“An old literary lady wrote me the other day, ‘Russia is like a Slav woman who loves the man in whom she finds a master and who, in the words of an old peasant song, asks her husband if he does not love her any more when he no longer beats her out of jealousy.’”472
—Sir George Buchanan, British ambassador to Petrograd, April 10, 1917
TROTSKY REACHED PETROGRAD on May 17 (May 4 under the Julian calendar used there until 1918), seven weeks after leaving New York City. His month of captivity in Nova Scotia had spoiled any chance to lead the parade of émigrés back home, but it gave his entrance a dramatic flourish. Controversy over his imprisonment helped Trotsky regain his celebrity status inside Russia and elevated his arrival to public spectacle. A handful of friends met him at the Beloostrov crossing. By the time they reached Petrograd’s Finland Station, so many well-wishers mobbed the train they had to lift him onto their shoulders to carry him to the street.
Petrograd, Russia’s imperial capital since Peter the Great, with its grand palaces, canals, and government buildings, had been transformed by the dramatic upheavals of early 1917. Tsarism shattered, the city now buzzed with excitement, capital of a Russia that Lenin called “the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world.”473 Concerts, meetings, and street corner rallies all mingled with city traffic. Banners hung from buildings, thousands of men and women wore scarlet ribbons pinned to winter coats, radicals clogged the streets, and soldiers carrying red flags sang songs while marching and jamming the trains.
Before Trotsky even found a hotel room, his friends launched him into a dizzying whirlwind of meetings and receptions. “Men and events swept by me as swiftly as litter in a rushing stream,” he recalled of that day.474 Among the first stops, they took him across the Neva River to the city’s latest political mecca, the former elite girls’ boarding school called the Smolny Institute. Surrounded by elegant gardens, this landmark had become the new home of the Petrograd Soviet, that odd gathering of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies that now stood as an independent competing government in postrevolutionary Russia.
Trotsky entered the chamber where the soviet’s executive committee was meeting that day, and it greeted him with applause. The committee deputies interrupted business and made a few speeches. Then a Bolshevik formally proposed inviting Trotsky to join them as a member, in honor of his role as chairman of this same committee in 1905. But the gesture, though gracious, created an awkward moment. Trotsky had been away from Russia for more than ten years, which made him a stranger here. He represented no political group. Looking at the committee members, a motley collection of workers, radicals, and politicians—mostly socialists, many from local Menshevik and Bolshevik organizations—Trotsky didn’t recognize many of the faces. Others, old friends, he hadn’t seen in years.
But the deputies all knew Trotsky, at least by reputation, including his penchant for high-profile arguments with Lenin, Martov, and other top figures. Some probably even heard about his fights with Morris Hillquit in New York City. They had to wonder: Who would he support now? Who would he attack? Nobody knew Trotsky’s views on the latest political twists and turns, and Trotsky himself had barely had time to figure them out. That day, for instance, as Trotsky came into the room, the committee had been debating a proposal from the provisional government, now mostly controlled by Alexander Kerensky as minister of war, to offer ministry portfolios to a handful of these soviet deputies. Should they accept? Trotsky, asked his opinion, said no, but he kept his words brief.
After some debate, they decided to seat Trotsky, but only as an honorary, nonvoting member. For now he would have to earn his wings anew.
Natalya and the boys spent their first night in Russia at the Kiev Hostelry, one of the few hotels in Petrograd that still had available rooms. “We lived as modestly as we had done in Paris and the Bronx,” Natalya recalled of those first weeks home. “Each day brought joyful or grave political news together with the constant problem of finding something to eat.”475 The boys, Sergei and Lyova, marveled at finally seeing their parents’ homeland. Exploring Petrograd with their mother, what fascinated them most was how people spoke here. Not only did they all talk the same language—the opposite of New York or even Paris—but it was Russian. With Russian words on street signs, shops, and billboards, the boys, for the first time in their lives, could actually understand all the conversations around them.
Politics aside, this was a homecoming for Trotsky and Natalya. They both had family here, relatives their sons had never met, including Alexandra Sokolovskaya, Trotsky’s first (and still legal) wife. She went by the name Bronstein and lived in Petrograd with her two daughters, Nina and Zina, the ones she’d had with Trotsky in Siberia during their exile together before his 1902 escape. Nina and Zina had grown into teenagers, fifteen and sixteen years old.
