Читать книгу Trotsky in New York, 1917 - Kenneth D. Ackerman - Страница 9

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TIMES SQUARE

“I am truly a fatherland-less chap and I am grateful to have found a country that is accepting me within its boundaries.”

—Leon Trotsky, New Yorker Volkszeitung, January 15, 1917 (translated from the German original)

WHAT A GREETING! They could not have treated him better if he were the King of England! Bounding down the gangway to the pier, Trotsky found himself a center of attention, and in the best way. No one came to arrest him, harass, argue, or give him a hard time. No one challenged his paperwork, his politics, his religion, or his writings. No interrogations, no extra inspections, no snooping. Not by the police, the customs officials, or even the ship’s officers.

Instead, they all smiled and acted politely, treating him like a guest. What a difference an ocean makes!

The landing of a transatlantic liner those days always attracted a carnival, and the Montserrat was no different. People came to watch and wave at the ship, even on a freezing cold Sunday morning like this. How many had come specifically for the great socialist Trotsky? Apparently quite a few. His friends in New York had been busy. LEON TROTZKI KOMMT HEUTE! (Leon Trotsky Is Arriving Today!) the New Yorker Volkszeitung had shouted from its front page that morning, urging its fourteen thousand readers to see “our much persecuted comrade” and “courageous fellow combatant.”⁵⁰ So too the Russian-language Novy Mir.

At least four newspapers sent reporters to the Montserrat’s landing that morning, looking for celebrities or politicians to interview, any speck of gossip or news. Trotsky easily fit the bill. When three English-speaking newsmen approached him, Trotsky saw a man suddenly appear at his side to help. His name was Arthur Concors, a senior staff official at the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigration Aid Society, or HIAS, the well-known charity that helped Jewish refugees fleeing Eastern Europe. One of Trotsky’s New York friends knew Concors and apparently asked him to come as a personal favor,ⁱⁱ an on-the-spot expert to help untangle any last-minute customs issues and deal with the English-speaking newsmen.

HIAS records contain no mention of the organization’s involvement in the incident, nor any mention of Trotsky (by any spelling) in its voluminous lists of immigrants it assisted. Concors apparently acted on his own, most likely contacted by Novy Mir editor Gregory Weinstein, who had once applied for a job at HIAS.

Concors knew his business and came prepared with what press-savvy people today call talking points, designed to give a story the right spin. As a result, all the English newspapers got the same line—EXPELLED FROM FOUR LANDS—that was headlined the New York Times. Its story, appearing the next morning, portrayed poor Trotsky as kicked out of Europe for nothing more than “preaching peace.”⁵¹ The New York Tribune took the drama further: WITH BAYONETS FOUR LANDS EXPEL PEACE ADVOCATE.⁵² The New York Herald touted Trotsky’s four years in Russian prisons and his battle with long-arm tsarist harassment even in France. Earlier, another English-language paper, the New York Call, had described Trotsky as “pursued with a particular vendictiveness [sic] by authorities of the capitalistic order” and now “penniless.”⁵³

Both the Times and Tribune also stressed Trotsky’s identity as a “Jewish” writer editing “Jewish” journals in Russia and France. A million and a half Jewish people lived in New York City then and bought newspapers, though mostly their own half dozen written in Yiddish. Trotsky himself never wrote Yiddish, barely spoke the language, was not raised in a shtetl (small Jewish Eastern European town), and never practiced the Jewish religion. He didn’t hide his Jewish background. In fact, he had spoken out eloquently against pogroms and anti-Jewish oppression in Europe, often at personal risk. But asked about it, he normally gave his religion simply as socialist or internationalist.

Still, this was Trotsky’s spin for the English-language press: man of peace persecuted by European autocrats, a Jewish victim of the hated anti-Semitic Russian tsar, finding refuge in kindhearted America. A fine human-interest story: simple, sympathetic, poignant.

