madrid, then in Cádiz, where they threatened to deport him to Cuba, where Trotsky had no friends and presumably could do no harm.

“I won’t go voluntarily,” Trotsky told the officials.

“Then we shall be compelled to place you in the hold of the vessel,” the officials snapped back.³⁰ As with France, Spain gave him no hearing or formal charges.³¹

Trotsky begged to stay in Europe.³² He sent panicked appeals to Spanish politicians and socialist friends across Europe. Switzerland, Britain, and Italy each denied his request for sanctuary or passage. “All my correspondence about going to Switzerland was confiscated by French authorities,” he complained.³³ Natalya, sitting in Paris, clamored for help to free her husband. With Trotsky behind bars, it fell on her alone to raise money, care for the boys, take them out of school, pay the bills and bribes, track down political friends, negotiate with steamship companies, and pack up their Paris home.

Spain finally decided to end this headache by sending Trotsky away, not to Cuba but to the United States of America, a country far across the ocean willing to take him and where Trotsky was willing to go. Who exactly made the decision? Did bribes get paid? The full truth may never be known, but the list of behind-the-scene players was long, including top Spanish officials such as Count Alvaro de Figueroa de Romanones, Spain’s Liberal prime minister at the time; a Republican deputy named Roberto Castrovido; a Spanish insurance official named Dupre; future Spanish parliamentarian Julian Besteiro; and the Russian-born Spanish bohemian novelist Ernesto Barc, all mentioned by various sources.³⁴

However it happened, Trotsky quickly grew sanguine with the idea of America. He knew people in New York City. Many Russian socialist friends, including some he’d shared prison time with back in Saint Petersburg, had already congregated there. Trotsky had written articles for their newspaper, Novy Mir. In New York, he would have a platform. Natalya and the boys could live in a stable place. Still jailed in Cádiz, he began studying English, a language totally new to him. “Received two English books,” he wrote one friend from his cell. “Thank you. The English pronunciation now absorbs my attention and makes the waiting painful for me.”³⁵

With arrangements finally set, Natalya brought the family to Barcelona. Here they enjoyed a day or two of sight-seeing before police detectives came to escort them to the Montserrat and place them aboard.

One last complication: At the Montserrat, the ship’s officers claimed to discover a problem with their tickets. Natalya, using cash she had raised from friends and family, had purchased four second-class fares for seventeen hundred pesetas, but the ship’s officers now told them they had no second-class cabins left, only first-class cabins and third-class steerage. To get on board, they would have to pay the difference for first class.

Was this a shakedown? A rip-off? Probably.

Natalya balked. She insisted she didn’t have the money. Trotsky claimed to be down to his last forty francs at that point (about $160). “The family was ready to pay for their second class fare,” she argued, but not more.

What to do? Spain came to the rescue. “Madrid was so anxious to get rid of [us] that it paid [our] full fare for first class,” Natalya later explained.³⁶ And so the family got its first-class cabin with its plenty of fresh air, windows, and light. “It was just about [our] only deluxe travel in [our] whole lives,” Natalya recalled.³⁷ Or, as Trotsky put it to a friend in Madrid, “We ‘enjoy’ the first [class], that is to say, we are conducting a continuous struggle to receive the water to wash in the morning and not receive it in the face during the night, when they wash the boat.”³⁸

All that, and Natalya managed to keep in her pocket some $500 cash (more than $10,000 in modern value), money she apparently failed to mention to the ticket agent.

“The last act of the Spanish police is superb,” Trotsky wrote mockingly to yet another friend. “In Valencia and Malaga, [Spanish] agents and gendarmes surround me on the boat to keep me from leaving with my wife and my children.”³⁹

ONCE AT SEA, they watched the last green hills of Spain sink below the horizon with little hope of returning anytime soon. “The door of Europe shut behind me in Barcelona,” he sighed.⁴⁰ To a socialist friend in London who had helped in the crisis, he confided, “I press your hand warmly. . . . I hope that we may meet once again in the ranks of fighters for the common cause.”⁴¹ To yet another: “This is the last time that I cast a glance at that old canaille [a French curse meaning “vulgar dog”] Europe.”⁴²

As days went by at sea, Trotsky seemed to dislike most of the people he met aboard the Montserrat, chafing at being on this ship at all. “The population of the steamer is multicolored, and not very attractive in its variety,” he wrote. He couldn’t help but notice the many young men fleeing Europe to avoid military service. “There are quite a few deserters from different countries, for the most part men of fairly high standing,” he noted, pointing to an artist carrying away his paintings, a billiard champion, and a few respectable older gentlemen. “The others are much of the same sort: deserters, adventurers, speculators, or simply ‘undesirables’ thrown out of Europe. Who would ever dream of crossing the Atlantic at this time of year on a wretched little Spanish boat from choice?”⁴³ He ventured below deck to explore the squalid, smelly steerage compartment, where the poorest immigrants stayed, and found the mood there sullen. “It is more difficult to make out the third-class passengers,” he wrote. “They lie close together, move about very little, say very little—for they have not much to eat.”⁴⁴

