* Leon Trotsky, 1897

In the wake of WW1, and to a limited extent before that war began, the paradox of the Nation State became clear. Kings had been reduced to constitutional monarchs as the Nation States arose in Europe, but the tyrannies remained, with Empires and Nationalists largely in charge of the world. For Liberalism was largely unknown in the world: democracies had not truly reached down to ground level. Here and there, men ruled with the consent of the governed, but universal suffrage and the rights of man remained merely ideals. Into this world steps Leon Trotsky, Russia’s first foreign affairs minister after the Russian Revolution. Lenin may have ruled the Revolution and Stalin would later overthrow it in a sort of Second Revolution, but Leon Trotsky was its brains and heart.

Trotsky was essentially a ruthless, decent, intelligent man, the first man with a vision for world democracy, right down to ground level. He is the intellectual forebear of several political movements including Neoconservatives and all the Liberal Hawks, Christopher Hitchens is another of his followers. But everyone who ever believed in Leon Trotsky hated Stalin and all he did. Do not confuse Trotsky with what Communism would become, for Stalin would eventually murder Trotsky for opposing those changes. Every enemy of totalitarian Communism owes a profound debt to Trotsky. Many people espouse his causes, completely unaware of Trotsky’s authorship of those causes. Trotsky is, to my way of thinking, the most misunderstood political theorist.

There’s that wonderful bit in the Declaration of Independence, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

This statement is the core of the issue for me and encapsulates Trotsky in a nutshell. It encompasses the essentially Conservative view in the first sentence and a bitter reaction to despotism in the second sentence, a profoundly Liberal statement. As is my wont, I resort to a history lesson.

* Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat
of All the Russia. Subsequent to his
canonization, he has been regarded as
Saint Nicholas The Passion Bearer by
the Russian Orthodox Church. Tsar
Nicholas II was Glorified and Canonized
by Russian Church in year 2000.

Tsar Alexander II of Russia emancipated his serfs in 1861. In 1879, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, later to be known by his alias Leon Trotsky was born to a wealthy secular Jewish farming family in a little village in what is now Ukraine. Educated in Odessa, he watched his essentially German school converted forcibly to Imperial Russian as a boy. Odessa, then and now, is a mighty port city, full of foreign influences. A modest autobiographer, Trotsky never revealed in addition to Ukrainian and Russian he spoke fluent French and German. This we do know, nine year old Lev Davidovich was sent to school the son of an illiterate farmer and became a man whose vision of populist democracy would encompass the world.

In 1898, a teenaged Lev Davidovich was imprisoned in Siberia for attempting to organize workers. Never imprison a thinking man to Siberia and let him live. In the prison camp, his fellow Marxists had time to talk. Trotsky himself would say “revolutions are always verbose”. Two factions developed around different aspects of the problem. Should the Marxists overthrow the Tsar, as Trotsky believed, or should they attempt to work within the existing system and organize the workers?

Four years before, in 1894, Nicholas II had been hastily installed as Tsar, woefully unprepared for the job by his father Tsar Alexander II. Some years before, Nicholas made a trip to visit his relatives in Great Britain and saw the House of Commons in operation, but democracy made little impression on the young Tsarevich Nicholas. After his coronation, a group of town councilmen, the zemstvos came to the Winter Palace, asking humbly if they might participate in the government. Tsar Nicholas II Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias haughtily replied: “... it has come to my knowledge that during the last months there have been heard in some assemblies of the zemstvos the voices of those who have indulged in a senseless dream that the zemstvos be called upon to participate in the government of the country. I want everyone to know that I will devote all my strength to maintain, for the good of the whole nation, the principle of absolute autocracy as firmly and as strongly as did my late lamented father.”

These fateful words set in motion all that would follow, for Tsar Alexander II had not been an autocrat. The Crimean War of the 1850s was an unmitigated disaster for Imperial Russia. In its wake, amid the humiliating peace which followed, Tsar Alexander I, great-grandfather of Nicholas II, promised reforms but died shortly thereafter. The Emancipation Proclamation signed by Lincoln in 1863 freed approximately 3.5 million black persons from a population of 9 million in the Southern States. By contrast, in 1861, Tsar Alexander II freed 25 million slaves with the Stolypin Reforms, around 44 percent of Russia’s population.

