“Trotsky was of medium stature, with very thick glasses and unkempt black hair. Most unprepossessing in appearance, he was the most vociferous of them all. As I saw him at these meetings, he impressed me as a definitely maladjusted personality; his speech and his gestures were those of a neurotic person. He spoke in a shrill, high pitched voice, and tried to hypnotize his listener with his myopic but intense eyes.”353
—Pierre Routsky, 1917 Russian vice consul in New York, writing in 1948
BACK IN NEW York, Trotsky started making plans to leave. Already, as he walked the sidewalks, ate breakfast in his favorite Bronx diner, rode the subway, played with his boys, or sipped tea at the Monopole Café, his mind had moved on, to Russia. The idea seduced him. It animated his productive hours, his speaking, his writing, his endless talks with friends. At Novy Mir, he continued to crank out columns and speeches, but he focused almost entirely on Russia’s revolution: that it must be worker-led, socialist, and ready to sweep across Europe.
Trotsky well remembered 1905, the year of the last uprising, and it reinforced his urgency to get home quickly. In 1905 he had made himself one of the first émigrés to reach Petrograd and join the movement. This head start gave him the chance to play a crucial leading role, to meet the leaders, win their trust, and understand their demands and the nature of their soviet. Trading memories with fellow veterans, 1905 looked increasingly like a dress rehearsal for this new uprising in 1917. But this time the tsar had been eliminated. The biggest obstacle had been removed. This time they would win.
Around him in New York, Trotsky saw the growing excitement as Americans prepared themselves for war against Germany. War talk blared at him from every street corner: the military recruitment drives with pretty girls and brass bands, the parades and rallies, the soldiers standing guard with rifles and bayonets, the daily drumbeat of newspaper headlines about German attacks. President Woodrow Wilson made his intentions clear in late March by calling a special session of Congress for April 2 to consider war. Broadway producer George M. Cohan, the tap dance and singing sensation appearing that week at the Strand on Forty-Seventh Street in his comedy Broadway Jones, jotted down a catchy tune while riding the train to New York from his home in New Rochelle. He called it “Johnny Get Your Gun,” and soon the chorus would be one everyone’s lips, be it marching down the street or just whistling around the house:
Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming
The drums rum-tumming everywhere.
Trotsky still followed such American events, but more at a distance. Since coming to New York in January, he had fought to radicalize the American socialists and had built a cadre of local activists. He had enjoyed the culture, the cinema, the cafés and libraries; seen the wealth and technology. But all that now took a backseat. America could take care of itself. Inside his immediate circle of Russians, they talked only about Petrograd and going home.
Just within the Novy Mir staff, five of them had started making travel plans: Trotsky, Bukharin, Chudnovsky, and two outside contributors, Philadelphia-based V. Volodarsky and New Jersey–based Guschon Melnichansky, who also worked as a watchmaker. In the city at large, hundreds more prepared to join them.
Compared to Vladimir Lenin in Switzerland, Trotsky’s path home looked relatively simple, at least on the surface. He too needed official papers to reach Russia, but he had no reason to bother with “sealed trains” or secret deals with hostile countries. Trotsky already had a French passport from his last ocean crossing, but this new Russian Revolution demanded a proper new one. Russia had declared amnesty for political refugees, so Russia should give him a passport. All he had to do was go down to the consulate, walk in the front door, and demand it. That, at least, was what they promised.
First things first. The Russian consulate in New York City took just a few days before announcing that it was ready to greet returning exiles coming to apply for travel papers. Trotsky made himself the first—literally “the very first,” according to officials—to march over and make his application.354
The Russian consulate in 1917 housed itself in an office building at 55 Broadway, just south of Wall Street near Trinity Church. On entering the room, Trotsky, ready to assert his rights, found chaos. He saw the consulate staff, diplomats who had spent years serving the tsar, scurrying in all directions. For days these diplomats had been bombarded by confusing, contradictory orders from Petrograd. As Pierre Routsky, the assistant consul general, recalled it, the first official cable during the crisis told them nothing about the political situation but ordered them to remove all portraits of Tsar Nicholas and his family from the walls. In response, diplomats at Russian consulates around the globe, from New York to Chicago to San Francisco to Buenos Aires, Paris, and Madrid, all raced about their buildings to strip away paintings and imperial insignia, putting them in storage or taking them home as mementos.
Despite the clamor for news, Russian consuls and vice consuls canceled speeches, meetings, and interviews all that week simply because they didn’t know what to say.
