“Many traits in [Trotsky’s] character also involuntarily thrust one towards such a suggestion: his sharply exaggerated egotism, his over-developed confidence, his extreme and sickly vanity, his proclivity for extravagance in speech, writing and demeanour, a kind of teasing pedantry . . . exhibited even in his precise, careful handwriting.”203
—Grisha Ziv, on why he thought Trotsky was epileptic, 1920
“I imagine there were enough romances in Trotsky’s life to occupy a really conscientious biographer for several chapters.”204
—Max Eastman, 1926
TROTSKY HAD QUALMS about seeing Grisha Ziv, his old contact from Russia. Ziv and he had been friends twenty years before, but not since. Ziv had participated in the 1905 uprising in Petrograd and sent Trotsky occasional notes, but they had drifted far apart. Ziv now lived in New York as a settled, conservative, middle-aged physician. On politics, the glue that once connected them, they now disagreed totally. Trotsky had seen Ziv at some of his speeches, but he knew Ziv disapproved. Ziv made no secret of opposing Trotsky’s antiwar stance and his anti-patriotic socialism.
But politics didn’t matter today, and Trotsky refused to let it spoil things. He had invited Ziv to his home out of courtesy and nostalgia. Facing each other in the doorway to his small Bronx apartment, shaking hands, perhaps sharing a hug and Russian greetings, Trotsky and Ziv must have startled to see the age in the other’s face, the lines and the traces of gray.
Trotsky made sure that he and Ziv had the apartment to themselves, except for Leon, his eleven-year-old son, who puttered about the room. Natalya apparently had gone out with the younger son, Sergei. Trotsky would have served tea and for Ziv maybe schnapps or hot borsht. Newspapers doubtless cluttered the floor along with the boys’ toys and piles of books. Sitting near a window, they would see snow clogging the street and tree branches shivering in the wind.
We know only bits and pieces of the conversation, though Trotsky and Ziv each remembered it years later. They didn’t make much small talk: The weather was cold, the apartment messy, Ziv’s medical practice busy. They side-stepped any mention of current events. “Both of us, as if we had a silent agreement between us, avoided any discussion on hot political topics,”205 Ziv recalled.
Ziv asked Trotsky about some of his celebrity-socialist friends. How was Parvus? Ziv had met Parvus in Petrograd in 1905. “Working on his twelfth million,” Trotsky answered with a laugh. And Georgi Plekhanov, a prominent writer and one-time Iskra editor? Ziv had read Plekhanov’s books as a young radical. Trotsky knew Plekhanov well. He had recently denounced Plekhanov publicly over Plekhanov’s decision to return to Russia and back the country’s war effort, making him a hated “social patriot.” Trotsky apparently mentioned the fact and made a joke of it.
“Does that mean that he is a counter revolutionist, Daddy?” little Leon asked in a squeaky high voice. Ziv recalled Trotsky just smiling at his son but ignoring the question.
Tensions soon melted, and they turned the conversation to the real connection between them, old times. For Trotsky and Ziv, old times had a special, more private meaning.
Trotsky had just turned seventeen when Ziv had first met him in 1896—brash, fresh-faced, jostled hair, eyes already intense behind pince-nez glasses. Trotsky had just graduated from the Realschule in Odessa (less prestigious than Odessa’s Gymnasium, which limited attendance by Jews), where his family had sent him to study. He had moved to the nearby industrial town of Nikolaev for more classes. But in Nikolaev, Trotsky found his schoolwork boring and irrelevant. He skipped classes, even after being visited by a truant officer. Instead, Trotsky that year befriended a man named Franz Shvikovsky, who lived nearby. Shvikovsky, a gardener by trade and unusually well read, kept a cabin by the garden he tended. Here he enjoyed hosting people he found interesting: students, exiles, local radicals, free thinkers. Trotsky—Bronstein back then—became a regular.
Ziv, also a teenager back in 1896, was a regular at Shvikovsky’s garden as well, though he attended medical school in Kiev most of the year.