* Pushkin by Tropinin

These were heady times, to be sure. Though the vast majority of Russians were illiterate, those who had an education began to see their culture and their language as something fine and good. Russians, no longer provincial bumpkins on the edge of the civilized world, were producing great writers in their own language. Cracks were appearing in the Imperial Façade. The poet Pushkin would write in the opening stanza of Eugene Onegin:

My uncle, a most worthy gentleman,
When he fell seriously ill,
By croaking made us all respect him,
Couldn't have done better if he tried.
His behavior was a lesson to us all.
But, God above, what crushing boredom
To sit with the malingerer night and day
Not moving even one footstep away.
What demeaning hypocrisy
To amuse the half-dead codger,
To fluff up his pillows, and then,
Mournfully to bring him his medicine;
To think to oneself, and to sigh:
When the devil will the old rascal die?

In the early 1860s, oil had been discovered in Baku and an economic boom followed. Tens of thousands of carts, filled with wineskins and barrels full of petroleum were hauled into Cherny Gorod, the Black City. Hellish flares lit the scene day and night, even the birds were black. Maxim Gorky writes of 120 wells and 110 companies on a little over 300 acres, of filth and dirt and dust and soot, saying Baku remained in his memory as the perfect picture of hell. Rogozin the industrialist said “all was done without counting and calculating”.

* Baku 1905

The intervening years between 1861 and 1898 in Russia were fermented with the yeast of capitalism and new philosophies. The old feudal order was gone and good riddance to it. In its place stood a new sort of capitalist feudalism: rich farmers dominated the landscape, little different than the American South following the American Civil War. These were the Kulaks, the Bourgeoisie. Though the serfs had been freed, land reform was essentially nil. The old Khutor system of land ownership was abolished. Whereas all the serfs had farmed a commons for a single landowner, the land was quickly gobbled up by anyone with money, reducing the serf to a sharecropper.

A new phenomenon arose to oppose the Kulaks, the Narodniks, and Trotsky was among them. Somewhat naively, the Narodniks dreamed of the Good Old Days of the Khutor feudal system. In the olden days, men were governed by the Obshchina, rather like the English Shire system, only somewhat better, for the Obshchina was governed by the full assembly of its members. Farmland and forest were assigned year by year to families, justice was meted out, taxes collected, soldiers levied for the Tsar. The Obshchina was their sunrise and sunset, it ruled their lives completely. It was all the Russian serfs had ever known, and though it had failed miserably, the Narodniks wanted to restore the Obshchina model. Obshchina means “commune”. God in heaven punishes those who pray unwisely and the Russians would eventually get their communes. They would not like them.

* Russian serfs

In 1897, Trotsky dropped out of university to organize the South Russia Worker’s Union. The Marxists and Narodniks knew each other, but Trotsky did not agree with the Marxists. Trotsky’s mission was to the workers, and had little interest in overthrowing the government. The government did not feel the same about Trotsky and his Worker’s Union. The Tsar’s police arrested him along with 200 members of his Worker’s Union, held him in prison for two years then sent him to Siberia along with all the other political prisoners of Tsar Nicholas II Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, including the Marxists.

Solzhenitsyn would later have one of his prisoners in Ivan Denisovich say: "You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul." Thus it was that Lev Davidovich Bronstein, a Jewish boy from the Ukraine in the Ust-Kut prison camp on the banks of the River Lena, fell in among the Marxists he once despised and became one of them. It was only a partial conversion, for even in the camps there were divisions among the Marxists. He escaped from prison in 1902 and fled to London, where he took the name of a friendly jailer in the Odessa prison, Trotsky.

Thus endeth the lesson for today. By 1902, Trotsky hasn’t written anything of substance yet. I am not a Trotskyite, I am a Liberal Democrat. Yet in this series, I hope to communicate certain fundamental issues which divided the revolutionaries of the early 1900s and divide us yet. More is coming.
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