“We undersigned political refugees after declaration of amnesty by present Russian Government returning via Norway to our country with passports issued Russian consul General New York are arrested Halifax on board ‘Kristiania.’ Held by British military authorities without any cause and reason and interned internment station Amherst together with German prisoners of war. We energetically protest against such unprecedented act and demand your immediate intervention to protect our interests of Russian citizens and dignity of government which you represent.
Signed trotzky melnitchaniny fishleff ishoodnouski muchin konstantin romanchenka.”418
—Telegram from Trotsky and fellow prisoners to the Russian consul general at Montreal, April 5, 1917
IN HALIFAX, HARBOR police immediately separated Trotsky from Natalya and the boys and surrendered him to the Canadian military. For his first night in captivity, they placed Trotsky and the other Russian prisoners at nearby Fort George, what locals called the Citadel, a star-shaped fortress that had sat on a hill overlooking Halifax since 1749, built originally to defend it from attacks by Indians and later Americans during the War of 1812. Recently, the Citadel had been converted into a wartime prison for domestic “enemy aliens,” primarily German immigrants suspected of disloyalty and German sailors captured in the port.
But Trotsky’s stay there would be brief. After one night, they put him and the others on a train to Amherst, a small industrial town in the Nova Scotia interior. Here, far from public view, 90 miles from Halifax, 500 miles from Quebec, 650 miles from Montreal, and surrounded by vast stretches of wilderness, Canada had opened a larger wartime camp, this one mostly for captured German soldiers.
The Amherst camp operated inside an abandoned iron factory once run by the Canadian Car and Foundry Company. The cavernous structure stood one hundred feet wide and a quarter of a mile long and held eight hundred prisoners at the time Trotsky arrived. Most of these, about five hundred, were soldiers and sailors rescued by the British navy from German ships it had sunk, including the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, scuttled off the coast of West Africa. Another two hundred were German civilians, laborers working in Canada when the war broke out and considered disloyal. About one hundred, housed in separate, better quarters at the building’s far end, were German officers and wealthier German civilians.
Canada would jail some eighty-five hundred “alien enemies” during the war, and Amherst was one of its largest camps.
If the Amherst camp had a personality, it came from its strict commanding officer, Colonel Arthur Henry Morris, a sixty-six-year-old retired British military officer and veteran of colonial campaigns in India, Burma, and Africa. Born on the Isle of Wight, Morris had won medals, including the Distinguished Service Order, for bravery both in the Boer War and the Anglo-Ashanti War in modern-day Ghana on the African Gold Coast. There he’d played a crucial role in the bloody battle over Kumasi, the Ashanti capital, leading infantry columns both into and out of the strategic city, despite severe injuries. Queen Victoria’s son-in-law, Prince Henry of Battenberg, had died of malaria in the campaign. After that, Morris, an avid hunter and shooter, commanded the Duke of York’s military school in England before coming to Canada in 1915 to run Amherst.
Morris had a favorite line when Trotsky annoyed him. “If only I had him on the South African Coast,” he’d mutter. There he could impose discipline as he pleased.
The Amherst camp sat along the railroad tracks between Park and Hickman Streets, toward the southern end of town. On bringing the prisoners inside, Colonel Morris’s men greeted them with an inspection worthy of any full-security prison. They recorded Trotsky’s height (five foot eight and a half), weight (137 pounds), eye and hair color (black), complexion (dark), and age (thirty-seven). They searched him, removed his clothes in front of a roomful of people for a full-body examination, and then took his fingerprints. Having seized his luggage and clothing, they gave Trotsky and his group uniforms, making them indistinguishable from the German soldier-prisoners. The guards then assigned them bunks in the main hall, where hundreds of men slept and lived cramped together, with the bunks arranged in three tiers, two deep along the walls on each side of the long room. “Men hopelessly clogged the passages, elbowed their way through, lay down and got up, played cards or chess,” Trotsky would write, describing the place as “very dilapidated.”419
They treated Trotsky and his party as prisoners of war, thereby limiting their access to habeas corpus and other legal rights accorded Canadian citizens and residents. They also assigned Trotsky a share of the daily menial labor required of captured German soldiers: sweeping floors, washing pots and dishes, peeling potatoes, cleaning the lavatory. Only the German officers and wealthier civilians apparently escaped these duties.
At his first chance, Trotsky requested a face-to-face audience with Colonel Morris, the camp commandant, to assert what he considered two key rights: learning the charges against him and being allowed to communicate with the outside world. Morris took until the next morning before finally agreeing to see him, and Trotsky didn’t get far on either score.
Trotsky and Colonel Morris apparently clashed from the start. Morris appeared in his sharp military khakis; Trotsky wore prison clothes. Beyond the thirty-year age difference and Trotsky’s Jewishness, Morris had made a career of fighting rebels in Burma and Africa and had little patience for back talk. Trotsky, for his part, had always despised uniformed bureaucrats like Morris.
