“The struggle for freedom in Russia . . . has ended at last in the complete triumph of democracy. For the first time in more than a millennium the Russian people are free from despotic control, and are at liberty to shape their future destiny with their own hands and in their own way.”
—George Kennan, the Outlook, March 1917
“All these are facts, big facts. [They] give the bourgeoisie of Europe and America occasion to say that the revolution has been won and is now complete. . . . Yet they are all amazingly stupid when they come to deal with mass-movements.”296
—Leon Trotsky, Novy Mir, March 17, 1917
THE NEWS REACHED Trotsky late Thursday, March 15, at Novy Mir on Saint Marks Place. That afternoon, as he, Bukharin, and the others were finalizing the next morning’s edition, telephones started to ring. They heard excited knocks at the door, messengers delivering telegrams, people poking in their heads: “Have you heard?” “What do you know?” The rumors sounded incredible. Chaos in Petrograd! Ministers jailed!
From the street came excited shouts. Celebrations were erupting all across New York’s vast immigrant neighborhoods: Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, especially the Lower East Side. Spontaneous parades, rounds of drinks, songs and dancing spread like wildfire with the news. One parade carrying red flags grew so boisterous that it degenerated into a riot at Clinton and Houston Streets, as people threw bricks and bottles and smashed windows until police broke them up with clubs.
At the Monopole Café, Trotsky’s favorite haunt on Second Avenue, a reporter found “the greatest rejoicing and enthusiasm,” people drinking toasts, one after the other.297
Inside the cramped basement office, Trotsky, Bukharin, Chudnovsky, and Weinstein—all veterans of the tsar’s prisons and Siberian exiles—must have whooped with delight. Like newsmen around the world, they had to rip up the Novy Mir front page they had laid out for the next morning and make a new one. Huge Cyrillic block letters would cover the top third: 
(Revolution in Russia).298
Reporters from English-language newspapers were among the first to besiege the small office, looking for anyone Russian who could explain what had just happened. “The American press was in a state of utter bewilderment,” Trotsky recalled of that day.299 Writing about it years later, he remembered snippets of conversation. “A cablegram has arrived saying that Petrograd has appointed a Guchkov-Miliukuff ministry. What does this mean?” Names popped up: Miliukov, Kerensky, Lvoff, the grand duke, the tsarevich. Who were these people? The phone kept ringing.
“Journalists, interviewers, reporters, came from all sides to the offices of the Novy Mir,” he wrote.300 William Randolph Hearst’s New York American would carry analysis from the tiny socialist Novy Mir for two days running
From the fragmentary reports, they quickly pieced together the situation: The food riots in Petrograd, started a week earlier, had exploded during the news blackout. Street crowds had grown to almost two hundred thousand by the second day and had begun attacking government buildings, setting fire to the Ministry of Justice. Police and protesters traded gunfire in the streets, with police shooting protestors from machine gun nests mounted on rooftops. Hundreds were killed. Finally, members of the thirty-thousand-strong Petrograd garrison had mutinied, turning against their commanders. Soon soldiers and protestors roamed the streets together, calling each other “comrade.” They started arresting ministers and broke into the elegant Tauride Palace, where the Duma sat, hoping to join forces. In the chaos, the Duma, which the tsar had personally suspended a few days earlier, decided to assert itself. A group of Duma deputies declared a republic and placed its own leaders in the top positions.
At the same time, a Soviet of Workers Deputies—a reincarnation of Trotsky’s own Petrograd Soviet from 1905—pulled itself into existence, commandeered its own space in the Tauride Palace, and claimed to speak independently for the people. In addition to leaders from factories and workhouses, its members included several local Mensheviks and even a few Bolsheviks.
At the height of the crisis, two Duma leaders—Alexander Guchkov and Vasili Shulgin—had raced across the frontier and found Tsar Nicholas II in his imperial railroad car at Pskov, near the Estonian border. Here they confronted him. Nicholas, facing overthrow, offered to surrender the throne in favor of his thirteen-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich. But he quickly reversed himself after his son’s doctors explained that young Alexei, a hemophiliac, could die from the strain. Nicholas then agreed to abdicate in favor of his younger brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich. This too failed. Grand Duke Michael, hearing the offer, refused to take power without a mandate from the people, fearing that he too could be killed or overthrown. Such as mandate was impossible though, since an elected constituent assembly could not meet for several months.
