Trotsky

Geoffrey Swain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317868750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Without Trotsky there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution, but Trotsky was no Bolshevik.

Providing a full account of Trotsky's role during the Russian Civil War and concentrating on his time as an active participant in Russian revolutionary politics, rather than his ideological writings of emigration, Swain gives the student a very different picture of the Bolshevik Commissar of War. This radically new interpretation of Trotsky's career spanning 1905-1917 incorporates the tense relationship between Trotsky and Lenin until 1917, and pays particular attention to the Russian Civil War and Trotsky's military organisation and contribution to the war.

Swain argues critically that Trotsky achieved where Lenin would have failed, suggesting that Trotsky was in the main part responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution.

Chapter 1

The Precocious Apprentice

Lev Davidovich Bronstein, or Trotsky as he became, was the son of a rich peasant, what the Russians term a kulak. Born on 26 October 1879, his father, David Bronstein, was an unusual kulak in that he was a Jew. Early in the 19th century Tsar Alexander I had offered Jews the chance to buy land in what was then termed “New Russia”, the southern steppe land bordering on the Black Sea, land that had been captured from the Turks a quarter of a century earlier by Catherine the Great. This land needed to be settled, thus the unusual decision for a Russian tsar to encourage even Jews to establish homesteads there. Trotsky’s grandparents had taken up the challenge, and by the time of Trotsky’s birth his father was well established. This was somewhat against the odds, for subsequent tsars had first dropped the Jewish settlement scheme and then started to deprive Jews of their land, but Trotsky’s father had stuck with farming and moved to buy up the small estate of Yanovka.

Growing Up

Yanovka was an isolated spot. The nearest post office was 15 miles away, the nearest railway station 25. When the Bronsteins moved in in spring 1879, the farm was dilapidated. The house was of leaky thatch and traditional mud walls and floors; only two rooms had wooden floors, and only one of these was painted. Yet, as Trotsky recalled, “my childhood was not one of hunger and cold; my family had already achieved a competence at the time of my birth, but it was the stern competence of a people still rising from poverty and having no desire to stop half-way.” Thus on the Bronstein farm moneymaking came first. The house might need repair, but that was because it was last on the list of the many improvements Trotsky’s father was determined to make. The original farm was 250 acres, but the family leased 400 acres more. There were three barns and two open sheds, as well as a machine shop, stables and a cow shed. Most important of all for a kulak, there was an engine-powered mill; Trotsky’s father could not only store his grain until the market price was right, but hire out his mill to his neighbours. Wheat made David Bronstein rich and the young Trotsky wanted for little. He was, he recalled, “the son of a prosperous landowner [and] belonged to the privileged class rather than to the oppressed”.¹

There were plenty of happy moments in Trotsky’s childhood. Around the house it was his job to fetch in the eggs laid by the hens, exploring under the raised floors of the barns. Where he was truly happy, however, was in the machine shed. There he idolised the machine hand Ivan Greben, and spent many happy hours in the company of this man who could rebuild an engine and repair a boiler. Greben clearly reciprocated to a degree and made the young Trotsky a bicycle and taught him to ride it. He also devised ways of making croquet balls; the future scourge of the bourgeoisie was a passionate croquet player for much of his life. Trotsky remembered twirling Greben’s moustache and studying “those unmistakable hands of the artisan”. He was delighted when he was allowed to cut the threads of nuts or screws. Greben also restored the family spinet, which eventually sat proudly in the parlour; the machine shop was occupied by the spinet for several winter weeks as Greben cleaned it, glued it, polished it and found new strings and keys.² But there were also the unhappy moments of childhood. He suffered the traditional torture inflicted by doting parents on a precocious child. When his parents discovered he had been writing poems, he was forced to read them out to their friends: “it was painfully embarrassing; I would refuse, they would urge me, gently, then with irritation, finally with threats; sometimes I would run away, but my elders knew how to get what they wanted; with a pounding heart, with tears in my eyes, I would read my verses, ashamed of my borrowed lines and limping rhymes.”³

Like most families on the way up the social ladder, Trotsky’s father was obsessed with the education of his children. David Bronstein could not read and his wife, despite developing a love of reading, only read with difficulty. At the age of seven Trotsky started school at the village of Gromoklei. The experiment was not a success. Although the village was only two and a half miles away, Trotsky had to stay during the week with his aunt and uncle; worse, all the other children in the village spoke Yiddish, a language the Bronsteins, with their social aspirations, had long since abandoned in favour of Russian. And yet the Bronsteins had a child who at the age of eight had persuaded one of his many elder cousins that they should produce a handwritten magazine. After two years Trotsky’s father decided he should move to a school in Odessa. What brought this about was the visit to Yanovka of another of Trotsky’s cousins, the 28-year-old Moishe Shpentser, a freelance journalist from Odessa who had been persuaded to spend the summer of 1887 at the Bronstein farm to help fight off what was believed to be incipient tuberculosis. Moishe held radical views, views which he believed had prevented him gaining a university education. Moishe and his wife were happy to bring Trotsky into their cramped house in order that he might attend the St Paul’s Realschule in Odessa. Unfortunately, the local Gromoklei school had educated him so poorly that Trotsky failed the entrance exam and had to spend a year in the preparatory class.

