Our Revolution: Essays on Working-Class and International Revolution, 1904-1917

Trotsky Leon

Our Revolution: Essays on Working-Class and International Revolution, 1904-1917

PREFACE

The world has not known us Russian revolutionists. The world has sympathized with us; the world abroad has given aid and comfort to our refugees; the world, at times, even admired us; yet the world has not known us. Friends of freedom in Europe and America were keenly anxious to see the victory of our cause; they watched our successes and our defeats with breathless interest; yet they were concerned with material results. Our views, our party affiliations, our factional divisions, our theoretical gropings, our ideological constructions, to us the leading lights in our revolutionary struggles, were foreign to the world. All this was supposed to be an internal Russian affair.

The Revolution has now ceased to be an internal Russian affair. It has become of world-wide import. It has started to influence governments and peoples. What was not long ago a theoretical dispute between two "underground" revolutionary circles, has grown into a concrete historical power determining the fate of nations. What was the individual conception of individual revolutionary leaders is now ruling millions.

The world is now vitally interested in understanding Russia, in learning the history of our Revolution which is the history of the great Russian nation for the last fifty years. This involves, however, knowing not only events, but also the development of thoughts, of aims, of ideas that underlie and direct events; gaining an insight into the immense volume of intellectual work which recent decades have accumulated in revolutionary Russia.

We have selected Leon Trotzky's contribution to revolutionary thought, not because he is now in the limelight of history, but because his conceptions represent a very definite, a clear-cut and intrinsically consistent trend of revolutionary thought, quite apart from that of other leaders. We do not agree with many of Trotzky's ideas and policies, yet we cannot overlook the fact that these ideas have become predominant in the present phase of the Russian Revolution and that they are bound to give their stamp to Russian democracy in the years to come, whether the present government remains in power or not.

The reader will see that Trotzky's views as applied in Bolsheviki ruled Russia are not of recent origin. They were formed in the course of the First Russian Revolution of 1905, in which Trotzky was one of the leaders. They were developed and strengthened in the following years of reaction, when many a progressive group went to seek compromises with the absolutist forces. They became particularly firm through the world war and the circumstances that led to the establishment of a republican order in Russia. Perhaps many a grievous misunderstanding and misinterpretation would have been avoided had thinking America known that those conceptions of Trotzky were not created on the spur of the moment, but were the result of a life-long work in the service of the Revolution.

Trotzky's writings, besides their theoretical and political value, represent a vigor of style and a clarity of expression unique in Russian revolutionary literature.

M.J. Olgin.

New York, February 16th, 1918.

LEON TROTZKY

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Trotzky is a man of about forty. He is tall, strong, angular; his appearance as well as his speech give the impression of boldness and vigor. His voice is a high tenor ringing with metal. And even in his quiet moments he resembles a compressed spring.

He is always aggressive. He is full of passion, – that white-hot, vibrating mental passion that characterizes the intellectual Jew. On the platform, as well as in private life, he bears an air of peculiar importance, an indefinable something that says very distinctly: "Here is a man who knows his value and feels himself chosen for superior aims." Yet Trotzky is not imposing. He is almost modest. He is detached. In the depths of his eyes there is a lingering sadness.

It was only natural that he, a gifted college youth with a strong avidity for theoretical thinking, should have exchanged, some twenty years ago, the somber class-rooms of the University of Odessa for the fresh breezes of revolutionary activity. That was the way of most gifted Russian youths. That especially was the way of educated young Jews whose people were being crushed under the steam-roller of the Russian bureaucracy.

In the last years of the nineteenth century there was hardly enough opportunity to display unusual energy in revolutionary work. Small circles of picked workingmen, assembling weekly under great secrecy somewhere in a backyard cabin in a suburb, to take a course in sociology or history or economics; now and then a "mass" meeting of a few score laborers gathered in the woods; revolutionary appeals and pamphlets printed on a secret press and circulated both among the educated classes and among the people; on rare occasions, an open manifestation of revolutionary intellectuals, such as a meeting of students within the walls of the University – this was practically all that could be done in those early days of Russian revolution. Into this work of preparation, Trotzky threw himself with all his energy. Here he came into the closest contact with the masses of labor. Here he acquainted himself with the psychology and aspirations of working and suffering Russia. This was the rich soil of practical experience that ever since has fed his revolutionary ardor.

