Book: L. Trotsky “My life

The memoirs of politicians are always posthumous writings. In the sense that a politician has time to write memoirs only after he leaves politics - that is why we have the memoirs of Churchill and de Gaulle, and we do not have Stalin's memoirs. Trotsky left politics forcibly - in 1929 he was expelled from the country (I almost wrote "expelled", but no, Solzhenitsyn was expelled, then this word was first applied to a similar situation). They expelled him to Turkey (it's just that no other country wanted to accept him (and I understand them)) and there, sitting idle, he decided to write his memoirs. Frankly, I would prefer that they were written a couple of years later, so that at least some time distance appears - but what is there.

The book begins with childhood memories and, I must say, they are written masterfully. If Trotsky had not become a revolutionary, he would have made a notable Russian writer:

Jewish landowners M-sky lived 5-6 versts from Yanovka. It was a quirky and crazy family. Old man Moisei Kharitonovich, aged 60, was distinguished by the upbringing of a noble type: he spoke fluent French, played the piano, and knew some of the literature. His left hand was weak, and his right hand was suitable, according to him, for concerts. He struck the keys of the old harpsichords with his running nails, like castanets. Starting with Oginsky's polonaise, he moved imperceptibly to Liszt's rhapsody and immediately slid down to the Maiden's Prayer. He had the same jumps in conversation. Suddenly breaking off the game, the old man went up to the mirror and, if no one was nearby, set fire to his beard from different sides with a cigarette, thus putting it in order. He smoked incessantly, out of breath and as if in disgust. I have not spoken to my wife, a heavy old woman, for 15 years.

In his memoirs, he writes that he specially worked on his literary style, and this is noticeable.

Trotsky was born and raised in the village of Yanovka, in central Ukraine, in a family, as it later became known, of a kulak. When he grew up, they sent him to Odessa to distant relatives to study at a real school:

A ten percent norm for Jews in state educational institutions was introduced in 1887. It was almost hopeless to get into a gymnasium: patronage or bribery were required. The real school differed from the gymnasium in the absence of classical languages ​​and a broader course in mathematics, natural science and new languages. The "norm" also extended to real schools. But the influx here was less, and therefore there are more chances. There was a long debate in magazines and newspapers about classical and real education. The conservatives believed that classicism instills discipline, or rather, they hoped that a citizen who endured Greek cramming in childhood would endure the tsarist regime during the rest of his life. The liberals, however, without abandoning classicism, which is supposedly the milk brother of liberalism, for both of them come from the Renaissance, patronized at the same time real education. By the time I was determined to an educational institution, these disputes had died down due to a special circular that prohibited the discussion of the question of the preference for different types of education.

He studied well, was one of the first students. I even wanted to be a mathematician. But not fate - he was carried away by all sorts of revolutionary ideas (at first, rather, issues of social justice) while still in school, for which he was even expelled. Here is a sample of the mentality of that time (IMHO, this disease is still relevant):

In parallel with the deaf hostility to the political regime of Russia, an idealization of foreign countries - Western Europe and America - developed in an imperceptible way. Based on individual remarks and fragments, supplemented by imagination, an idea was created of a high, uniform, embracing culture without exception. Later, the notion of an ideal democracy was associated with this.
Young rationalism said that if something is understood, then it means that it is implemented. Therefore, it seemed incredible that there could be superstitions in Europe, that the church could play a big role there, that blacks could be persecuted in America. This idealization, imperceptibly absorbed from the surrounding philistine-liberal milieu, continued even later, when I began to be imbued with revolutionary views.

This is the middle of the 1890s, Trotsky is 15-17 years old. However, he graduated from college - it was his only regular education. All further is exclusively self-education, often in prisons:

Trotsky's prison cell, Sverchkov continues, soon turned into some kind of library. Absolutely all new books worthy of attention were handed over to him; he read them and was busy with literary work all day from morning until late at night. "I feel great," he told us.

After all, I can't complain about my prisons. They were a good school for me. I left the tightly sealed solitary cell of the Peter and Paul Fortress with a hint of chagrin: it was quiet there, so even, so noiseless, so ideally good for mental work.

What did he study there? There is no question of any system - I studied what I came across. This is all sorts of underground literature that came to him through illegal channels - in particular, some Marxist writings. These are the books that were in the prison library - for example, in one of the prisons there was a collection of the journal "World of God" and he wrote the history of Freemasonry (!) on the materials of this journal - the manuscript was not preserved, which the author regrets.

So, through self-education, Trotsky was indoctrinated by the ideas of Marxism, or rather, historical materialism. The idea that history develops according to its own laws, not much dependent on the will of people who can contribute to its progress, or who can stand in the way of history, but will inevitably be swept away by it; and specifically, this development goes from capitalism through socialism to communism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat is the tool (of history, not people!) - Trotsky was sincerely and completely imbued with this idea.

Here is a very remarkable story from 1907, at that time Trotsky lived in exile in Austria (escape from Siberian exile, where he ended up for active participation in the 1905 revolution). He writes about the Austrian socialists:

These people boasted of realism and efficiency. But even here they swam shallowly. In 1907, in order to increase income, the party started to create its own bread factory. It was a crude adventure, dangerous in principle, practically hopeless. I waged a fight against this undertaking from the very beginning, but met with the Viennese Marxists only a condescending smile of superiority. [...] I proceeded not from the conjuncture of the grain market and not from the state of the party masses, but from the position of the party of the proletariat in capitalist society. This seemed doctrinaire, but it turned out to be the most realistic criterion. The confirmation of my warnings meant only the superiority of the Marxist method over its Austrian forgery.

Without a broad historical forecast, I cannot imagine not only political activity, but also spiritual life in general.

Two things are striking here: firstly, well, in what way should the success of a commercial enterprise (bread factory) depend on the position party of the proletariat? It seems that economics as a science passed by Trotsky's interests (hello, non-systematic self-education!). And secondly, how important a Marxist historical forecast is for him! In confirmation of the second - a quote from 1912, when Trotsky sees the mobilization for the Balkan war:

I understood well even then that the humanitarian-moralistic point of view on the historical process is the most fruitless point of view. But it was not about explanation, but about experience. A direct, indescribable feeling of historical tragedy penetrated into the soul: powerlessness in the face of fate, burning pain for the human locust.

Here is this combination of uncompromising faith in the historical process and the visibility of its immorality, the visibility of what happens in the course of history, and, more importantly, what a person who decides to contribute to the historical process has to do - this problem is recognized by Trotsky and he repeatedly refers to it:

To operate in politics with abstract moral criteria is obviously a hopeless thing. Political morality follows from politics itself, is its function. Only a policy that is in the service of a great historical task can provide itself with morally irreproachable methods of action. On the contrary, lowering the level of political tasks inevitably leads to moral decline.

The historical end justifies the means - he sincerely believes in it. This is his strength.

What else is Trotsky's strength - he adequately perceives reality, he is amazingly devoid of self-deception of perception. His behavior is appropriate to the circumstances. He knows his goal and he does not deceive himself about reality - this is a terrible combination, terrible in its effectiveness. Especially if for him the end justifies the means, and this goal is not momentary, but strategic - such people are able to change the world. Which direction is another question.

Perhaps it's time to move on to the main thing - to the October Revolution. The February Revolution found Trotsky in America:

I found myself in New York, in the fabulously prosaic city of capitalist automatism, where the aesthetic theory of cubism triumphs in the streets, and the moral philosophy of the dollar is in the hearts. New York appealed to me because it most fully expresses the spirit of the modern era.