Together, Trotsky, Ziv, and their circle at Shvikovsky’s cabin spent time reading books by leading liberal thinkers—John Stuart Mill, writers on the French Revolution, Russian dissidents—plus the underground newspapers. Over time they started living together as a commune. They ate and slept in Shvikovsky’s cabin and joined in projects such as a protest against a fee hike at a local library. Trotsky remembered these as happy times, summer evenings spent sharing a samovar prepared by the landlady’s daughter, along with bread and sausage (no, he didn’t keep kosher) they’d scrounged up during the day. And on politics, they talked into the late night hours.
Two brothers named Sokolovskaya also joined the group, along with their sister, Alexandra Lvovna. She—tall, attractive, and educated, with long dark hair—held a special place. The only woman, older and more serious than the boys, she easily held her own in debate and she alone had read Karl Marx, then a new voice to Russian radicals, who still mostly followed the Narodniki, the peasant-based anarchists behind the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Trotsky relished these arguments, but his debating tactics sometimes turned mean-spirited. He especially teased Alexandra. “Marxism is a narrow teaching that splits the personality,” he argued, needling her and calling her obdurate and narrow-minded.206 Ziv remembered how Trotsky’s insults could startle the group, make “everyone turn to stone” as he put it. She responded in kind. “I will never, never stretch out my hand to that little boy!” she confided once to Ziv.207 Another friend, watching these arguments, said of Trotsky, “He will either turn out a great hero or a great scoundrel.”208
Then came the blowup with Trotsky’s father, David Bronstein, who was still paying the bills for his son’s schooling in Nikolaev while running his farm back home in Kherson province. When Bronstein learned that his son was skipping classes and hanging around with troublemakers, it infuriated him. He raced to Nikolaev to confront him. One of Trotsky’s friends recalled Trotsky’s father showing up at the garden unannounced one day: “this big-whiskered farmer” shouting, “Hello! You run away from your father too?”209
Trotsky often quarreled with his father. The family had settled in Kherson province—a rural area far from the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe—in the 1850s, during a brief time when Tsar Alexander II allowed Jews to leave their crowded pale of settlement and try farming. It was an attempt to draw Jews into mainstream Russian culture, and, at least for the Bronsteins, it worked. At home they spoke no Yiddish and barely bothered with religion. Instead Trotsky’s father worked hard at building his farm business. He bought additional land and saved money.
But his son, instead of admiring the accomplishment, belittled it. He identified his father with the Russian propertied class—what future Bolsheviks/Communists would call kulaks—and routinely sided with workmen and townspeople whenever they argued with him. When young Trotsky once tried to explain to his father his democratic ideals over the family dinner table, his father dismissed him as ridiculously naive. “This will not pass even in three hundred years,” he thundered back.
Now in Nikolaev, Trotsky and his father argued again. “We had several stormy scenes,” Trotsky recalled. His father insisted that Trotsky at least finish school before dabbling in politics. “I uncompromisingly defended my independence,” Trotsky wrote. “It ended with my refusing to accept material aid from home.”210
Trotsky would never bridge this gap with his parents. They would reconcile briefly after 1905, when his mother and father came to Saint Petersburg to attend his public trial for leading the 1905 Petrograd Soviet. Trotsky remembered the awkwardness they created, this “old couple,” as he called them, his mother crying during court sessions that “she could scarcely understand,” his father sitting there “pale, silent, happy and distressed, all in one.”211 His mother had died in 1912, and he hadn’t seen his father since leaving Vienna. After the 1917 revolution, the Soviets would confiscate his father’s farm (as they did with all large landowners), forcing David Bronstein, by then seventy years old, to reach Moscow and take a post his son had arranged managing a small grain mill. He would die of typhus in 1922.
But for Trotsky and the Nikolaev commune, the most fateful step came in 1898 when they decided to help local factory workers organize a union. Trotsky (still just eighteen), Ziv, and Alexandra Lvovna all happily joined the project and made it a big success. Ziv even conceded Trotsky the “lion’s share” of credit, pointing to his “inexhaustible energy, skill in plans and contrivances of all sorts and resistance to fatigue.”212
Local factory owners, however, had no intention of allowing a union in their city. They complained to the police, who quickly came and arrested some two hundred union members and organizers, including Trotsky, Alexandra Lvovna and her two brothers, Shvikovsky, and Ziv. A Nikolaev court sentenced all of them to Siberian exile, with four years apiece for Trotsky and Alexandra.