Trotsky, by his own account, asked Morris the basis for his arrest, to which Morris told him simply, “You are dangerous to the present Russian government” and have been sent to Amherst “until such time as further instructions are received from the Admiralty.”420 Trotsky argued the point, telling Morris: “But the New York agents of the Russian government issued us passports into Russia, [and] the Russian government should be allowed to take care of itself.”
At this, Morris simply shifted ground. “You are dangerous to the allies in general,” he answered, and, having fled his own country, “should not be surprised” at being arrested now.421
Trotsky again tried to argue, pointing to the Russian Revolution as having changed things, but Morris stopped answering. Trotsky asked to see any written charges against them, but Morris had nothing to show.
As for contacting outsiders, the conversation here reached the same dead end. Trotsky had prepared telegrams for the Russian consuls in Halifax and Montreal, the Russian justice minister in Petrograd, the Petrograd Soviet, the New York Call, and others. He submitted them all, and Morris apparently took them but never told Trotsky what he planned to do with them. Trotsky asked Morris if he could contact his wife in Halifax, but Morris refused unless Trotsky promised not to try to send messages through her to the Russian consulate. This time it was Trotsky who refused. Trotsky was free to send letters through the normal postal system, Morris told him, but he and military censors routinely examined all outgoing mail from the camp.
In the end, Morris agreed to forward just one telegram that day, a cable from Trotsky and his group to the Russian consulate in Montreal and its consul general, I. A. Lakatscheff. Canadian archives confirm that Lakatscheff actually received the telegram in Montreal and that, on reading it, he dutifully contacted the Canadian foreign ministry in Ottawa, asking for an explanation.422 Joseph Pope, the Canadian undersecretary of state for external affairs, responded a few days later, saying simply, “I am informed that this action was taken at the request of the Admiralty; the persons arrested being Russian Socialists animated with the purpose of starting revolution against the present Russian Government.”423
And that was that. The archive files contain no indication of any follow-up by Lakatscheff, and none of this exchange was shared with the prisoners.
AS TROTSKY LANGUISHED in Amherst, Natalya and the two boys, Sergei and Lyova, settled awkwardly into their new roles as civil detainees in Halifax. Britain had not charged Natalya with a crime or even being a threat to anyone, so it had no basis to lock her up. But the authorities hardly intended to let her run loose around Halifax or, even worse, skip town to make trouble. Instead, Canadian harbor officials coaxed a local staff member into boarding Natalya in his house. David Horowitz, the port’s official Russian translator, lived with his family on Market Street and, speaking Russian, could communicate with Natalya in her native language. The port officials tried at first to separate Sergei and Lyova and place them in an asylum, but Natalya refused to separate from her sons. On this point, the officials relented. They allowed Natalya to keep the boys so long as she prevented them from leaving the house without her supervision.
Natalya soon detested living with Horowitz. She described his home as “utter squalor” and him personally as “so stupid as to be comical. Having been ordered to keep a discreet watch over me, he nevertheless boasted to me of his many disguises.”424 After a week of complaints, the authorities determined she was not a flight risk and decided to let her and the boys live on their own, moving them into a local hotel, the Prince George on Sackville and Hollis Streets near the waterfront (a few blocks from the hotel’s modern site on Market Street). But they insisted that Natalya continue to check in at the local police station each day to make sure she didn’t run off or cause problems.
Once on her own, Natalya tried to meet people in Halifax but found it difficult. She had no friends there, didn’t speak the language, and had no visible means of support. Unlike the Bronx, she found few fellow Russians or leftists to sympathize with or understand her. Natalya did strike up a friendship with Fanny Horowitz, adult daughter of the port translator who had housed her originally. Fanny spoke Russian and remembered watching Natalya fumble with her few English phrases, such as asking people on the street, “Speek you French?”425
On anything political, though, Fanny found that Natalya could be just as rigid as Trotsky himself. One day, Fanny took Natalya shopping for a notepad. They happened to stop at a bookstore on Barrington Street, where a clerk showed her a pad decorated with flags of all the Allied countries. “I want none of them,” Natalya complained in Russian. “I have no use for any flags but the flag of real freedom.” The flag she meant, of course, was the red one.426
BACK INSIDE THE crowded Amherst detention camp, cut off from the outside world, Trotsky decided to turn his attention instead to the German soldier-prisoners surrounding him there. He spoke fluent German and didn’t hesitate to strike up conversations. The prisoners took to him, and Trotsky, as he watched them, began to appreciate the prisoners as well. He noticed how they survived for months or years under these conditions, how some practiced crafts at their bunks, some with “extraordinary skill,” and he admired what he called their “heroic efforts . . . to keep themselves physically and morally fit.”427
Most of these captured German sailors and soldiers, homesick and lonely, cooped up during the long Canadian winter, had long since grown cynical about the war. They now despised their own government and officers even more than they hated their British and Canadian guards, making them perfect grist for Trotsky’s brand of socialism. In the bunks, at meals, at work and exercise, he began to engage them, and he soon found himself giving talks to small ad hoc circles, all under the watchful eye of Colonel Morris and his guards.