How did he even end up in America? This is a very interesting story. After the revolution of 1905, he escaped from exile and lived in exile - in Austria, then in France. Meanwhile, the First World War began. The communists of many countries immediately forgot about communist internationalism and became patriots, only the most ardent, and Trotsky among them, opposed the war (he opposed imperialist wars in general and for the revolution - that is, against the war between states for the war between classes) . The communist press and communist agitators in the army campaigned for desertion as a way to end the war. Of course, in a warring state, this is a serious crime. The Russian secret police seized the opportunity and framed Trotsky (they sent their agent as a communist agitator, and during interrogation he declared that he had been sent by Trotsky) and the French authorities received a legal pretext to expel Trotsky. They sent him to Spain, and secretly - the police in civilian clothes escorted him by train to Madrid, and even under a false name - no one coordinated this matter with Spain. Why were they not sent to Russia, which would be logical? All of Europe is at war, so they sent them wherever they could.
It's funny that Trotsky, once in Madrid, the first thing he began to go to museums (I approve).
At some point, the Spanish authorities discovered that there was an international revolutionary on their territory and also wanted to expel him. They did not become like the French and slowly push him to Portugal, for example, and decided the issue more radically - to send him across the Atlantic. At first they tried to put him on a steamer to Havana, but then Trotsky balked. In short, they agreed on the United States - they agreed to accept it. Judging by how Trotsky screwed up the American communists, the US authorities really didn’t really have to be afraid of him (it would take less than a decade and a half and the danger of Trotsky’s stay in the country would increase - by that time the world would see what had become of Russia - and after America was expelled from the USSR refuses to accept Trotsky).

This is how it happened that during the February Revolution, Trotsky was across the Atlantic, in the USA. Lenin at the same time sat quietly in Zurich - the two most dangerous revolutionaries were removed from Russia. The secret police knew their business and did everything that was necessary.

In a sense, this is the solution to the question that worried me for many years: why did the Russian authorities not destroy the Bolsheviks with the help of their secret police - did they not understand how dangerous they were? Now I see: they knew and acted; the Bolsheviks in the country were practically crushed - the two most important leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, were removed from the country, and those who remained huddled in the corners and were practically not dangerous. Why were the authorities satisfied with the expulsion, why did they not organize a political assassination? - Precisely because for them the end did not justify the means, the Russian authorities considered political assassinations immoral. And rightly so, in general, they thought, even in this case.

Well, then the ambitions of some were superimposed on the personal characteristics of others, and specifically Emperor Nicholas II. He abdicated the throne, and it was only his decision (he dreamed of a private family life, humanly understandable, but the monarch has no right to be just a man, such is his heavy royal fate). The Provisional Government came to power, the government of fine-hearted university professors. It was they who returned Trotsky to the country, but Lenin returned with the help of the German authorities in a sealed carriage (Trotsky writes quite a lot about this, he confirms the fact, while denying only the financing of the Russian revolution by the German authorities).

Further it is known that the Bolsheviks lost the elections to the Constituent Assembly to the Socialist-Revolutionaries (25% versus 50%), quickly outlawed the Cadets Party and shot the party leader, then dispersed the Constituent Assembly ("the guard was tired") and away we go.

It is clear that Trotsky does not write anything about the February Revolution, he was not a participant in it, but the October Revolution is extremely indistinct in his autobiography. It seems that they tried to seize power of the nasharomyzhka - and it worked!

Those days were extraordinary days both in the life of the country and in personal life. The tension of social passions, as well as personal forces, reached its highest point. The masses created the era, the leaders felt that their steps merge with the steps of history. In those days, decisions were made and orders were issued on which the fate of the people depended for a whole historical era. These decisions, however, were hardly discussed. I would be at a loss to say that they really weighed and considered. They improvised. That didn't make them worse. The pressure of events was so powerful, and the tasks were so clear, that the most responsible decisions were made easily, on the go, as a matter of course, and were perceived in the same way. The path was predetermined, it was only necessary to call the task by name, there was no need to prove it, and almost no longer needed to call. Without hesitation or doubt, the masses picked up what flowed for them from the situation. Under the weight of events, the "leaders" formulated only what met the needs of the masses and the requirements of history.

Well, the Bolsheviks have power. Power in Petrograd and Moscow, and throughout the country - a civil war. Which is aggravated by the fact that just recently the Bolsheviks agitated the soldiers for "stop fighting, everyone goes home," and now the new government needs an army, and where to get it? The old one, through the efforts of the same Bolsheviks, was decomposed, unfit for combat.

We need to create a new army. And Trotsky becomes the organizer of the Red Army (chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council). He was an excellent organizer, and given that for him the end justified the means, he could apply harsh methods without hesitation:

You can not build an army without repression. You can't lead masses of people to their death without having the command of the death penalty in their arsenal. As long as the evil, tailless apes called humans, proud of their technology, build armies and fight, the command will put the soldiers between possible death ahead and inevitable death behind. But armies are not created by fear. The tsarist army did not disintegrate because of a lack of repression. Trying to save her by restoring the death penalty, Kerensky only finished her off. On the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. Anyone who understands the language of history even a little, these facts need no explanation.

Since August 1918, a "train of the Pre-revolutionary Military Council" has been organized, and for several years Trotsky literally lives in this train, wandering around the theaters of military operations:

There was a telegraph on the train. We were connected by direct wire to Moscow, and my deputy Sklyansky received from me demands for the most necessary supplies for the army - sometimes for a division, even for a separate regiment - supplies. They appeared at a speed that would have been completely impossible without my intervention. Of course, this method cannot be called correct. The pedant will say that in supply, as in all military affairs in general, the most important thing is the system. This is right. I myself tend to sin rather in the direction of pedantry. But the fact is that we did not want to die before we managed to create a coherent system. That is why we were compelled, especially in the first period, to replace the system with improvisations, so that in the future we could base the system on them.

He was able to think soberly and separate "revolutionary inspiration" from the essence of the matter:

Opposition on the military question took shape already in the first months of the organization of the Red Army. Its main provisions boiled down to upholding the elective principle, to protests against the involvement of specialists, against the introduction of iron discipline, against the centralization of the army, etc. The oppositionists tried to find a generalizing theoretical formula for themselves. The centralized army, they argued, is the army of the imperialist state. The revolution must put an end not only to positional warfare, but also to a centralized army. The revolution is entirely built on mobility, bold strike and maneuverability. Its fighting force is a small independent detachment, combined from all types of weapons, not connected with the base, relying on the sympathy of the population, freely entering the rear of the enemy, etc. In a word, the tactics of the revolution were proclaimed the tactics of a small war. All this was extremely abstract and essentially an idealization of our weakness. The serious experience of the civil war soon disproved these prejudices. The advantages of centralized organization and strategy over local improvisation, military separatism, and federalism came to light all too soon and vividly in the experience of struggle.

The Communists did not easily enter into military work. This required both selection and education. As far back as Kazan, in August 1918, I telegraphed Lenin: "Send communists here who know how to obey, who are ready to endure hardships and are willing to die. Lightweight agitators are not needed here."

Of the major topics, very few remained - attitudes towards Lenin and Stalin.

I'll start with Trotsky's attitude to Lenin. According to the text, this is reckless veneration. Lenin is ten years older than Trotsky, he is generally the oldest of the top Bolsheviks. Trotsky, as it were, does not want to notice that Lenin is an intriguer: for the first time, Trotsky met Lenin during his first emigration, while still a very young man; they met in the editorial office of Iskra, and Lenin immediately began to win over Trotsky to his side against Plekhanov - so, a petty episode of the struggle for power, but very revealing.

The lines where Trotsky writes about Lenin are permeated not even with reverence, but with enthusiasm:

I realized too clearly what Lenin meant for the revolution, for history, and for me personally. He was my teacher. This does not mean that I repeated his words and gestures belatedly. But I learned from him to come independently to the decisions he came to.

In the same places where Trotsky came into conflict with Lenin, he writes that he later realized that he was wrong - Lenin was right.

