Trotsky in New York, 1917. Kenneth D. Ackerman
being fought.
At some point that night, Bukharin told Trotsky something else. The very next night, a small group of determined American leftists was planning to hold a secret meeting. Their ambition was no less than to change the future of American socialism. They had asked Bukharin to come. And certainly, Bukharin told his new friend, they would want to hear from the great Trotsky. The meeting would be over dinner at the home of a prominent American socialist, an editor at the German-language newspaper New Yorker Volkszeitung. His name was Ludwig Lore, and Trotsky must come.
To get there, Bukharin went on, they would have to venture outside the island of Manhattan, cross the East River, and enter a part of New York not normally seen by tourists or visitors, called Brooklyn.
i HIAS records contain no mention of the organization’s involvement in the incident, nor any mention of Trotsky (by any spelling) in its voluminous lists of immigrants it assisted. Concors apparently acted on his own, most likely contacted by Novy Mir editor Gregory Weinstein, who had once applied for a job at HIAS.
“To be a Soviet Commissar one must first have swept the offices of the Novyi Mir.”73
—Morris Hillquit, circa 1920
“His personal life? What should I know about his personal life? . . . Every day Leon Trotsky worked with me, all day long at that desk where you sit. What should I care if he had one wife or two, two children or a dozen? Or that he lived in the Bronx and drank tea? Read his books, find out what he thinks—then you will know Leon Trotsky.”74
—Gregory Weinstein, Novy Mir editor, speaking in late 1917
EARLY THE NEXT morning, his first full day in America, Trotsky took the subway, his first chance to rub elbows with the local working class. Before Brooklyn, first he had to spend a day at his new office.
A New York friend doubtless joined him to make sure he didn’t get hopelessly lost along the way. Leaving the Astor House, he would have grabbed the Sixth Avenue elevated train at Forty-Second Street. After seven stops of bone-rattling twists and turns on the screeching rails, watching rooftops and third-story windows sweep by at eye level, Trotsky would have reached West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. From here, West Eighth became East Eighth at Fifth Avenue. It changed names again after Broadway to become Saint Marks Place. At Second Avenue, Trotsky would have passed the garish marquees of the Yiddish theaters and the popular Monopole Café. Back then, this spot began the vast Jewish Lower East Side, which stretched to the East River and south beyond Grand Street toward the Brooklyn Bridge.
After Second Avenue, Saint Marks Place changed personality and became quietly residential. Old four-story brownstones lined the sidewalks on both sides. Near the end of the block came number 77, a modest row house with signs for a dentist’s and a doctor’s office upstairs and mail slots for a few private apartments. Stairs led down to a basement, and by the door hung a sign on a cast-iron railing that said
This is where Trotsky came that morning. Opening the door, he found himself immediately surrounded by all things Russian: Russian voices, Russian smells, Russian papers, Russian posters on the cracked walls. The whole cellar consisted of three cramped rooms and a hallway crammed with desks, cabinets, a telephone, and piles of paper. A plaque of Leo Tolstoy decorated a wall over a fireplace. Thick cigarette smoke clouded the air. Ashtrays overflowed onto the floor, and teacups cluttered any empty space. From a back room came the clicking of a linotype machine and the hum of a small printing press. Three small windows barely peeking above the sidewalk provided the only trickle of daylight.
Novy Mir sold only eight thousand copies each day, eight flimsy pages. The penny apiece it cost on New York street corners and two cents elsewhere didn’t come close to covering expenses: rent, overhead, and the $20 a week it paid a few full-time workers. Most contributors wrote for free. The paper sold advertisements to cover the difference, and it welcomed any capitalist who paid good money. Budweiser beer, Piedmont tobacco, the International Phonograph Company, the American Line shipping company, and even a few local banks all advertised in Novy Mir.
But those eight thousand copies made Novy Mir arguably the most impactful Russian journal in the Western Hemisphere, easily overshadowing the city’s three larger-circulation Russian dailies, Russkii Golos, Russkoe Slovo, and the reactionary Russkaya Zemla. Novy Mir’s readers included Europeans like Vladimir Lenin and Menshevik leader Julius Martov, plus comrades in Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. Its contributors would read like a who’s who of future leaders of post-1917 Bolshevik Russia, starting with Trotsky and Bukharin. The paper’s editorial slant teetered between Bolshevik and Menshevik, though Bukharin’s arrival in October had tipped the balance decidedly toward Lenin’s faction.
Trotsky needed no introductions here. He knew every face in the room. In a few minutes, he and they all chatted away in Russian. They called him Lev Davidovich, or just “comrade.”
Gregory Gdaly Weinstein, an old friend from Europe and now Novy Mir’s editor in chief, sat at the largest desk.75 Trotsky knew Weinstein from having shared the excitement of the 1905 uprising in Saint Petersburg. Born in Vilna and a public schoolteacher at the time, Weinstein had ended up, like Trotsky, getting arrested, jailed in Brest-Litovsk, and sentenced to four years of “penal servitude” in Siberia, prison slave labor rather than simple exile. He escaped after ten days, reached Paris and then Switzerland, where he earned a degree at the University of Geneva. Then he moved to New York.
Weinstein hardly looked the radical fugitive. Mild mannered with a slight frame and scraggly beard, he had what one friend called a “humorous way of meeting embarrassing situations—he would simply smile them away.”76 He was trained as a statistician, and even the United States government had trusted Weinstein enough to once hire him to study conditions at Ellis Island. He had also applied for a job doing charity work for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).
Bukharin sat at another desk and, near him, twenty-six-year-old Grigorii Chudnovsky, one of Trotsky’s protégés from Paris and his newspaper there, Nashe Slovo. Chudnovsky, like Bukharin, had joined the revolutionary cause as a teenager during the 1905 Saint Petersburg uprising. Like the others, Chudnovsky had won himself a tsarist arrest and Siberian exile and had escaped. Most recently, he had left Paris for Copenhagen, then made his way to America and Novy Mir. Natalya described Chudnovsky as “an overgrown boy with a bad complexion and somewhat curly hair, a student who was perhaps too talkative for our taste and quick to flare up.”77 Trotsky himself considered him “impressionable and hot-headed.” But here, in New York, he was a friendly face in a foreign country.78
Others scampered in and out, but these four now comprised the paper’s core staff: Weinstein, Bukharin, Chudnovsky, and Trotsky. And what a rarified group they made: four escaped jailbirds, convicted Russian radicals, veterans of Siberian exiles and the failed 1905 Soviet uprising, all now marooned in America until . . . when? The end of the world war? The revolution? And if revolution never came? Their profession in the meantime: to theorize, proselytize, and lay groundwork for achieving their life’s goal of overthrowing the tsar and establishing socialism. It was good steady work.
Weinstein gave Trotsky a desk in a corner—no private offices here—surrounded by mountains of papers and manuscripts. They quickly came to terms. Weinstein would pay Trotsky $20 each week. Trotsky would deliver two or three columns, plus he could write more for any other newspaper he pleased and give all the speeches he wanted. Already Trotsky planned to contribute to at least three others: the Call, the Volkszeitung,