Only Trotsky, hearing himself portrayed as a helpless “pacifist” bullied by Europeans, seemed embarrassed by the characterization, a far cry from his own preferred self-image as revolutionary fighter. He soon found a chance to set the record straight, or at least to add his own spin. A German-speaking reporter for the New Yorker Volkszeitung came by to talk, and at last Trotsky had someone he could address directly in a language he knew. Even better, the reporter called him “comrade.” He was a socialist. Bubbling in good humor, Trotsky quickly befriended the man and took the opportunity to recast his recent fights with the French and Spanish governments. “You know, I made myself impossible in France as editor of Nashe Slovo,” he told the reporter. “Honestly, this [expulsion from Europe] isn’t surprising in light of the fierce opposition we posed to the ‘socialist’ and the ‘capitalist’ war warmongers.” Trotsky had picked this fight, he insisted, not anybody else.⁵⁴

“In Comrade Trotsky, America gains a resolute fighter for the Revolutionary International,” Novy Mir reported after talking with him.⁵⁵ That’s the way they wanted him: Trotsky the fighter.

He must have marveled at the whole circus, this claque of newspapermen who actually listened to him and accepted his stories almost without question. His friends had done a wonderful job. Within two days, at least six New York newspapers with more than half a million readers would announce Trotsky’s arrival in the city. Three put the story on the front page, and two, the Forward and the New York Call, included front-page photos.

Who were these friends arranging Trotsky’s greeting in New York? The news accounts didn’t specify who exactly came to the pier other than Arthur Concors, but Trotsky would spend all that day and the next shaking their hands, grabbing their shoulders, kissing their cheeks, giving them well-deserved thanks. By the time he finished the greetings at the pier, he was exhausted. He, Natalya, and the boys had been wide awake since 3 AM, and the boys whined impatiently. Arthur Concors, their expert guide, again took command. He claimed their bags and grabbed a car to take them uptown.

Trotsky’s friends had arranged a hotel for their first night in America. To reach it, Concors led them on a tour through the densely packed streets of lower Manhattan.

No riverfront highways yet existed to take them around the crowded South Street waterfront or the sprawling Lower East Side. Traveling uptown, they would have seen elevated railroads erected right down the middle of traffic-clogged streets. It being Sunday morning, they heard church bells chiming over the din of motorcars, horses, and pushcarts. Out their car windows, they would have seen a cacophony of humanity—rich, poor, and homeless—peddlers and police; garish mansions, filthy tenements, and all the towers; all squashed together in vivid confusion. Trotsky would have recognized Wall Street from photographs of the famous capitalist stronghold. At Union Square, they would have passed Tammany Hall, the city’s ultimate cathedral to politics. On lower Broadway, they would have seen huge shopping emporiums, stores with names like Macy’s, Gimbels, and Lord & Taylor, where women searched for fashions and bargains.

Finally, they passed Forty-Second Street and reached their hotel, another eye-popping wonder. The Astor House on Times Square, opened in 1904, easily matched in luxury anything Trotsky had seen in Paris or Vienna. Its arched doors led into an opulent lobby under enormous ceiling frescoes and crystal chandeliers, a Flemish smoking room, a Pompeian billiards room, and, upstairs, an exotically landscaped rooftop garden. Piano music played by day, dance music by night. Valets in uniform opened doors and carried bags. The building dominated the full block on Broadway between Forty-Forth and Forty-Fifth Streets, its eleven stories housing one thousand guest rooms.

Trotsky must have gasped at the sight. Who picked such an elaborate, expensive place? Could they possibly afford it? Did some unidentified benefactor pay the tab? Could Natalya cover it with the $500 cash in her pocket? Would they have anything left? Neither he nor Natalya ever mentioned the Astor House in their memoirs, as if embarrassed by the splurge. It hardly fit their new image as victimized refugees and voices of the working class. But there is little doubt they stayed there. Trotsky specified the “Astor Hotel, 42nd Street” in the Montserrat manifest as his first stop in New York City, and the location matched their activities that day.

Once inside, the greetings continued, in the lobby, the hallways, the room. A parade of faces kept introducing themselves, the friends who had arranged his arrival in New York. Trotsky greeted them all, clapped their shoulders like any seasoned politician. He recognized many from Europe. The Russian socialist underground by 1917 numbered thousands of people scattered around the world, and Trotsky, a leading figure since the start, knew almost all of them, or they knew him.