His first period of work was short. In 1900 we find him already in solitary confinement in the prisons of Odessa, devouring book after book to satisfy his mental hunger. No true revolutionist was ever made downhearted by prison, least of all Trotzky, who knew it was a brief interval of enforced idleness between periods of activity. After two and a half years of prison "vacation" (as the confinement was called in revolutionary jargon) Trotzky was exiled to Eastern Siberia, to Ust-Kut, on the Lena River, where he arrived early in 1902, only to seize the first opportunity to escape.

Again he resumed his work, dividing his time between the revolutionary committees in Russia and the revolutionary colonies abroad. 1902 and 1903 were years of growth for the labor movement and of Social-Democratic influence over the working masses. Trotzky, an uncompromising Marxist, an outspoken adherent of the theory that only the revolutionary workingmen would be able to establish democracy in Russia, devoted much of his energy to the task of uniting the various Social-Democratic circles and groups in the various cities of Russia into one strong Social-Democratic Party, with a clear program and well-defined tactics. This required a series of activities both among the local committees and in the Social-Democratic literature which was conveniently published abroad.

It was in connection with this work that Trotzky's first pamphlet was published and widely read. It was entitled: The Second Convention of The Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Geneva, 1903), and dealt with the controversies between the two factions of Russian Social-Democracy which later became known as the Bolsheviki and the Mensheviki. Trotzky's contribution was an attempt at reconciliation between the two warring camps which professed the same Marxian theory and pursued the same revolutionary aim. The attempt failed, as did many others, yet Trotzky never gave up hope of uniting the alienated brothers.

On the eve of the Revolution of 1905, Trotzky was already a revolutionary journalist of high repute. We admired the vigor of his style, the lucidity of his thought and the straightness of his expression. Articles bearing the pseudonym "N. Trotzky" were an intellectual treat, and invariably aroused heated discussions. It may not be out of place to say a few words about this pseudonym. Many an amazing comment has been made in the American press on the Jew Bronstein "camouflaging" under a Russian name, Trotzky. It seems to be little known in this country that to assume a pen name is a practice widely followed in Russia, not only among revolutionary writers. Thus "Gorki" is a pseudonym; "Shchedrin" (Saltykov) is a pseudonym. "Fyodor Sologub" is a pseudonym. As to revolutionary writers, the very character of their work has compelled them to hide their names to escape the secret police. Ulyanov, therefore, became "Lenin," and Bronstein became "Trotzky." As to his "camouflaging" as a Russian, this assertion is based on sheer ignorance. Trotzky is not a genuine Russian name – no more so than Ostrovski or Levine. True, there was a Russian playwright Ostrovski, and Tolstoi gave his main figure in Anna Karenin the name of Levine. Yet Ostrovski and Levine are well known in Russia as Jewish names, and so is Trotzky. I have never heard of a Gentile bearing the name Trotzky. Trotzky has never concealed his Jewish nationality. He was too proud to dissimulate. Pride is, perhaps, one of the dominant traits of his powerful personality.

Revolutionary Russia did not question the race or nationality of a writer or leader. One admired Trotzky's power over emotion, the depth of his convictions, the vehemence of his attacks on the opponents of the Revolution. As early as 1904, one line of his revolutionary conceptions became quite conspicuous: his opposition to the liberal movement in Russia. In a series of essays in the Social-Democratic Iskra (Spark), in a collection of his essays published in Geneva under the title Before January Ninth, he unremittingly branded the Liberals for lack of revolutionary spirit, for cowardice in face of a hateful autocracy, for failure to frame and to defend a thoroughly democratic program, for readiness to compromise with the rulers on minor concessions and thus to betray the cause of the Revolution. No one else was as eloquent, as incisive in pointing out the timidity and meekness of the Zemstvo opposition (Zemstvo were the local representative bodies for the care of local affairs, and the Liberal land owners constituted the leading party in those bodies) as the young revolutionary agitator, Trotzky. Trotzky's fury against the wavering policy of the well-to-do Liberals was only a manifestation of another trait of his character: his desire for clarity in political affairs. Trotzky could not conceive of half-way measures, of "diplomatic" silence over vital topics, of cunning moves and concealed designs in political struggles. The attitude of a Milukov, criticizing the government and yet willing to acquiesce in a monarchy of a Prussian brand, criticizing the revolutionists and yet secretly pleased with the horror they inflicted upon Romanoff and his satellites, was simply incompatible with Trotzky's very nature and aroused his impassioned contempt. To him, black was always black, and white was white, and political conceptions ought to be so clear as to find adequate expression in a few simple phrases.