The camp provided the prisoners only one newspaper, the Halifax Chronicle, but few could read it because it was in English. So Trotsky designated himself their collective translator. He would take the paper each day, use his own poor, broken English to interpret a few key words, and then extemporize in German on his own views of the world.
As he got to know them, he started acting like a big brother, pushing the young soldiers to use their time better. Trotsky himself had spent years in Russian jails when he was younger and had used the time behind bars to write articles and build his underground network. Now he told these German prisoners to be more productive, take pride in cleaning up the camp, even study English while there in Canada.
And he interweaved every conversation with politics. “We had constant group discussions,” Trotsky recalled. “Our friendship grew warmer every day.”428 In small and then larger gatherings, he told the men about the Russian Revolution, about Lenin, about America’s intention to join the war, and about how, once the war ended, they could go home and overthrow their own government in Germany, just as Russian soldiers had helped topple the tsar. They could get rid of the Kaiser and the whole capitalist crowd in Berlin that had started this pointless bloodbath in the first place.
He soon had a following. Even many of the Amherst guards found him intriguing. “He was a man who when he looked at you seemed to hypnotize you,” recalled one of them, a Captain F. C. Whitmore. “He gave us a lot of trouble, and if he had stayed there any longer . . . would have made communists of all the German prisoners.”429
Not everyone in the camp appreciated his agitation, though. Preaching overthrow of the kaiser in a British camp as Britain was fighting a desperate war against Germany hardly seemed seditious on its face. But the separately housed German officers, still loyal to their country, resented it. “The officers and non-commissioned Naval officers who had separate quarters, at once beheld us as their hated enemies,” Trotsky recalled, and this created a problem for the camp’s commandant, Colonel Morris.430
Morris watched Trotsky’s antics with growing concern. “After only a few days stay here [Trotsky] was by far the most popular man in the whole Camp with the German Prisoners of war, two thirds of whom are Socialists,” Morris complained to the Ottawa police commissioner.431 As commandant, Morris insisted on order. For now, there was little he could do about this man Trotsky and his constant talking. So he simply told his guards keep an eye on him. These were the times he’d mutter, “If only I had him on the South Africa coast.”
THE NEWS FINALLY reached New York on April 9, a Monday, seven days after the Halifax arrests and two weeks since Trotsky’s ship had sailed. A letter arrived at the basement office of Novy Mir on Saint Marks Place. Gregory Weinstein, the Novy Mir editor, was there to open it. Weinstein had stayed behind in New York when most of his staff left for Russia. Almost forty years old, living in Brooklyn with his family and having been a refugee before, Weinstein showed little desire to pull up stakes again. But the empty desks made it difficult now to produce a newspaper each day.
The letter came from Canada and bore the signature of Grigorii Chudnovsky, Trotsky’s young sidekick and fellow editor at Novy Mir, who had joined Trotsky on the trip back to Russia. Chudnovsky, doubtless with Trotsky’s help, had crammed a treasure of detail into a few terse sentences:
The British Military Authorities found that we, a group of Russian Socialists, are dangerous to the cause of the Allies. They took us off the ship and sent us to an internment camp for Prisoners of War in Amhurst. We protested and refused to leave, but in spite of all they dragged us off by force. We sent telegrams to the Russian Consul in Halifax and Montreal, to the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the Russian Minister of Justice, the Vice President of the Deputation, Committee of Workers and Soldiers, Tchkeidze, to the New York ‘Call’ and some private people. We do not know whether the telegrams arrived. . . . They left us without clothes and even took away our towels and handkerchiefs. Direct material help is necessary. It is also necessary to take steps to set us free.432
Weinstein, studying the letter, had to be amazed at what he read. No one in New York had even a hint of this story. For all anyone here suspected, Trotsky had long since reached Russia and joined the revolution. As an experienced journalist, Weinstein, holding the letter in his hand, fully recognized what he had here: a scoop, and a good one.
New York had hardly forgotten Trotsky after the splash he’d made. Weinstein had shared this basement office with him for ten weeks that winter, and with Chudnovsky even longer. They had drunk tea and worked side by side late into the night. They were friends and comrades. Trying to confirm what facts he could, Weinstein contacted the New York Call and asked if they had received a telegram from Trotsky or his party in Canada, but they’d seen nothing. If Chudnovsky was right, this meant someone had blocked it.