This is where the story became more personal. While waiting in jail in Nikolaev, Trotsky surprised friends by asking Alexandra Lvovna to marry him, and she agreed. All the bickering back in Shvikovsky’s garden had apparently sparked something between them. But Trotsky was still a minor under Russian law and needed his parents’ consent to marry. His father, hearing the news, immediately objected, calling Alexandra Lvovna, this older woman and Marxist troublemaker, a bad influence on his son.
Once again, Trotsky refused to take orders from his father. It took him months to figure it out, but he finally found a way to bypass him. Moved to a prison in Moscow to await final transit to Siberia, Trotsky quietly convinced the officials there to conduct the ceremony. They produced a chaplain-rabbi, and a prison guard lent him a ring. Ziv attended the wedding.
By the time Trotsky’s father found out, it was too late to stop the marriage.
As a married couple, Trotsky and Lvovna had the legal right to live together in Siberia. For political crimes like theirs, exile meant being taken to an isolated place and forced to stay there, with police periodically checking to make sure they hadn’t moved. The government even paid a small subsidy for food, rent, and cleaning. Far from being locked inside a prison cell, Vladimir Lenin famously went duck hunting in Siberia. Trotsky used the time to read, write, and start a family.
The authorities sent Trotsky and his wife first to a tiny peasant village called Ust-Kut on the Lena River in Central Asia, so remote that it took three weeks to get there—by train, wagon, and then river barge. Cockroaches infested their tiny hut, and temperatures outside fell to thirty degrees below zero. Still, in Siberia they found a network of fellow radical exiles eager to connect. They won permission to move upriver to another village, Verkholensk, where Trotsky worked briefly as a merchant’s clerk, but mostly he read and wrote. He studied history, politics, and Marxism; wrote for journals like the Irkutsk-based Eastern Review;213 and met other young activists such as Felix Dzerzhinsky (the future “Iron Felix,” founder of the Cheka, or secret police) and Moises Uritzky (future Bolshevik Central Committeeman and head of the Petrograd Cheka). Trotsky recalled pleasant times with them, such as one “dark spring night, as we sat around a bonfire on the banks of the Lena, [and Felix] Dzerzhinsky read one of his poems in Polish.”
Along the way, he and Alexandra Lvovna also became parents, producing two baby daughters. By early 1902, Zina (Zinalda) was one and a half years old. Nina was just four months.
It was at this point, after two years in jails and two more in Siberia, that Trotsky grew restless and decided to leave. He had heard about exciting changes in the outside world and felt that a young politico like himself needed to be in the West with the dynamic leader Vladimir Lenin. His wife and daughters must simply stay behind. There was no room for them in an escape.
It seems only natural that Trotsky, as a father and husband, would have agonized over this decision. But here the story turns fuzzy. As he tells it, Alexandra actually pushed him to go. “You must,” he quotes her as saying when he posed the question. “She was the first to broach the idea of my escape,” he later insisted. “Duty to the revolution overshadowed everything else for her,” he wrote. “She pushed away all my doubts.”214 By his account, Alexandra even helped in the getaway. She and Trotsky at that point lived upstairs in a two-story cabin in Verkholensk, and a police inspector came daily to check on them, barging into the upstairs bedroom. One night Trotsky told the inspector to stop intruding, and he did. He used this chance to slip away, and Alexandra hid the secret. The police didn’t discover him missing until after he had been gone for five days.
How severely the police treated Alexandra and the baby girls after discovering the escape is never mentioned in any of the accounts.