Trotzky's own political line was the Revolution – a violent uprising of the masses, headed by organized labor, forcibly to overthrow bureaucracy and establish democratic freedom. With what an outburst of blazing joy he greeted the upheaval of January 9, 1905 – the first great mass-movement in Russia with clear political aims: "The Revolution has come!" he shouted in an ecstatic essay completed on January 20th. "The Revolution has come. One move of hers has lifted the people over scores of steps, up which in times of peace we would have had to drag ourselves with hardships and fatigue. The Revolution has come and destroyed the plans of so many politicians who had dared to make their little political calculations with no regard for the master, the revolutionary people. The Revolution has come and destroyed scores of superstitions, and has manifested the power of the program which is founded on the revolutionary logic of the development of the masses… The Revolution has come and the period of our infancy has passed."

The Revolution filled the entire year of 1905 with the battle cries of ever-increasing revolutionary masses. The political strike became a powerful weapon. The village revolts spread like wild-fire. The government became frightened. It was under the sign of this great conflagration that Trotzky framed his theory of immediate transition from absolutism to a Socialist order. His line of argument was very simple. The working class, he wrote, was the only real revolutionary power. The bourgeoisie was weak and incapable of adroit resistance. The intellectual groups were of no account. The peasantry was politically primitive, yet it had an overwhelming desire for land. "Once the Revolution is victorious, political power necessarily passes into the hands of the class that has played a leading rôle in the struggle, and that is the working class." To secure permanent power, the working class would have to win over the millions of peasants. This would be possible by recognizing all the agrarian changes completed by the peasants in time of the revolution and by a radical agrarian legislation. "Once in power, the proletariat will appear before the peasantry as its liberator." On the other hand, having secured its class rule over Russia, why should the proletariat help to establish parliamentary rule, which is the rule of the bourgeois classes over the people? "To imagine that Social-Democracy participates in the Provisional Government, playing a leading rôle in the period of revolutionary democratic reconstruction, insisting on the most radical reforms and all the time enjoying the aid and support of the organized proletariat, – only to step aside when the democratic program is put into operation, to leave the completed building at the disposal of the bourgeois parties and thus to open an era of parliamentary politics where Social-Democracy forms only a party of opposition, – to imagine this would mean to compromise the very idea of a labor government." Moreover, "once the representatives of the proletariat enter the government, not as powerless hostages, but as a leading force, the divide between the minimum-program and the maximum-program automatically disappears, collectivism becomes the order of the day," since "political supremacy of the proletariat is incompatible with its economic slavery." It was precisely the same program which Trotzky is at present attempting to put into operation. This program has been his guiding star for the last twelve years.

In the fall of 1905 it looked as if Trotzky's hope was near its realization. The October strike brought autocracy to its knees. A Constitution was promised. A Soviet (Council of Workmen's Deputies) was formed in Petersburg to conduct the Revolution. Trotzky became one of the strongest leaders of the Council. It was in those months that we became fully aware of two qualities of Trotzky's which helped him to master men: his power as a speaker, and his ability to write short, stirring articles comprehensible to the masses. In the latter ability nobody equals him among Russian Socialists. The leaders of Russian Social-Democracy were wont to address themselves to the intellectual readers. Socialist writers of the early period of the Revolution were seldom confronted with the necessity of writing for plain people. Trotzky was the best among the few who, in the stormy months of the 1905 revolution, were able to appeal to the masses in brief, strong, yet dignified articles full of thought, vision, and emotion.