Unable to check anything else, Weinstein decided the letter had to speak for itself. His best strategy would be the most simple: sound the alarms.
America had changed in the two weeks since Trotsky had left town. Spring had come. The Easter and Passover holidays had just passed, and baseball opening day at the Polo Grounds that week featured young Boston Red Sox pitcher Babe Ruth, the “round-faced, left-handed Baltimore orphan boy,” as Hearst sportswriter Damon Runyon described him.433 Ruth threw a three-hitter to embarrass the Yankees before their home crowd on his way to twenty-four wins and a 2.01 ERA that season. But a military tone dominated the game. Army general Leonard Wood, not the mayor, threw out the ceremonial first pitch, and the pregame fanfare at the Polo Grounds featured Yankee and Red Sox players marching across the infield to patriotic songs in military drill formations, carrying bats on their shoulders instead of rifles.
Most things in New York now jangled to military tunes. Young men in crisp new army uniforms popped up on every corner. The country had crossed a bridge on April 6, when President Woodrow Wilson had finally led it into the European war, famously telling Congress in a joint session, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” He asked for an army of 500,000 men to fight Germany, a number that would top 2.8 million by the time the war ended. More than 2 million would reach Europe, and of these, 230,000 would be wounded and more than 116,000 would not come home alive.
Congress had approved Wilson’s proposed declaration of war by lopsided votes, 82 to 5 in the Senate and 373 to 50 in the House. New York’s Meyer London, the only Socialist congressman, and Jeanette Rankin, a Republican from Montana and the recently elected first woman member of the House, both voted no.
The country celebrated war with parades and recruitment rallies, but, Wilson’s rhetoric aside, the declaration also triggered immediate action. Federal Justice Department agents arrested sixty-five German residents in New York during the first twenty-four hours on suspicion of espionage. Port officials seized ninety-five German vessels and sent more than nine hundred German sailors to detention on Ellis Island, turning the immigration center into a vast prison, much like Halifax’s Citadel or Amherst. And this was just the start. A crackdown would soon touch Americans from all backgrounds. In New York that week, police arrested two men for disorderly conduct in Madison Square Park simply for getting up at a street-corner rally and criticizing the president. One of them called Wilson a “dirty skunk” and “perjurer,” the other called the United States “rotten.” A judge sentenced them each to six months in the city workhouse, making them early victims of a new regime. Insulting politicians had now become a crime in America.434
Arrests would escalate over the coming days. The police would shut down an anti-draft protest in Brooklyn. Crackdowns on newspapers would follow quickly.
And it wasn’t just the government enforcing patriotism. Any German or socialist insulting the flag or the president risked getting punched, kicked, or beaten on the subway or in the street. In Chicago stores refused credit to newlyweds, suspecting young men of using marriage to avoid the army. In a the favorite new expression, such men were “slackers.” Demand for American flags ran so high that wholesale dealers stopped taking orders and flag manufacturers ran out of bunting.
Swimming against this tide, Morris Hillquit, New York’s Socialist leader, still worked frantically to build his coalition against the war. That week he managed to pull two hundred Socialist Party leaders to an emergency conference in Saint Louis—still possible in these early weeks of mobilization. “It was a tense and nervous gathering,” he recalled, reflecting the hostility and growing isolation.435
Unlike earlier party meetings, though, the bleak atmosphere this time helped forge consensus. The Saint Louis convention adopted a strikingly clear platform. “In all modern history there has been no war more unjustifiable than the war in which we are about to engage,” it read. It denounced the war, the draft, press censorship, and limits on free speech, and it called for resistance though public demonstrations, mass petitions, and “all honorable and effective means within our power”—everything short of breaking the law.436
With this result, Hillquit had now unified his Socialist Party but had also set it on a direct collision course, both with federal law enforcement authorities and with his own party’s left wing and its increasing embrace of Russian-style extremism. Reckonings on both scores would come soon.
All these distractions aside, the news of Trotsky’s arrest in Canada still managed to command attention in New York City. Trotsky’s loyalists wasted no time springing into action. At Novy Mir, Gregory Weinstein still had plenty of friends in the newspaper business, and he called on them now. He mobilized his remaining small staff, and within a few hours they shared copies of Chudnovsky’s letter with the New York Times, the New York Call, the New Yorker Volkzeitung, the Forward, and any other newspaper he thought might help. By the next morning, each had printed large chunks of the letter verbatim. BRITISH SEIZE RUSSIAN SOCIALISTS AND INTERN THEM IN PRISON CAMP, the New York Call announced in a front-page headline. RUSSIAN RADICAL DETAINED: TROTZKY AND SEVEN OTHERS TAKEN OFF STEAMSHIP IN HALIFAX, echoed the New York Times.437
Weinstein also sent telegrams to top officials in Russia, including Alexander Kerensky, the minister of justice, and the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet. At the same time, the New York Call used its Socialist Party contacts to reach Congressman Meyer London in Washington, DC. “Can you do anything through government? Please wire answer,” it asked him in a telegram.438
Another idea came from Nicholas Aleinikoff, the lawyer and local socialist leader. Aleinikoff had sat with Trotsky on the Socialist Party’s Resolutions Committee in its arguments over the war and had spoken against Trotsky’s minority report at the Lenox Casino back in March. But despite the disagreement, Aleinikoff agreed to help.
