Trotsky did not agree with Plekhanov, and could not know that time would prove ‘the father of Russian Marxism’ right. Trotsky sensed that the revolutionary arena was both uniting and dividing people, and that he must define his own position: the revolution would not tolerate neutrality.
Trotsky’s centrist course at first took him to the Inter-district Committee of the RSDLP, known by its Russian diminutive ‘Mezhrayonka’. Founded in St Petersburg in 1913 by revolutionaries seeking to bridge the gap between the two social democratic factions, during the war the remnants of its membership adopted a similar radical position to that of Trotsky, and close to that of Lenin. By the time Trotsky returned to Russia, the Mezhrayonka consisted of about 60 per cent Bolsheviks and the rest radical Mensheviks. Many of Trotsky’s friends, most of them intellectuals, were to be found there. As ‘Europeanized’ revolutionaries, they were facing the difficult choice between Bolshevik radicalism and Menshevik parliamentarism. For Trotsky, it was like returning to his Paris days.
Petrograd was seething. The streets were thronged by continuous euphoric meetings, and from the moment he left his apartment early in the morning until he returned late at night, Trotsky moved from meeting to meeting, from assembly to committee, engaging in speeches, debates and discussions. He took a week or two to get his bearings, to see who was who, who the emerging leaders were. He observed that slowly but surely the Bolsheviks were taking the leading rôle—unsurprisingly, perhaps, since they had come out so firmly against the war. But the memory of several years of intellectual discord with Lenin still held Trotsky back. At a meeting of the Mezhrayonka of 10 (23) May, when the issue of the group’s self-definition was being discussed, he said: ‘I cannot call myself a Bolshevik … We should not be expected to recognize Bolshevism.’4
Lenin noticed Trotsky’s arrival in the capital. At first he lumped him together with Mensheviks such as Martov, whom he dismissed as ‘hesitant petit bourgeois’,5 but he read Trotsky’s speeches and took note of their undertones. During this ideological intermission Trotsky frequented the newspaper offices of various tendencies, where he would meet old friends such as Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Sukhanov, Matvei Skobelev and Lev Kamenev, who was married to his sister Olga. Trotsky would sound his brother-in-law out on the Bolsheviks’ position and try to divine Lenin’s attitude towards him at that moment, since he knew how close Kamenev was to the Bolshevik leader. Their intimacy, indeed, was demonstrated in 1922 when, after falling ill, Lenin handed over a large part of his personal papers to Kamenev for publication. Trotsky evidently harboured some dislike for Kamenev, as appears in his book The February Revolution:
A Bolshevik virtually since the foundation of Bolshevism, Kamenev was always on the right wing of the party. Not devoid of theoretical grounding and political common sense, and with his great experience of the factional struggle in Russia and a fund of political observations in the West, Kamenev was better able than many other Bolsheviks to grasp Lenin’s general ideas, but only in order to give them as peaceful a slant in practice as possible. He could not be relied on to give an independent decision or to initiate any action himself. An outstanding propagandist, orator and journalist, not brilliant, but thoughtful, Kamenev was especially valuable in discussions with other parties and for sounding out other social circles, though when he returned from such forays something of the other party’s mood would always have rubbed off on him. Kamenev’s characteristics were so plain to see that almost no one ever misjudged his political profile.6
From his conversations with Kamenev, Trotsky gained the impression that Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee were taking an extremely cautious attitude towards him, and he received direct evidence of this when he met Lenin at a joint Mezhrayonka—Bolshevik session where the entry of the Mezhrayonka into the Bolshevik party was discussed. Lenin was the undisputed leader of the Bolsheviks, who better than most realized that momentous social upheavals were on their way, and he saw a unique historical opportunity for the party which he did not want to lose. Moreover, he wanted to bring over to his side such eminent and popular figures as Martov, Plekhanov and Trotsky. The first two were lost causes, being committed social democrats and of no use to the Bolsheviks, while Trotsky was still a potential ally. For his part, Trotsky felt a new wave of revolution rising and had no intention of being left standing. As he grew closer to the Bolsheviks, his relations with Lenin gradually improved. As he would later write: ‘Lenin’s attitude to me went through several phases in 1917. First he was reserved and content to wait and see. The July days brought us together at once. When I launched the campaign to boycott the Pre-parliament, against the majority view among the leading Bolsheviks, Lenin wrote “Bravo, Comrade Trotsky!”’
