by A J Allen
“No. I recall one or two of the hunters were carrying pikes, because I thought at the time how difficult they must have found killing their prey. But the thing that I remember most was that, just like us, they were poised on the brow of a very steep hill and were on the point of descending the other side. You could see their home town laid out tidily below them and it looked so cold. There were two or three small lakes of ice in the distance, with little figures walking about on them and skating and playing games of football. And from the hill which was quite high, you could see all the roofs of the buildings in the town covered in white snow. The branches of the trees were bare with no leaves because it was the depths of winter, and they had nothing in them except a few black birds. And in the sky there was one bird of prey hanging quite still in mid-flight, looking out for signs of the smallest field mouse, but there was not enough for even a bird to eat. And it made you feel the cold, and understand how tired and dispirited and chilled to the bone the hunters must be feeling going back home with such a poor catch. And how they might not have any money, or any wood or coals to burn in their hearths. It was magnificent.”
“This Breughel, he was Dutch, you say?” asked Sverchkov.
“Yes, I think so.”
“And the painting was meant to portray everyday life in the Low Countries?”
“I suppose so,” said Trotsky with a shrug.
“A high hill,” said Sverchkov doubtfully, “in the Low Countries. Really?”
Turning in his seat, Trotsky regarded his comrade through narrowed eyes.
“The picture was so true to life,” he said slowly, “I remember now, that it had a fire, with some women round it, piling on some faggots of wood as the hunters were walking past. Even the flames of the fire made you feel cold.”
“And all of this,” challenged Sverchkov, holding out his arms wide embrace to the view before them, “reminds you of that picture?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Even though there are no lakes and no birds,” he persisted, “no fire, and no neat town. Just a few scattered buildings with, I grant you, snow on their roofs.”
“The scenery is still reminiscent of the poetry of the painting as I can recall it,” said Trotsky.
“Aha!” exclaimed Sverchkov. “‘The poetry of the painting.’ Ha!”
Struggling to his feet, he assumed the stance of a public prosecutor, pointing accusingly down at Trotsky.
“What you are remembering, Comrade, is not the snow and the roofs and the lakes and the sky of the original but the small group of defeated hunters with their dogs. You are identifying us, this convoy with them, and that is defeatist, revisionist and dangerously bourgeois thinking,” he proclaimed triumphantly, adding, “unlike your hunters, the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers Deputies is not defeated!”
“It is just meeting in a new location?” suggested Trotsky.
The faint sound of a whistle come from the village below. Turning their heads, they saw the sergeant beckoning the convoy down from the hills with exaggerated gestures of his arms. Sitting back down again, Sverchkov regarded Trotsky fondly.
“Bourgeois element!”
“Philistine,” retorted Trotsky.
Refusing to be hurried, the drivers finished their discussion before tramping back to the waiting sleighs. Within a few minutes the brow of the hill was once more empty and the teams of ponies were picking a path carefully down the icy road way to the waiting crowd of villagers.
The sergeant had organised the villagers into a well-regulated welcoming reception, splitting them into groups on either side of the road to greet the two columns of sleighs as they came to a stop in the clearing that served the settlement as a communal square. Discarding their travelling rugs, the exiles and their families began the now familiar process of arrival and disembarkation, stretching their arms and legs to remove the stiffness from sitting for so long in the sleighs. The villagers waited patiently, many of the women and children carrying wooden trays of biscuits, bread, salt and beakers of goat’s milk. The men of the village were clustered around the sergeant, who was pointing out which prisoners would be billeted with them.
Together, Trotsky and Sverchkov walked to the nearest group of villagers. One of the mothers pushed forward her daughter, who bobbed a curtsey and offered them a plate of grey dumplings. Bowing over the plate Trotsky inspected the dumplings, noting the deep finger marks in the pastry and black flecks of dirt, and quickly took the least unappealing. He smiled his thanks to the child and to her mother, who regarded him impassively. There were none of the banners or written signs of salutation that they had seen in the other places they had rested for the night.
These are not Party members, he thought. They are real people.
He was still holding the dumpling when a blow to his wrist knocked it out of his hand.
“Come on!” ordered the corporal. “You can’t always be eating. Time to bed you two fairies down for the night.”
Grabbing Trotsky by his upper arm, the corporal began marching him away from the crowd, accompanied by two of his cronies carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. Sverchkov started to protest and he was effortlessly gathered up by the two guards. The small group set off in the direction of an izba at the far end of the village street.
“Where are you taking us?” demanded Trotsky.
“You’ll see,” said the corporal grimly, adding, “somewhere where you will feel right at home.”
Pigs. Trotsky could smell them before he could hear them, and he could hear them before he could see them. Shaking himself free of the guards, Sverchkov hurried to catch up with him.
“Well, this isn’t pleasant,” he said anxiously.
“Don’t worry,” Trotsky told him. “It’s just their idea of a joke.”
“I suppose you’re used to this,” said Sverchkov, his nose wrinkling as they drew nearer to the izba.
“Why?”
“Didn’t you say you were brought up on a farm?”
