They arrested him again in late 1905. This time, Trotsky, living in Switzerland and already well-known as a socialist writer, had snuck back into Russia on hearing of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Saint Petersburg, in which tsarist soldiers had shot down nearly a thousand peaceful protesters. The incident sparked protests across Russia, and Trotsky joined the brewing uprising in Saint Petersburg, ultimately leading the Saint Petersburg Workers Soviet (Council) in its stand against the regime. When police again crushed the revolt and arrested the participants, Trotsky used his public trial—a group trial of fifty-two leaders—as a platform to denounce the government. This made him a national figure while earning him his second conviction and Siberian exile. He again escaped, traveling almost a thousand miles across frozen Siberian wilderness hidden in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.
These jailings had occurred long before, in 1901 and 1906, before Trotsky had matured into a leading journalist, but he had more recent ones too. Just within the past two months, he had been arrested in Paris and imprisoned in Spain, and he remained subject to arrest in Russia, France, and Germany. But to the steamship officials on the Montserrat that day, he said not a word about any of this. So far, so good.
Natalya came next. Asked her name for the manifest, she gave it as Natalya Sedova, and they entered it that way beneath his. But then she changed her mind. She had the ship’s officer cross out the “Sedova” and replace it with ditto marks under his “Zratsky.” She gave her occupation as “his spouse.” This too was a lie.
For starters, Sedova in fact was her real name. It came from her father, a well-off factory manager near Kharkov, though both her parents had died when she was about eight years old. And yes, Natalya was the mother of Trotsky’s two sons and his companion the past fifteen years. But no, they had never married. Trotsky had a wife still living in Russia whom he had never divorced. He also had two daughters with her. Trotsky’s first wife had been a friend from his teenage years, a fellow Marxist arrested with him in the 1898 Nikolaev union crackdown. They had married behind bars awaiting sentence, and the two daughters were born during their exile in Siberia. When Trotsky escaped from Siberia in 1902, he left them behind.
Natalya certainly knew about the prior marriage. She had met Trotsky later that same year in Paris, where she had come as a student and joined the local group of young Russian socialists. One day, a dashing young speaker named Lev Davidovich came to visit them, telling exciting stories of his recent adventures in Siberia and his daring agitation in Russia. Just twenty years old, Natalya was smitten. As she explained it, “It just happened that one day the two of us were standing together looking at Baudelaire’s tomb in the Montparnasse Cemetery . . . and from that time on, our lives were inseparable.”6 Marriage or not didn’t matter. He became her husband in fact if not law.
Natalya lied again when she told the ship’s officer she had never been to prison. But this was a small lie. She had been jailed only once. Russian police had arrested her eleven years earlier, in 1905, for attending an illegal May Day workers meeting near Saint Petersburg. The judge sentenced her to six months at the nearby Dom Predvaritelnogo Zakluchenyo, what Natalya later called “un tres bon prison” (a very nice prison), since it had electric lights and separate cells for inmates.7 Years later she still had warm memories of the prison mistress there announcing, “Your bath is ready, Madame Sedova.”8
She and Trotsky both lied about their birthdays for the manifest, declaring themselves ten years younger than their actual ages, thirty-seven and thirty-four. And the boys lied too, about their names, calling themselves Leon and Sergei Zratsky. In fact, neither son had taken their father’s last name. Both had taken their mother’s name, Sedov.
For Leon Trotsky and his family, all this was nothing new. Over the years, he and Natalya had often traveled using false identities or forged papers, sneaking across borders to avoid police. Many Russian radicals adopted aliases. “The very character of their work compelled them to hide their names,” one contemporary explained.9 “I suppose I’ve had fifteen or twenty names myself,” said another. “Sometimes a fellow will come up to me and hail me by some name and I have to think a minute before I remember it was once mine.”10
Trotsky himself wasn’t really named Trotsky or Trotzki or Zratsky either. Nor Lvov, Yanofsky, Vikentiev, nor Arbuvov, other names he’d called himself.11 His actual family name, Bronstein, was one he hadn’t used in fifteen years. He had adopted Trotsky in 1902 during his first escape from Siberia. The name actually belonged to a jail guard.
So now, in a pinch, to satisfy the steamship officers on the Montserrat and the American customs officials who used the ship’s manifest, the Trotskys made themselves look on paper like any nice, normal family. No questions. No problems.
The Montserrat was an old ship. Its coal-powered engines dragged its 4,377-ton carcass across the water as slow as an old freighter, managing top speeds of fourteen knots and usually far less. It took the ship seventeen days to cross the ocean from Barcelona to New York. Storms ravaged the Atlantic that month. Rough seas and freezing gale winds made the ship roll and pitch. Passengers got seasick. Meals sat untouched. For passengers below deck in steerage, nausea and stale air made the stench unbearable. Trotsky complained about what he called this “wretched little Spanish boat” that “did everything to remind us of the frailty of human life” and practiced what he called “transport barbarism.”12
To make things worse, German submarines patrolled the waters off the Spanish coast. In the three weeks before the Montserrat sailed, they had sunk two American-flag merchant ships, the Coruna and the Columbian, plus the Italian-flag Palermo. The Palermo had carried fifty-two Americans and a cargo of two thousand horses and mules. Two of the Palermo crewmen, Frank Carney and Dan O’Connor, hitched rides back home to New York aboard the Montserrat and happily shared their stories. As they described it, the Germans had attacked the Palermo while they were sleeping, sunk the ship with torpedoes and artillery guns, and then left them to row their tiny lifeboat across twenty-five miles of open ocean.13 One American horse trainer died in the incident.
It is easy to picture nervous Montserrat passengers hearing this and spending their days searching the horizon for periscopes. Normally the Montserrat carried twelve hundred passengers and a crew of eighty on its transatlantic crossings, including a thousand poor souls stuck below in steerage. But wartime and winter left most of the cabins empty this time. The entire ship now held barely four hundred people, including crew.
Trotsky’s young sons, Leon and Sergei, seemed the only ones in the family actually to enjoy the cruise. Braving the cold, they ventured outside to explore the Montserrat stem to stern, counting the ship’s decks and cabins and getting to know the sailors and other passengers. Like kids anyplace, they marveled at the ocean, the ship’s engines, its huge smokestacks, the birds and fish, the salty smell and roaring waves.
The boys spoke no Spanish. As sons of Leon Trotsky, their unusual language skills reflected the family’s unique odyssey. They’d learned Russian from their parents. Leon, the older son, was actually conceived in a Russian prison during his father’s imprisonment after the abortive 1905 Saint Petersburg uprising. Tsarist police had held Trotsky in the notorious Peter-Paul Fortress awaiting trial, and it was during one of Natalya’s conjugal visits that she became pregnant with Leon. When the Russian court sentenced Trotsky to lifelong exile in Siberia, Natalya stayed behind in Saint Petersburg to give birth alone. Then, after he escaped, Trotsky quickly reunited the family in Finland and moved them to safety in Austria. As a result, Sergei, the younger son, was born in Vienna in 1908. The boys learned smatterings of German and French from attending public schools in Vienna and Paris, following Papa’s various places of refuge.
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