Trotsky brought the families together and apparently the reunion went well. Trotsky’s sons became fast friends with their half sisters. The families started spending time together. That summer, when Trotsky would bury himself in politics, the wives and children would vacation as a group at the nearby beach resort of Teriyoki (now Zelenogorsk) on the Gulf of Finland.
Meanwhile, after so many years abroad, seeing his own country again had to be a shock for Trotsky. Russia had suffered terribly in the world war, to an extent that outsiders could barely imagine, making its backwardness and poverty painfully visible. Russia had mobilized 14 million young men for the fight, more than any other country in Europe, and now 3 million lay dead and another 4 million had been wounded. The war had killed more than a million civilians from disease, dislocations, malnutrition, and military cross fire. Fighting had devastated Russia’s farmlands and wrecked hundreds of villages and towns. The resulting chaos had created millions of refugees.
Even before the war, Russian society had strained under vast disparities in wealth and privilege. Its economy remained predominantly agricultural, but the tsar personally owned 70 percent of the country’s arable land, and nobles owed most of the rest, leaving 110 million peasants, more than 80 percent of the population, largely landless and poor. Military mobilization had dragged millions off the land and organized them into an army that now sat angry and disillusioned. Starvation plagued the cities. This, plus a growing militant urban proletariat, created a powder keg easily capable of exploding again any time.
Trotsky had recognized this dynamic even sitting far away in Paris and New York. Back in Petrograd, watching soviet deputies quibble over ministry portfolios and a provisional government trapped in a doomed war effort, he saw only one other person in the city who seemed to grasp the moment as he did, with the same impatience and single-minded opportunism. It was a returned exile like himself, his old mentor and rival Vladimir Lenin.
The Lenin–Trotsky partnership of posterity, the one that finally seized power later that year, began as a courtship starting almost the minute Trotsky set foot in Petrograd. Lenin sent an emissary to the border crossing at Beloostrov to greet him and ask about his plans. Trotsky recognized the friendly overture and reciprocated. His younger sister, Olga, whom he had not seen since before the war, lived in Petrograd and was married to Lev Kamenev, one of Lenin’s close confidantes and a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Trotsky and Natalya made a point to meet them over dinner on one of their first nights back in Russia. Through Kamenev, Trotsky arranged to visit the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda and meet the local party chieftains.
For the time being, Trotsky decided to join only one political group, Mezhrayontska, the Inter-District Committee. Known by its Russian-language acronym RSDLP, it was a loose confederation of socialists who had described themselves as unifiers before the war. The group attracted many returning émigrés who simply hadn’t yet decided where to place themselves in the new constellation, including many of Trotsky’s friends from abroad: Chudnovsky and Volodarsky from New York, Moises Uritsky from Paris, and Adolf Joffe, whom he’d known in Vienna. Its membership, never more than a few hundred before, had risen to four thousand since March, swelled with newcomers.
Trotsky encountered Lenin face-to-face in Petrograd for the first time just a few days after arriving. Bolshevik and Mezhrayontska leaders had decided to meet and consider merging the two groups, and Trotsky and Lenin both decided to participate. Trotsky hadn’t seen Lenin in more than two years, since the 1915 Zimmerwald conference in Switzerland, and it’s easy to picture them, Trotsky thirty-eight years old and Lenin forty-seven, two no-nonsense, ambitious politicos, eyeing each other across the table, each trying to size up the other, curious and skeptical at the same time. There’s no indication they formed any special chemistry that day. Instead, pleasantries aside, they mostly bickered.
Trotsky by now had read Lenin’s April Theses, and he appreciated how closely they tracked his own thinking. But, typically, instead of seeing this as a reason to join forces, Trotsky took Lenin’s new approach as a concession, as Lenin’s finally agreeing that Trotsky had been right all along. That being so, he suggested, why shouldn’t Lenin be the one to change sides and join Trotsky’s group rather than asking the Mezhrayontska to become Bolsheviks? “I cannot call myself a Bolshevik,” he insisted. “We should not be expected to recognize Bolshevism.”476
But Lenin refused even to consider the idea. Friendly overtures aside, he had not yet decided what to make of Trotsky: friend, foe, or indifferent. Besides, Lenin had no intention of giving up his Bolshevik apparatus. Why should he? Things were going well at that moment. Not only were his calls for “Peace, Land, and Bread!” winning followers, but his party suddenly had become rich. After years of struggling on shoestring budgets, Lenin now had all the money he needed to print pamphlets and run the organization. By one count that spring, Lenin’s Bolsheviks were operating as many as forty-one newspapers inside Russia, including the largest, Pravda, with a daily print run of ninety thousand copies, costing them some 260,000 rubles each month. And this was on top of paying salaries and other party expenses.