Was this admiration and respect sincere? And was their mutual understanding so cloudless (as Trotsky writes about repeatedly)? Here I tend to doubt. One of the aims of this autobiography for Trotsky was to convince the Communists that Lenin was grooming him to be his successor, that the transfer of power was to take place at the 15th Party Congress, and only Lenin's second stroke, after which he lost his speech, and subsequent death prevented this.

The cunning Stalin seized power in the party. That's who Trotsky does not spare black paint, so this is the insidious intriguer Stalin. It is somewhat incomprehensible, if he is so mediocre, then what is he doing at the top of the Bolshevik Party? Where did the brilliant Lenin look? In general, this is the very case when too little time has passed between the event (Trotsky's expulsion from the country) and the writing of memoirs, it is too reminiscent of waving fists after a fight.

The last chapters, which describe party intrigues against Trotsky, the Stalin-Kamenev-Zinoviev conspiracy, etc. it’s quite disgusting to read - here I looked through diagonally.

I've read the book and won't be re-reading it. I did not find in it an answer to the question of where his pseudonym, Trotsky, came from - after all, he was originally Bronstein. In his youth, his first pseudonym was Lvov - this is understandable, on behalf of. And where did "Troky" come from? I have a suspicion that from the Trotsa River (by analogy as "Lenin" from the Lena River, there was such a school version), but the malicious Internet suggests that this is the name of the prison guard. Further versions differ - either the documents were found only for this surname and therefore the choice is random, or the choice was conscious and here hello to Freud.
Say what you like, but by the name of the river it would be beautiful. Although, a small river in the Ivanovo and Nizhny Novgorod regions ... Not by his conceit.

Trotsky Lev Davidovich

My life

Trotsky Lev Davidovich

My life

I. Rosenthal. Revolution and literature

MY LIFE

Foreword

Chapter I. Yanovka

Chapter II. Neighbours. First school

Chapter III. Family and school

Chapter IV. Books and early conflicts

Chapter V. Village and City

Chapter VI. fracture

Chapter VII. My first revolutionary organization

Chapter VIII. My first prisons

Chapter X. The First Escape

Chapter XI. First emigration

Chapter XII. Party congress and split

Chapter XIII. Return to Russia

Chapter XIV. 1905

Chapter XVI. Second emigration and German socialism

Chapter XVII. Preparing for a new revolution

Chapter XVIII. The beginning of the war

Chapter XIX. Paris and Zimmerwald

Chapter XX. Deportation from France

Chapter XXI. Through Spain

Chapter XXII. In NYC

Chapter XXIII. In a concentration camp

Chapter XXIV. In Petrograd

Chapter XXV. About slanderers

Chapter XXVI. July to October

Chapter XXVII. The night that decides

Chapter XXVIII. Trotskyism in 1917

Chapter XXIX. In power

Chapter XXX. In Moscow

Chapter XXXI. Negotiations in Brest

Chapter XXXII. World

Chapter XXXIII. A month in Sviyazhsk

Chapter XXXIV. Train

Chapter XXXV. Defense of Petrograd

Chapter XXXVI. Military opposition

Chapter XXXVII. Military-strategic disagreements

Chapter XXXVIII. The transition to the NEP and my relationship with Lenin

Chapter XXXIX. Lenin's illness

Chapter XL. Conspiracy of epigones

Chapter XLI. Lenin's death and power shift

Chapter XLII. The last period of struggle within the party

Chapter XLIV. Exile

Chapter XLV. Planet without a visa

REVOLUTION AND LITERATURE

The author's preface to the book "My Life" is dated September 14, 1929. The next eleven years of the life of Leon Trotsky, not reflected in his memoirs, are the time of preparation and unleashing of the Second World War, a grandiose social collapse and terror of unprecedented proportions in the USSR. In the atmosphere that then reigned in the minds of the West, gloomy uncertainty and illusions about the Soviet experiment that had not yet disappeared, the furious accuser of Stalin, prophesying about the world revolution, turned out to be equally unacceptable to the enemies and friends of the country from which he was expelled. .

In July 1933, Trotsky got the opportunity to move from Turkey to France, but two years later he was forced to move to Norway, and the Norwegian government demanded that he give up political activity. He violated this condition when he learned about the first trial in Moscow of alleged members of the "anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary Trotskyist center" that never existed. After several months of internment in Norway, the Mexican government granted Trotsky political asylum, and in January 1937 he settled with his wife in the town of Coyoacan near the Mexican capital. One great artist - Diego Rivera - gave him shelter, another - David Siqueiros - immediately joined in the preparation of an assassination attempt on the "worst enemy of Leninism."

Participating in the work of an independent international commission, he proves that the Moscow political trials are a falsification orchestrated by Stalin, and at the same time organizes the Fourth International opposing the Comintern. The main theme of his articles in the Paris Bulletin of the Opposition is the exposure of "bureaucratic absolutism," as he defines the regime established in the USSR, while denying, however, that the foundations of this regime were laid with its direct participation. Following "My Life", "History of the Russian Revolution", "Stalin's School of Falsification", "The Betrayed Revolution" ("What is the USSR and where is it going?") were published. Books about Lenin and Stalin remained unfinished. But Trotsky's current position is incomparable with pre-revolutionary emigration - he is impenetrably separated from the USSR: what he writes about with such passion is read only by Stalin and his informants.

He was able to accurately predict the rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler and the inevitable German attack on the Soviet Union, but what happened next seemed to him, in general, similar to the course of events of 1914-1918: the second world war would develop into a revolutionary war, and both dictators would be overthrown; if this does not happen, the Soviet state will face defeat. Trotsky was not destined to find out that both predictions turned out to be untenable. At the same time, he was aware of the ambiguity of his attitude to what was happening in his homeland: "I am struggling in a noose of contradictions, completely rejecting Stalin, but I don't know how to 'not hurt' the people, 'socialism'."

Back in February 1932, Trotsky was deprived of Soviet citizenship. Since the hopes that the White Guards would deal with him abroad did not materialize, Stalin ordered the destruction of his main enemy by the forces of a special terrorist group. Trotsky understood that he was doomed, although he did not know that his every step was known in the Kremlin. By this time, both of his sons, the father's chief assistant in exile, Lev Sedov, and professor-mathematician Sergei Sedov, who remained in the USSR, had died. In a will drawn up in February 1940, Trotsky wrote that he would die "a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and therefore an implacable atheist", with faith "in the communist future of mankind".

On August 20, 1940, the NKVD agent, the Spanish communist Ramon Mercader, who managed to gain confidence in Trotsky, stabbed him to death with an ice pick when he was looking through the manuscript brought by Mercader. Soviet newspapers published brief information: Trotsky's murderer was someone "from among the persons of his inner circle." The decree on conferring the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on Mercader was not made public either - after he served a twenty-year prison sentence in Mexico.

The myth about Trotsky, the embodiment of world evil, that had been planted for decades, has become a thing of the past. But Trotsky's literary heritage, which opposed this myth, belongs to history, a monument to the radical thought of the first half of the 20th century.

Trotsky entered history as an outstanding orator. The eloquence of the young Trotsky was appreciated immediately and unconditionally, but opinions differed about his first journalistic experiments. Krzhizhanovsky gave him the flattering pseudonym "Pero", while Plekhanov was annoyed by the lightness of Trotsky's "writings" by which he "lowers the literary level of Iskra". Trotsky subsequently agreed with this - a rare case! - noting that his writer's teeth were just erupting then. During the years of the revolution and civil war, when the spoken word meant much more than the printed word, Trotsky's speeches to a mass audience made a significant contribution to the victory of Bolshevism. But one can believe Lunacharsky: Trotsky was "literature in his oratory and an orator in his literature," the articles and books he wrote are "frozen speech."