Just like that, three hundred years of Romanov rule in Russia came to an abrupt end. In its wake, power suddenly shifted to a fragile new structure, an ad hoc committee of moderate and liberal Duma deputies calling itself a provisional government.
HEARING THE NEWS, one of Trotsky’s first reactions was to commandeer the telephone in the hectic Novy Mir office and call his apartment in the Bronx. Natalya answered the phone. She had spent the day caring for their nine-year-old son Sergei, home from school with a fever that a doctor had diagnosed as diphtheria. When he told her, she too let out a yelp. She told little Sergei, and the two of them celebrated together in his room. Sergei, after a lifetime of hearing his parents tell stories about Russia and the movement, understood instantly. “He jumped to his feet and danced on the bed,” as Trotsky described it.301
Talking it over, it didn’t take Trotsky and Natalya long to reach a decision. Thousands of Russian émigrés and their families, hearing the news, were weighing the same question that night. Ten weeks in New York had given Trotsky and Natalya time to rest, enjoy comforts, make friends, and dabble in local affairs. But their new roots could hardly eclipse the commitment of a lifetime. Trotsky had been writing about revolution in Russia, talking about it, planning for it, anticipating and encouraging it, for the better part of twenty years. It had been his consuming passion.
Besides, once America entered the world war, crackdowns against radicals like him could easily land him in prison in New York, just as they had in Europe.
If revolution finally had come to Russia, he and she both needed to be there. “We were anxious to leave by the first boat,” he recalled.302
IN THE INITIAL glow, hardly anyone in America seemed to shed a tear for the fallen tsar. By themselves, cheers from Russian immigrants in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and other large cities were almost deafening. Fifteen thousand people jammed Madison Square Garden that Tuesday night for a huge celebration sponsored by the Socialist Party. Morris Hillquit, Forward editor Abraham Cahan, Algernon Lee, and dozens of local bigwigs mounted the stage as people in the hall waved red flags. A huge banner announced, “Greetings to the New Russia!” They sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America” along with a teary, nostalgic rendition of the old Volga boatman’s song “Ey Uchnjem.”
Hillquit too was besieged by English-speaking reporters after the news broke, and he had no trouble explaining his feelings about the revolution, which were all entirely positive: “The [Russian] people were tired of war, deprivation, and particularly of the mismanagement and graft,” he said in a statement.303 To the Madison Square Garden crowd, he predicted a quick end to the European war, as Germans too would soon “dispose of the Hohenzollerns [the German royal family of Kaiser Wilhelm] and their junkers as the Russian people has disposed of the Romanovs.” And more: “The Russian Revolution is the first bright ray of light that has come to us from Europe since the dark days of August 1914.”304
And the cheering went far beyond socialists and immigrants and far beyond just New York City. London, Paris, and Washington all joined the celebration. The new provisional government, in one of its first actions, pledged to continue Russia’s fight against Germany in the world war, news that delighted British and French leaders, who had long fretted over Russia’s military failures. Privately, they blamed the tsar for incompetence and considered his court riddled with German spies. Now, with cables from Petrograd reporting dozens of pro-German ministers being fired or jailed, they too applauded.
On financial markets, Russian rubles soared in value. Even conservative Orthodox clergymen seemed happy with the change. At New York’s Russian Cathedral on East Ninety-Seventh Street, Archbishop Evdokim Meschensky conspicuously omitted the tsar’s name from his Sunday service for the first time anyone could remember.
Alexander Kerensky, justice minister in the new Russian regime, stoked the enthusiasm even further by promising sweeping reforms. He declared immediate freedom for political prisoners, and police began releasing hundreds from jail cells in Moscow and Petrograd and from exile in Siberia.
Kerensky also declared amnesty for overseas political refugees and legal equality for Russian Jews. This last point brought a quick response from Jacob Schiff, head of New York’s Kuhn Loeb banking house, who had used his fortune to protest Russia’s violent anti-Semitism, even to the extent of blocking war loans and funding anti-tsarist propaganda. Schiff now sent an urgent telegram to the Evening Post from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where he was visiting, praising the new government and pledging financial support. “With the shackles removed from a great people,” he wrote, “Russia will before long take rank financially among the most favored nations in the money markets of the world.”305
The good feeling reached all the way to President Woodrow Wilson in the White House. As Wilson saw it, not only had the tsar’s overthrow removed a terrible dictator from the world stage, but it also cleared a major stumbling block for what had become his own biggest headache: how finally to bring America into the European war.