Much of the new funds came from an account at the Commercial Bank of Siberia that always seemed to have plenty of money. Russian government investigators had already started asking questions about the account and tracing its cash flow back to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Lenin’s friend Jacob Furstenberg. And through him to Alexander Israel Helphand “Parvus,” a known agent of Germany.
Trotsky, Lenin, and their followers made no decisions at that first meeting. Over the next few weeks, they continued to see each other. In the frenzy of revolutionary Petrograd—its daily rallies, speeches, and backroom huddles—early morning till late each night, they stood on platforms together and shared the excitement. Lenin spoke at Mezhrayontska assemblies and Trotsky addressed Bolshevik conferences. Lenin came to hold a unique sway over these crowds. He was “a strange popular leader,” as John Reed, the American journalist, would describe him in October, “a leader purely by virtue of the intellect: colourless, humourless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies—but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms. . . . And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.”477
Trotsky, for his part, started to write articles for Lenin’s newspaper Pravda, though he also kept doors open to other political groups, particularly the Mensheviks and their leader, his old Paris and London friend Julius Martov. His favorite venue became the Cirque Moderne, a large concert hall in the Vyborg District near the army barracks, where his speeches drew big audiences most nights. Petrograd was enjoying a moment of freedom that must have made it reminiscent of New York.
IT TOOK A crisis that summer finally to cement the deal. They called it the July Days, a week of violent street clashes culminating in a harsh crackdown by Kerensky’s government against Lenin and his followers. “Lenin’s attitude to me went through several phases,” Trotsky later explained. “First he was reserved and content to wait and see. The July days brought us together at once.”478
That summer Kerensky, yielding to demands from Britain and France, decided to launch a major military offensive against German forces in Galicia in western Ukraine. He committed four Russian armies to the operation. It enjoyed initial success using heavy artillery to blast German lines, but then it stalled and collapsed, disintegrating into a rout. Russian forces suffered staggering losses, almost one hundred thousand men killed or wounded, in what looked like an increasingly pointless effort.
Soldiers back in Petrograd, angry at both Kerensky’s military failure and worsening conditions at home, decided to launch protests against the government. But both the provisional government and the soviet, fearing violence, insisted the soldiers stay in their barracks. Only Lenin’s Bolsheviks decided to support them, partly in hopes of keeping the situation under control.
By the second day, the demonstrations had grown immensely. Half a million armed military men, including a fully equipped machine gun unit and sailors from the Kronstadt naval base, plus tens of thousands of rifle-carrying workers from nearby factories, jammed the streets demanding “All Power to the Soviets,” a direct challenge to Kerensky. The mob surrounded the Tauride Palace and threatened to kill government ministers. At one point Trotsky personally had to intercede with demonstrators to rescue Viktor Chernov, the minister of agriculture, when protestors surrounded him on the palace steps.
Kerensky, finally sensing public support, decided to respond with force of his own. He sent loyal troops to disperse the crowds, resulting in more than seven hundred demonstrators being shot or beaten in street battles. Through friendly newspapers, Kerensky blamed Lenin’s Bolsheviks not only for the violence in Petrograd but also for the collapse in army morale behind that summer’s military disaster. In fact, all along Lenin’s Bolsheviks had been sending agitators to the front lines, urging soldiers not to fight.
But this led to an even darker charge. At the height of the crisis, a popular progovernment newspaper claimed to possess evidence that Lenin had acted on orders directly from Berlin, that he was a German spy, financed by the Kaiser’s general staff. In addition to the Bolsheviks’ suddenly flush bank accounts, the newspaper pointed as evidence to Lenin’s “sealed train” through Germany; his dealings with Parvus, the notorious German financier; and all the material assembled by government prosecutors looking into the Commercial Bank of Siberia. The charges prompted even more violence. Government troops and right-wing vigilantes broke into the Bolshevik Party’s headquarters that week and vandalized the offices of Pravda. The charges mixed with traditional Jew-baiting, attacks in Jewish neighborhoods, and calls to “drown the Jews and Bolsheviks,” the same tactic that tsarist officials had used in 1905.479
As icing on the cake, Paul Miliukov, now the former foreign minister, speaking through his affiliated newspaper, took this precise moment to charge Trotsky with being part of the German conspiracy. Based on what? That Trotsky in New York City had received $10,000 from German sources that he had carried with him back to Russia to overthrow the provisional government. How did Miliukov know this? He had an excellent source, he explained: the British.