Aleinikoff happened to know the Canadian postmaster general, a man named R. M. Coulter, whom Aleinikoff had dealt with in prior legal work on behalf of Russian newspapers, possibly Novy Mir itself. “Trust as champion of freedom you will intercede on their behalf,” he cabled Coulter on April 11, telling him about the arrests and insisting he knew Trotsky, Chudnovsky, and Melnichansky “intimately” and considered them “true sons of Russia who should be released at once [to] contribute their share” to rebuilding the country.”439 Arthur Wolf, another colleague at 134 East Broadway, knew Coulter too and also sent him a cable that day to underline the point.
Coulter, receiving these messages in Ottawa, would tap his own contacts in the Canadian military to get to the bottom of things.440 But this too was just the start.
EVEN IN PETROGRAD, Russia, preoccupied with war and political upheaval, Trotsky’s arrest made headlines. Trotsky hadn’t set foot there since his public trial a decade earlier for chairing the 1905 Petrograd Soviet, but many local socialists now playing lead roles in 1917 remembered Trotsky from those days, his escapes from Siberia, and his defiance of tsarist prosecutors. Many of Trotsky’s anti-tsarist writings since then, from Vienna, the Balkans, Paris, even New York, had filtered back there. His name still grabbed attention, and politicians treated it gingerly.
The provisional government, under Paul Miliukov and Alexander Kerensky, had learned about Trotsky’s arrest when it first occurred but kept the news secret. Britain’s Foreign Office had notified them in early April, and Miliukov, as Russia’s foreign minister, initially had asked that Trotsky be released.441 But Miliukov changed his mind after British officials told him what they’d heard about Trotsky from New York: that Trotsky had been leading “an important movement . . . financed by Jewish (and, possibly, ultimately German) funds” aimed at overthrowing Miliukov’s own provisional government.442 That was enough to convince Miliukov to cancel his request for Trotsky’s release.
All this changed, however, once word reached the city. Hiding the story became impossible. Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and a dozen other left-wing parties all vied for support in Petrograd, and each one flooded the sidewalks with its tabloids, posters, and pamphlets. They quickly made Trotsky’s arrest a sensation, sparking protests and speeches. The Mensheviks, who still considered Trotsky their own, demanded his release and accused Britain of deceit.443 Britain’s ambassador in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan, felt so threatened by the anti-British tone of the Trotsky clamor that he complained to the provisional government. “The attacks made against us in the press . . . had taken such a serious turn,” he wrote, “they were even endangering the lives of some of the British factory owners.”444
Old rules no longer applied in postrevolutionary Russia, and now a new catalyst had come to stir the pot even more. It was the most important Bolshevik leader of all, Vladimir Lenin.
Lenin’s return from exile at this moment in April 1917 would set in motion a chain of events that would reshape world history: seventy years of communism, transformation of Russian society, Stalinist purges, victory over Hitler, the Cold War. None of this, though, appeared likely at the time. Lenin’s Bolsheviks in early 1917 remained a small minority even within Russia’s radical left, smaller than the Mensheviks and shut out from government circles. In a democratic Russia, the Bolsheviks had little chance to amount to more than a tiny fringe.
But from the moment he set foot in Petrograd, Lenin had set about changing Bolshevism. His weeklong trip from Switzerland gave him time to refine his April Theses, a new ten-point strategy that would win him power before the year was over. For now it remained a provocative, radical departure, defying orthodox socialism. Lenin called for complete rejection of the provisional government, immediate power for the proletariat and the “poorest sections of the peasants,” rejection of parliamentary democracy, confiscation of landed estates, and recognition of the workers committees, or soviets, as the “only possible form of revolutionary government.”445
At this point, only two other figures in the socialist world had publicly reached these same radical conclusions: Trotsky and Parvus in their 1905 theory of “permanent revolution.”
