* Iskra Offices
37a Clerkenwell_Green
London

Trotsky’s escaped from Siberia and fled to London in 1902. Why London? It was a magnet for Russian exiles and other personae-non-grata. Lenin had also escaped to London and was editing Spark magazine, Iskra in Russian. Trotksy began writing for Spark, as were several other raffish ex-prisoners of Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias. All would figure large in the years to follow. This little magazine would be the fulcrum upon which Marxism would teeter and totter. With a smaller circulation than many college newspapers, around 8000, struggle for control of its editorial board would have consequences far beyond anyone’s ability to predict at the time. I give you the cast of characters, for Trotsky cannot be understood without them.

Trotsky had married while in prison. He had left his first wife and two daughters behind in Russia of necessity: escaped prisoners don’t usually go back to their families, and his wife understood completely. Trotsky met his second wife in London, took her name and had two more children. The children of Trotsky’s first marriage were raised on their grandfather’s estate. His first wife would later die in the gulag of Kolyma, mining gold in the Arctic. She was last seen in 1938 and has vanished from history. Varlam Shalamov describes the mass graves where she was doubtless buried in his Kolyma Tales, left as an exercise to the reader. Solzhenitsyn said Shalamov, not he, saw the worst of the Stalinist evil. In 1903, Stalin was in Siberia, a young sociopath and thug in training, soon to return to Georgia to a career of robbing banks and extorting money for the Bolsheviks. But this would be far in the future.

* Lenin

* Plekhanov

* Zasulich

* Axelrod

* Martov

Vladimir Lenin: In 1887, Vladimir’s brother Alexander was hanged for participating in a plot to assassinate Alexander II with a bomb. Vladimir and his mother are shown in Belousov’s painting, which was once in every Russian child’s schoolbook. Vladimir was only 17 in 1887, and his sister got off with mere banishment to the family estate, but the boy was hardened by the experience. His father had died the year before, a rather noble man, a public school administrator who wanted democracy for Russia. The universities of the time were hotbeds of revolutionaries, and Vladimir was promptly expelled from Kazan State University. He would finish a law degree in St Petersburg, but his law practice soon took a back seat to his Marxism, and in 1897 he found himself, like Trotsky, a guest of the Tsar at Shushenskoye on the Yenisei River. There Vladimir would meet Georgi Plekhanov, the first Russian Marxist, of whom much more shall be said in due time. During this time, Lenin would write his magnum opus: The Development of Capitalism in Russia, The Process of the Formation of a Home Market for Large-Scale Industry.

In it, Lenin would dissect the naïve assertions of the Narodniks and their idyllic communes. Does it surprise you to see Vladimir Lenin writing like a hard-nosed capitalist, quoting Adam Smith, pointing out the need for foreign markets and the simple fact that as industry increases, agriculture decreases? It shouldn’t. We must remember, in those days, Russians understood how far behind they were in the Industrial Revolution: none better than Lenin. All his life, Vladimir Lenin was a denizen of libraries, most famously the British Library, where he applied for a reader’s card under several aliases.

What Jean-Paul Marat had been for the French Revolution, Lenin became to the Russian Revolution, and Marat became a hero to the Russian revolutionaries. Lenin was, quite simply, the most dangerous man of his age and many others: a thinking man forged early into a pitiless weapon on the anvil of revenge.

Georgi Plekhanov: the Old Man of the Revolution. He was the theorist, and the first Russian revolutionary. His commentary ran to art, spiritual considerations and the relationship of the individual to society, especially to Russian society. After condemning the worst excesses of the Russian aristocracy, the Tsar’s police hunted and hounded him out of Russia. In exile, Plekhanov became a focal point for other émigrés, first in Switzerland, then in London. Though Lenin would eventually part ways with him, he always respected and admired Plekhanov. Plekhanov, like Trotsky, began as a Narodnik: he never shared Lenin and Trotsky’s vision for an international democratic movement. Georgi Plekhanov was Russian in every sense of that word: to read him is to be given insight into the Russian ethos. But Plekhanov put on airs and became something of a petulant bully at The Spark.

