Passing of Trotsky

Shortly prior to Lenin's death came stories which would indicate that War Lord Trotsky has been relegated to a lowly place among the leaders of the less radical order of Russians.

It was announced, but subsequently denied, that Trotsky had been arrested by M. Dzerjinsky, chief of the Cheka, the political police force of Sovietdom, on the order of M. Zinoviev, President of the Moscow Soviet. He was charged with "treasonable conspiracy against the Soviet, rebellion against the Central Committee of the Communist Party and disloyalty to the Internationale."

The report was, however, partly substantiated by evidence from Moscow, received by the British Foreign Office, which purported to prove the Cheka had attempted to "kidnap" the War Lord, presumably for "flirting with the monarchists and plotting to make himself a dictator a la mode under a puppet Tsar." It was not clear whether this report had any connection with his arrest, but the details of the attempted kidnapping are:

At midnight an armored car and two lorries full of men halted opposite the palatial country residence of M. Trotsky outside Moscow. The men descended, marched to the big iron gates and demanded to be admitted "in the name of the Cheka." Trotsky's guards refused to open the gates; the men from the Cheka blew them up. Inside the grounds, however, they were confronted with barbed wire entanglements and a chain of concrete "pill boxes." Fire was opened, two Cheka men dropped dead; the remainder took cover; communications were cut. Meanwhile, one of Trotsky's soldiers had climbed the wall and summoned a detachment of the Red Army, upon whose approach the Chekaists fled back to Moscow. M. Dzerjinsky disavowed responsibility for the attempt, stating that the men were impostors--an explanation accepted by War Lord Trotsky.

Another despatch from Sovietland corroborated the fact that Trotsky had retired to his country palace, but authoritatively stated that he had been ordered by doctors to rest for two months, owing to "weakness of both body and spirit, the result of a mysterious malady developing during the past three months, whose marked symptom was a wasting, intermittent fever." This despatch inferred that the rumors in Russia about Trotsky were more numerous than those received by the outside world, and that the political dispute of which Trotsky is the center, was "so hot as to mislead some of the Communists themselves." Leon Trotsky, son of a Jewish farmer of the Ukraine, is 44 years of age. At nine he went to Odessa and studied at St. Paul's High School, where, says he: "I displayed great diligence in my studies and always was first in my class." He does not appear to have sponsored Marxism for any personal grievance and was, according to himself, slow to embrace it at all. It is true that beginning with Jan. 18, 1898, he served various terms of imprisonment amounting in all to ten years. "It was in prison that I finally became converted to the theory of Marx." He was a Social Democrat. After the Brussels Conference of 1903, when the Socialist Convention split to become known as Bolshevik* and Menshevik Parties, he joined the Mensheviki. "As soon as Menshevism began to assume the character of a tactical movement. . . I broke with the Mensheviki and remained outside both factions," he related. After Bloody Sunday, Jan. 9, 1905, he seems to have become an ardent Bolshevik and to have worked hard for the revolution. At the outbreak of the War he fled to Germany and was imprisoned by the Kaiser for writing a seditious pamphlet. He subsequently escaped to France, was expelled and fled to Spain, was again expelled and in January, 1917, he went to the U. S. and lived for several months in Manhattan. Later in the same year, he returned to Russia, took a prominent part in the Bolshevik Revolution.

* Bolshevik, from bolshinstvo, meaning majority; Menshevik, from menshinstvto, meaning minority.