On top of that, while the provisional government had made a big public fanfare over its declared amnesty for political refugees, the consulates had no actual lists of Russian political exiles in their cities. This presented a serious problem because the foreign ministry in Petrograd had also instructed them to deny travel papers to any person unable to prove he was, in fact, Russian, a precaution against German spies trying to slip into the country.355 But few actual refugees carried Russian passports. Many had fled the country to avoid arrest and lived under fake names or as undocumented fugitives. Separating real émigrés from imposters might be impossible.
Routsky remembered greeting Trotsky at the New York consulate that day, and he recalled Trotsky’s pushy attitude on meeting him, his “shrill, slightly hysterical voice.” Not knowing quite what to do, Routsky asked his superior, Consul General Michael Oustinoff, and Oustinoff decided to meet with Trotsky personally, out of “curiosity,” as he later put it. Trotsky’s radical history had made him a minor celebrity in this office. Oustinoff doubtless had seen Trotsky’s Okhrana police file, and they’d all seen his columns in Novy Mir. If this man Trotsky represented the New Russia, then Oustinoff wanted to see it for himself.
Once they sat down, though, any friendliness quickly disappeared. Routsky joined them, and according to a tongue-in-cheek account that Routsky wrote years later, Trotsky began lecturing them about who now ran their country and who didn’t. He reminded them they belonged to the “old regime” with “antiquated views” and insisted that he, Trotsky, be entitled to travel home as a “passenger of note.” Oustinoff tried to cut him off and finally interrupted with an old Russian expression. “The eggs do not teach the hen,” he said, to which Trotsky replied: “Mr. Consul, evidently you have not grasped as yet that the time has already come for the eggs to teach the hen.”356
With that, Oustinoff decided to hand the mess back to his deputy, Routsky. Routsky, at thirty-six years old, educated at Saint Petersburg’s Imperial School of Law and Paris’s École des Sciences Politiques et Economiques, had served consular postings in Brussels, the Vatican, and Montreal and as a special European courier to the tsar before being sent to New York in 1913. He was a diplomatic veteran, but he also didn’t quite know whom he was starting up with.
Sitting down with Trotsky, Routsky first offered him a new Russian passport printed on the standard ornate stationery Russia had used for decades, showing the imperial eagle, symbol of the regime, engraved in a bed of artistic flourishes. But Trotsky refused to take it. He wanted no tsarist symbols on his paper. That was the Old Russia. Instead, he insisted they print him a new passport on plain white stationery, simply certifying his right to enter the country.
Then came the problem of how to confirm Trotsky’s bona fides, a problem Routsky knew he’d face with the whole flood of applicants he expected. For this, Routsky suggested they convene a working group consisting of representatives from each local Russian political faction—Bolsheviks, Social Democrats, anarchists, and so on—to identify Russian members wishing to be repatriated. That way, they could assemble a prioritized list of people vouched for by the leaders.
Trotsky agreed, but he had to laugh at the process. “They demand proof that we are members of the Russian revolutionary organization,” he told Ludwig Lore in disbelief one night. “The crimes for which we were hounded from country to country,” he said, “suddenly become a badge of service that will admit us as honored citizens.”357
Silly or not, over the next few days, as the consulate’s clerks worked on Trotsky’s paperwork, Routsky convened his working committee of Russian émigrés. Trotsky and Bukharin came to represent the Novy Mir group,358 with Trotsky, of course, doing the talking. Bukharin, normally friendly and outgoing, seemed tongue-tied in this strange milieu, hobnobbing with former tsarist officials. He spent the meetings in silence, looking absorbed but saying nothing. Routsky found this curious. He had thought Bukharin the more intellectual of the pair and asked one of Bukharin’s friends about it. The friend explained, perhaps tongue-in-cheek as well, that Bukharin was a “true Yogi follower” who enjoyed “concentration and meditation.”359
Finally the passports came. They had cleared the first hurdle. The next stop was to buy steamship tickets.
By now Trotsky had organized a group of sixteen fellow Russians who wanted to make the voyage with him, Natalya, and their two sons. The group included two of Trotsky’s colleagues at Novy Mir—Grigorii Chudnovsky, his sidekick at Saint Marks Place, and Guschon Melnichansky, the contributor from New Jersey. Also traveling with them would be a carpenter named Konstantin Romanchinko, whose wife still lived in Russia, though he himself was largely nonpolitical, and a man named W. Schloima Dukhom, the only one who insisted on traveling first-class.
For tickets, all sixteen of them decided to walk en masse to the office of Henry C. Zaro, an agent for the Russian Steamship Company at 1 Third Avenue, a few blocks down the street from Novy Mir. Trotsky acted as their spokesman since they and Zaro all spoke Russian. With Zaro’s help, they checked schedules, dates, and calendars and finally decided on the Kristianiafjord, a comfortable, relatively new steamship of the Norwegian-America Line, capable of carrying twelve hundred passengers at a speed of fifteen knots. Its route would take them from New York to Bergen, Norway. From there they would take trains across Scandinavia to Russia. The ship had one scheduled stop, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As Zaro explained it, second-class tickets cost $80 apiece (today about the cost of a first-class round-trip airfare between New York and Paris). First-class cabins went for $114.50.