One person on the ship Trotsky apparently did strike up a conversation with was a twenty-nine-year-old artist and boxer named Arthur Cravan. Cravan, telling the story years later, claimed he had just fought a one-round match in Barcelona against American world champion Jack Johnson. Johnson had knocked him out, Cravan said, but the fight was rigged. Now, like the others, Cravan had booked passage on the Montserrat to flee Europe and avoid serving in the war. Trotsky later described him this way: “Boxer who is also a novelist and a cousin of Oscar Wilde, confesses openly that he prefers crashing Yankee jaws in a noble sport to letting some German stab him in the midriff.”⁴⁵

By Cravan’s account, Trotsky sat him down one night and told him about his work as a socialist agitator. “In New York, I hope to find support—and funding—for our cause,” he quoted Trotsky as saying. “Think of it: An international movement! War will be outlawed! People will achieve economic justice!”⁴⁶

Cravan recalled listening to Trotsky and shrugging him off as a sincere lunatic. He warned him to be careful, saying, “You will surely be betrayed by your comrades,” to which Cravan recalled Trotsky saying, “Thanks for the warning, my friend, but I am not so cynical.”⁴⁷ The two apparently never met again.

Snow fell the night the Montserrat finally reached the other side of the ocean and slipped into New York Harbor. Excitement grew among the passengers when the engines stopped throbbing at 3 AM and the crew told them to prepare for arrival. Finally, after seventeen days, they could all get off that cramped, slow, uncomfortable little ship.

The Montserrat passed directly under the Statue of Liberty as it steamed toward lower Manhattan, though Trotsky made no mention of it. If he or the boys actually did see Lady Liberty through the fog and dark, they might have noticed shrapnel and debris defacing her on the side facing New Jersey. In July, an explosion at the nearby Black Tom military depot had destroyed two million pounds of ammunition awaiting shipment to Britain and France, including one hundred thousand pounds of TNT. The explosion had killed seven men, shattered windows on Times Square, and shaken people out of bed as far away as Connecticut. It damaged Lady Liberty so severely that tourists still were being kept outside six months later.

New York police had determined that the Black Tom explosion was no accident and focused their suspicion once again on German saboteurs. One step closer to war.

Trotsky and his family never had to set foot on Ellis Island, New York’s huge processing center for immigrants built on a small sandbar in the harbor. For first-class passengers, immigration inspectors came to the ship and examined them privately in their cabins. Natalya wore a veil that day and reportedly gave one doctor a withering stare when he tried to lift it to examine her eyes for disease—a standard check for new arrivals. Natalya, like her husband, had little patience for policemen.

The ship waited until Sunday morning, January 14, to unload its passengers on Pier 8 at the bottom tip of Manhattan Island. Looking out from the railing, Trotsky had to marvel at what he saw. On land, at the end of the pier, he saw rising abruptly before him a giant mountain range, jagged square buildings, some with spires and towers, shooting up so high that locals called them “sky scrapers.” One, the Woolworth Building, stood almost eight hundred feet, the tallest building on earth. Another, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, stood almost as high at seven hundred feet, the clock face on its dramatic tower covering more than four stories. Dozens more of these behemoths stretched for miles beyond.

Looking up along the East River, he saw more giant things. The massive Brooklyn Bridge arched across the sky above them, crossing the entire harbor. And two newer bridges, just as huge, stood nearby: the Williamsburg (1903) and the Manhattan (1909). The harbor itself buzzed with movement from hundreds of ships, boats, tugs, and schooners of every size and description.

Looking down at the pier, he saw a crowd of people shivering in the cold, waiting for friends and family. He and Natalya scanned them for familiar faces. Finally they saw someone wave back at them.

VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN, sitting now in Berne, Switzerland, with his wife, Krupskaya, running his Bolshevik network with a firm grip, kept tabs on his rival Trotsky. Through letters from friends across Europe, he followed Trotsky’s latest expulsions from France and Spain and finally to North America. And not without concern.

These were difficult days for Lenin. “Never, I think, was Vladimir Ilyich in a more irreconcilable mood than during the last months of 1916 and the early months of 1917,” Krupskaya recalled.⁴⁸ Chronically short of money, he found himself isolated in Switzerland. Most of his Bolshevik followers were scattered abroad. He had no direct contact with Russia. Letters and papers had to be smuggled through Scandinavia, wasting time and losing information. Britain denied him permission to publish journals and pamphlets there, cutting him off from a major source of possible support. He sensed the war going badly for Russia and heard tremors of discontent there, but the waiting seemed endless. Revolution could come tomorrow or next week, or maybe not for another ten years. It all made him impatient and agitated.

Lenin knew all about the colony of Russian socialists in New York City. He read their newspaper Novy Mir but complained that it reached him with “devilish irregularity.”⁴⁹ Lenin saw opportunity in America. Americans had money and power but were neophytes at politics. America had a Socialist Party, but it seemed uninformed and disconnected.

Lenin had taken steps to plant his own flag on US soil. Recently, he had sent an envoy, a Scandinavian comrade named Alexandra Kollontai, with instructions to contact American leaders, raise money, sell them on his Bolshevik ideas, and get his tracts published in English, for free if possible. In addition, one of his Bolshevik circle, a talented young intellectual named Nikolai Bukharin, had recently settled in New York City after being expelled from his perch in Norway. Bukharin had established himself as an editor at Novy Mir, giving Lenin a direct pipeline into their central organ.

Lenin had no intention of letting Trotsky interfere with his plans for America. Kollontai and Bukharin would keep him posted.