“A Republican?” Trotsky asked, curious at the strange term. “How could you understand him?”
“Oh, he explains everything fine.” The boys then told Papa the latest piece of sign language the sailors had taught them. “He said ‘Alfonso!’” The fireman had been telling the boys about Spanish king Alfonso XIII, widely hated among the country’s poor. Alfonso had sat on the Spanish throne for thirty-two years. The boys went on: “He said ‘Alfonso!’ and then went ‘Poff-Piff.’” Sergei and Leon then drew their fingers across their necks, as if cutting a man’s throat with a knife.
That, they said, was what the sailors wanted to do with Alfonso.14
“Oh, then he is certainly a Republican,” Trotsky laughed, apparently pleased with these new friends of his young sons. Natalya gave the boys Malaga grapes and other delicacies from their first-class cabin to share with the friendly sailors.15
Why were they on this ship at all? Three months earlier, Trotsky and his family were living in Paris in a small apartment on rue Oudry near the Place d’Italie, a pretty spot on the Left Bank with trees, grass, and a small fountain. Trotsky had settled in France in 1914 at the start of the world war after Austria, their home up till then, had forced them to leave. As Russians, they would have been considered alien enemies. Germany had gone further and indicted Trotsky in absentia over an antiwar tract he had written, convicted him of treason, and threatened to arrest him if he entered the country. That left Switzerland as a refuge, where many émigré Russian radicals fled, or France.
Trotsky tried Switzerland but picked France. He enjoyed the French cinema, French novels (which he read in the original language), and the cafés. A favorite became the Rotonde in Montmartre, rich with artists and writers surviving on handouts and cheap coffee. In Paris he had Russian friends and could mingle with leading French socialist politicians, including legislators and cabinet ministers. In Paris Trotsky coedited a small Russian-language newspaper called Nashe Slovo (Our Word), a platform for his socialist, antiwar, anti-tsarist views.
French military censors sometimes harassed him, often prompted by complaints from the Russian embassy. Russia, after all, was France’s ally in the war, and the Russians resented Trotsky’s anti-tsarist articles, particularly the ones he arranged to have smuggled back home. Trotsky haggled with the censors, and sometimes they forced him to publish a blank page or two, but his tabloid survived long enough to produce 213 editions between January 1915 and October 1916.
In addition to the censors, French military intelligence also kept an eye on Trotsky, suspecting him of being pro-German. They noticed, for instance, how Nashe Slovo barely mentioned Germany’s sinking of the Lusitania. In 1915 French military police spotted Trotsky at the French war front near Belgium, snooping around the trenches, an area off-limits to foreign journalists. They followed him back to his room at the Hotel Parisien in Le Havre, confronted him there, and, as they put it, “immediately invited [him] to leave” and return to Paris.16 After that, they began monitoring his mail and his friends, noting the many registered letters from Switzerland and Russia and his notoriety as a self-proclaimed socialist revolutionary. In a July 1915 report, they claimed that Trotsky’s newspaper had received money from a Romanian revolutionary named Rakovsky, a suspected Austrian spy.
All this, to French authorities, made Trotsky an “etranger comme suspect au point de vue national”17 (suspicious alien from a national viewpoint), a designation likely to cause trouble.
With her common-law husband gallivanting around Paris and the battlefront, Natalya was left to run a household with two small children under wartime stringencies. She remembered these Paris years in depressing terms. “We lived in a densely populated district. Walks through Paris were our only amusement,” she wrote later. “There was so much mourning [for soldiers killed on the front] that black had become the latest fashion; even the streetwalkers wore black.” As for her husband’s newspaper, she described it as a constant struggle to stay solvent. “Nashe Slovo was run on the devotion of a few militants who contributed their labor as well as what little money they could spare,” she wrote. “Payment for paper and printing was a daily worry.”18 She recalled her husband often staying up past midnight to write articles, then dropping them off at the printer the next morning when he took Sergei to school.
Despite all these tensions, French authorities mostly left Trotsky alone. They let him enjoy his cafés, his leftist friends, and his travels. They even gave him a passport in 1915 to leave France altogether for a trip to Switzerland. Here, Trotsky would attend a small conference of socialists in the resort town of Zimmerwald that would cast a long shadow over the future. Beyond everything else, it would feature the last major pre-1917 clash between Trotsky and his then-leading rival in the small world of Russian émigré socialists, the intense bearded man who would lead the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin.
TODAY, A CENTURY later, Americans mostly think of Lenin and Trotsky together, as the inseparable coauthors of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, famous partners in crime. Modern Russians see them differently, swayed unavoidably by the bloodstained later efforts of another rival, Joseph Stalin, to vilify Trotsky, kill thousands of his backers, and literally erase him from the country’s history. For Russians today, Trotsky is a vague blank figure, largely missing from civics books.
But the lives of these two men, Lenin and Trotsky, grew so intertwined in the years around 1917 that it is near impossible to explain one without the other. And in 1915, two years before their famous collaboration, the state of the Lenin–Trotsky relationship was clear to anyone who looked: Already the two most prominent figures in Russian émigré socialism, they despised each other, or at least acted that way.
Trotsky had first become aware of Vladimir Lenin in 1902 during his first exile in Siberia. Copies of Lenin’s magazine Iskra (Spark) and his pamphlet “What Is to Be Done?” reached him there. Trotsky read the tracts and became a convert. Lenin, nine years older than Trotsky, had already established himself as leader of the emerging Russian Social Democratic Party. He had built Iskra into both a tabloid and a movement, with followers across Europe and Russia. Trained as a lawyer, a veteran of Russian jails and Siberian exile like Trotsky himself, Lenin as a teenager had seen tsarist police hang his older brother, Alexander, for joining an antigovernment plot. A friend described Lenin around 1915 as “the lean, tallish man, with large fierce eyes and large, sensual, irregular mouth, perched on the platform like a ‘bird of prey.’”19
Trotsky, after his escape from Siberia in 1902, decided he must meet this Lenin and become his protégé. As the story goes, it took Trotsky weeks to secretly cross Siberia and Europe, meeting members of the anti-tsarist underground along the way, including a two-month stop in Paris. He reached London, where Lenin had set up operations, and took until well past midnight to finally locate Lenin’s apartment at 10 Holford Square near King’s Cross. Trotsky left his cab driver unpaid at the curb, came inside the apartment house unannounced, bounded up the stairs oblivious to the late hour, and knocked three times loudly at the door, the signal for strangers. When Lenin’s wife, Nadezhka Krupskaya, got out of bed to answer it, she found a disheveled young man excitedly telling her of his journey. She woke her husband, who recognized the stranger as the young writer he had recently heard about, and said, “The Pen has arrived!”
Krupskaya described the friendship that blossomed between her husband, Lenin, and the brilliant, outgoing young stranger, Trotsky. “Leaving them together I went to see to the cabman and prepare coffee! When I returned I found Vladimir Ilyich still seated on the bed in animated conversation with Trotsky on some rather abstract theme.”20 Over the next few days, Lenin took him on long walks through London, showing him the sights. “This is their Westminster” or “their British Museum,” he told Trotsky. They spoke about Russia, about socialism, and about Lenin’s plans for Iskra, both the magazine and the movement. Lenin decided to nurture the young man’s talent. He included Trotsky on Iskra’s small board of editors, despite objections from some older members,