When time came to pay, Trotsky collected the money from each of his travel mates, each paying their own way. For the sixteen second-class cabins and one in first class, he handed Zaro a fat pile of bills coming to $1,394.50.360 Zaro then handed him the tickets to pass out to the group. They were almost done.
Finally, one last stop: Trotsky and his group would need British visas for the ship’s stop in Halifax, where British officers would inspect them for contraband under the British blockade. So down Broadway they all marched to the British consulate at 44 Whitehall. Here, once again, all went smoothly. They went inside and found the consulate staff helpful and polite. Trotsky and his friends each filled out forms and questionnaires. Then Trotsky went through an elaborate cross-check. “From the office of the British Consulate, in the presence of one of its officials, I telephoned to the Russian Consulate which assured me that I had complied with all formalities and could make my journey without any difficulties,” he explained.361 Finally, the paperwork finished, the British approved their visas. “They told me,” he wrote, that they “would put no obstacles in the way on my return to Russia.”362
That was that. They had taken all the proper steps. They had tickets, passports, visas, and assurances from all the relevant governments. The Kristianiafjord would leave from its dock on the Brooklyn side of the harbor at 10 AM Tuesday morning, March 27, exactly ten weeks and two days after Trotsky had first set foot in the New World.
At that point, Trotsky went back to his office on Saint Marks Place and used the telephone to call Henry Feuer, the salesman at the Bronx furniture shop that had supplied his apartment on Vyse Avenue with chairs, tables, carpets, and beds: “I’m going to Russia, Comrade Feuer,” Trotsky told him. “You can have back your furniture.”363
WILLIAM WISEMAN HEARD all about Trotsky’s visit to the Russian consulate. Pierre Routsky, the veteran diplomat there, knew that plenty of his friends around New York City would enjoy the story. They included Sidney Reilly and Wiseman’s spymaster Norman Thwaites.364 Routsky doubtless gave them a good laugh, telling it over a few rounds of vodka, describing Trotsky’s antics in his office, lording over the consul general and lecturing them about their “antiquated views.”
Wiseman also heard all about Trotsky’s visit to the British consulate at 44 Whitehall, his own building. Wiseman’s group would have had to approve their visas that day.
So far, Wiseman had done nothing to interfere with Trotsky. But Trotsky wouldn’t leave the city for a few more days, and Wiseman hadn’t finished yet. He still had all his concerns about Jews, socialists, and revolutionaries threatening to destabilize Russia, and possible German agents behind them.
For instance, Wiseman would have heard about Trotsky’s visit to the steamship ticket office. Henry C. Zaro, the agent who sold his group their cabins aboard the Kristianiafjord, was also part of Wiseman’s network. Zaro had friends, and they had friends who spoke to Norman Thwaites, who in turn reported to Wiseman.365 One detail in the story that apparently got highlighted was that Trotsky personally had paid for tickets for the whole group by handing Zaro a stack of bills totaling $1,340.50, an eye-popping sum of money for a supposedly poor revolutionary. Where did he get it? From rich Germans? From rich Jews? Or agents from Berlin?
The fact that Trotsky had collected it from each of the sixteen other people traveling with him, each paying their own way, seemed to get lost.
And more. Wiseman kept hearing reports of Trotsky receiving money from local Germans all over town. Wiseman would have seen the special collection being taken up by the German-language socialist daily New Yorker Volkszeitung, money for Trotsky and his comrades to carry home to support revolutionaries. And this was on top of all the collections at speeches and rallies, at Beethoven Hall, Lenox Casino, and the rest. All this money, certainly most of it as Wiseman saw it, came from Jews and Germans. Were German spies behind it? How much did it amount to? He had no idea and no real way to find out.
Wiseman milked his sources. He reached out to a Professor Richard J. H. Gottheil at Columbia University, known to have fears about “Russian-Jewish-Socialists,” and asked him to tap his network in the Jewish community.366 He may have also heard from a one-time official at the Russian-American-Asiatic Corporation named Nikolai Volgar, who later claimed that he could prove in court that Trotsky had received German money.367 Through Thwaites, he may have heard more from Sidney Reilly, who heard from his business partner Alexander Weinstein, who may have spoken to his likely relative Gregory Weinstein, editor of Novy Mir.368
But then came the clincher. Casimir Pilenas, his Russian-speaking agent with the long history with Scotland Yard and the Russian Okhrana, sent him a message. No copy of Pilenas’s report exists in the British Intelligence files, but the files do contain a document in which Wiseman confirms its existence and importance.369 It apparently contained concrete allegations about Trotsky’s activities in the city.