All that month, German submarines had continued to sink one American ship after another: the Algonquin on March 12; the City of Memphis, the Vigilante, and the Illinois, all on March 13; the Healdton on March 18; and others. Two more spy plots had exploded in newspaper headlines in early March, sparking fresh waves of public outrage. In one, rumors that German agents planned to dynamite the dam in Boonton, New Jersey, sent dozens of policemen racing to the scene. The Boonton Dam held back seven billion gallons of water for the Jersey City Reservoir; an explosion there could have flooded the entire Rockaway and Passaic Valleys, wiping out dozens of towns, villages, and munitions plants. The blast never came, but that didn’t stop the fear. The panic had been based on reports from a handful of witnesses who claimed to see a German officer walking along the reservoir with a camera and one who claimed to overhear him talking about the plan in a diner.306 The other plot, a supposed attempt to blow up Fort Totten near Bayside, Long Island, again with no actual explosion, also sent dozens of policemen scrambling to the scene.307
Now, with the tsar removed and a new regime promising freedom, Wilson could openly side with Britain and France in the war without having to connect himself to the odious Russian autocrat. Joining the Entente would now mean fighting for a new free Russia, a cause everyone could embrace. The White House would grant the new provisional government formal diplomatic recognition within the week.
FREEDOM, DEMOCRACY, AND a new open government. Wide global support. Possible victory in the war. Americans applauded the news from Petrograd. They saw the revolution as a rousing success and a great step for mankind. Who could complain about such a wonderful thing? Everyone seemed happy.
But not Leon Trotsky and his circle at Novy Mir, the radical fringe within even the small cloistered world of New York socialism. They didn’t see it quite that way. They celebrated too, but for a different reason. To them, the revolution in Russia, wonderful to a point, amounted to no victory. Instead it remained incomplete, a prelude to something else, an opening scene in a larger drama.
That very first night, just hours after the first reports, Trotsky, working late with the others in Novy Mir’s basement office, found himself greeting yet one more English-speaking newspaper reporter who had rushed down to Saint Marks Place looking for an expert on Russia. He identified himself as from the New York Times, though we don’t know his name. His stories ran without a byline, typical back then. He may have been the same Times reporter who had covered Trotsky at the Lenox Casino in the vote over the Trotsky–Fraina minority report. He seemed to recognize Trotsky, asked for him by name, and called him Leo.
Trotsky, doubtless sipping hot tea in the late-night hours, sat down with him amid the clutter of desks, books, and piles of papers. Someone translated.
What did Trotsky think of the new regime in Petrograd? Trotsky answered him flatly: They “do not represent the interests or the aims of the revolutionists.” And more. Its days were numbered. It will “probably be short lived and step down in favor of men more sure to carry forward the democratization of Russia.”308
What was the problem?
Trotsky could have talked all night on this question. He, Bukharin, and the others had been at it for hours. Yes, the people had toppled the tsar, but look who held power now. Not the workers or soldiers who had risked their lives in the streets of Petrograd, as they’d told the men from the World, the American, and the Call. The people had been cheated. Instead power had been snatched by a small group of bourgeois liberals, tsarist apologists who had ignored corruption for years, ignored starvation in their own streets, and already committed Russia to continue the world war despite the country’s terrible losses. “The people will not be satisfied.”309
For Trotsky, this fine revolution presented the chance of a lifetime to achieve socialism in Russia and perhaps all Europe. But so far, it had been hijacked.
Just look at the top people in the provisional government. Trotsky knew them all, and he likely ticked off the names on his fingertips sitting in the cramped office late that night, eyes flaring, words dancing from his lips in rapid Russian. Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvoff, the prime minister, was a nobleman, longtime bureaucrat, and supporter of constitutional monarchy. Alexander Guchkov, the new minister of war and navy, owned an insurance company and, as a conservative Octobrist (supporter of Tsar Nicholas’s October 1905 program of limited constitutional reforms), had served as the tsar’s Duma speaker. And so on down the list. They were the “liberal element,” composed of “industrial leaders and the landed aristocracy,” as Novy Mir would describe them, not much better than the tsar himself.310
Only one, Alexander Kerensky, the new justice minister, drew any nice words from the Novy Mir crowd. Kerensky, as a young socialist lawyer, had defended revolutionaries jailed by police during the 1905 uprising and had spent time behind bars as a result. Kerensky still called himself a socialist and served as vice chairman of the new Petrograd Soviet, a far better credential to Trotsky than his seat in the Duma.