Vladimir Chernyaev, a leading researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, believed that My Life justified the author’s right to be considered Lenin’s closest ally and allowed him to “settle scores” with former party comrades. According to the authors of the four-volume biography of Trotsky, Yuri Felshtinsky and Georgy Chernyavsky, Trotsky's "polemical" memoirs had "all the advantages and disadvantages that are inherent in memoirs as a genre": the book was "subjective and biased", which, however, was not denied by the author. At the same time, Trotsky’s “exciting memoirs, captivating the reader from the first pages,” were written by the “maestro of elegant prose” and “master of words” in a lively, free language, using many literary devices and were factually accurate: it is almost impossible to detect inaccuracies in them. in dates, names and the general outline of events.

The author's style was also noted by the Nobel laureate François Mauriac: he compared Trotsky, who showed his literary talent in his autobiography, with Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. The French writer believed that - if Lev Davidovich had not chosen a "revolutionary career" - he could well have taken a worthy place in a series of great Russian writers.

Biographers of the revolutionary claimed that "the two-volume book was a personified history of the Russian revolutionary movement." Particularly interesting is the part concerning the Soviet period of Trotsky's life: it "brightly and in detail" described the inner-party struggle of 1923-1927 and explained the political position of the author. Felshtinsky and Chernyavsky also reported that the most important shortcomings of the work were, firstly, the author's "concentration of the author's attention" on his own person, and, secondly, the "not quite sincere" idealization of the image of Vladimir Lenin and the entire Leninist period in the history of Soviet Russia.

The anonymous authors of a review of the book published in connection with its publication in Britain in the Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs agree with them: without accusing the author of outright falsification (rather, of “minimizing past disagreements”), they draw attention to the fact that the reader, who is not familiar with all the ups and downs of the inter-factional struggle in the RSDLP at the beginning of the 20th century, may get the impression that Trotsky was the closest friend and loyal ally of V. I. Lenin for many years:

original text(English) :

In addition, they, speaking about the last chapter of the book, dedicated to the “attacks” on the bourgeois governments of Europe (which regularly refuse Lev Davidovich an entry visa), ask a rhetorical question: was there something fundamentally wrong in the “political career” of the protagonist, which ended the loss of friends and the Turkish exile that left him alone?

The vagueness of the description of the protagonist's childhood, the lack of details (in particular, the topic of anti-Semitism of the time) were noted in a review of a 1970s edition. Modern research, carried out after the opening of the Trotsky archive, confirmed that the author's corrections were actively made on the parts related to the "consistency" of the Bronstein family, as well as their Jewish roots and connections. The autobiography also omitted parts related to Trotsky's role in the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising and the Tambov (Antonov) rebellion. The choice of sources, in particular the citation of only "laudatory" reviews about the former People's Commissar published by Anatoly Lunacharsky, also raised questions. According to the figurative expression of the author of the biography of the revolutionary Ronald Segal, quoted by the historian Paul Le Blanc in 2015, the book "looks like a window gallery, in which only some of the windows have transparent glass, the other part is frosted glass, some are hung with paintings, and there are those that are bricked" .

The fact of publishing an autobiography “openly directed against Lenin and Bolshevism” commissioned by a “Berlin bourgeois publisher” was used by Soviet historians to fight “Trotskyism” in the 1980s as well.

anti-stalinism

“All Americans shout out loud what a wonderful book. Poor Stalin, probably, they take envy that they are shouting not about him, but about you, ”wrote Elena Krylenko in 1930, who translated Trotsky’s work into English. An old friend of the Trotskys - Anna Klyachko - after reading the copy sent to her, answered the author: “Your personality, Lev Davidovich, interests and occupies everyone, and now you speak vividly, vividly, plastically from your book, and it is clear to everyone what kind of person, how he worked what he aspired to, and everything personal that so occupies people. Professor Alexander Kaun, who worked on a book about the writer Maxim Gorky, wrote that he finished reading the American edition of Trotsky's memoirs with regret: he wanted to listen to the author of "the most valuable contribution to the history of the Russian revolution" again and again.

In a review of My Life published in conjunction with its American edition, Professor Walter Carl Barnes calls the book "one of the most important documents of the new Russia". He notes the accuracy and detail of the work, especially when compared to the "vague" memoirs written by Alexander Kerensky and Sergei Sazonov. Professor Vladimir Mamonov in 1991 called "My Life" "the most interesting [book], and not only for specialists." Nikolai Berdyaev spoke of the book as a work “written to glorify L. Trotsky as a great revolutionary and even more so to humiliate his mortal enemy Stalin as a nonentity and a miserable epigone. But it is written very talentedly ... ". In the book, Joseph Stalin is first called "outstanding mediocrity".

Volume 1

FOREWORD

Our time is again rich in memoirs, perhaps more than ever. This is because there is something to talk about. Interest in current history is the more intense, the more dramatic the era, the richer it turns. Landscape art could not have been born in the Sahara. "Crossed" epochs, like ours, give rise to the need to look at yesterday and already such a distant day through the eyes of its active participants. This is the explanation for the tremendous development of memoir literature since the last war. Perhaps this is also the justification for this book.

The very possibility of its appearance in the world was created by a pause in the active political activity of the author. Constantinople turned out to be one of the unforeseen, although not accidental stages of my life. Here I am bivouacking, not for the first time, patiently waiting to see what happens next. Without a certain amount of "fatalism" the life of a revolutionary would be completely impossible. In any case, the intermission in Constantinople proved to be the perfect moment to look back before circumstances allowed us to move forward.

Initially, I wrote cursory autobiographical essays for newspapers and thought of limiting myself to this. I will note right there that I did not have the opportunity to follow from my refuge the form in which these essays reached the reader. But every job has its own logic. I entered my topic only by the time I was finishing the newspaper articles. Then I decided to write a book. I took another, incomparably larger scale and did the whole job anew. The only thing the original newspaper articles have in common with this book is that they talk about the same subject. Otherwise, these are two different works.

With particular thoroughness, I dwelled on the second period of the Soviet revolution, the beginning of which coincides with Lenin's illness and the opening of the campaign against "Trotskyism." The struggle of the epigones for power, as I am trying to show, was not only a personal struggle. It expressed in itself a new political chapter: the reaction against October and the preparation of Thermidor. From this follows by itself the answer to the question I have been asked so often: "How did you lose power?"

The autobiography of a revolutionary politician necessarily touches upon a whole series of theoretical questions connected with the social development of Russia, and partly of all mankind, especially with those critical periods which are called revolutions. Of course, I did not have the opportunity to consider complex theoretical problems in essence in these pages. In particular, the so-called theory of permanent revolution, which has played such a large role in my personal life and which, more importantly, is now acquiring such acute relevance for the countries of the East, passes through this book as a distant leitmotif. If this does not satisfy the reader, then I can only tell him that an examination of the problems of the revolution will essentially form the content of a special book in which I will try to sum up the most important theoretical results of the experience of the last decades.

* * *

Since a considerable number of people pass through the pages of my book, not always in the light that they themselves would choose for themselves or for their party, many of them will find my exposition lacking the necessary objectivity. Already the appearance of passages in the periodical press caused some rebuttals. It's unavoidable. There can be no doubt that even if I succeeded in making my autobiography a simple daguerreotype of my life, which I did not aspire to at all, it would still evoke echoes of those debates that were generated in their time by the collisions set forth in it. But this book is not a dispassionate photograph of my life, but an integral part of it. On these pages I continue the struggle to which my whole life is dedicated. In stating, I characterize and evaluate; when I tell, I defend myself and, more often, I attack. It seems to me that this is the only way to make a biography objective in some higher sense, that is, to make it the most adequate expression of a person, conditions, and epoch.

Objectivity is not in feigned indifference, with which well-established hypocrisy speaks of friends and enemies, suggesting to the reader indirectly what is inconvenient for him to say directly. This kind of objectivity is only a secular trap, nothing more. I don't need her. Since I have resigned myself to the necessity of talking about myself—no one has yet succeeded in writing an autobiography without talking about himself—then I have no reason to hide my likes and dislikes, my love and my hate.