Within a month of his arrival in Petrograd, Trotsky became one of the stars on the revolutionary meetings circuit. In the summer and autumn his presence was in huge demand and he rarely declined an invitation to appear. He often spoke at meetings in tandem with Lunacharsky, another popular speaker among the revolutionary crowds of soldiers, sailors and workers. Trotsky’s favourite venue was Kronstadt, the island fortress some twenty miles from the capital in the Gulf of Finland, where the soldiers and sailors represented the most radical element of the armed forces.
The mood of the people was becoming more and more desperate, as the promises of the February revolution failed to be realized: the abolition of the autocracy was not followed by peace, nor by the redistribution of land to the peasants. The Bolsheviks seized on the mood of the workers, soldiers and peasants and did their utmost to nudge them into an increasingly radical state. On 4 (17) July, news of the Russian army’s rout in Galicia reached the capital, coinciding with a huge anti-war demonstration organized and led by the Bolsheviks in what might have turned into a bid for power. The rightwing press blamed the Bolsheviks for the army’s failure, and reports appeared with growing frequency alleging Lenin’s links with the German General Staff and claiming that he was playing the Kaiser’s game in order to knock Russia out of the war.
Trotsky wrote of this period that the Bolsheviks did not waver: despite the ‘thunder and lightning of philistine bourgeois public opinion in July, they were not frightened by the slander, the lies and persecution. They set their sights on the distant target, while at the same time shortening the timetable and speeding up events.’7 Russian public opinion provided fertile soil, however, for anything that would help explain the Russian army’s defeat, and the finger of accusation was pointed firmly at the Bolsheviks. They for their part would continue to deny any collaboration with the Germans, even after the October revolution. For instance, Trotsky received a telegram from the Bolshevik Foreign Commissar Chicherin in January 1919, reporting that
In January 1918 Russian counter-revolutionaries sent Colonel Robins [of the American Red Cross] a number of documents showing there was a link between the German government and Lenin and Trotsky. Robins conducted an investigation and questioned Galperin who admitted that many of the documents had been in the hands of the Kerensky government and are obvious forgeries … The former publisher of Cosmopolitan Magazine, Verna Sisson, agreed with Robins, but later changed his mind.8
The Bolsheviks preferred not to raise the subject after October, and to do so meant risking one’s life. Before the revolution, however, things were different. The accusation was a serious one, and it was difficult to refute it. Many newspapers were writing about Bolshevik treachery and espionage. A good deal of concrete evidence of collaboration was collected, and more came to light in the Bolshevik—Germanensuing years. For example, General Erich Ludendorff, who had been in the German High Command during the war, wrote in his memoirs in 1919: ‘In helping Lenin to get back to Russia [through Germany] our government took a special responsibility upon itself. From the military point of view the enterprise was justified. Russia had to be brought down.’9
One of the most diligent investigators of the crimes and misdemeanours of Russian socialists was Vladimir Burtsev, a member of the
Socialist Revolutionary Party who in 1908 had exposed one of the most daring and effective police infiltrators in his party, Yevno Azef, and who pursued the Bolshevik—German link with equal tenacity. He wrote: ‘All these years I have asserted the same thing: we must pursue and beat the Bolsheviks.’ In one of his many articles, entitled ’My Challenge to the Traitors and their Defenders’, which was sent from Paris to Moscow by local Soviet agents in 1922, he wrote that since August 1914 the Germans had transmitted to the Bolsheviks more than 70 million marks. ‘As early as the summer of 1917, openly and in the press under my own name, I accused Lenin and a dozen of his comrades by name: Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Ganetsky, Kollontai, Lunacharsky, Nakhamkes, Rakovsky and others of treason to Russia and of having had relations with the Germans during the war and I demanded their immediate arrest and trial.’10
In July 1917 the Provisional Government decided to act on the evidence it had collected, even though it was not totally conclusive, and ordered the arrest of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and a large number of other Bolsheviks. At the height of the furore Trotsky met Lenin, evidently during a joint session of the Central and Petrograd Party Committees on 4 (17) July. When the question whether the accused should appear in court was discussed, Trotsky said they should turn the court into a revolutionary tribunal. Kamenev supported this view, but Lenin and most of the others felt, with some reason, that the government would take the opportunity to deprive the revolution of its leaders and thus be able the more easily to damp it down. The government moreover had already used troops to close down Pravda. It should also be noted that Lenin was by nature very cautious, and would not take risks with his own life.