But Kerensky was the exception. More typical to Trotsky was Paul Miliukov, the new foreign minister. Trotsky could have spent hours talking about Miliukov alone. It was Miliukov in 1906 who had first used Trotsky’s name as an “ism” and an insult, blaming the “revolutionary illusions of Trotskyism” for the tumult then plaguing Russia.311 Trotsky had returned the favor many times, such as accusing Miliukov of hiding atrocities committed by Russian-backed Serbian militias during the 1912–13 Balkan Wars, which Trotsky had witnessed as a news correspondent.312
Miliukov, a gray-haired academic with a wide face, pince-nez glasses, and a distinctive bushy mustache, had himself been jailed by tsarist police during the 1890s after a student riot. He had written several books and had delivered course lectures at the University of Chicago in 1903. Miliukov had cofounded the Russian reformist Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) Party in 1905 and had represented it in the Duma ever since but had abandoned any radicalism after the tsar cracked down on political liberties in 1907. Since then, Miliukov had served as a mostly loyal deputy and strong backer of the military. On Nicholas II’s abdication, it was Miliukov who had insisted that the tsar’s brother, Archduke Michael, take power to preserve the Romanov line, preferring a sitting tsar—a constitutional monarchy modeled perhaps on Britain’s—over anarchy.
This, to Trotsky, was the provisional government: capitalist, militarist, and royalist. Not much to like.
But then there was the other side to the story. The Petrograd revolution had set powerful forces in motion. Chaos meant opportunity. Just down the hall from the provisional government, in the same Tauride Palace, sat the new Petrograd Soviet, what Trotsky called the “genuine face” of the people, already “raising a voice of protest against the liberal attempt to rob the Revolution.”313 If Trotsky and his cobelievers could only get back in time, they could still refight 1905, but this time on the winning side.
All this revolutionary theory, though, hardly mattered to the New York Times reporter that night. Knowing his readers, he quickly turned to how the tsar’s fall might affect the world war. He filed just a short piece the next morning: CALLS PEOPLE WAR WEARY: BUT LEO TROTSKY SAYS THEY DO NOT WANT SEPARATE PEACE.314
All that week, Trotsky carried the same message of incomplete revolution through a blizzard of newspaper columns and speeches. He appeared before audiences almost every night, starting Friday at Beethoven Hall. His rallies had a sentimental flavor, with thousands packing the halls to see friends and share memories of Russia and the underground. They waved red flags, shouted themselves hoarse, drank plenty of schnapps, and sang songs like the “Pochorny Marsh” and “The Marseillaise.”315 “The mothers of Russia started the Revolution with their food riots,” Trotsky told the crowd at Beethoven Hall, making it a family affair.316 Typically, his rally Tuesday at the Lenox Casino on 116th Street, pulling in more than two thousand people despite taking place the same night as Hillquit’s mass meeting at Madison Square Garden, featured seven different speakers in seven different languages, including Trotsky in Russian, Ludwig Lore in German, Louis Boudin in English, and Santeri Nourteva in Finnish.
Beneath the show and rhetoric, a movement was sprouting. Thousands of Russian immigrants in America suddenly wanted to go home. Many, like Trotsky, were radicals hoping to stir revolution. But not all. With the tsar gone and freedom in the wind, Russia sounded like a changed, welcoming place. Nostalgia, longing for lost homes and separated families, the chance to build a new life in an idealistic free country drew many homesick immigrants. At every rally, whether with Leon Trotsky or Morris Hillquit, they passed the hat to raise money for Russian émigrés wanting to return. One new group, calling itself the Executive Russian Committee, announced plans to raise $2 million to pay passage for as many as three hundred thousand exiles.317 Russkoe Slovo, another small Russian-language newspaper in New York, also took up a collection. Almost ten thousand ultimately made the trip back.
Looking at the crowd at the Lenox Casino rally, though, Trotsky might have noticed an unfamiliar face, a squat man with a mustache and balding head talking Russian with the others, his eyes scanning the room, noticing faces and catching names. Casimir Pilenas didn’t applaud much. He came because he had a job to do. He worked for an organization in New York suddenly very interested in these radical revolutionary celebrations. American authorities might still be oblivious, but not Pilenas’s employer, the head of Britain’s MI1c counterintelligence bureau at 44 Whitehall.