Fair or not, Trotsky critics over the years have pointed to this incident, the fact that he abandoned his wife and two baby daughters in Siberia, as proof of Trotsky’s bad character, his selfishness and arrogance.215 Trotsky supporters usually respond that his decision fit the era’s revolutionary code and that Alexandra Lvovna never complained about it, never publicly challenged his account, never appeared to hold a grudge. Of course, complaining would not have done her any good. Who would have believed her, taken her word against the great Trotsky? She believed in the cause and apparently chose not to make waves.
What was the private truth about their marriage, the actual face-to-face dynamic of the young husband and wife? Other than themselves, no one really knew.
In any event, when Alexandra Lvovna finally returned home from Siberia, poor and friendless, it was Trotsky’s parents—his father David Bronstein, who had originally tried to block the marriage—who gave her shelter and agreed to help raise the daughters. Trotsky and Alexandra never divorced. “From abroad, I could hardly keep up a correspondence,” he explained. “Then she was exiled for a second time; after this we met only occasionally. Life separated us, but nothing could destroy our friendship and our intellectual kinship.”216
Within a few months, in late 1902 in Paris, Trotsky would meet another attractive young woman, Natalya Sedova, who would become his common-law wife, the mother of his two sons, and his life partner. Natalya certainly knew this history. Trotsky’s continuing marriage to Alexandra Lvovna was the reason Natalya could never marry him herself.217
Grisha Ziv knew this story too. It was water under the bridge for him when he saw his old friend Trotsky resurface in New York City in 1917 and as he joined Trotsky in the Bronx apartment a good fifteen years after these events. When Ziv and Trotsky talked about old times, when they “drifted back to the mood of [our] recollections,” as Trotsky’s friend Max Eastman put it after hearing Trotsky’s side of the story,218 it is hard to see how they could have avoided it.
“I learned a lot about my long-lost friends and acquaintances,” Ziv recalled of the afternoon. Certainly these would have included old man David Bronstein, their old circle from Nikolaev, and the girl they both knew there, Alexandra Lvovna.
At one point, Trotsky challenged Ziv to a game of chess. Trotsky loved chess and considered himself a fine player. Living in Vienna before the world war, he had enjoyed spending days at the popular Café Central on Herregasse in the fashionable Innere Stadt district, playing chess with all comers, including celebrities like Baron Rothschild. Years later, Trotsky would even be rumored to be second cousin to the Russian grand master David Bronstein, a World Chess Championship contender in the late 1940s.
But Ziv played a good game of chess too. He won the first game and noticed how Trotsky seemed to get annoyed over losing the match. “He showed himself to be a weak player and lost, which obviously upset him,” Ziv wrote about it later. They played a second game, which Trotsky won. Then they stopped. Ziv insists that it was Trotsky who refused to press things to a rubber match.
Ziv left Trotsky’s apartment shortly after that. He walked away offended, clearly over more than the chess game, and he stewed over it for a long time. He and Trotsky saw each other a few times more in New York, at speeches and meetings. Ziv recalled how Trotsky would “give me a friendly clap on the back” and tell people, “This is my old friend who needs to stay in France for a couple of months to become a good socialist.”
Ziv would write a highly critical book about Trotsky in 1921—at the height of Trotsky’s global fame—talking about their chess games that day and about the earlier times in Nikolaev. In colorful language that Trotsky himself, as a writer, would have appreciated, Ziv described him as a man who “loved his friends and loved them sincerely; but his love was of the kind that a peasant has for his horse, which assists the confirmation of his peasant individuality. But as soon as the horse becomes unfit for work, he will unhesitatingly, and without a shred of conscience, send it to the knacker’s yard.”219
Whether driven by pique, principle, or profit, Ziv’s book and its many insults gave plenty of ammunition for detractors. Trotsky’s friend Max Eastman would dismiss it as a “little volume of weak and ludicrous personal spite” and explain Ziv’s antagonism as based simply on Trotsky’s refusal to talk politics with him that day: “the manifestation of a self-seeking intellectual arrogance which [Ziv] suddenly discovered had characterized his friend’s activities from the cradle.”220
More likely, Ziv’s hostility had deeper roots—in Nikolaev, in their friendship with the girl Alexandra Lvovna, and in his perception of how Trotsky had treated her.