“At Yanovka, yes. We grew wheat and reared cattle, horses and, of course, pigs; lots of pigs. My father tried Merino sheep but they didn’t take.”
They had arrived at the izba. Letting go of Trotsky’s arm, the Corporal stepped back in triumph. With a mocking bow he gestured towards the evil smelling izba, signalling them to enter.
“How big was the farm?” enquired Sverchkov, pointedly ignoring their escort.
Trotsky coolly looked the Corporal up and down.
“Oh, it was quite small,” he said nonchalantly. “Only about 650 acres. But it was home for my first nine years.”
Turning on his heel, he entered the izba. A rough flight of steps led to the upper storey which was bounded by a balustrade that allowed the inhabitants to oversee their herd below.
“It all sounds rather idyllic, unlike here,” Sverchkov said enviously, as he followed him up the steps.
“Happy childhoods are mostly based on myths propagated by tales of the privileged,” said Trotsky.
He walked over to the windows and, reaching up, opened their shutters.
“My childhood was not unpleasant,” he continued as he watched the corporal and the two guards return to the crowd around the sleighs, “but there were no luxuries that I can remember. Every copeck had to be watched. My father’s peasants used to lie face down in the dirt showing him their cracked bare feet in protest against the meagre wages he paid them. Although he was by no means a particularly cruel employer, I remember that.”
Sverchkov came to stand beside him at the open window, fanning his face with his hand in an attempt to dispel the strong smell of the pigs below.
“Things aren’t too bad, I suppose,” he said hopefully.
Below them one of the larger pigs shoved a smaller pig out of the way and began rooting in the corner of the sty.
“Did you see that one?” asked Sverchkov. “Pigs and men, eh? Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. We should call that one ‘the Corporal’.”
“Ah well, we will just hav
e to make the best of it,” advised Trotsky and then chuckled quietly.
“What’s so funny?” Sverchkov asked.
“I was just reminded of something Lenin said to me when we were in London,” he replied.
He had never become familiar with London and had disliked its rain, its squalor and the way the city sprawled in every direction. His personal lack of awareness of the relationship between different locations within the capital – what he had self-deprecatingly described to Jules and Vera as his “topographical cretinism” – had often caused him to become lost when he was out walking alone. Not that he was usually allowed to leave his lodgings unaccompanied; at least, not at the beginning. Then he had been grateful, and flattered, to have the illustrious company of Jules Martov, Vera Zasulich or Nicolai Lenin to show him the city. They had told him that it was to ensure that he didn’t get lost. Later they had admitted that they were worried in case he was picked up, or followed by one of the many Tsarist agents and their spies operating undercover in London. Later still he had realised that, equally suspicious of his own bona fide credentials, they were interested to see with whom he was making contact in the streets and pubs. After all, with a wife and two young daughters still under sentence of internal exile in Russia, this talented newcomer was vulnerable to pressure.
Nicolai had been particularly attentive, taking him for long walks through the administrative centre of the capital to show him the different seats of bourgeois power, all the while quizzing him on political theory.
“This is their Houses of Parliament,” Nicolai had scoffed as they stood together on the pavement outside the faux Gothic landmark. “They are very proud of this particular institution, and of their so-called democracy. Once every seven years the British male proletariat are allowed to decide which agents of the ruling class should be allowed to oppress them.”
“Can we Russians learn anything from this?” he had asked.
“Of course – yes!” Nicolai had insisted. “The bourgeoisie in Britain has mastered the art of hypocrisy and of fooling the people in a thousand ways, by passing off their hallowed parliamentarianism as ‘pure democracy’ and so on, while cunningly concealing the million threads which bind Parliament to the Stock Exchange, and to the capitalist class. What this teaches us is to reject completely the belief that a Parliament can ever act in the genuine interest of the working class. It has no useful role to play.”
“Not even as a stepping stone to establishing Socialism?”
“If you use parliamentary democracy as a stepping stone,” Nicolai had said firmly, “you will never, ever get to Socialism.”
He had later realised that, even at that early stage, by taking him in hand and giving him basic training in street craft and organisational strategy, Nicolai had been grooming him for the Second Congress, where the future shape of the RSDLP was to be decided. That is why Nicolai had built him up in the Party’s estimation, put him on the circuit of speakers and ensured that his articles were of sufficient quality to be published in Iskra. In return the Old Man had expected his personal loyalty and political support when the time came to move against Jules Martov.
The sight of the pigs wallowing in the mire below had reminded him the morning that Nicolai had taken him to the Reading Room at the British Museum. The night before he had sat up late listening to Jules, Vera and Nicolai arguing over the membership question. Jules and Vera were in favour of the RSDLP becoming a more open mass party with a broad membership, whereas Nicolai – ever the conspirator – wanted a narrower inner clique; an oligarchy that ruled through the outer party through diktat and ukase. In his innocence he had been shocked that such a fundamental divergence of opinion existed amongst these pillars of the movement.