It was the same old accusation from New York of a secret $10,000 payment that had started at the British intelligence office at 44 Whitehall. It had followed Trotsky across the ocean. Instead of being discredited after British officials had failed to find the money on Trotsky in Halifax, the story had lived on within British intelligence circles.480 And now, through Miliukov, it had leaked into the wider world.
Having painted them as traitors, Kerensky’s government now issued arrest warrants for Lenin and his top lieutenants. Lenin, refusing to surrender himself, decided instead to go underground, ultimately reaching Finland.481 “They have chosen this moment to shoot us all,” he told Trotsky shortly before leaving the city.
But Kerensky chose not to arrest Trotsky, at least not yet. Trotsky, after all, was not part of Lenin’s official circle—technically he had not become a Bolshevik yet—and he remained a sitting member of the soviet executive committee. The protection this gave him wasn’t much, but Trotsky decided to use it, for however long it lasted, to defend himself.
What followed was a one-person publicity campaign in which Trotsky turned his pen, his popularity, his press contacts, and his seat on the soviet committee into weapons against the government. Refusing to distance himself from Lenin, he sent a public letter to Kerensky’s government, printed in the widely read Novaya Zhizn, a newspaper edited by Maxim Gorky, tying himself directly to the Bolsheviks:
Comrade Ministers! I know you have decided to arrest Comrades Lenin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. But the arrest order does not include me. Therefore I think it is essential to draw your attention to the following facts: 1) In principle, I share the views of Lenin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, and I defend them in my newspaper Vpered and in my many public speeches. . . . I am just as irreconcilable an opponent of the general policy of the Provisional Government as the above-mentioned Comrades.482
But he didn’t stop there. He insisted on confronting his accusers. He marched over to the Smolny Institute and took the podium at a meeting of the soviet committee, which had backed Kerensky’s crackdown up to that point. “Lenin has fought for revolution thirty years, I have fought against the oppression of the popular masses twenty years,” he told the roomful of deputies, who reacted mostly with silence and a few catcalls. “We cannot but hate German militarism. Only he who does not know what revolution is can say otherwise.” Privately, he made the case even more sharply. “Everybody thinks they can stab Lenin in the back,” he told people. “Whoever accused Lenin of being a German agent is a scoundrel.”483
Finally, on the $10,000 charge itself, he turned to ridicule. In the same speeches and public letters, he explained how, yes, in New York he had received small donations from local socialists at speeches and rallies—nickels, pennies, quarters, and a few dollars, totaling a few hundred altogether. The mysterious German newspaper editor identified by Miliukov, he explained, was Ludwig Lore, editor of the New Yorker Volkszeitung, a longtime socialist who’d taken a collection among his readers; and the crowds at the Harlem River Casino, Beethoven Hall, and other venues were simply immigrants wanting revolutions in their home countries, including Russia and Germany. That’s who had given him money in New York.
“In my entire life I have not only never had at my disposal, at one time, $10,000, but even a tenth of that sum,” he wrote, making a joke of the affair.484 Besides, he added, $10,000 was a cheap price to overthrow a government. Germany would have given more if it really meant business. And it was Miliukov himself who had insisted that Trotsky be released from Halifax over the same charge.
After about a week of this, Kerensky decided he’d had enough and ordered Trotsky arrested along with the others. Trotsky found himself behind bars again, this time in Petrograd’s Kresty Prison near the Neva River, rapidly filling up with Bolsheviks caught in the dragnet. But all the publicity had its effect. On the street, sympathies began to change.
Nobody found these shifting political winds more confusing than Trotsky’s own sons, Sergei and Lyova. “What sort of revolution is this?” they asked their mother the morning the squad of policemen came and invaded their apartment before dawn to arrest their father, “if Dad could first be put in a concentration camp and then in prison?”485 Natalya, working at the woodworkers trade union by day that summer to earn money for the family, kept the boys away from Petrograd to insulate them from these attacks. She sent them to Tariyoki, the beach town on the Gulf of Finland, where they mostly enjoyed being “happy, sunburnt and mad about swimming and fishing,” as she put it. But when she came to visit them once around this time, she discovered the boys cowering in a corner of their room at the local boardinghouse. They had heard people call their father a German spy and had gotten into a fight. Someone had pulled a knife and thrown a chair. They hadn’t eaten in hours.486
After that, she took Sergei and Lyova back to Petrograd. There the boys got in the habit of riding the tram to the prison to carry baskets of food to their father.
