Trotsky in New York, 1917. Kenneth D. Ackerman
Natalya, like her husband, had little patience for policemen.
The ship waited until Sunday morning, January 14, to unload its passengers on Pier 8 at the bottom tip of Manhattan Island. Looking out from the railing, Trotsky had to marvel at what he saw. On land, at the end of the pier, he saw rising abruptly before him a giant mountain range, jagged square buildings, some with spires and towers, shooting up so high that locals called them “sky scrapers.” One, the Woolworth Building, stood almost eight hundred feet, the tallest building on earth. Another, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, stood almost as high at seven hundred feet, the clock face on its dramatic tower covering more than four stories. Dozens more of these behemoths stretched for miles beyond.
Looking up along the East River, he saw more giant things. The massive Brooklyn Bridge arched across the sky above them, crossing the entire harbor. And two newer bridges, just as huge, stood nearby: the Williamsburg (1903) and the Manhattan (1909). The harbor itself buzzed with movement from hundreds of ships, boats, tugs, and schooners of every size and description.
Looking down at the pier, he saw a crowd of people shivering in the cold, waiting for friends and family. He and Natalya scanned them for familiar faces. Finally they saw someone wave back at them.
VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN, sitting now in Berne, Switzerland, with his wife, Krupskaya, running his Bolshevik network with a firm grip, kept tabs on his rival Trotsky. Through letters from friends across Europe, he followed Trotsky’s latest expulsions from France and Spain and finally to North America. And not without concern.
These were difficult days for Lenin. “Never, I think, was Vladimir Ilyich in a more irreconcilable mood than during the last months of 1916 and the early months of 1917,” Krupskaya recalled.48 Chronically short of money, he found himself isolated in Switzerland. Most of his Bolshevik followers were scattered abroad. He had no direct contact with Russia. Letters and papers had to be smuggled through Scandinavia, wasting time and losing information. Britain denied him permission to publish journals and pamphlets there, cutting him off from a major source of possible support. He sensed the war going badly for Russia and heard tremors of discontent there, but the waiting seemed endless. Revolution could come tomorrow or next week, or maybe not for another ten years. It all made him impatient and agitated.
Lenin knew all about the colony of Russian socialists in New York City. He read their newspaper Novy Mir but complained that it reached him with “devilish irregularity.”49 Lenin saw opportunity in America. Americans had money and power but were neophytes at politics. America had a Socialist Party, but it seemed uninformed and disconnected.
Lenin had taken steps to plant his own flag on US soil. Recently, he had sent an envoy, a Scandinavian comrade named Alexandra Kollontai, with instructions to contact American leaders, raise money, sell them on his Bolshevik ideas, and get his tracts published in English, for free if possible. In addition, one of his Bolshevik circle, a talented young intellectual named Nikolai Bukharin, had recently settled in New York City after being expelled from his perch in Norway. Bukharin had established himself as an editor at Novy Mir, giving Lenin a direct pipeline into their central organ.
Lenin had no intention of letting Trotsky interfere with his plans for America. Kollontai and Bukharin would keep him posted.
“I am truly a fatherland-less chap and I am grateful to have found a country that is accepting me within its boundaries.”
—Leon Trotsky, New Yorker Volkszeitung, January 15, 1917 (translated from the German original)
WHAT A GREETING! They could not have treated him better if he were the King of England! Bounding down the gangway to the pier, Trotsky found himself a center of attention, and in the best way. No one came to arrest him, harass, argue, or give him a hard time. No one challenged his paperwork, his politics, his religion, or his writings. No interrogations, no extra inspections, no snooping. Not by the police, the customs officials, or even the ship’s officers.
Instead, they all smiled and acted politely, treating him like a guest. What a difference an ocean makes!
The landing of a transatlantic liner those days always attracted a carnival, and the Montserrat was no different. People came to watch and wave at the ship, even on a freezing cold Sunday morning like this. How many had come specifically for the great socialist Trotsky? Apparently quite a few. His friends in New York had been busy. LEON TROTZKI KOMMT HEUTE! (Leon Trotsky Is Arriving Today!) the New Yorker Volkszeitung had shouted from its front page that morning, urging its fourteen thousand readers to see “our much persecuted comrade” and “courageous fellow combatant.”50 So too the Russian-language Novy Mir.
At least four newspapers sent reporters to the Montserrat’s landing that morning, looking for celebrities or politicians to interview, any speck of gossip or news. Trotsky easily fit the bill. When three English-speaking newsmen approached him, Trotsky saw a man suddenly appear at his side to help. His name was Arthur Concors, a senior staff official at the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigration Aid Society, or HIAS, the well-known charity that helped Jewish refugees fleeing Eastern Europe. One of Trotsky’s New York friends knew Concors and apparently asked him to come as a personal favor,ii an on-the-spot expert to help untangle any last-minute customs issues and deal with the English-speaking newsmen.
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.
Concors knew his business and came prepared with what press-savvy people today call talking points, designed to give a story the right spin. As a result, all the English newspapers got the same line—EXPELLED FROM FOUR LANDS—that was headlined the New York Times. Its story, appearing the next morning, portrayed poor Trotsky as kicked out of Europe for nothing more than “preaching peace.”51 The New York Tribune took the drama further: WITH BAYONETS FOUR LANDS EXPEL PEACE ADVOCATE.52 The New York Herald touted Trotsky’s four years in Russian prisons and his battle with long-arm tsarist harassment even in France. Earlier, another English-language paper, the New York Call, had described Trotsky as “pursued with a particular vendictiveness [sic] by authorities of the capitalistic order” and now “penniless.”53
Both the Times and Tribune also stressed Trotsky’s identity as a “Jewish” writer editing “Jewish” journals in Russia and France. A million and a half Jewish people lived in New York City then and bought newspapers, though mostly their own half dozen written in Yiddish. Trotsky himself never wrote Yiddish, barely spoke the language, was not raised in a shtetl (small Jewish Eastern European town), and never practiced the Jewish religion. He didn’t hide his Jewish background. In fact, he had spoken out eloquently against pogroms and anti-Jewish oppression in Europe, often at personal risk. But asked about it, he normally gave his religion simply as socialist or internationalist.
Still, this was Trotsky’s spin for the English-language press: man of peace persecuted by European autocrats, a Jewish victim of the hated anti-Semitic Russian tsar, finding refuge in kindhearted America. A fine human-interest story: simple, sympathetic, poignant.
Only Trotsky, hearing himself portrayed as a helpless “pacifist” bullied by Europeans, seemed embarrassed by the characterization, a far cry from his own preferred self-image as revolutionary fighter. He soon found a chance to set the record straight, or at least to add his own spin. A German-speaking reporter for the New Yorker Volkszeitung came by to talk, and at last Trotsky had someone he could address directly in a language he knew. Even better, the reporter called him “comrade.” He was a socialist. Bubbling in good humor, Trotsky quickly befriended the man and took the opportunity to recast his recent fights with the French and Spanish governments. “You know, I made myself impossible in France