Three or four days after Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev had gone into hiding, Trotsky published a carefully composed open letter to the government:
Citizen Ministers! I know you have decided to arrest Comrades Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. But the arrest order does not include me. Therefore I think it essential to draw your attention to the following facts: 1) In principle, I share the views of Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev and I defend them in my newspaper Vpered and in my many public speeches. 2) My position on the events of 3-4 July coincides with those of the above-mentioned comrades.11
Trotsky continued to make speeches declaring himself, like Lenin, a sworn enemy of the government, and labelled as a scoundrel anyone who called the leaders of the revolution German spies. Most of his listeners at that dangerous moment kept silent, even though they may have shared his position, but many others shouted abuse and threats.
Remaining at large, Trotsky continued to goad the government, accusing it of criminally continuing the war and of wanting to deprive the people of the fruits of the February revolution. After tolerating this for a week and a half, the government finally sent a detachment of officers to arrest him. In the packed Kresty Prison, familiar to him from 1905, he found his friends Lunacharsky and Antonov-Ovseenko, Raskolnikov and Kamenev, as well as many others from both wings of the RSDLP and the Socialist Revolutionaries. The following day Nikolai Sukhanov, the Menshevik chronicler of the revolution, announced to the massed crowd at the Cirque Moderne, where Trotsky had been due to speak, that he was under arrest. A howl of indignation erupted, and Sukhanov and Martov barely managed to prevent a riot by passing a resolution of protest. Sukhanov later wrote that rumours had been spread by right-wing agitators to the effect that Lenin, Trotsky and Lunacharsky had wanted to establish a three-man dictatorship and seize power, thus putting an end to the revolution.12 This only inflamed passions further. The fact that Trotsky’s arrest became an item of importance in the press and a topic of widespread debate at workers’ meetings throughout the city demonstrated his rapid ascent to local fame, despite his not having yet declared himself as a Bolshevik or Menshevik—or perhaps because of it.
Repeating his actions of 1905, Trotsky took up his pen in prison and wrote a number of articles on the issues of the day, becoming more and more revolutionary as he wrote. Raskolnikov later recalled Trotsky in prison: ‘When he went out for a stroll, wearing his foreign cape and soft felt hat, Comrade Trotsky would at once be surrounded by a group of comrades and a lively discussion on politics would ensue … In his cell, however, he spent from morning till night writing intensively.’13
Trotsky’s authority rose after his arrest, even if it had taken place virtually at his invitation. A few days after it had occurred, the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP opened in semi-legal circumstances. Many of those who would have taken part as leading members were either in hiding or in prison, among them, of course, Lenin. His intellectual and political influence, however, was much in evidence. Indeed, it was his interpretation of the political scene that echoed throughout the proceedings, namely that as long as the counter-revolution was in the ascendancy, the possibility of seizing power by peaceful means did not exist. The question of an armed uprising therefore was at the top of the party’s agenda. The radicalism of the Bolsheviks emerged more sharply from this moment. As Kerensky later put it, Lenin chose the path of tragic developments: the imperialist war of nations was being turned into a civil war of the classes.14
The Sixth Party Congress was of enormous importance for Trotsky, who was elected an honorary chairman in his absence. After preliminary discussion and agreement, the Mezhrayonka, which could boast some 4000 members, was accepted into the party. They consisted of Menshevik-Internationalists, Bolshevik-Conciliators, and Trotsky. Thus, his party membership was resolved while he was in prison. Along with him, Lunacharsky, Volodarsky, Ioffe, Manuilsky, Uritsky and many other intellectuals became full-fledged Bolsheviks. Trotsky’s authority rose still higher when he was elected a member of the new party Central Committee by only three votes less than were cast for Lenin.