“Few Bolsheviks could believe their ears” on first hearing Lenin’s new line, biographer Robert Service wrote about these days.446 Lenin’s April Theses set him at odds with just about everyone. At one meeting his first day back, he delivered what Service described as a “diatribe” against his own Bolshevik Central Committee for its weak stance. Later, at the Tauride Palace, he criticized any reconciliation with Mensheviks. His April Theses, when finally published, sparked heated debate. At a joint meeting with Mensheviks that day, Lenin shouted “Never” when asked about party unity. The more the Mensheviks understood Lenin’s concept, the more hostile they became. “Lenin’s program is sheer insurrectionism, which will lead us into the pit of anarchy,” one proclaimed.447 Said another, “Lenin will remain a solitary figure outside the revolution and we’ll all go our own way.”448
Even Ambassador Buchanan, appalled at Lenin’s extremism, took comfort in its rejection by fellow leftists. Alexander Kerensky, talking with the ambassador, agreed.449
But Lenin finally got his way. The turning point came in late April when newspapers disclosed that Paul Miliukov, the provisional government’s foreign minister, had secretly told Allied governments that he planned to continue Tsar Nicholas’s aims in the world war, a wildly unpopular position in war-weary Russia. The public backlash not only forced Miliukov to quit his post, but it discredited the entire provisional government as a force for change. Lenin used this moment to raise his April Theses at a party conference on April 24. This time the majority backed him.
It was also around this time that Lenin decided to place his Bolsheviks behind another popular cause: freedom for Leon Trotsky, hero of 1905, jailed by the British in Canada.
Lenin had no special love for Trotsky, still nursing insults and quarrels with him stretching back a dozen years. But Lenin recognized opportunity. Seeing Trotsky jailed by Britain on charges of accepting German help must have startled him. After all, it was he, Lenin, who had traveled home through Germany on a “sealed train” provided by the German government and arranged by the German agent Parvus. Lenin had his own vulnerabilities on this score, and what Britain had done to Trotsky, it easily could do to him.
Besides, Trotsky was popular. Why not ride his coattails? Lenin had worked with Trotsky, he recognized his talents, and the reports he heard about Trotsky from New York, especially from friends like Alexandra Kollontai—who came regularly to Lenin’s Petrograd meetings and speeches—had to affect him.
“Can one even for a moment believe the trustworthiness of the statement that Trotsky, chairman of the Soviet of Workers delegates in St. Petersburg in 1905—a revolutionary who has sacrificed years to a disinterested service of revolution—that this man had anything to do with a scheme subsidized by the German government?” the Bolshevik Party organ Pravda pronounced in an editorial at the height of the controversy. It was “patent, unheard-of, and malicious slander,” Pravda added. “Six men dragged Comrade Trotsky away by his legs and arms, all in the name of friendship for the Provisional Russian government!”450
Finally, even Miliukov, in his last days as Russia’s foreign minister, on the verge of resignation, had to bite his lip and agree. Shortly before stepping down, he reinstated his demand that the British release Trotsky.
BACK IN NEW York, Trotsky’s friends hadn’t finished showing their support. No movement could be complete without a mass meeting, and for Trotsky, they threw a fine one. They held it on a Sunday afternoon, April 15, and Louis Fraina, Trotsky’s partner back at the Lenox Casino, took the lead arranging it, sponsored by the Boston-based Socialist Propaganda League.
In the vacuum created by Trotsky’s departure, Fraina, just twenty-four-years old, had stepped up and made himself a leading voice of the American far left. He still used the offices of Modern Dance magazine at 562 Fifth Avenue, a few blocks from Times Square. Seeing the growing hostility toward foreigners, he had prepared papers to apply for US citizenship later that month, despite having lived in New York without it for twenty years. But Fraina saved his main energies for his two political magazines: the Internationalist and Class Struggle, which he would soon coedit with Ludwig Lore and Louis Boudin.
Within a few weeks, by May 16, Fraina would add another credential to his list: his first visit by agents of the federal Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigations (forerunner of the FBI). The agents that day would come looking for the mailing list for Fraina’s Internationalist, which Fraina easily would avoid giving them by claiming he didn’t have a copy, that somebody else kept it. Fraina ultimately would be the subject of one of the bureau’s thickest files from that era. Before the end of the year, he would have his first arrest and conviction on federal charges, for giving an antiwar speech in September and thus violating the Selective Service Act by encouraging young men to refuse to register.
The rally for Trotsky drew a big, boisterous crowd of mostly radical immigrants—Russians, Jews, Lithuanians, and Germans. Accounts don’t mention the locale, but one of the usual favorites, Lenox Casino or Beethoven Hall, was most likely. Any good rally needed music, and this one featured a choir of children from the Ferrer School singing under a red banner, not only movement favorites such as “IWW Unite” and “The Internationale” but also the peppy 1915 tune “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” (so popular that it had already spawned a prowar alternative called “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Coward,” sung to the same tune):
I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?