Wiseman now decided to act, at least in a cautious, initial way. He took the formal step of drafting a warning to his superiors at MI1c and sending it by secret cable:
An important movement has been started here among Socialists backed by all Jewish funds, behind which are possibly Germans, with a view to getting back Revolutionary Socialists into Russia under expedited political amnesty, with object of overturning present Government and establishing Republic and initiating Peace movement; also of promoting Socialistic Revolutions in other countries, including United States. Main leader is TROTZKI who was principal speaker at a mass meeting here March 20th. He says he means to leave for Russia March 27th. Some Socialists are reported to have left on a Scandinavian boat on March 19th.370
Wiseman, ever circumspect, stopped short of asking the British navy to detain Trotsky at Halifax or even to stop him from leaving New York Harbor. He didn’t directly accuse Trotsky of planning a separate peace with Germany.
Wiseman sent the cable on March 23, four days before Trotsky’s planned departure, giving himself extra time to think, gather more facts, and perhaps take stronger steps later.
A thought was forming in his mind: With pro-German socialists threatening to make trouble in Petrograd, why not insert into Russia a few high-profile socialists of his own, ones who might actually help Britain or, if things went awry, at least speak out against a separate peace with Germany? Wiseman already envisioned an organized program to send prominent left-wingers back to Russia to counter anti-British propaganda. Within a few weeks, he would have $75,000 placed in his credit at J. P. Morgan to get started.
But for now, he still had his immediate problem: What to do about Trotsky?
SOON AFTER HE finished making travel plans, Trotsky took the opportunity to win perhaps one additional convert to his cause. He answered an invitation he’d received earlier from Frank Harris, a brash, Irish-born, big-mustachioed editor of one of New York’s popular English-language magazines, Pearson’s. A few mainstream progressives had started noticing Trotsky, and Harris, for one, had decided to reach out. Harris dabbled in socialism, or at least liked to talk about it. Before settling into a literary life, editing London’s Evening News and Saturday Review and writing a handful of novels before landing in New York to edit Pearson’s, Harris had done manual labor, working as everything from a boot polisher to a cowboy to a construction worker on the Brooklyn Bridge. He’d also invented a pornographic card game called Dirty Banshee, with cards showing satyrs and goddesses in various erotic poses. Harris thought that he, if anyone, could understand what this Trotsky had to say.
And so Trotsky walked the dozen blocks up Second Avenue to Harris’s office at Pearson’s magazine on East Twenty-Fourth Street, an address far more expensive than Novy Mir could ever afford. Harris made him comfortable, and Trotsky agreed to stay for a few hours. Harris’s account doesn’t mention a translator, but Harris would have needed one, since he apparently spoke little Russian or German.
Banter came easy, and the conversation wandered from politics to philosophy to world events. Harris found his guest to be “an idealist and unselfish in the main,” he would say later.371 Harris even felt relaxed enough to challenge Trotsky on his core socialist beliefs. “The Russian,” he argued, “is not likely to work harder than his neighbour unless he gets something more out of it than his neighbour,” he suggested, to which Trotsky had a ready answer: “We shall all work for Russia and the future.” Then “we want the complete Social Revolution, the antithesis to the capitalist state in every particular.”372
When Trotsky at one point proclaimed, “The hour of the social revolution has struck,” Harris replied, “You frighten me.”
They talked most of the afternoon, until Trotsky finally had to leave. Then, as he was getting up, Harris happened to ask Trotsky about his plans to travel back to Russia. When Trotsky mentioned a stopover in Halifax, Harris acted surprised. “Good God,” he asked. “You surely won’t trust yourself in an English port?”
“Why not?” he recalled Trotsky’s answering. “The English are our allies, you forget.”
“If you think that the English government regards itself as an ally of any revolutionary Socialist and firebrand such as you, you are mistaken. [They] regard you as more dangerous than the Kaiser or Bethmann-Hollweg or Hindenberg.”
“However they dislike me personally, they can do nothing; they are our allies, allies of all Russians,” Harris recalled Trotsky telling him. They both laughed about it for a few minutes before Harris showed Trotsky back out onto the street.373
Back at Novy Mir, Trotsky penned a few last columns, including a manifesto for Louis Fraina to publish in the Internationalist after he had left the country. Then came one last complication. The telephone rang, and someone said it was for him. Trotsky picked it up and heard Natalya’s voice speaking in an unusually nervous tone. Their son Sergei was missing. After days in bed, she had let him go outside alone onto Vyse Avenue for a few minutes, and the boy had wandered off.