Trotsky in New York, 1917. Kenneth D. Ackerman
Trotsky lasted only a few months and came to a quick end. The very next year, 1903, they had a falling-out, part of a larger, major split within Iskra and the Social Democratic movement that would leave Trotsky and Lenin on opposite sides: the famous schism between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
The rupture occurred at a 1903 party conference that started in Brussels but moved to London after Belgium police began harassing delegates. Typically, it was Lenin who started the argument. And just as typically, it was Lenin who won the key vote and seized the chance to call his faction Bolsheviks (Russian for “majority”), even though most people in the group actually disagreed with him. As Bolsheviks, Lenin and his followers insisted that socialism could be achieved in Russia only by a party tightly controlled by a tiny leadership elite, its members limited to active revolutionaries serving as vanguard of the working class. Workers could not be trusted to do it themselves.
Years later, dedicated Bolsheviks would honor Lenin by giving the concept a deeper, more profound aura, a distinction “between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft,’ the ‘workers’ and the ‘talkers,’ the ‘fighters’ and the ‘reasoners’—between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks—which was [Lenin’s] great psychological contribution to the science of revolution,” as one put it.21 But in 1903, most people, even his friends, saw it more narrowly.
Opposing Lenin at the 1903 conference was Lenin’s friend and Iskra cofounder Julius Martov, another Russian émigré. Martov, more bookish and soft-spoken, argued the opposite point, that socialism, like any political movement, could succeed only if backed by an open, inclusive mass movement. His group became known as Mensheviks (Russian for “minority”), even though it had more people on its side.
Trotsky attended the 1903 conference and, much to Lenin’s chagrin, sided squarely with Martov. Trotsky at the time shared a London apartment with Martov and other friends and happily turned his acid pen to their defense. Trotsky ridiculed Lenin’s entire concept of “dictatorship of the proletariat” as amounting to “dictatorship over the proletariat,”22 a pinnacle of concentrated power with Lenin the self-appointed dictator.
Lenin and Trotsky never healed the wound over this argument. By 1915 their rivalry had become a high-profile, seemingly permanent fixture in émigré Russian politics, complete with name-calling and finger-pointing. Among other things, Trotsky had called Lenin a “terribly egocentric person,” a “master-squabbler,” and a “professional exploiter,” preoccupied with “bickering” and power mongering.23 Lenin, for his part, called Trotsky a “cur,” a “judas,” “always evasive, cheating, posing,” his views “vacuous and unprincipled,” his writing littered with “puffed up phrases” to support “absurd” arguments.24
Trotsky later claimed to find the whole Bolshevik–Menshevik quarrel petty, which irritated his Menshevik friends as well.25
The 1915 Zimmerwald conference, called originally by Swiss socialists, was intended to bridge this gap and address a new crisis created by the world war. Its attendees included a who’s who of socialist celebrities, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike, including many destined to become top figures of the post-1917 Russian communist government: Trotsky, Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev (future Politburo member and Comintern chairman), Karl Radek (future vice commissar of foreign affairs), and others.
The problem they faced was this: Up until 1914, socialists, as a basic element of their creed, all pledged their belief in the solidarity of the international working class. This, they claimed, could always be counted on to prevent wars among nations. Why should workers in France or Germany pick up guns to kill each other, they argued, when their common enemy was the bourgeoisie? But the outbreak of world war in 1914 shattered this belief system. Instead of opposing the war, workers in Germany and France were among the first to join the war hysteria sweeping their countries and enlist in their respective armies. Worse still, leading socialist politicians across Europe, including elected members of parliaments, one after another abandoned their principles to support their national war efforts.
Lenin and Trotsky both considered this betrayal unforgivable and considered these “social patriots”—their derisive term for the turncoat socialist leaders—cowards and scoundrels. Denouncing “social patriot” traitors became just as important to them as opposing the war itself.
But faced with this immediate problem, Lenin came to Zimmerwald with a more aggressive idea, stunning in its counterintuitive boldness. Lenin proposed that socialists must reject peace for its own sake. Instead, he argued, the world war had created an opportunity. Instead of peace, they must demand the defeat of their own countries. Russians must support defeat of Russia, Germans defeat of Germany, British defeat of Britain. These defeats would discredit the capitalist ruling classes and set the stage for revolution. The world war must be transformed into smaller civil wars in each country, leading to victory for the working class.
Trotsky actually agreed with Lenin on most of this bold concept. He detested “social patriots,” and his exposure to the French and Balkan battlefronts had already convinced him that the war had destroyed public faith in governments, setting the stage for uprisings. But Lenin’s defeatism—insisting that socialists make themselves traitors in their own countries—seemed needlessly confrontational. And Lenin’s call for national civil wars could hardly attract the support of war-weary Europeans. Even the assembled socialists at Zimmerwald found it excessive. This was no way to achieve unity.
Trotsky ended up working with moderate delegates to forge a compromise, a manifesto calling for peace without victories or annexations. Lenin thought it much too weak but, finding himself outnumbered, voted for it anyway. Two later Zimmerwald conferences, with Trotsky absent, would produce manifestos much closer to Lenin’s original idea. Still, the split between “Zimmerwald left” (pro-Lenin) and “Zimmerwald right” (anti-Lenin) added an entire new layer of division to the already fractured movement.26
After Zimmerwald, Lenin returned to his own wartime refuge in Switzerland, like everyone else, to wait.
BACK IN PARIS, Trotsky finally reached the end of his rope with French officials in mid-1916, when Russia decided to send a small navy squadron to the French port of Marseilles. Mutiny broke out on one Russian ship, the Askold, where Russian soldiers murdered one of their officers. When police searched the murderers, they found some carrying copies of Trotsky’s newspaper Nashe Slovo.
Russian diplomats, long irritated at Trotsky’s anti-Russian articles, now insisted he be expelled from France. Trotsky complained bitterly. He claimed that a Russian agent provocateur had framed him by placing the copies of Nashe Slovo on the soldiers. Besides, Trotsky argued, French censors had approved the newspaper edition. He asked political friends, including high-ranking socialist ministers, to intervene, but to no avail. After a few weeks, the French interior minister, Louis Malvy (who himself would be exiled from France in 1918 on charges of treason), bowed to Russian pressure and issued the expulsion order. “On 30 October [1916] the [Paris] Prefect invited me, pointed out that my time of grace had long ago run out, and suggested my going to Spain,” Trotsky confided in a letter to a friend. “I refused,” he said.
“Then what is left for us to do?” the police prefect asked.
“Cart me out in your own way,’” Trotsky told him, meaning at the prefect’s expense.27
Sure enough, that night, a pair of plainclothes French detectives came to the apartment on rue Oudry and took Trotsky away, leaving Natalya and the boys behind. They escorted him under arms to the Spanish border—no hearing, no formal charges, no day in court.
Things went no better in Spain. Trotsky spoke no Spanish and found the country, as he put it, “lazy,” “provincial,” and corrupt.28 He spent his first few days wandering the coastal town of San Sebastian, where, as he later recounted, “I was delighted by the sea but appalled by the prices.”29 In Madrid, he spent days at the famous Prado Museum, discovering masterpieces by painters Rembrandt, Hieronymus Bosch, and Jan Miel. But this leisure ended abruptly. Spanish police, acting on a tip from the French, soon arrested him. They stuck him in jail first in Madrid, then in Cádiz, where they threatened