Then came speeches and resolutions in multiple languages. Fraina chaired the event and gave the major address in English. “We talk about the autocratic Governments of Germany and Austria, but the Allies are just as bad,” he shouted to loud applause. “In England Lloyd George is as supreme as the Kaiser is in Germany, and here in this country they are seeking to introduce similar autocracy.”451 Then came talks from a Russian, a Dane, and a Japanese, doubtless Gregory Weinstein, Sebald Rutgers, and Sen Katayama. The crowd cheered and waved and sang and passed resolutions. They urged workers all over the world to “use all force in their possession to bring about the release of Trotzky and to bring peace.”452
The rally probably did more to raise the morale of local socialists than to push government officials. The New York Times account in particular tried to paint the event as pro-German, describing the crowd as “dominated by Germans,” describing the immigrants as “many apparently of German birth or extraction,” and highlighting the German speeches and songs.453 But all the efforts—the letters, demonstrations, telegrams, and newspaper stories—had a cumulative impact: Government officials in America, Canada, Britain, and Russia were now all asking questions. If William Wiseman of British intelligence had hoped to avoid an international incident by having Trotsky arrested in faraway Canada instead of New York City, he had failed badly.
BACK AT AMHERST, tension between Trotsky and the camp’s commandant, Colonel Arthur Henry Morris, continued to escalate as Trotsky continued to preach revolution among the German prisoners. “The whole month there was like one continuous mass meeting,” Trotsky wrote.454 The German soldiers, bored and frustrated after months of captivity, came to appreciate the idea of overthrowing their kaiser once they got home, at least as something to talk about while stuck in Canada.
The talk became so general that the German officers, housed in nicer quarters at the opposite end of the camp, finally lodged a formal complaint with Colonel Morris. It was an insult to their country, they said, let alone a threat to themselves.
Colonel Morris, having had enough of Trotsky, issued an order forbidding him from giving any more speeches. When Trotsky predictably refused to obey, Morris ordered his guards to separate Trotsky from the other prisoners. They removed him from the crowded bunk area and placed him into an old foundry blast furnace that they’d converted into a chamber for solitary confinement.
We don’t know how long Trotsky spent inside the old blast furnace, but instead of complaining, he seemed to take an almost cheerful view of it. Despite the discomfort, Trotsky saw Morris’s action as a moral victory. “The British colonel instantly sided with the Hollenzollern officers,” he wrote years later, as if Trotsky had forced Morris to concede a bigger point: that Trotsky had been right all along about the war and its basis in the global class struggle, a force that transcended national borders, pitting rulers (officers and capitalists) against workers and soldiers of all countries.
The rank-and-file German prisoners had come to enjoy Trotsky’s daily dissertations and now came to his defense. They passed around a petition protesting Trotsky’s silencing and confinement. As Trotsky remembered it, a full 530 of them, a majority of the entire camp, signed it. “A plebiscite like this, carried out in the very face of [the guards’] heavy-handed supervision,” he wrote, “was more than ample compensation for all the hardships of the Amherst imprisonment.”455 Still Morris wasn’t ready to let go.
THE FINAL STRAW came from inside government circles, both in London and Ottawa. Canada’s postmaster general, R. M. Coulter, having received telegrams from his two acquaintances in New York City, decided to raise the issue with Major General Willoughby Gwatkin, the Canadian military chief of staff in Ottawa. Gwatkin, in turn, passed his concern along to top navy brass, warning of concerns that “an act of high-handed injustice has been done.”456 Another ranking military figure, Admiral C. E. Kingsmill, director of the Canadian Naval Service, took the point further, contacting Captain Makins in Halifax, still responsible for the prisoners, and asking him to make an early decision on their disposition. In London pressure grew too as the Russian charge d’affaires pressed the British Foreign Office on the situation, reminding them that Trotsky carried a valid Russian passport.457
Canada, a British dominion, still owed allegiance to the British Crown. It practiced limited autonomy, but its foreign policy emanated from London. Canada thus had no right to free Trotsky without permission from the British navy, whatever its own government ministers might think. Still, top officials in both countries, Canada and Britain, recognized a problem. Their countries’ legal systems still required some legal basis to hold a prisoner. But Trotsky had broken no law, had not carried contraband (at least that anyone had found), had presented a proper British visa and Russian passport, and, as a noncombatant, hardly qualified as a prisoner of war. And the evidence against him as a German spy was thin at best.
If Trotsky ever got his case in front of a judge, any court in Canada or Britain ultimately would be hard-pressed not to release him. And now, with newspapers on three continents reporting his arrest, they were turning Trotsky into a global celebrity.
The turning point came on April 20, when British colonel Claude E. M. Dansey,458 the senior British MI-5 official responsible for port intelligence (controlling who could enter or leave British territory), arrived in Halifax en route to Washington, DC, as part of a delegation of British military experts assigned to advise the US Army. With twenty-six years of service, Dansey ranked as one of Britain’s most senior intelligence chiefs. He had learned the spy game in Rhodesia in the 1890s, practiced it during the Boer War, and spent three years in America before 1914 spying on Irish nationalists and US bankers. Sometimes known by his code name, “Z,” he had been an original agent for Britain’s Secret Service Bureau (forerunner to MI-5 and MI-6) when it was first created in 1909.
