“In Comrade Trotsky, America gains a resolute fighter for the Revolutionary International,” Novy Mir reported after talking with him.55 That’s the way they wanted him: Trotsky the fighter.
He must have marveled at the whole circus, this claque of newspapermen who actually listened to him and accepted his stories almost without question. His friends had done a wonderful job. Within two days, at least six New York newspapers with more than half a million readers would announce Trotsky’s arrival in the city. Three put the story on the front page, and two, the Forward and the New York Call, included front-page photos.
Who were these friends arranging Trotsky’s greeting in New York? The news accounts didn’t specify who exactly came to the pier other than Arthur Concors, but Trotsky would spend all that day and the next shaking their hands, grabbing their shoulders, kissing their cheeks, giving them well-deserved thanks. By the time he finished the greetings at the pier, he was exhausted. He, Natalya, and the boys had been wide awake since 3 AM, and the boys whined impatiently. Arthur Concors, their expert guide, again took command. He claimed their bags and grabbed a car to take them uptown.
Trotsky’s friends had arranged a hotel for their first night in America. To reach it, Concors led them on a tour through the densely packed streets of lower Manhattan.
No riverfront highways yet existed to take them around the crowded South Street waterfront or the sprawling Lower East Side. Traveling uptown, they would have seen elevated railroads erected right down the middle of traffic-clogged streets. It being Sunday morning, they heard church bells chiming over the din of motorcars, horses, and pushcarts. Out their car windows, they would have seen a cacophony of humanity—rich, poor, and homeless—peddlers and police; garish mansions, filthy tenements, and all the towers; all squashed together in vivid confusion. Trotsky would have recognized Wall Street from photographs of the famous capitalist stronghold. At Union Square, they would have passed Tammany Hall, the city’s ultimate cathedral to politics. On lower Broadway, they would have seen huge shopping emporiums, stores with names like Macy’s, Gimbels, and Lord & Taylor, where women searched for fashions and bargains.
Finally, they passed Forty-Second Street and reached their hotel, another eye-popping wonder. The Astor House on Times Square, opened in 1904, easily matched in luxury anything Trotsky had seen in Paris or Vienna. Its arched doors led into an opulent lobby under enormous ceiling frescoes and crystal chandeliers, a Flemish smoking room, a Pompeian billiards room, and, upstairs, an exotically landscaped rooftop garden. Piano music played by day, dance music by night. Valets in uniform opened doors and carried bags. The building dominated the full block on Broadway between Forty-Forth and Forty-Fifth Streets, its eleven stories housing one thousand guest rooms.
Trotsky must have gasped at the sight. Who picked such an elaborate, expensive place? Could they possibly afford it? Did some unidentified benefactor pay the tab? Could Natalya cover it with the $500 cash in her pocket? Would they have anything left? Neither he nor Natalya ever mentioned the Astor House in their memoirs, as if embarrassed by the splurge. It hardly fit their new image as victimized refugees and voices of the working class. But there is little doubt they stayed there. Trotsky specified the “Astor Hotel, 42nd Street” in the Montserrat manifest as his first stop in New York City, and the location matched their activities that day.
Once inside, the greetings continued, in the lobby, the hallways, the room. A parade of faces kept introducing themselves, the friends who had arranged his arrival in New York. Trotsky greeted them all, clapped their shoulders like any seasoned politician. He recognized many from Europe. The Russian socialist underground by 1917 numbered thousands of people scattered around the world, and Trotsky, a leading figure since the start, knew almost all of them, or they knew him.
For instance, there was Lev Deutch with his bushy gray beard, a grand old man of Russian socialism. Now sixty-two years old, Deutch had settled in New York in 1915 as an original editor of Novy Mir. He had earned his first arrest in Russia back in 1875—before Trotsky was even born—and described his ordeal in a book called Sixteen Years in Siberia, published in Europe and America. It made him one of the most recognized Russians of the era. Deutch had known Trotsky in London as part of the Iskra crowd and had joined Trotsky as a Menshevik in the famous 1903 split. Like Trotsky, he too had returned to Saint Petersburg for the 1905 uprising and had landed with Trotsky in the same prison. Trotsky had considered it a great coming-of-age moment when Deutsch, behind bars, finally agreed to stop calling him “the youth” and started addressing him by his actual name.56
Most recently, Deutch, typically obstinate, had quit Novy Mir in an argument over the world war and now edited his own tiny pro-Ally competitor called Svobodnoye Slovo (Free Word).
Then came Moissaye Olgin, a friend from Copenhagen and Vienna who also had left Russia after several arrests. In New York, Olgin landed not at Novy Mir but instead at the city’s largest socialist voice, the Forward. “When I met him here, he looked haggard,” Olgin recalled of Trotsky that day. “He had grown older, and there was fatigue in his expression. His conversation hinged around the collapse of international socialism. He thought it shameful and humiliating.”57
All these reunions had to be a thrill for Trotsky, seeing these people from his past, still alive and healthy, here to support him. But the biggest greeting that day came as a surprise, from a comrade Trotsky knew only slightly in Europe. He hadn’t seen him since before the war. He was a Bolshevik, Vladimir Lenin’s friend, making him, what . . . ? A rival? An adversary? Still, he had suffered just like Trotsky. Norway had arrested and deported him, and he had landed in New York just two months earlier, still finding his way.
Natalya remembered the moment distinctly, perhaps because it seemed out of place. “Bukharin greeted us with a bear-hug,” she wrote. Added Trotsky, he “welcomed us with the childish exuberance characteristic of him.”58 This was New York. Here they could all be friends.
NICOLAI IVANOVICH BUKHARIN had a destiny much like Trotsky’s. Bukharin too would become a top leader in Bolshevik Russia after the 1917 revolution, editor of Pravda, chairman of the Comintern, member of the Politburo, leading theoretician, and later a close ally of dictator Joseph Stalin. Like Trotsky, he too would suffer when Stalin turned against him; had him purged, tortured, and forced to confess false charges and denounce friends he knew to be innocent (including Trotsky); and finally had him murdered. But this was all still far in the future.
For now, in January 1917, Bukharin embodied “vivacity itself, has an open, smiling face, is affectionate and a lively conversationalist with a touch of humor,” as Natalya described him.59 His red beard, balding head, ready laugh, and unassuming manner made him easy to like. Just twenty-eight years old, ten years younger than Trotsky, Bukharin had grown up in Moscow as an academic, his parents both schoolteachers. His father, a Moscow University graduate and later a government civil servant, had nurtured his son’s interests in nature, botany, birds, literature, and art.
Bukharin had joined the socialist underground as a student at Moscow University back in 1905, when anti-tsarist protests had erupted across Russia. Barely sixteen years old, he found himself absorbed in the excitement, the mass meetings and crowds singing “The Marseillaise” and cheering the hot rhetoric. The experience drew him like a moth, he said, and “completed” him as a revolutionary. During those heady days, he followed the exploits of the movement’s charismatic leader, the head of the Saint Petersburg Soviet who talked back to the tsarist judge at his trial, the man Trotsky.
By 1910 Bukharin had risen to the Moscow Bolshevist Party’s Central Committee, making him a target for the tsar’s secret police. They arrested him, and he spent six months in prison before being exiled to Siberia. Like Trotsky, he escaped. He then made his way to Hanover, Germany. After a year, he arranged an audience with the movement’s leader, the great Lenin, then living in Cracow.
Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, remembered her husband’s first meeting with Bukharin. They had “quite