In the end, Trotsky’s loud protests reached their most important audience. In early August, with both of the key leaders absent—Lenin hiding in Finland and Trotsky locked up in Kresty Prison—their followers decided to seal the alliance. Trotsky’s vocal defense of Lenin had removed any doubt about loyalty between Bolsheviks and Mezhrayontska. At a party congress, the Bolsheviks formally voted to absorb them, and the Mezhrayontska formally voted to accept. Leading the congress in Lenin’s absence were Nikolai Bukharin, Trotsky’s fellow Novy Mir editor from New York and now head of the Moscow Soviet, and Joseph Stalin. On Stalin’s motion, they also voted to make Alexandra Kollontai the only female member of the Bolshevik Central Committee.
They were all Bolsheviks now, committed to revolution, the full package: toppling Kerensky and “All Power to the Soviets.”
THE GOVERNMENT RELEASED Trotsky from prison on September 4 during its next big crisis. This time, it was an attempted coup d’etat by Russian army general Lavr Kornilov, a leader of that summer’s failed military offensive against Germany, now fed up with Kerensky’s leadership. Kornilov, promising to restore military discipline, had ordered his soldiers to march on Petrograd, occupy it, and impose martial law. Faced with Kornilov’s approaching army, Kerensky decided he now needed help from the Bolshevik soldiers in local garrisons, the same ones whose demonstrations he had crushed in July. And to convince these soldiers to support him, he needed Trotsky.
In the end, Bolshevik support proved crucial in stopping Kornilov by instigating dissent among Kornilov’s own soldiers.
By now the winds had turned. Trotsky returned to the Smolny Institute and found that Bolsheviks, recently vilified, now controlled a majority on the soviet committee. In early October, the soviet elected Trotsky its chairman, then gave him control of its newly created Military Revolutionary Committee, a group Trotsky himself had proposed for the Soviet to defend against government attacks and that he now used to plan and execute the ultimate seizure of power. Lenin kept contact from hiding places, first in Finland and then safe houses around Petrograd. In early November, he showed himself to participate in a key meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee, where it voted to launch its own coup d’etat. The decision came on a ten-to-two vote, with Kamenev and Zinoviev opposing the idea. Two of the Bolsheviks voting yes along with Lenin and Trotsky were Joseph Stalin and Alexandra Kollontai. Kollontai remembered the session as exhausting. “We felt hungry,” she wrote of the moment after the tense vote. “A hot samovar was brought out, we fell upon cheese and sausage.”487
By the time Lenin appeared in disguise at the Smolny Institute on November 6 (October 24 on the Russian calendar), all was ready. At that point, Trotsky was in full flower, running from speech to speech, meeting to meeting. “His influence among the workers and the revolutionary leadership was colossal,” recalled fellow soviet committee member Nikolai Sukarnov. “He was the principal actor, the hero of that extraordinary page of history.”488
The Bolshevik Revolution of November 7, 1917, was largely a bloodless coup. Operating from their command center at the Smolny Institute, Trotsky and his Military Revolutionary Committee directed Red Guards—organized groups of armed party members—and sympathetic military units, including sailors from the Kronstadt naval base, who stationed the battle cruiser Aurora and three torpedo boats in the Neva River. Starting before dawn, they captured strategic facilities, the central post office, bridges and railway stations, the state bank, electrical generating stations, newspaper offices, communications and administrative centers, and telephone exchanges, culminating in seizure of the Winter Palace, the ornate former home of tsars that had become the official seat of the Kerensky government. The palace surrendered well past midnight after Cossack troops, cadets, and a women’s battalion protecting the building either deserted or surrendered.
In Petrograd only six people died in the clashes. In Moscow it took a far bloodier fight, resulting in deaths of about five hundred Bolsheviks and government defenders.
Seizing control, the Bolsheviks would change their name to communists and set about consolidating power. It would take three years to fully control the country after a grisly civil war. They’d move the capital to Moscow, easier to defend in case of invasion. Communists would hold power in Russia for seventy-four years, during which they would reshape both it and the power structure of the world, making their revolution a pivotal event of the twentieth century. Their legacy would include a pronounced dark side: harsh realities of life under Soviet dictatorship, gulag prisons and KGB torture, Stalinist purges and Cold War, economic stagnation, deaths and imprisonments by the millions.