Dansey knew all about the Trotsky controversy before he landed in Halifax, and he sought out Captain Makins to discuss it.459 To Dansey, the whole situation looked suspicious. “I believed the new Russian Government would at once ask for Trotsky’s release,” Dansey reported telling Makins when they finally got together, and “unless they [British naval authorities were] very certain of the source of the information against him, it would be much better to let him go before he got angry.”460
Trotsky, of course, was already quite angry. Still, as Dansey remembered it, Makins promised to wire New York or Washington and “ascertain the reliability of their information.”461
Who or what exactly had sparked Dansey’s suspicions over the Trotsky affair is far from clear. The War Office in London had grown concerned over the performance of Britain’s intelligence operation in New York City—Wiseman, Gaunt, Norman Thwaites, and the rest. Wiseman in particular came across to some London officials as a likeable amateur, just thirty-three years old and with barely sixteen months’ experience in intelligence work at a point when America was about to enter the war.
Dansey apparently expected that he himself would be asked to take over the job of managing British intelligence in New York—perhaps as Wiseman’s commanding officer—once he had finished his assignment in Washington, DC. “Dansey was obviously unimpressed” with Wiseman’s work, one biographer noted,462 including probably Wiseman’s confusing signals over the Trotsky affair.
Dansey would explain his concern once he reached Washington a few weeks later. Seeing for himself the report from the informer Casimir Pilenas that had prompted Trotsky’s arrest in the first place, he would shake his head in disbelief. It “looked to me like the work of a Russian Agent Provocateur,” he wrote. When he finally had the chance to confront Wiseman directly in New York, he reported: “I told Wiseman that [Pilenas] had better be discharged at once, and [Wiseman] said that he was going to do so.”463
Whatever Dansey said or did behind the scenes in Halifax, the next day, April 21, Captain Makins informed Ottawa that he had received new orders from the admiralty that the “Russian Socialists should be allowed to proceed.”464 Gwatkin, the Canadian military chief of staff, quickly informed Postmaster General Coulter. “Our friends the Russian socialists are to be released,” he told him in a letter. “Arrangements are being made for their passage to Europe.”465
Still, even with the decision made, British and Canadian officers dragged their feet. “We must permit but need not expedite their journey,” one Foreign Office bureaucrat grumbled.466 It would take another week, until April 28, for the order freeing Trotsky to reach Amherst. Canadian officials said they needed the extra time to arrange for a ship to carry him immediately from Halifax to Norway. They had no intention of allowing Trotsky even a few hours to dawdle around Halifax making trouble.
AT AMHERST, COLONEL Morris still hadn’t finished with Trotsky and his Russian friends. Getting word from the British admiralty to release them, Morris at first refused to tell them. Instead, he waited until the day came. Then he ordered Trotsky and the others to pack their belongings so they could be taken back to Halifax. “We were never told, either that we should be freed, or whither we were to be sent,” Trotsky recalled.467 As a result, they assumed the worst, that the Canadians planned to send them to another prison, perhaps the Citadel again, en route to someplace else, maybe this time to the Canadian interior, even farther from civilization.
So Trotsky refused to move. He and the others sat on their bunks as soldiers came and seized their belongings and as a crowd of prisoners congregated around them to watch. Finally, facing a confrontation, Morris gave up. Standing at Trotsky’s bunk, he gave him the news. “In his characteristic Anglo-colonial way [Morris told us] that we were to sail on a Danish boat for Russia,” Trotsky recalled. “The colonel’s purple face twitched compulsively.”468
Trotsky remembered his departure from Amherst as bittersweet. The German soldiers and sailors came to see him off. They lined the sidewalk on both sides, and a makeshift band played socialist tunes as they shared speeches and handshakes. “In later years I received letters from many of them, sent from Germany,” Trotsky wrote.469
It would take until May 3, a full month after his arrest in Halifax, for the British to place Trotsky, his family, and the other Russian prisoners on a Scandinavian-America Line ship called the Hellig Olav for the trip to Kristiania. Trotsky remembered the crossing as dull and eventless, like “going through a tunnel.”470 Natalya recalled the small ship being “pounded mercilessly by the Atlantic waves.” The only entertainment came from Chudnovsky, who apparently found romance on the voyage. He “paid court to a little Russian dancer” he met on board, Natalya recalled.471
From Kristiania, it would take another week by train to reach Russia. But finally they had escaped beyond the reach of Britain, Canada, and America. No chains or hesitations held them back. Trotsky could now go home and join the fight he’d been itching to finish since 1905, taking the chaos in Russia and shaping it to his own unique vision of the world.