Vera Zasulich: Trotsky describes her circa 1903 in his biography of Lenin,

Born in 1849, Vera Zasulich was fundamentally a ferocious, beautiful little nihilist who spent time in the Tsar’s prisons between 1869 and 1873. When a Russian general had a Polish political prisoner flogged for failing to remove his cap, Zasulich, acting alone, shot and critically wounded General Feodor Trepov on January 24, 1878. Such was the contempt for the Tsar’s heavy-handed tactics, Vera Zasulich was found not guilty. She fled to Switzerland, met Plekhanov and founded an anti-Narodnik group, “Emancipation of Labor” with Plekhanov at the helm. Despite her bravery and demonstrated willingness to blast holes in Russian officers, she opposed the terror tactics of the Russian Revolution. She, like Plekhanov and Trotsky, would part eventually part ways with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Pavel Axelrod: Every movement of this sort needs a Pavel Axelrod. The son of a poor Jewish innkeeper, Axelrod ran a little company in Switzerland making kefir, a health drink from the Caucasus. Though he didn’t have much money, what he did have he gave to the Russian exiles. He would side with Plekhanov and Trotsky against Lenin in time, eventually calling Bolshevism a historical crime without parallel in modern history. Pavel Axelrod briefly flirted with the terrorist philosophy of Bakunin. In 1877 he joined the Land and Liberty Group. Three years later the group split into two factions. The majority of members, who favored a policy of terrorism, established the People's Will. Axelrod and George Plekhanov established the Black Repartition group that rejected terrorism and supported a socialist propaganda campaign among workers and peasants.

Julius Martov: Of all the characters in this essay, Martov’s story is perhaps the most tragic. Where Lenin argued for a tightly controlled central committee, Martov’s vision was a loose coalition with a broad base of support and membership. Martov correctly predicted all the failures of the Bolsheviks. A few people listened, but Martov was sidelined, his every effort to reunite with the Bolsheviks was shot down. Like Trotsky and Axelrod, Martov was a Jew and a Menschevik. He feebly attempted to oppose Lenin’s tactics, but would eventually be mocked out the circles of influence by his one-time friend, literally consigned in the words of Lenin to “the dustbin of history”. Every time I see a toppled statue of Lenin, I think of Martov and smile grimly, for I am often mocked for my prophecies.

Alexander Potresov: Along with Lenin, Potresov was the first to become disillusioned with Old Man Plekhanov. The two were horrified by Plekhanov’s dictatorial style. Potresov would later break with Lenin for the same reasons and became a leader among the Menscheviks.

In 1903, a 23 year old Leon Trotsky joins this fractious little group in London. Plekhanov represented the Old Guard, the Geneva crowd of Russian intelligensia who’d been in exile for decades. Lenin represented the New Guard, the young people who’d long since decided the Old Guard wasn’t serious about the revolution. Both sides wooed Trotsky, for he was the seventh member and therefore a tie-breaker. Because Trotsky didn’t fall in line behind him, Old Man Plekhanov conceived a dislike for Trotsky and kept Trotsky from full membership in the editorial board. Still, Trotsky was there at the meetings, and contributed the lion’s share of the copy for the struggling little magazine. As Plekhanov’s petty tyrannies and slights increased, Trotsky, Lenin and Potresov grew increasingly angry. There would be consequences for Plekhanov’s autocratic management style later that year.

Conclusion:

In 1903, Russia stood at the crossroads of history. The more the Tsar’s secret police and Cossacks cracked down on the revolutionaries, the worse the situation became. Russia’s universities degenerated into gangs of revolutionaries: Siberia proved their true education. All semblance of peaceful coexistence with the Tsar and with each other had been cast aside. In a strange twist of fate, a tiny magazine in London proved a tableau in miniature of Russia itself. Would the Revolution be a tolerant, inclusive thing, open to differences of opinion within its ranks? Would it be a tight, hierarchical movement, led by a small corps of leaders, intent on loyalty to a single doctrine of world domination? In 1903, nobody could have predicted the Revolution would succeed: seven odd people in a cloud of tobacco smoke, a strange beautiful woman throwing lit cigarettes here and there, led by a domineering old artsy-fartsy gent who offended a handful of young men who would later overthrow Peter the Great’s Romanov Dynasty. It was a most improbable revolution.

Langston Hughes once wrote:

Every revolution sows the seeds of its own demise. Lenin’s choice to centralize the struggle would concentrate power into few enough hands for Stalin’s tyranny to seize it all. Though they all hated the Tsar and his regime, the early Communists had a blind spot. The absolute power which corrupted the Tsar would corrupt them, too, absolutely, turning an idealistic scheme of world democracy into the greatest engine of murder and sorrow the world has yet seen. Trotsky foresaw it, and his first wife would die in it. My next installment will focus upon this problem more directly. Thanks for getting this far into this series. More is coming.
--

--

--

--

--