This book is controversial. It reflects the dynamics of that social life, which is all built on contradictions. The audacity of a schoolboy to a teacher; salon hairpins of envy covered with courtesy; continuous competition of trade; frenzied competition in all fields of technology, science, art, sports; parliamentary skirmishes in which a deep conflict of interests throbs; the everyday furious struggle of the press; workers' strikes; executions of demonstrators; pyroxylin suitcases sent through the air by civilized neighbors to each other; the fiery languages ​​of civil war, almost never extinguished on our planet, are all different forms of social “controversy”, from the ordinary, everyday, normal, almost imperceptible, despite its tension, to the extreme, explosive, volcanic polemics of wars and revolutions. This is our era. We grew up with her. It is what we breathe and live. How can we not be polemical if we want to be faithful to our fatherland in time?

* * *

But there is another, more elementary criterion, which concerns mere good faith in the presentation of facts. Just as the most irreconcilable revolutionary struggle must take into account the circumstances of place and time, so the most polemical work must observe the proportions that exist between things and people. I would like to hope that I have complied with this requirement not only in general, but also in parts.

In some, not numerous, however, cases, I present conversations in the form of a dialogue. No one will demand verbatim reproduction of conversations many years later. I don't claim to be. Some of the dialogues are more symbolic. But every person in his life had moments when this or that conversation was particularly vividly engraved in his memory. You usually retell such conversations more than once to your close and political friends. Thanks to this, they are fixed in memory. I have in mind, of course, primarily conversations of a political nature.

I want to note here that I used to trust my memory. Her testimony has been repeatedly subjected to objective verification and successfully withstood it. However, a caveat is needed here. If my topographic memory, not to mention my musical memory, is very weak, and my visual memory, like my linguistic memory, is rather mediocre, then my idea memory is much higher than the average level. Meanwhile, in this book, ideas, their development and the struggle of people because of these ideas, occupy, in essence, the main place.

True, memory is not an automatic counter. She is the least selfless. Often she pushes out of herself or pushes into a dark corner such episodes that are unfavorable to the life instinct that controls her, most often from the point of view of pride. But this is a matter of "psychoanalytic" criticism, which is sometimes witty and instructive, but more often capricious and arbitrary.

Needless to say, I persistently controlled my memory through documentary evidence. No matter how difficult the working conditions were for me, in the sense of library and archival information, I still had the opportunity to check all the most significant circumstances and dates that I needed.

Beginning in 1897, I fought mainly with a pen in my hands. Thus, the events of my life left an almost uninterrupted print mark for 32 years. The factional struggle in the Party, beginning in 1903, was rife with personal episodes. My opponents, like me, did not spare blows. All of them left printed scars. Since the October Revolution, the history of the revolutionary movement has occupied a large place in the studies of young Soviet scientists and entire institutions. Everything that is of interest is searched in the archives of the revolution and the tsarist police department and published with detailed factual comments. In the early years, when there was still no need to hide or disguise anything, this work was carried out with complete conscientiousness. Lenin's "Works" and some of mine were published by the state publishing house with notes, occupying dozens of pages in each volume and containing indispensable factual material both about the activities of the authors and about the events of the corresponding period.

All this, of course, facilitated my work, helping to establish the correct chronological outline and avoid factual errors, at least gross ones.

* * *

I can't deny that my life hasn't been exactly normal. The reasons for this, however, must be sought more in the conditions of the era than in me personally. Of course, certain personal traits were also needed to do the job, good or bad, that I did. But under other historical conditions, these personal characteristics could slumber peacefully, as countless human inclinations and passions slumber, for which the social situation does not demand. On the other hand, perhaps other qualities that are pushed aside or suppressed today could manifest themselves. Above the subjective rises the objective, and in the last analysis it decides.

My conscious and active activity, which began at about the age of 17-18, proceeded in a constant struggle for certain ideas. There have been no events in my personal life that in themselves would merit public attention. All the facts of my past that are anything out of the ordinary are connected with the revolutionary struggle and derive their significance from it. Only this circumstance can justify the publication of my autobiography.

But from the same source there are also difficulties for the author. The facts of personal life were so closely woven into the fabric of historical events that it is difficult to separate one from the other. However, this book is not a historical work. Events are taken not according to their objective significance, but depending on how they were connected with the facts of personal life. It is not surprising if in the characterization of individual events and entire stages there is not that proportionality that should be required if the book were a historical work. The dividing line between autobiography and the history of the revolution had to be groped empirically. Without dissolving life stories in historical research, it was necessary, however, to give the reader support in the facts of social development. I proceeded from the fact that the main contours of great events are known to the reader, and that his memory needs only brief reminders of historical facts and their sequence.

* * *

By the time this book is published, I will be 50 years old. My birthday coincides with the day of the October Revolution. Mystics and Pythagoreans can draw whatever conclusions they want from this. I myself noticed this curious coincidence only three years after the October Revolution. Until the age of 9, I lived without a break in a remote village. I studied in high school for eight years. He was arrested for the first time a year after graduation. For me, as for many of my peers, prison, exile, and emigration served as universities. I spent about four years in the tsarist prisons in two receptions. He spent the first time in royal exile for about 2 years, the second time for several weeks. Twice escaped from Siberia. In exile he lived in two receptions for about 12 years in different countries of Europe and America, two years before the revolution of 1905 and almost ten years after its defeat. During the war he was sentenced in absentia to imprisonment in Hohenzollern Germany (1915); was exiled the following year from France to Spain, where, after a short imprisonment in a Madrid prison and a month's stay under police supervision in Cadiz, he was deported to America. There I was caught by the February Revolution. On my way from New York I was arrested in March 1917 by the British and kept for a month in a concentration camp in Canada. I participated in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, was chairman of the St. Petersburg Council of Deputies in 1905, then in 1917. I took a close part in the October Revolution and was a member of the Soviet government. As People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, he conducted peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk with delegations from Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria. As People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, I devoted about five years to the organization of the Red Army and the restoration of the Red Navy. In the course of 1920, I connected with this the management of the disorganized railway network.

The main content of my life - with the exception of the years of the civil war - was, however, party and writing activities. In 1923, the State Publishing House began publishing my collected works. It managed to release thirteen books, not counting the previously published five volumes of military works. The publication was suspended in 1927, when the persecution against "Trotskyism" became especially fierce.

In January 1928 I was sent into exile by the current Soviet government, spent a year on the border of China, was exiled to Turkey in February 1929, I am writing these lines in Constantinople.

Even in this concise presentation, the outward flow of my life is by no means monotonous. On the contrary, by the number of turns, surprises, sharp conflicts, ups and downs, one can say that my life was rather full of "adventures." Meanwhile, let me say that in my inclination I have nothing in common with adventurers. I am rather pedantic and conservative in my habits. I love and appreciate discipline and system. Not at all for the sake of paradox, but because it is so, I must say that I cannot stand disorder and destruction. I have always been a very diligent and tidy schoolboy. These two qualities I retained in later life. During the years of the Civil War, when in my train I covered a distance equal to several equators, I rejoiced at each new fence made of fresh pine boards. Lenin, who knew about this predilection of mine, more than once teased him in a friendly way. A well-written book in which one can find new thoughts, and a good pen with which one can communicate one's own thoughts to others, have always been for me - and still are - the most valuable and close fruits of culture. The desire to learn never left me, and many times in my life I had the feeling that the revolution was preventing me from working systematically. Nevertheless, almost a third of a century of my conscious life is completely filled with revolutionary struggle, and if I had to start over, I would not hesitate to follow the same path.