The Soviet was struggling in a desperate situation. Autocracy had promised freedom, yet military rule was becoming ever more atrocious. The sluices of popular revolutionary movement were open, yet revolutionary energy was being gradually exhausted. The Soviet acted as a true revolutionary government, ignoring the government of the Romanoffs, giving orders to the workingmen of the country, keeping a watchful eye on political events; yet the government of the old régime was regaining its self-confidence and preparing for a final blow. The air was full of bad omens.

It required an unusual degree of revolutionary faith and vigor to conduct the affairs of the Soviet. Trotzky was the man of the hour. First a member of the Executive Committee, then the chairman of the Soviet, he was practically in the very vortex of the Revolution. He addressed meetings, he ordered strikes, he provided the vanguard of the workingmen with firearms; he held conferences with representatives of labor unions throughout the country, and – the irony of history – he repeatedly appeared before the Ministers of the old régime as a representative of labor democracy to demand from them the release of a prisoner or the abolition of some measures obnoxious to labor. It was in this school of the Soviet that Trotzky learned to see events in a national aspect, and it was the very existence of the Soviet which confirmed his belief in the possibility of a revolutionary proletarian dictatorship. Looking backward at the activities of the Soviet, he thus characterized that prototype of the present revolutionary government in Russia. "The Soviet," he wrote, "was the organized authority of the masses themselves over their separate members. This was a true, unadulterated democracy, without a two-chamber system, without a professional bureaucracy, with the right of the voters to recall their representative at will and to substitute another." In short, it was the same type of democracy Trotzky and Lenin are trying to make permanent in present-day Russia.

The black storm soon broke loose. Trotzky was arrested with the other members of the "revolutionary government," after the Soviet had existed for about a month and a half. Trotzky went to prison, not in despair, but as a leader of an invincible army which though it had suffered temporary defeat, was bound to win. Trotzky had to wait twelve years for the moment of triumph, yet the moment came.

In prison Trotzky was very active, reading, writing, trying to sum up his experience of the revolutionary year. After twelve months of solitary confinement he was tried and sentenced to life exile in Siberia: the government of the enemies of the people was wreaking vengeance on the first true representatives of the people. On January 3, 1907, Trotzky started his trip for Obdorsk, in Northern Siberia on the Arctic Ocean.

He was under unusual rigid surveillance even for Russian prisons. Each movement of his and of his comrades was carefully guarded. No communication with the outer world was permitted. The very journey was surrounded by great secrecy. Yet such was the fame of the Soviet, that crowds gathered at every station to greet the prisoners' train, and even the soldiers showed extraordinary respect for the imprisoned "workingmen's deputies" as they called them. "We are surrounded by friends on every side," Trotzky wrote in his note book.

In Tiumen the prisoners had to leave the railway train for sleighs drawn by horses. The journey became very tedious and slow. The monotony was broken only by little villages, where revolutionary exiles were detained. Here and there the exiles would gather to welcome the leaders of the revolution. Red flags gave touches of color to the blinding white of the Siberian snow. "Long live the Revolution!" was printed with huge letters on the surface of the northern snow, along the road. This was beautiful, but it gave little consolation. The country became ever more desolate. "Every day we move down one step into the kingdom of cold and wilderness," Trotzky remarked in his notes.

It was a gloomy prospect, to spend years and years in this God forsaken country. Trotzky was not the man to submit. In defiance of difficulties, he managed to escape before he reached the town of his destination. As there was only one road along which travelers could move, and as there was danger that authorities, notified by wire of his escape, could stop him at any moment, he left the road and on a sleigh drawn by reindeer he crossed an unbroken wilderness of 800 versts, over 500 miles. This required great courage and physical endurance. The picturesque journey is described by Trotzky in a beautiful little book, My Round Trip.