Thus, at the age of nine, Trotsky started seven years of education in Odessa. He was a model student for most of that time. At the end of the preparatory year he scored maximum marks in every subject and that was to be the pattern for the rest of his time at the Realschule. The Shpentsers supported him, but from the start he was both self-contained and self-confident, although occasionally he missed his mother and cried himself to sleep. Trotsky later described his time in Odessa as “becoming an urbanite”.

Every day there was revealed to me some aspect of a cultural environment greater than that in which I passed the first nine years of my life. Even the machine shop at home began to dim and to lose its magic as compared with the spell of classical literature and the charm of the theatre.

Part of this process of urbanisation was to shed all aspects of his Jewishness and assimilate completely into the world of Russian culture. At key moments in his later life he would remember his roots: in 1917 he told Lenin his Jewishness prevented him from serving as Commissar for Internal Affairs; in 1926 he was horrified by the way the Party’s campaign against Zinoviev took on an anti-Semitic hue; but Trotsky consciously rejected all aspects of Jewish separateness.

While Trotsky was living in the Shpentser’s home, Moishe moved on from journalism to establishing a publishing concern, which was eventually to become very successful. Trotsky was keen to help, and was soon familiar with the different typefaces, printing layouts and bindings. He developed a particular passion for proof-reading. “My love of the freshly printed page”, he recalled, “has its origins in those far-away years as a school boy.” At school his own literary work was regularly read aloud in class by the teacher as a model, and a journalist friend of Shpentser was soon encouraging him to write more and more.⁴ But Trotsky was not always the model student. In his second year he was involved in a typical schoolboy prank. As a certain teacher left the room, the whole class made a humming noise, but without moving their lips so that there were no obvious culprits. The teacher responded by disciplining some likely suspects quite arbitrarily, while Trotsky, the star pupil, was left untouched. However, some of those punished reported Trotsky as the ringleader and he was summoned to the head teacher. Athough expulsion was considered, the pleadings of the Shpentser family were listened to and Trotsky escaped with a suspension. Rather to Trotsky’s surprise, his father took the whole incident in good heart.⁵

Trotsky’s concern about his father’s attitude reflected a gradual breakdown in their relationship, a natural enough occurrence, but aggravated in this case by Trotsky’s growing rejection of what his father represented. Returning to Yanovka after his first year at school, Trotsky noted his gradual distancing from the country.

Our house looked terribly small to me now; the homemade wheat bread seemed grey, and the whole routine of country life seemed at once familiar and strange … Something new had grown up like a wall between myself and the things bound up with my childhood. Everything seemed the same and yet quite different. Objects and people looked like counterfeits of themselves.

Sometimes the issues that divided him from his father were trivial – Trotsky’s father considered his glasses an urban affectation, while Trotsky felt they gave him a sense of added importance – but increasingly he was disturbed by his father’s kulak values. Even before the move to Odessa, Trotsky would mingle with the migrant labourers and domestic servants and note what was said about his parents as employers.

Then, in the summer breaks from schooling in Odessa, he often witnessed scenes of apparent heartlessness. He would help his father calculate the wages, and always interpreted the payment due far more generously than his father; the labourers soon sensed he was on their side, which understandably infuriated David Bronstein. One summer, after a day spent playing croquet, he witnessed his father arguing with a peasant about the damage caused by an untethered cow. On another occasion he left a field where harvesting was underway and came across a barefoot woman owed money by his father who had been forced to wait until the day’s harvesting was over before being returned the money she was due. Such incidents made him feel awkward and out of place, as indeed he was, for on this last occasion he recalled that he was wearing around the farm “a freshly laundered duck suit, with a leather belt that had a brass buckle and a white cap with a glittering badge”. Yet it was not just “the instinct of acquisition, the petit bourgeois outlook and habits of life” which he rejected.