For instance, there was Lev Deutch with his bushy gray beard, a grand old man of Russian socialism. Now sixty-two years old, Deutch had settled in New York in 1915 as an original editor of Novy Mir. He had earned his first arrest in Russia back in 1875—before Trotsky was even born—and described his ordeal in a book called Sixteen Years in Siberia, published in Europe and America. It made him one of the most recognized Russians of the era. Deutch had known Trotsky in London as part of the Iskra crowd and had joined Trotsky as a Menshevik in the famous 1903 split. Like Trotsky, he too had returned to Saint Petersburg for the 1905 uprising and had landed with Trotsky in the same prison. Trotsky had considered it a great coming-of-age moment when Deutsch, behind bars, finally agreed to stop calling him “the youth” and started addressing him by his actual name.⁵⁶

Most recently, Deutch, typically obstinate, had quit Novy Mir in an argument over the world war and now edited his own tiny pro-Ally competitor called Svobodnoye Slovo (Free Word).

Then came Moissaye Olgin, a friend from Copenhagen and Vienna who also had left Russia after several arrests. In New York, Olgin landed not at Novy Mir but instead at the city’s largest socialist voice, the Forward. “When I met him here, he looked haggard,” Olgin recalled of Trotsky that day. “He had grown older, and there was fatigue in his expression. His conversation hinged around the collapse of international socialism. He thought it shameful and humiliating.”⁵⁷

All these reunions had to be a thrill for Trotsky, seeing these people from his past, still alive and healthy, here to support him. But the biggest greeting that day came as a surprise, from a comrade Trotsky knew only slightly in Europe. He hadn’t seen him since before the war. He was a Bolshevik, Vladimir Lenin’s friend, making him, what . . . ? A rival? An adversary? Still, he had suffered just like Trotsky. Norway had arrested and deported him, and he had landed in New York just two months earlier, still finding his way.

Natalya remembered the moment distinctly, perhaps because it seemed out of place. “Bukharin greeted us with a bear-hug,” she wrote. Added Trotsky, he “welcomed us with the childish exuberance characteristic of him.”⁵⁸ This was New York. Here they could all be friends.

NICOLAI IVANOVICH BUKHARIN had a destiny much like Trotsky’s. Bukharin too would become a top leader in Bolshevik Russia after the 1917 revolution, editor of Pravda, chairman of the Comintern, member of the Politburo, leading theoretician, and later a close ally of dictator Joseph Stalin. Like Trotsky, he too would suffer when Stalin turned against him; had him purged, tortured, and forced to confess false charges and denounce friends he knew to be innocent (including Trotsky); and finally had him murdered. But this was all still far in the future.

For now, in January 1917, Bukharin embodied “vivacity itself, has an open, smiling face, is affectionate and a lively conversationalist with a touch of humor,” as Natalya described him.⁵⁹ His red beard, balding head, ready laugh, and unassuming manner made him easy to like. Just twenty-eight years old, ten years younger than Trotsky, Bukharin had grown up in Moscow as an academic, his parents both schoolteachers. His father, a Moscow University graduate and later a government civil servant, had nurtured his son’s interests in nature, botany, birds, literature, and art.

Bukharin had joined the socialist underground as a student at Moscow University back in 1905, when anti-tsarist protests had erupted across Russia. Barely sixteen years old, he found himself absorbed in the excitement, the mass meetings and crowds singing “The Marseillaise” and cheering the hot rhetoric. The experience drew him like a moth, he said, and “completed” him as a revolutionary. During those heady days, he followed the exploits of the movement’s charismatic leader, the head of the Saint Petersburg Soviet who talked back to the tsarist judge at his trial, the man Trotsky.

By 1910 Bukharin had risen to the Moscow Bolshevist Party’s Central Committee, making him a target for the tsar’s secret police. They arrested him, and he spent six months in prison before being exiled to Siberia. Like Trotsky, he escaped. He then made his way to Hanover, Germany. After a year, he arranged an audience with the movement’s leader, the great Lenin, then living in Cracow.

Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, remembered her husband’s first meeting with Bukharin. They had “quite a long talk,” she recalled.⁶⁰ But Lenin and his new devotee hit a sore spot when Bukharin mentioned a police informant he believed had betrayed him in Moscow, a fellow Bolshevik committeeman named Malinovskii. This same Malinovskii had since risen high in the party, heading the Moscow Bolshevik Committee and representing them in the Russian Duma, or parliament. Lenin considered Malinovskii a friend and grew indignant at Bukharin’s accusation. Lenin later accused Bukharin of being “credulous toward gossip.”⁶¹

Events ultimately proved Bukharin right about Malinovskii. A post-1917 Bolshevik tribunal would convict Malinovskii of being a police spy and sentence him to death by firing squad. For now, though, Bukharin stayed in Cracow several weeks, contributed to Lenin’s newest magazine, and became a regular member of the circle.

After Cracow, Bukharin moved to Vienna, Austria, where he married a fellow Moscow refugee named Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina. They set up housekeeping not far from the Trotskys, though the two couples never became close. At Lenin’s request, Bukharin also helped another young Lenin protégé, a Georgian who recently had started calling himself Koba Stalin. Lenin had sent Stalin to Vienna to research a paper on Marxism and the National Question. Since Stalin spoke no German, Bukharin acted as both his translator and his academic guide.

With the world war, Bukharin left Vienna and moved to Switzerland. He tried to start an independent Bolshevik journal there, but Lenin objected. In 1915 he moved to Sweden, a key link in the underground smuggling route for messages between Russia and the outside world. Here he wrote his second major book, Imperialism and World Economy; his Economic Theory of the Leisure Class had been completed in Vienna. But relations between him and Lenin continued to deteriorate.

Each time Bukharin tried to assert independence, Lenin resisted. When Bukharin asked that he and his Swedish group be appointed a “special commission” to keep contact with allies in Russia, Lenin sniffed disloyalty and forbade them from any direct contact with Russia at all. When Bukharin and his friends complained, Lenin accused them of having an “anti-party attitude” and called Bukharin himself “unstable in politics” with “semi-anarchistic ideas.”⁶² Bukharin also clashed with Lenin on ideological issues, such as the role of nationalism and popular self-determination.

Even Lenin’s ally Alexander Shliapnikov, watching from Russia, lamented that “both sides began to display pettiness.”⁶³

Swedish police arrested Bukharin in April 1916 for antiwar activities and then deported him to Christiana, Norway (renamed Oslo in 1924). A German agent had tried to involve Bukharin in an espionage plot, which had infuriated Swedish authorities. The last straw between Bukharin and Lenin came in September 1916 when Lenin rejected an essay Bukharin had prepared for him as “decidedly incorrect.”⁶⁴ As the argument escalated, Lenin complained to Zinoviev, “I am now so ill-disposed toward Bukharin I cannot write.”⁶⁵

By then, Bukharin had had enough. He too complained to Zinoviev: “You simply do not want me as a collaborator. Don’t worry. I won’t be troublesome.” To Lenin himself he wrote that his vendetta had caused rumors that “I am being kicked out because ‘you Lenin cannot tolerate any other person with brains.’”⁶⁶ Bukharin decided he needed distance and booked passage to America. His biographer Stephen Cohen concluded: “The deterioration in his relations with Lenin was probably a major factor.”⁶⁷

Despite these arguments, Bukharin and Lenin never broke ties. They managed somehow to keep the door open between them. Before leaving Europe, Bukharin bared his feelings to Lenin in an emotional letter: “At any rate, I ask one thing: If you will polemicize, etc., preserve such a tone as not to force a split. It would be very painful to me, painful beyond my strength, if joint work, even in the future, should become impossible. I have the greatest respect for you and look upon you as my revolutionary teacher and love you.”⁶⁸ Lenin responded in kind, telling his young protégé, “We all value you highly.”⁶⁹ The two continued to write back and forth, Lenin asking Bukharin to use his new perch in New York to help the cause by raising money and finding English publishers for Lenin’s articles.⁷⁰

On reaching New York, Bukharin and his wife slept on a friend’s sofa the first few nights. Then he started his new post on the editorial staff of Novy Mir.