It was in this Ostiak sleigh, in the midst of a bleak desert, that he celebrated the 20th of February, the day of the opening of the Second Duma. It was a mockery at Russia: here, the representatives of the people, assembled in the quasi-Parliament of Russia; there, a representative of the Revolution that created the Duma, hiding like a criminal in a bleak wilderness. Did he dream in those long hours of his journey, that some day the wave of the Revolution would bring him to the very top?

Early in spring he arrived abroad. He established his home in Vienna where he lived till the outbreak of the great war. His time and energy were devoted to the internal affairs of the Social-Democratic Party and to editing a popular revolutionary magazine which was being smuggled into Russia. He earned a meager living by contributing to Russian "legal" magazines and dailies.

I met him first in 1907, in Stuttgart. He seemed to be deeply steeped in the revolutionary factional squabbles. Again I met him in Copenhagen in 1910. He was the target of bitter criticism for his press-comment on one of the Social-Democratic factions. He seemed to be dead to anything but the problem of reconciling the Bolsheviki with the Mensheviki and the other minor divisions. Yet that air of importance which distinguished him even from the famous old leaders had, in 1910, become more apparent. By this time he was already a well-known and respected figure in the ranks of International Socialism.

In the fall of 1912 he went into the Balkans as a war correspondent. There he learned to know the Balkan situation from authentic sources. His revelations of the atrocities committed on both sides attracted wide attention. When he came back to Vienna in 1913 he was a stronger internationalist and a stronger anti-militarist than ever.

His house in Vienna was a poor man's house, poorer than that of an ordinary American workingman earning eighteen dollars a week. Trotzky has been poor all his life. His three rooms in a Vienna working-class suburb contained less furniture than was necessary for comfort. His clothes were too cheap to make him appear "decent" in the eyes of a middle-class Viennese. When I visited his house I found Mrs. Trotzky engaged in housework, while the two light-haired lovely boys were lending not inconsiderable assistance. The only thing that cheered the house were loads of books in every corner, and, perhaps, great though hidden hopes.

On August 3, 1914, the Trotzkys, as enemy aliens, had to leave Vienna for Zurich, Switzerland. Trotzky's attitude towards the war was a very definite one from the very beginning. He accused German Social-Democracy for having voted the war credits and thus endorsed the war. He accused the Socialist parties of all the belligerent countries for having concluded a truce with their governments which in his opinion was equivalent to supporting militarism. He bitterly deplored the collapse of Internationalism as a great calamity for the emancipation of the world. Yet, even in those times of distress, he did not remain inactive. He wrote a pamphlet to the German workingmen entitled The War and Internationalism (recently translated into English and published in this country under the title The Bolsheviki and World Peace) which was illegally transported into Germany and Austria by aid of Swiss Socialists. For this attempt to enlighten the workingmen, one of the German courts tried him in a state of contumacy and sentenced him to imprisonment. He also contributed to a Russian Socialist daily of Internationalist aspirations which was being published by Russian exiles in Paris. Later he moved to Paris to be in closer contact with that paper. Due to his radical views on the war, however, he was compelled to leave France. He went to Spain, but the Spanish government, though not at war, did not allow him to stay in that country. He was himself convinced that the hand of the Russian Foreign Ministry was in all his hardships.

So it happened that in the winter 1916-1917, he came to the United States. When I met him here, he looked haggard; he had grown older, and there was fatigue in his expression. His conversation hinged around the collapse of International Socialism. He thought it shameful and humiliating that the Socialist majorities of the belligerent countries had turned "Social-Patriots." "If not for the minorities of the Socialist parties, the true Socialists, it would not be worth while living," he said once with deep sadness. Still, he strongly believed in the internationalizing spirit of the war itself, and expected humanity to become more democratic and more sound after cessation of hostilities. His belief in an impending Russian Revolution was unshaken. Similarly unshaken was his mistrust of the Russian non-Socialist parties. On January 20, 1917, less than two months before the overthrow of the Romanoffs, he wrote in a local Russian paper: "Whoever thinks critically over the experience of 1905, whoever draws a line from that year to the present day, must conceive how utterly lifeless and ridiculous are the hopes of our Social-Patriots for a revolutionary coöperation between the proletariat and the Liberal bourgeoisie in Russia."