While the Yanovka people were spending many weary hours trying to measure the area of a field which had the shape of a trapezoid, I would apply Euclid and get my answer in a couple of minutes. But my computation did not tally with the one obtained by “practical” methods and they refused to believe it. I would bring out my geometry text-book and swear in the name of science; I would get all excited and use harsh words – and all to no purpose. People refused to see the light of reason and this drove me to despair.⁶

What brought matters to a head was David Bronstein’s decision that Trotsky should move to study in Nikolaev in order to prepare for university entrance. His father had organised some comfortable lodgings and in autumn 1895 Trotsky arrived in a nicely pressed tan suit and stylish hat; within weeks the clothes of the swell bourgeois would be exchanged for those of a worker. In Odessa Trotsky had shown no interest in politics. He had rebelled against some of the more authoritarian aspects of his school regime, but that was just at the level of bravado. In Nikolaev Trotsky discovered politics. Nikolaev was one of the towns where former political prisoners were allowed to take up residence, and it had been favoured by some of the veterans of the 1880s People’s Will party. Unfortunately for David Bronstein he had chosen to lodge his son with a respectable family whose sons were captivated by revolutionary politics. After a month or so of dismissive banter about “socialist utopias”, Trotsky became hooked and was introduced to Franz Shvigovskii, the key figure in a commune of revolutionary youngsters which owed its ideological allegiance to the ideas of Chernyshevsky, the radical peasant socialist or Populist of the 1860s. This link was reinforced by the fact that Shvigovskii’s younger brother was also a pupil at Trotsky’s school.

The South Russia Workers’ Union

Trotsky soon began to neglect his studies and spend all his time in the tumbledown house and garden rented by Shvigovskii, which became a sort of debating club for Nikolaev’s radical youth. In despair, Trotsky’s father came down to sort things out: he was keen to expand his business and diversify into profitable sugar beet production and brewing; for this he needed not a mechanic like Greben, but a fully qualified engineer, his own son. David Bronstein berated his chosen landlady for not keeping an eye on her young ward, and told Trotsky to mend his ways or else: Trotsky responded in kind, and with great vehemence. He and his circle were, after all, preparing to build a new world. David Bronstein then cut off his allowance, forcing Trotsky to move into the revolutionary commune, dressing henceforth in blue workers’ shirts and refusing to make use of “bourgeois” bedlinen. His only source of income was some private tutoring, and when he travelled to Odessa and called on the Shpentsers at this time Moishe noted he was as “gaunt and ill-clad as a tramp”.⁷

The only woman associated with this commune was Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, the sister of one of Trotsky’s friends. Trotsky at this stage was 17, she was 22 and had already completed a course in midwifery at Odessa University. While in Odessa she had studied the writings of Georgii Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, and was a self-declared Marxist. This made her unique among the members of the Commune, who all based themselves on the Populism of Chernyshevskii and the People’s Will. Baiting Aleksandra about her Marxism was a regular pastime of the group – along with writing her love poetry – and she recalled that when she first met Trotsky she had been told by her brother that at last they had found someone who would be able to defeat her in argument. His first attack was to say: “You still think you’re a Marxist? I can’t imagine how a young girl so full of life can stand that dry, narrow, impractical stuff!” She replied: “I can’t imagine how a person who thinks he is logical can be contented with a headful of vague, idealistic emotions.” Such banter continued for weeks.⁸

Then, in spring 1896, Trotsky suddenly fainted. These fits were to occur throughout his life, but the worried revolutionaries quickly informed the family and David Bronstein was soon back on the scene, greeting the earnest young people with a cheerful, “Hello, have you run away from your father, too?” Trotsky, unwilling to patch up his quarrel with his father completely, agreed to return to Yanovka over the summer as a “guest” rather than a son. At Yanovka a compromise was hammered out. Another Odessa uncle was visiting the farm at the time; he owned a small engineering plant and was happy to look after Trotsky for a while. So it was agreed Trotsky would return to Odessa and there start attending some mathematics lectures at the university to see if such a career suited him. September saw him doing just this, discussing with tutors possible futures for those with a degree in mathematics. He remained financially independent from his father, again earning money from giving private lessons and, when money was short, staying with the Shpentsers. But politics got the better of him. He attempted to set up a political cell in the Shpentser printworks and by December 1896 was back in the Nikolaev commune and back in the company of Aleksandra Sokoloskaya.⁹

Not long after his return, Trotsky became involved in a cruel practical joke on Aleksandra. While in Odessa he had begun to wonder if there might not be something to Marxism after all, and had discussed this with Shvigovskii. Shvigovskii had countered these doubts and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Precocious Apprentice
• 2 Revitalising the Party
• 3 Insurrection
• 4 Saving the Revolution
• 5 Building a Workers’ State
• 6 Combating Thermidor
• 7 Exile and Internationalism
• Conclusion
• Bibliographical Note
• Index