Nicolai had promised him to show him the Reading Room where Karl Marx had worked on Capital on the following day and they agreed that they should set off early. It had been most unfortunate that Nicolai’s understanding of “early” did not correspond with his own. He was still asleep in bed when Nicolai called on the house on Percy Circus that he shared with Jules and Vera. Impatient to make the most of the day, the older man would not wait for Trotsky to prepare and eat his breakfast. Instead he had hustled the young comrade out of the house and had taken him to a worker’s cafe abutting the Euston railway terminus where he had ordered food for them both. While they waited for their meal to arrive, Trotsky had asked Nicolai to explain the deep division between himself and Jules.
“Jules Martov is a good comrade but he is dangerously mistaken in the type of party that we need to have if we are to lead the revolutionary working class, defeat the Autocracy and its apparatus and pursue the correct socialist agenda. We can’t have a mass party of flâneurs or part time members who can choose to support us one day and not the next, or who want to waste time in endless discussion trying to reach an unachievable consensus. Do you think that the Tsar’s armies or the Okhrana work like that? We won’t close their torture chambers using the politics of the debating chamber. And we can’t have members that face different ways like the splayed fingers of a hand – they have to be united and held closed tight, like a fist!”
Suiting his actions to his words, Lenin held up one tightly clenched hand threateningly between them. Trotsky looked at it doubtfully. Nicolai’s hand, he realised, made a surprisingly large fist for such a compact man.
“Jules Martov would have the party open to a multitude of people,” Nicolai went on, “who feel, for whatever personal reason – and many of them will be rank opportunists or Liberals – that they ought to be ‘involved’ in the Struggle. Whereas the need is not to build a mass party but for a small group of politically dedicated men and women wholeheartedly committed to the struggle and willing to accept, and dispense, iron Party discipline. The only way that the working class stands a chance of defeating the Autocracy is by being led by a Party that can distinguish between mere involvement and full-blooded, unthinking commitment.”
He paused as a waiter hurriedly placed two plates of food in front of them.
“It is like this English breakfast of eggs and bacon,” observed Nicolai happily, pointing with his knife at the meal on his plate. “The hen is involved but the pig is committed.”
“But Nicolai,” Trotsky had said quietly, “the pig is dead.”
“There can be no life outside the Party,” Nicolai had replied.
For a while they had eaten in silence.
“I understand the need for revolutionary discipline,” said Trotsky at last with a frown, “but many of the people who would want to join Jules’s version of the Party will still want to be involved, and they have some power and influence and, more importantly, money. We must be practical.”
Nicolai put down his knife and fork and, reaching inside his worn black overcoat, produced a small dog-eared green card and passed it across the table. Trotsky took the card and read the typed script upon it, and the name of its owner handwritten in faded ink.
“British Library… Readers Ticket… ‘Dr. J Richter’ Ticket number A72453.”
“Don’t lose it,” Nicolai told him.
Trotsky nodded obediently.
“But what has this to do with the question of Party membership?” he asked, putting the card in his jacket pocket.
Carefully wiping up a remaining smear of egg, Nicolai ate the last mouthful of his breakfast and dropped his cutlery with a clatter onto his plate.
“There is no better library than the British Library,” he said with a shrug. “There are fewer gaps in its collections than in any other library. It is a remarkable institution, and the Reference section is exceptional. Ask them any question, and in a minute they’ll tell you where to look to find the material that interests you.”
“So?”
“The Library is organised along strict lines and access is severely limited,” he explained patiently. “They don’t let just anyone in. To get a ticket like that, you have to be vouched for. There are even collections within the Library that ordina
ry Readers cannot see without written permission. It is organised like an engine – an engine for the retrieval and creation of knowledge. It has to be that way.”
“But I don’t see…”
“The party we have to build must be an engine for Revolution. There can be no spare parts floating around. Everybody must be fully engaged all the time. Every part must be bent to the common purpose of driving the Revolution forward.”
Trotsky shook his head.
“But there are so many people who support us who would never be, could never be, revolutionists and yet share our goals and our principles,” he protested. “Good people… influential people… wealthy people, some of them. How do we regard them, if not as Party members?”
“As useful idiots?” Nicolai had suggested.
Was Nicolai thinking of me when he said that? Trotsky now wondered.
Nicolai had taken him in, in both senses of the word. A vision of his own father shaking his head in disbelief at his naïveté rose and burst in his mind. He realised that, in all the time Nicolai and he had spent together, it had never occurred to him to ask himself, Why? Why is this man doing this for me? How stupid he had been! There were so many fine lines, like the ones between innocence and self-delusion; between comrade and friend. He had allowed himself to think of Nicolai as a friend and mentor – no, more than that; almost as an elder brother, a more capable Alexander – when all the time Nicolai had seen him for what he was: another impressionable comrade for him to manipulate. Nicolai, a very shrewd judge of character, had known how to play on his personal weaknesses.
Standing beside him, Sverchkov stirred impatiently.
“Sorry, Lev, but I have to get out of here. This stink is overwhelming. Are you coming?”
“Not yet,” Trotsky replied slowly. “I’ve got some thinking to do. Leave me a couple of cigarettes, will you?”
When Sverchkov had gone he crossed the floor of the upper room and opened the shutters of a second small window. Resting his arms on its sill he looked out, his eyes unfocussed on the monotony of the snow covered landscape.