Now, seeing Trotsky standing in front of him in New York City, Bukharin seemed happy to forget politics. He and Trotsky apparently said not a word about their common headaches with Vladimir Lenin that first day. Instead, Bukharin had found something in New York City that he felt Trotsky, as Europe’s foremost socialist writer, would surely appreciate. It wasn’t the theater or the skyscrapers; not the subway, the cinema, or the fancy stores. Instead, “[We] had hardly got off the boat when he told us enthusiastically about a public library which stayed open late at night and which he proposed to show us at once,” Natalya recalled. “At about nine o’clock in the evening we had to make the long journey to admire his great discovery.”⁷¹

THE FRONT LOBBY of the Astor House led directly out onto Times Square. New Yorkers had named this spacious, five-block-long intersection for the building at its south end, constructed by the New York Times Company, yet another behemoth skyscraper at four hundred feet tall and with twenty-five stories. Already this square had become the heart of New York theater. Giant advertising posters covered the walls, though Trotsky could barely comprehend their garish colors and oversize English words. Al Jolson? Zeigfeld Girls? Cohan? Bukharin, just five feet tall and half a head shorter than either Trotsky or Natalya, led them down the sidewalk past crowds of people laughing, singing, or talking, off to a show, a concert, or a restaurant. The voices competed with noise from taxis and horses on the street. At Forty-Second Street they turned east into a canyon between tall buildings, which whipped the wind in their faces and made them shiver. At the next block, they passed under a singularly ugly structure, the Sixth Avenue elevated train line with its metal trestles blocking the sidewalk, frustrating traffic, and hiding the streetlights. Their teeth rattled as trains passed overhead, though at least the belching smoke of coal-burning steam engines had recently been eliminated with new electric cars.

Across the street they passed the giant Hippodrome Theatre on one side, featuring that week an enormous ice ballet with more than a thousand performing skaters. On the other side they passed Bryant Park, cluttered with shanties and huts. At Fifth Avenue, Bukharin led them around the corner until they stood in front of a great white marble building, an architectural marvel opened just a few years earlier, in 1911. Two white marble lions guarded the front entrance from either side. Overhead, etched in stone, was the name New York Public Library.

Bukharin knew Trotsky would adore this site. He and Trotsky shared a passion as deep as politics, what today would label them “wonks” or “nerds” or “geeks.” In every European capital either of them visited, one of their first stops had been the library, be it in Vienna, Paris, Madrid, or Copenhagen. Trotsky had loved libraries since his teens. In his first prison in Nikolaev, he had sought out the prison library for solace. As writers, they craved the long days spent doing research in the stacks, especially in an age before TV, radio, talking movies, or the Internet became distractions.

Bukharin took them inside and led them up marble stairways to the building’s top floor, then through a small foyer to the library’s main reading room. This too was magnificent, a vast open space almost three hundred feet long and seventy-seven feet wide, larger than the entire ship Montserrat on which they had just crossed the ocean, with ceiling paintings and sculptures and flooded with light. And books! The library’s seventy-five miles of shelves held more than a million of them, plus newspapers and magazines from around the world! For anyone! For free! To just come and read! Till almost midnight! Even on a Sunday night!

Neither Trotsky nor Bukharin had any idea that this library was actually a monument to capitalism, largely financed by three great American fortunes: those of real estate mogul John Jacob Astor; corporate lawyer Samuel Tilden; and in particular that widely reviled enemy of the working class, Andrew Carnegie. No matter. For the Russians, it would become a second home.

They didn’t stay long. The walk back to the Astor House was just five blocks, but it could seem endless on a freezing cold night like this. “On the way back we got to know the exhausted faces of the New Yorkers,” Natalya recalled.⁷² Walking in Times Square, one could forget totally that, across the ocean, a world war was still being fought.

At some point that night, Bukharin told Trotsky something else. The very next night, a small group of determined American leftists was planning to hold a secret meeting. Their ambition was no less than to change the future of American socialism. They had asked Bukharin to come. And certainly, Bukharin told his new friend, they would want to hear from the great Trotsky. The meeting would be over dinner at the home of a prominent American socialist, an editor at the German-language newspaper New Yorker Volkszeitung. His name was Ludwig Lore, and Trotsky must come.

To get there, Bukharin went on, they would have to venture outside the island of Manhattan, cross the East River, and enter a part of New York not normally seen by tourists or visitors, called Brooklyn.

i HIAS records contain no mention of the organization’s involvement in the incident, nor any mention of Trotsky (by any spelling) in its voluminous lists of immigrants it assisted. Concors apparently acted on his own, most likely contacted by Novy Mir editor Gregory Weinstein, who had once applied for a job at HIAS.