Meanwhile, the government could find no serious grounds for holding Trotsky, while he for his part declared a hunger-strike and refused to answer any questions. On 2 September he was released on bail of 3000 roubles, paid by the Petrograd Soviet. Since his arrest the political situation had changed dramatically, and Kerensky now felt he needed the support of the Soviets to resist an attempt by his commander-in-chief, General Kornilov, to crush the radical and anti-war elements in the capital and install a tough military leadership to defend Russia, which was still at war. Kerensky, meanwhile, was afraid that an anti-Soviet putsch would threaten his own precarious position, and as a result he found himself on opposing sides with his own army chief.
Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Kamenev, Kollontai and others were released, much to the disgust of the Kornilovites. General Lukomsky, chief-of-staff first to General Brusilov and then to Kornilov himself, recalled that after the events of July, ‘to general consternation the Provisional Government, having crushed the Bolshevik demonstration, appeared criminally weak. Lenin, who could easily have been arrested, was given the chance to escape. Trotsky was released from prison. Traitors to the country, working with German money and openly calling for an end to the war and a peace “without annexations or reparation”, were not only not punished with the full force of the law, but they were given the opportunity to start their destructive work in the capital and the army once again.’15 The Provisional Government had become a scarecrow that had ceased to scare the crows. The many memoirs of this period, published abroad in the 1920s by men who had been associated with Kerensky’s government, focus much of their indignation at the course of events precisely on the government’s failure to deal forcefully with the anti-war agitation.
In the middle of September 1917 the Democratic Conference opened in Petrograd, a forum of sorts for those political parties which were committed to finding an appropriate form of government through dialogue. These included all the socialist parties and the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). It might conceivably have succeeded, had the Mensheviks and SRs not wavered and finally opted for a compromise with the Bolsheviks in preference to a coalition with the Kadets. This meeting was a significant one for Trotsky, who had for the first time been asked by the Central Committee to
explain the Bolshevik position. According to eye-witnesses, his speech made a huge impression. He had prepared it with care, aware of its importance for his future. Sukhanov recorded that this was one of Trotsky’s most brilliant speeches, devoid of the usual polished phrases and metallic clarity of his voice, and more in the nature of an intimate conversation with his audience. In his speech Trotsky demanded the arming of the Red Guards, the largely Bolshevik militia composed of deserters and workers who had been armed by the party: ‘only by this means can we create a genuine bastion against counter-revolution’. If the Bolsheviks’ proposals on the war were going to be rejected, he went on, ‘then the armed workers of Petrograd and the whole of Russia will defend the fatherland of the revolution against the soldiers of imperialism with heroism unheard of in Russian history’.16 At the end of the speech Trotsky condemned the falsification of the figures on representation at the Democratic Conference, and demonstratively walked out with the Bolshevik delegates. It was an ominous sign that the Bolsheviks had chosen the path of armed uprising.
Lenin approved of Trotsky’s behaviour and, as a result, when elections for the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet took place on 25 September the Bolsheviks proposed Trotsky as chairman, and he was duly elected. In his speech of thanks he promised that he would do his best to make his second stint as chairman more successful than the first, in 1905. Two sentences in this speech stand out: ‘We will conduct the business of the Petrograd Soviet in the spirit of full freedom for all parties. The hand of the leadership will never be raised to oppress the minority.’17 Despite the fact that on this occasion the principle of proportional representation was observed, Trotsky’s laudably democratic sentiments would quickly be forgotten by him and the rest of the Bolshevik dictatorship. He would support measures to liquidate revolutionary pluralism, and would let his fine words about safeguarding the majority slip into history.
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