I have to write these lines in emigration, the third in a row, while my closest friends fill the places of exile and the prison of the Soviet republic, in the creation of which they took a decisive part. Some of them hesitate, retreat, bow before the enemy. Some because morally used up; others because they do not find their own way out of the labyrinth of circumstances; the third - under the yoke of material repression. I have already experienced such massive withdrawal from the banner twice: after the collapse of the revolution of 1905 and at the beginning of the world war. I know fairly well, therefore, from life experience what the ebb and flow of history is. They are subject to their laws. Naked impatience will not speed up their change. I am accustomed to consider the historical perspective not from the point of view of personal destiny. To recognize the regularity of what is happening and to find one's place in this regularity - such is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, such is the highest personal satisfaction available to a person who does not dissolve his tasks in today.

L. TROTSKY

Chapter I. YANOVKA

Childhood is considered the happiest time in life. Is it always like this? No, the childhood of the few is happy. The idealization of childhood traces its lineage back to the old literature of the privileged. Prosperous, abundant, cloudless childhood in hereditarily rich and enlightened families, among caresses and games, remained in the memory, like a glade flooded with sunshine at the beginning of life's journey. The nobles in literature, or the plebeians who sang of the nobles, canonized this thoroughly aristocratic assessment of childhood. The vast majority of people, insofar as they look back at all, see, on the contrary, a dark, hungry, dependent childhood. Life hits the weak, but who is weaker than children?

My childhood was not one of hunger and cold. By the time I was born, my parental family already knew prosperity. But it was a harsh prosperity of people rising up from poverty and not wanting to stop halfway. All muscles were tense, all thoughts were directed to work and accumulation. In this everyday life, the children got a modest place. We did not know the need, but we did not know the bounty of life, its caresses. My childhood does not seem to me to be either a sunny meadow, like that of a small minority, or a gloomy cave of hunger, violence and resentment, like the childhood of many, like the childhood of the majority. It was a greyish childhood in a petty-bourgeois family, in the countryside, in a remote corner, where nature is wide, but morals, views, interests are meager and narrow.

The spiritual atmosphere that surrounded my early years, and the one in which my later conscious life passed, are two different worlds, separated from each other not only by decades and countries, but also by mountain ranges of great events, and less noticeable, but for an individual no less significant internal collapses. At the first draft of these memoirs, it often seemed to me that I was describing not my childhood, but an old journey through a distant country. I even tried to talk about myself in the third person. But this conventional form is too easily confused with fiction, that is, with what I would like to avoid in the first place.

Despite the contradiction of the two worlds, the unity of the individual passes through some hidden paths from one to the other. This explains, generally speaking, the interest in the biographies and autobiographies of people who, for one reason or another, have occupied a somewhat more extensive place in the life of society. Therefore, I will try to tell in some detail about my childhood and my school years, without foreseeing or prejudging anything, that is, without stringing facts on preconceived generalizations - just the way it was and how my memory preserved the past.

Sometimes I thought I remembered suckling my mother's breast. One must think, however, that I simply transferred to myself what I saw on younger children. I had vague memories of some scene under an apple tree in the orchard, which played out when I was about a year and a half. But this memory is also unreliable. The following incident remains most firmly in my memory: I am with my mother in Bobrinets, in the family of Ts., where there is a girl of two or three years old. They call me the groom, the girl - the bride. Children play in the hall on the painted floor, then the girl disappears, and the little boy stands alone at the chest of drawers, he experiences a moment of stupefaction, as in a dream. The mother enters with the mistress. The mother looks at the boy, then at the puddle next to him, then again at the boy, shakes her head reproachfully and says: “Shame on you” ... The boy looks at his mother, at himself and then at the puddle, as if it were something completely foreign to him. “Nothing, nothing,” says the hostess, “the children started playing.”

The little boy feels neither shame nor remorse. How old was he then? It must have been two years, but maybe three.

Around the same time, I came across a viper while walking with the nurse in the garden. “Look, Leva,” said the nurse, pointing to something shiny in the grass, “the tobacconist is buried in the ground.” Nanny took a stick and began to dig. The nanny herself was hardly more than sixteen years old. The tobacconist turned, stretched out into a snake, and crawled across the grass with a hiss. “Ai! ouch! cried the nanny, and, seizing my hand, quickly ran away. It was difficult for me to move my legs quickly. Choking, I later told how we thought we had found a tobacconist in the grass, but it turned out to be a viper.

I remember an early scene in the "white" kitchen. Neither father nor mother is at home. In the kitchen, except for the servants and the cook, their guests. The elder brother, Alexander, who came for the holidays, spins right there. He stands with both feet on a wooden shovel, as if on stilts, and dances on it for a long time on the earthen floor of the kitchen. I ask my brother to give me a shovel, I try to climb it, I fall and cry. My brother picks me up, kisses me and takes me out of the kitchen in his arms.

I must have been four years old when someone put me on a big gray mare, quiet as a sheep, without a saddle and without a bridle, only with a rope halter. Spreading my legs wide, I held on to the mane with both hands. The mare quietly drove me to a pear tree and passed under a branch that hit me in the stomach. Not understanding what this meant, I slid down the rump until I plopped into the grass. It didn't hurt, but it was incomprehensible.

I didn't have any store-bought toys when I was a kid. Only once from Kharkov did my mother bring me a paper horse and a ball. I played with homemade dolls with my younger sister. One day Aunt Fenya and Aunt Raisa, my father's sisters, made us several dolls out of rags, and Aunt Fenya drew eyes, mouth and nose with a pencil. The dolls seemed extraordinary, I remember them even now. On one of the winter evenings, Ivan Vasilievich, our engineer, cut out and glued a car with windows and wheels out of cardboard. The older brother, who arrived for Christmas, immediately declared that such a car could be made in no time. He began by pasting my wagon, armed himself with a ruler, pencil and scissors, drew for a long time, and when he cut it off according to the drawing, the wagon did not fit.

Relatives and acquaintances who were leaving for the city asked me more than once: what would you like to bring from Elizavetgrad or Nikolaev? My eyes lit up. What would you like to ask? They came to help me. Some offered a horse, some books, some colored pencils, and some skates. “Halifax skates,” I say, because I heard the name from my brother. Those who promised, forgot about their promise, barely crossed the threshold. And I lived for several weeks in hope, and then for a long time I languished in disappointment.

A bee sat on a sunflower in the front garden. Since the bees bite and caution is needed, I pluck a burdock leaf and through this leaf I grab the bee with two fingers. Unexpected and unbearable pain pierces me. With a cry, I run across the yard to the workshop, to Ivan Vasilyevich. He takes out the stinger and lubricates his finger with a life-saving liquid.

Ivan Vasilyevich had a jar in which tarantulas swam in sunflower oil. It was believed that this is the most reliable remedy for bites. I caught tarantulas together with Vitya Gertopanov. For this purpose, a piece of wax was strengthened on a thread and descended into a mink. The tarantula clings to the wax with all its paws and sticks. Then it remains only to capture it in an empty matchbox. However, the hunting of tarantulas must be related to a later time.

I remember the conversation of the elders, over a long winter evening tea, about how and when they bought Yanovka, how old each of the children was then, and when Ivan Vasilyevich entered the service. Mother says: “But Lyova was transported from the farm already ready,” and looks slyly at me. I conclude to myself, and then I say out loud: “So I was born on a farm? ..”. “No,” they tell me, “you were already born here, in Yanovka.”

“But how does mom say that they brought me ready?” ...

“This is what my mother said to herself, she was joking” ... I am not satisfied and think that this is a strange joke, but I fall silent, because on the faces of the elders I see that special smile of the initiates, which I really dislike. From these memories over winter tea, when no one is in a hurry, a chronology follows. I was born on October 26th. So, my parents moved to Yanovka from the farm in the spring or summer of 1879.

The year of my birth was the year of the first dynamite strikes against tsarism. On August 26, 1879, two months before my birth, the terrorist party Narodnaya Volya, which had come into being, passed the death sentence on Alexander II. On November 19, a dynamite attempt was already made on the tsar's train. A formidable struggle began, which led on March 1, 1881 to the assassination of Alexander II, but at the same time to the death of Narodnaya Volya itself.

