Bolshevik Reminiscences

MY LIFE -- Leon Trotsky -- Scribners ($5).

Leo Davidovich Bronstein, middleaged, nearsighted, hooknosed, big-lipped, spectacled, with a shock of greying hair, is an exile on the island of Prinkipo in the Sea of Marmosa. Once, as Leon Trotsky, he was second most powerful Russian. Lenin's right-hand man. In My Life he gives the story of his rise, decline, fall.

Born in Little Russia in 1879, the son of a Jewish farmer, Trotsky early became class-conscious. Arrested for revolutionary activities at 19, he spent two years in prison, then was exiled to Siberia. There he married Alexandra Lvovna, revolutionary coworker, because the work that we were doing bound us closely together." Two years later Trotsky escaped. On the fake passport friends provided he wrote the name Trotsky: of his several aliases that one somehow stuck. In London he met Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), worked with him on the Iskra, revolutionary magazine. Lenin and Trotsky had many a difference of opinion and one serious argument: Trotsky left Lenin for the Mensheviki (moderates), but during the Revolution became a Bolshevik again. Says he of Lenin: "He was my master. This does not mean that I repeated his words and gestures a bit late, but that I learned from him to arrive independently at the same conclusion."

During his European exile in Europe Trotsky married again (there had been a friendly separation from his first wife); his present wife is Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. With many another revolutionary Trotsky was in Russia again for the unsuccessful uprising of 1905. He was caught, tried, once again sentenced to Siberia. This time he escaped before he reached his place of exile, got to the railroad by reindeer sleigh. He rejoined his wife, went into exile again in Europe. In Vienna he started the Pravda, famed newspaper. But by this time Trotsky was known to most Foreign Offices as an undesirable alien; one after the other the countries of Europe ejected him. Finally he was deported from Spain to the U. S. In January 1917 he landed in Manhattan. When the Russian Revolution broke he had a hard time getting back to Russia, was interned "in a prison camp in Canada for a month. Triumphant was his arrival in Petrograd. He was made People's Commissar for foreign affairs; when Kerensky fell and Lenin came into power Trotsky was second in command. Lenin died at the height of his popularity, and Death canonized him. But Trotsky lived on, and Trotskyism (doctrine of "permanent revolution") grew more & more out of fashion. In January 1928, Trotsky and his followers, hopelessly in the minority, were ordered into exile in Central Asia. From there a year later Trotsky was deported into Turkey. Now he lives on Prinkipo, "a planet without a visa."

Says Trotsky of the rise of Stalin, his own defeat: "Stalin is gifted with practicality, a strong will, and persistence in carrying out his aims. His political horizon is restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive. The fact that today he is playing first is not so much a summing-up of the man as it is of this transitional period of political backsliding in the country." Lenin, says Trotsky, never liked nor trusted Stalin, but of Trotsky he said-"There has been no better Bolshevik."

Exile Leo Davidovich Bronstem thinks the part he has played in Russia's affairs an honest, able, ill-requited one; thinks the rest of Russia is now out of step. But he is philosophical, quotes Revolutionist Pierre Joseph Proudhon's (1809-65) words from prison: "Destiny--I laugh at it; and as for men, they are too ignorant, too enslaved for me to feel annoyed at them."

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