Trockij Lev D. - Leon Trotsky : a revolutionarys life

A Revolutionarys Life

JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN

Frontispiece: Leon Trotsky in Mexico, c. 1940. Photograph by Alexander H. Buchman.

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.

Copyright 2011 by Joshua Rubenstein. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Set in Janson type by Vondas Comp Services, Morley, Michigan.
Printed in the United States of America by Maple-Vail, York, PA.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dat
Rubenstein, Joshua.
Leon Trotsky / Joshua Rubenstein
p. cm.(Jewish lives)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-13724-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Trotsky, Leon, 18791940.
2. CommunistsRussiaBiography. I. Title.
HX312.T75R83 2011
947.084092dc22
[B] 2010053718

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Nothing great has been accomplished in history
without fanaticism.
Leon Trotsky

LEON TROTSKY haunts our historical memory. A preeminent revolutionary figure and a masterful writer, Trotsky led an upheaval that helped to define the contours of twentieth-century politics. While still a teenager, he threw himself into the antitsarist underground and from that time on never renounced his commitment to revolution. He organized, wrote, distributed pamphlets and essays, faced Siberian exile, abandoned his first wife and daughtersall for the purpose of opposing a deeply conservative monarch. But when he realized his dream and found himself against all odds and expectations among those in charge of a triumphant revolution, he adopted the very methods of the regime that had once hounded him.

Unlike some of Trotskys other biographers, most notably Isaac Deutscher, I did not explore his life as an admirer or a follower, nor did I seek to savage him for his personal failings, real or alleged, as I believe Robert Service sought to do in his recent biography. As much as I came to recognize the courage Trotsky later exhibited in opposing Stalin and the profound suffering he and his family endured, I did not find myself attracted to his revolutionary lan when he sought to undermine the Provisional Government in 1917 or to oppose Stalin from his places of exile by resuming his efforts to undermine a dictator. Trotsky fully understood that Stalin was creating a regime that used the veneer of socialism to camouflage its brutal intentions. He also grasped the danger in Stalins equivocal response to the rise of Hitler when the Kremlin failed to insist that the German Communist Party work together with German Socialists to oppose the Nazis. Trotsky was among the first to foresee that Hitlers triumph would spell disaster for his fellow European Jews and that Stalin would seek an alliance with Hitler if Soviet overtures to the Western democracies led nowhere. But he could never acknowledge that he and Lenin had been responsible for the rejection of democratic values that Stalin soon exploited for his own more sinister purposes. Trotsky asserted that he and Lenin had wanted to fashion a different kind of dictatorship.

History is full of such tragic heroes. They dream of justice and then wreak havoc.

TO THE WORLD he will always be known as Leon Trotsky, but he was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on October 26, 1879, in southern Ukraine, near the city of Kherson. His parents, David and Anna Bronstein, had eight children. Lev was their fifth, the third-oldest of their surviving children; four others died in infancy of diphtheria and scarlet fever. The Bronsteins were not typical Russian Jews. Unlike the majority of the tsars five million Jews who were compelled to reside in the Pale of Settlement, an area encompassing much of present-day Belarus and Ukraine, Levs parents lived on a farm, near land that Davids father had initially cultivated in the 1850s when he left Poltava to settle among a group of Jewish colonies established by Tsar Alexander I earlier in the century. Most Russian Jews lived in small towns, on the margins of Russian cultural and social life, their day-to-day existence constrained by myriad legal restrictions that reduced them to second-class citizens.

In 1879 Tsar Alexander II sat securely on the throne, but the year marked a dramatic turn in the fate of Russias Jews and the struggle against the Romanov dynasty. Earlier in his reign, Alexander II had carried out many significant reforms following Russias defeat in the Crimean War, including the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the introduction of laws in the 1850s and 1860s that eased some of the long-standing civil restrictions on Russias Jews. He ended forced Jewish juvenile conscription; expanded the right of Jews to live closer to the borders of Poland and Bessarabia; broadened opportunities for prosperous Jewish merchants to live in major Russian cities; and, at least under law, permitted Jews with university degrees to pursue government service throughout the Russian Empire.

These changes were not enough to assuage radical opinion, and the Jews remained a vulnerable and persecuted minority. On August 26, 1879, the Peoples Will, an underground opposition dedicated to the violent overthrow of the monarchy, proclaimed its intention to kill the tsar. And in November, an attempt was made to blow up the royal train. A month later, on December 21, Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, who would adopt the name Stalin as a young revolutionary, came into the world in a remote corner of the Caucasus.

Lev was born into a Russia that continued to be roiled by the Jewish Question. Seven months before his birth, Russias Jews were shaken by an unexpected attack. On March 5, 1879, a group of Jews was brought to trial in the town of Kutaisi for the ritual murder of a young peasant girl in Georgia. She had disappeared on Passover Eve in April 1878 and had been found dead two days later. The coroner ruled that she had accidentally drowned, but the police, convinced that the date of her disappearance and unusual wounds on her body and hands were evidence of foul play, arrested nine Jews from a neighboring village. Their trial was the first ritual-murder trial ever held in the Russian Empire, and though the defendants were acquitted, the case provoked intense attention, including a concerted campaign in Russias extreme right-wing press to lend credibility to the charge.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was famous for his sympathy for the downtrodden, nonetheless succumbed to the hysteria surrounding the Kutaisi affair; he was so obsessed with Jews and the Jewish Question that he introduced the idea of ritual murder into his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, which he completed in November 1880, a few months before his death. Dostoevsky had also engaged in attacks on Jews in Russia and in Europe generally. Dostoevsky held the Jews responsible for the abuses of capitalism and the menace of socialism, concluding that Russia should not harbor any forgiving sentimentality toward its Jewish minority.