Lenin and Trotsky personally would hold power only a short time. Lenin would survive two assassination attempts, both in 1918, and suffer three strokes in 1923. The strokes left him largely incapacitated until his death in January 1924, at just fifty-three years old. Trotsky, celebrated in Russia as a hero of the revolution and subsequent civil war, would lose a power struggle after Lenin’s death to his rival Joseph Stalin, who would orchestrate Trotsky’s ouster from the party in 1927 and expulsion from Russia a year later.
But in the flush of victory at that moment in 1917, an era when millions around the world placed their trust in a vague, seductive notion they called socialism, it seemed a modern miracle, a grand experiment, a chance for utopia. It captured imaginations and abruptly transformed its chief architects, Lenin and Trotsky, into two of the most recognized, notorious, loved, hated, and talked-about figures on earth.
BACK IN NEW York City, news of the Bolshevik takeover made headlines, but it hardly sparked the same giddy celebrations that had greeted the toppling of the tsar the prior March. No parades or street parties broke out this time. Applause came only from a few rarified places. Americans mostly found the situation confusing. Russia had been in turmoil for months, and they struggled to see much difference in one strongman, Kerensky, being overthrown by another. Besides, who were these Bolsheviks? Most Americans had never heard of them. Even Meyer London, the Socialist New York Congressman, predicted the new regime would “last but a matter of days,” since Bolsheviks, he explained, “represent an infinitely small part of the Socialist Party in Russia.”489
Americans now looked at world events through a single new lens: How would it affect our boys “over there?” Almost a million young men had already joined the army: husbands, fathers, sons, and neighbors from cities and towns across the country. The first large waves of American soldiers were now crossing the ocean—braving the threat of German submarines—to fight the kaiser. More than 180,000 of them would reach Europe by the end of 1917. The war now touched every walk of life in America, from conscription to what people could eat, speak, or write. That month, the Federal Fuel Administration in Washington issued an edict ordering Broadway itself, New York’s glittering theater district, to dim its lights, limiting electric signs to three hours per night to save coal.
Would these Bolsheviks help our boys fight the Germans? Were they on our side? Or theirs? Here too confusion. “If the Bolshevik win, America must not make the mistake of thinking that this is a German plot or feel that Russia is lost to the war,” warned one prominent news correspondent, the New York World’s Arno Dosch-Fleurot, from Petrograd. Bolsheviks, he explained, wanted to give Germany “a chance to accept an offer of peace” without annexations or indemnities,” but should it refuse, “she will then have to be beaten by arms.”490
This tough talk, though, didn’t quite measure up to actions. Americans had seen the midsummer accusations that Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, was a German spy. And one of the Bolsheviks’ first moves in power was to declare a temporary, thirty-day armistice with Germany to start peace talks. It hardly sent a reassuring signal.
The one place in America that saw it differently, though, was New York City, and not just its socialists and Russians. Trotsky had made a mark here, and people remembered him. Hundreds had met him; thousands had heard him speak or read his columns. Even the big-circulation English-language newspapers felt obliged to put his face on their front pages, the sharp eyes looking out from behind the signature beard and wire glasses. TROTSKY, NOW IN KERENSKY’S PLACE, ONCE LIVED HERE, headlined the New York World.491 TROTZKY, NEW RUSSIAN LEADER, IS KNOWN HERE, echoed the New York Call. TROTZKY, WHO HELPED OVERTHROW KERENSKY, ONCE WORKED FOR NEW YORK PAPER, announced the New York American. TROTZKY IN EXILE LIVED IN THE BRONX, added the New York Times.492
The Forward carried Trotsky’s photo on its front page two straight days, placing it just above Lenin’s when they appeared together. The Bronx Home News made the point best: BRONX MAN LEADS RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.493
Slants varied. The World portrayed Trotsky in New York as a hothead radical who had challenged local moderates like Morris Hillquit and Forward editor Abraham Cahan. The Times spotlighted the recent charges against him as a German agent. On the other side, William Randolph Hearst’s New York American painted Trotsky as a good influence, almost one of the family, a friend of the newspaper who had written an article explaining how “Russia will be a republic built on the lines of the great American republic.”494
At Novy Mir, Trotsky’s actual base in New York, the staff virtually rejoiced. “A wonderful man,” gushed Alexander Menshoy, an editor there, happy to now call himself Trotsky’s “most intimate friend in America.” In talking with the New York Call, he described Trotsky as “tall, commanding, about 40 years old with a wonderful personality and a winning smile.”495
But all the accounts agreed on one thing. Whether they liked him or not, they all made Trotsky out as the real leader in chaotic Petrograd, as if confirming the obvious: that only a New Yorker could have pulled off this affair.