The Russo-Turkish war ended the year before. In August 1879, Bismarck laid the foundations for the Austro-German alliance. Zola published a novel this year, where the future organizer of the Entente, the then Prince of Wales, is bred as a connoisseur of operetta singers ("Nana"). The wind of reaction that had intensified in European politics since the Franco-Prussian War and the defeat of the Paris Commune had not yet abated. In Germany the Social Democracy has already fallen under the exclusive laws of Bismarck. Victor Hugo and Louis Blanc in 1879 submitted to the French Chamber a demand for an amnesty for the Communards.

But neither parliamentary debates, nor diplomatic acts, nor even dynamite explosions carried their echoes to the village of Yanovka, where I saw the light and spent the first nine years of my life. On the vast steppes of the Kherson province and all of Novorossia, the kingdom of wheat and sheep lived by special laws. It was firmly protected from the intrusion of politics by its spaces and the absence of roads. Numerous steppe mounds remained here as milestones of the great migration of peoples.

My father was a farmer, first small, then larger. As a boy, he left with his family a Jewish town in the Poltava province to seek happiness on the free steppes of the South. In the Kherson and Yekaterinoslav provinces in those years there were about forty Jewish agricultural colonies with a population of about 25,000 souls. Jewish farmers were equalized with peasants not only in rights (before 1881), but also in poverty. Tireless, cruel, merciless to himself and to other labor of primitive accumulation, my father rose up.

The metric book was kept in the Gromokley colony not very well. A lot of things were written down.

When I needed to enter a secondary educational institution and it turned out that I had not yet passed the first grade for years, my birth was transferred in the metrics from 1879 to 1878. Therefore, my years were always double counted: official and family.

For the first nine years of my life, I hardly stuck my nose out of my father's village. She was called Yanovka - after the name of the landowner Yanovsky, from whom the land was bought. Old Yanovsky became a colonel from the rank and file, fell in favor with the authorities under Alexander II and received a choice of 500 acres in the still uninhabited steppes of the Kherson province. He built a straw-covered dugout in the steppe and similarly uncomplicated outbuildings. With the economy, however, it did not work. After the death of the colonel, his family settled in Poltava. Father bought over 100 acres from Yanovsky and kept 200 acres on lease. I remember the colonel, a wizened old woman, quite distinctly: she came here once or twice a year to receive rent for the land and see if everything was in place. Horses were sent for her to the station and a chair was brought out to the entrance to make it easier for her to get off the spring wagon. The phaeton appeared to his father only later, when traveling stallions also started. The old colonel was boiled chicken broth and soft-boiled eggs. Walking with my sister in the garden, the colonel tore off hardened tree resin with dry marigolds from the trunks and assured me that this was the best delicacy.

Crops expanded, the number of horses and cattle increased. They tried to get merino sheep, but things did not work out. But there were a lot of pigs. They freely walked around the yard, rummaged through all the surroundings and finally ruined the garden. The economy was carried out carefully, but in the old fashioned way. It was possible only by eye to determine which industry was profitable and which was losing. For the same reason, it was difficult to determine the size of the state. All funds were always in the ground, in the ear, in the grain, the grain lay in the bins or moved to the ports. Sometimes, over tea or at dinner, my father suddenly recalled: “Come on, write down, I received 1300 rubles from the commission agent: I sent 660 to the colonel, I gave 400 to Dembovsky, she write down that Feodosia Antonovna gave 100 rubles when I was in Yelizavetgrad in the spring.” So, roughly, bookkeeping was conducted. Nevertheless, the father slowly but stubbornly rose up.

We lived in the same earthen house that had been built by the old colonel. The roof was thatched, with innumerable sparrows' nests in a trapdoor. The walls outside gave deep cracks, and snakes started in these cracks. They were sometimes mistaken for vipers, they poured hot water from a samovar into the cracks, but to no avail. During heavy rains, the low ceilings leaked, especially in the entrance hall: cups and basins were placed on the earthen floor. The rooms were small, the windows dimly lit, the floors in two of the bedrooms and in the children's room were clay and flea-producing. A plank floor was laid in the dining room and rubbed with yellow sand once a week. And in the main room, eight paces long, which was solemnly called the hall, the floor was painted. A colonel was placed there. Bushes of yellow acacia, white and red roses grew in the front garden around the house, twisted panychs curled in summer. The yard was not fenced at all. A large earthen building under the tiles, which was already being built by my father, contained: a workshop, a master's kitchen and a human one. Then came the “small” wooden barn, followed by the “large” wooden barn, then the “new” barn, all under reeds. So that the water would not leak and the grain would not rot, the barns towered on stones. In heat and cold, dogs, pigs and poultry hid under them. Chickens found secluded places there to lay eggs. More than once I took out chicken eggs from there, crawling between the stones on my stomach: it was impossible for an adult to crawl through. On the roof of a large barn every year storks start up. Raising their red beaks to the sky, they swallow snakes and frogs - it's scary! The body of the snake wriggles out of its beak and it seems as if the snake is eating the stork from the inside.

In the barn, divided into bins, there is fresh fragrant wheat, rough prickly barley, flat, slippery, almost fluid flaxseed, black and blue rapeseed beads, thin light oats. When children play hide and seek, it is allowed, not always, but with honored guests, to hide even in barns. After climbing over the fence of the bin, I climb a wheat hill and roll over to its other side. Arms to the elbows and legs to the knees go into a blurring mass; in shoes, often torn, and grain is stuffed into the bosom. The door of the barn is closed, and a lock is hung on it for the sake of appearance by someone, only not locked - this was required by the rules of the game. I am lying in the coolness of the barn, immersed in grain, inhaling plant dust and hearing how Senya V., or Senya Zh., or Senya S., or sister Liza, or someone else wandering around the yard, find those who have hidden, but they can’t open it in any way. me, drowning in fresh arnautka.

FOREWORD

Our time is again rich in memoirs, perhaps more than ever. This is because there is something to talk about. Interest in current history is the more intense, the more dramatic the era, the richer it turns. Landscape art could not have been born in the Sahara. "Crossed" epochs, like ours, give rise to the need to look at yesterday and already such a distant day through the eyes of its active participants. This is the explanation for the tremendous development of memoir literature since the last war. Perhaps this is also the justification for this book.

The very possibility of its appearance in the world was created by a pause in the active political activity of the author. Constantinople turned out to be one of the unforeseen, although not accidental stages of my life. Here I am bivouacking, not for the first time, patiently waiting to see what happens next. Without a certain amount of "fatalism" the life of a revolutionary would be completely impossible. In any case, the intermission in Constantinople proved to be the perfect moment to look back before circumstances allowed us to move forward.

Initially, I wrote cursory autobiographical essays for newspapers and thought of limiting myself to this. I will note right there that I did not have the opportunity to follow from my refuge the form in which these essays reached the reader. But every job has its own logic. I entered my topic only by the time I was finishing the newspaper articles. Then I decided to write a book. I took another, incomparably larger scale and did the whole job anew. The only thing the original newspaper articles have in common with this book is that they talk about the same subject. Otherwise, these are two different works.

With particular thoroughness, I dwelled on the second period of the Soviet revolution, the beginning of which coincides with Lenin's illness and the opening of the campaign against "Trotskyism." The struggle of the epigones for power, as I am trying to show, was not only a personal struggle. It expressed in itself a new political chapter: the reaction against October and the preparation of Thermidor. From this follows by itself the answer to the question I have been asked so often: "How did you lose power?"