In fact, to their growing dismay, Americans were quickly learning that New York City had supplied a whole raft of leading Bolsheviks, not just Trotsky. Dozens of top new officials announced in Petrograd had names familiar to the cafés of lower Manhattan. They included Alexandra Kollontai, the new people’s commissar for social welfare, and Nikolai Bukharin, the new editor of Pravda.496 Grigorii Chudnovsky, still remembered as Trotsky’s young Russian sidekick in New York, was identified as one of the Red Guards leading the assault on the Winter Palace. Another Novy Mir contributor, V. Volodarsky, emerged as Petrograd’s new commissar over the press. Alexander Menson-Minkin, a Novy Mir linotype operator, became director of the Soviet state mint, and a Novy Mir advertising agent named Model became commandant of Petrograd’s Peter-Paul Prison. The soviet heads of the city governments of Moscow and Kronstadt and of a key rifle factory all came from New York.
Soon the number of New Yorkers known to hold top posts in the new regime reached into the hundreds, almost all of them Russian immigrants returning since March. “The returned radicals, on account of their wider experience, are gaining the ascendency in power over the Bolsheviki,” a New York World on-the-scene reporter wrote. Only the Russian wives of some of these American Bolsheviki seemed to miss the comforts of Broadway and New York shopping.497 Final estimates of returning Russians from New York would range as high as ten thousand, making it the largest reverse migration in American history.498
Most Americans, though, hardly took comfort in this news. They had never trusted these immigrant radicals, and now, seeing the trouble they’d made in Russia, they liked them even less. “Both Trotzky and Lenin have many friends and sympathizers in New York, where they once lived,” warned William Shepherd, a United Press reporter just returned from Russia since the takeover, “who, if given the opportunity will try to do the same thing in the United States.”499 Worse, they had a “direct line of communication between the Bolsheviki in Petrograd and the radicals in New York,” added Robert Maisel, director of the antisocialist American Alliance for Labor and Democracy.500
Within weeks, an even darker picture started to emerge. American socialists who had traveled to Russia during the revolution started coming home with stories about Bolshevik extremists ruining their long-sought Marxist state, turning it into a dictatorship not of the proletariat but for themselves. Within days of taking power, the Lenin–Trotsky regime had banned political parties, shut down newspapers (even socialist ones), and arrested scores of political opponents, including the entire Kerensky cabinet and members of a recently elected constituent assembly. “The revolution is on the verge of destruction through the excesses of its new leaders,” explained Anna Ingerman, the woman who had clashed with Trotsky in New York over her support for the Red Cross and who had gone to Russia as a nurse to help wounded revolutionaries. “If the revolution is crushed,” she said, “history will place the blame on the Bolsheviki.”501
Another returning socialist, a man named S. Lovich, reported how Trotsky had confiscated printing plants, dissolved the Petrograd Duma, “arrested men who have given half of their lives to the cause of the revolution, some of them who have spent at least thirty years in the prisons of Siberia,” and “placed 6-inch guns along the Nevsky” in downtown Petrograd.502
Trotsky himself fanned these flames with his own hot rhetoric. In a speech to the Petrograd Soviet that December after banning the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party and jailing members of the recently elected constituent assembly, he laughed at their squeamishness. “You are perturbed by the mild terror we are applying to our enemies,” he told them. “But know that within a month this terror will take the terrible form of the French revolution—not the fortress but the guillotine.”503
But at that moment in late 1917, these fears too remained abstract and hypothetical, especially for Americans watching from the safe distance of New York City. Here, among socialists and well-meaning friends, optimism reigned. The revolution still seemed a wonderful event, a vindication of Marxist dogma they had recited for years. Even Morris Hillquit, as skeptical as anyone toward Trotsky after their bitter fights in New York, gave him grudging credit for the accomplishment. While they differed on many points, he conceded, “I believe [Lenin and Trotsky] have rendered a tremendous service to our movement . . . by shaking up the old world.”504