The autobiography of a revolutionary politician necessarily touches upon a whole series of theoretical questions connected with the social development of Russia, and partly of all mankind, especially with those critical periods which are called revolutions. Of course, I did not have the opportunity to consider complex theoretical problems in essence in these pages. In particular, the so-called theory of permanent revolution, which has played such a large role in my personal life and which, more importantly, is now acquiring such acute relevance for the countries of the East, passes through this book as a distant leitmotif. If this does not satisfy the reader, then I can only tell him that an examination of the problems of the revolution will essentially form the content of a special book in which I will try to sum up the most important theoretical results of the experience of the last decades.

* * *

Since a considerable number of people pass through the pages of my book, not always in the light that they themselves would choose for themselves or for their party, many of them will find my exposition lacking the necessary objectivity.

Already the appearance of passages in the periodical press caused some rebuttals. It's unavoidable. There can be no doubt that even if I succeeded in making my autobiography a simple daguerreotype of my life, which I did not aspire to at all, it would still evoke echoes of those debates that were generated in their time by the collisions set forth in it. But this book is not a dispassionate photograph of my life, but an integral part of it. On these pages I continue the struggle to which my whole life is dedicated. In stating, I characterize and evaluate; when I tell, I defend myself and, more often, I attack. It seems to me that this is the only way to make a biography objective in some higher sense, that is, to make it the most adequate expression of a person, conditions, and epoch.

Objectivity is not in feigned indifference, with which well-established hypocrisy speaks of friends and enemies, suggesting to the reader indirectly what is inconvenient for him to say directly. This kind of objectivity is only a secular trap, nothing more. I don't need her. Since I have resigned myself to the necessity of talking about myself—no one has yet succeeded in writing an autobiography without talking about himself—then I have no reason to hide my likes and dislikes, my love and my hate.

This book is controversial. It reflects the dynamics of that social life, which is all built on contradictions. The audacity of a schoolboy to a teacher; salon hairpins of envy covered with courtesy; continuous competition of trade; frenzied competition in all fields of technology, science, art, sports; parliamentary skirmishes in which a deep conflict of interests throbs; the everyday furious struggle of the press; workers' strikes; executions of demonstrators; pyroxylin suitcases sent through the air by civilized neighbors to each other; the fiery languages ​​of civil war, almost never extinguished on our planet, are all different forms of social “controversy”, from the ordinary, everyday, normal, almost imperceptible, despite its tension, to the extreme, explosive, volcanic polemics of wars and revolutions. This is our era. We grew up with her. It is what we breathe and live. How can we not be polemical if we want to be faithful to our fatherland in time?

* * *

But there is another, more elementary criterion, which concerns mere good faith in the presentation of facts. Just as the most irreconcilable revolutionary struggle must take into account the circumstances of place and time, so the most polemical work must observe the proportions that exist between things and people. I would like to hope that I have complied with this requirement not only in general, but also in parts.

In some, not numerous, however, cases, I present conversations in the form of a dialogue. No one will demand verbatim reproduction of conversations many years later. I don't claim to be. Some of the dialogues are more symbolic. But every person in his life had moments when this or that conversation was particularly vividly engraved in his memory. You usually retell such conversations more than once to your close and political friends. Thanks to this, they are fixed in memory. I have in mind, of course, primarily conversations of a political nature.

I want to note here that I used to trust my memory. Her testimony has been repeatedly subjected to objective verification and successfully withstood it. However, a caveat is needed here. If my topographic memory, not to mention my musical memory, is very weak, and my visual memory, like my linguistic memory, is rather mediocre, then my idea memory is much higher than the average level. Meanwhile, in this book, ideas, their development and the struggle of people because of these ideas, occupy, in essence, the main place.

True, memory is not an automatic counter. She is the least selfless. Often she pushes out of herself or pushes into a dark corner such episodes that are unfavorable to the life instinct that controls her, most often from the point of view of pride. But this is a matter of "psychoanalytic" criticism, which is sometimes witty and instructive, but more often capricious and arbitrary.

Needless to say, I persistently controlled my memory through documentary evidence. No matter how difficult the working conditions were for me, in the sense of library and archival information, I still had the opportunity to check all the most significant circumstances and dates that I needed.

Beginning in 1897, I fought mainly with a pen in my hands. Thus, the events of my life left an almost uninterrupted print mark for 32 years. The factional struggle in the Party, beginning in 1903, was rife with personal episodes. My opponents, like me, did not spare blows. All of them left printed scars. Since the October Revolution, the history of the revolutionary movement has occupied a large place in the studies of young Soviet scientists and entire institutions. Everything that is of interest is searched in the archives of the revolution and the tsarist police department and published with detailed factual comments. In the early years, when there was still no need to hide or disguise anything, this work was carried out with complete conscientiousness. Lenin's "Works" and some of mine were published by the state publishing house with notes, occupying dozens of pages in each volume and containing indispensable factual material both about the activities of the authors and about the events of the corresponding period.

All this, of course, facilitated my work, helping to establish the correct chronological outline and avoid factual errors, at least gross ones.

* * *

I can't deny that my life hasn't been exactly normal. The reasons for this, however, must be sought more in the conditions of the era than in me personally. Of course, certain personal traits were also needed to do the job, good or bad, that I did. But under other historical conditions, these personal characteristics could slumber peacefully, as countless human inclinations and passions slumber, for which the social situation does not demand. On the other hand, perhaps other qualities that are pushed aside or suppressed today could manifest themselves. Above the subjective rises the objective, and in the last analysis it decides.

My conscious and active activity, which began at about the age of 17-18, proceeded in a constant struggle for certain ideas. There have been no events in my personal life that in themselves would merit public attention. All the facts of my past that are anything out of the ordinary are connected with the revolutionary struggle and derive their significance from it. Only this circumstance can justify the publication of my autobiography.

But from the same source there are also difficulties for the author. The facts of personal life were so closely woven into the fabric of historical events that it is difficult to separate one from the other. However, this book is not a historical work. Events are taken not according to their objective significance, but depending on how they were connected with the facts of personal life. It is not surprising if in the characterization of individual events and entire stages there is not that proportionality that should be required if the book were a historical work. The dividing line between autobiography and the history of the revolution had to be groped empirically. Without dissolving life stories in historical research, it was necessary, however, to give the reader support in the facts of social development. I proceeded from the fact that the main contours of great events are known to the reader, and that his memory needs only brief reminders of historical facts and their sequence.

* * *

By the time this book is published, I will be 50 years old. My birthday coincides with the day of the October Revolution. Mystics and Pythagoreans can draw whatever conclusions they want from this. I myself noticed this curious coincidence only three years after the October Revolution. Until the age of 9, I lived without a break in a remote village. I studied in high school for eight years. He was arrested for the first time a year after graduation. For me, as for many of my peers, prison, exile, and emigration served as universities. I spent about four years in the tsarist prisons in two receptions. He spent the first time in royal exile for about 2 years, the second time for several weeks. Twice escaped from Siberia. In exile he lived in two receptions for about 12 years in different countries of Europe and America, two years before the revolution of 1905 and almost ten years after its defeat. During the war he was sentenced in absentia to imprisonment in Hohenzollern Germany (1915); was exiled the following year from France to Spain, where, after a short imprisonment in a Madrid prison and a month's stay under police supervision in Cadiz, he was deported to America. There I was caught by the February Revolution. On my way from New York I was arrested in March 1917 by the British and kept for a month in a concentration camp in Canada. I participated in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, was chairman of the St. Petersburg Council of Deputies in 1905, then in 1917. I took a close part in the October Revolution and was a member of the Soviet government. As People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, he conducted peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk with delegations from Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria. As People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, I devoted about five years to the organization of the Red Army and the restoration of the Red Navy. In the course of 1920, I connected with this the management of the disorganized railway network.

The main content of my life - with the exception of the years of the civil war - was, however, party and writing activities. In 1923, the State Publishing House began publishing my collected works. It managed to release thirteen books, not counting the previously published five volumes of military works. The publication was suspended in 1927, when the persecution against "Trotskyism" became especially fierce.

In January 1928 I was sent into exile by the current Soviet government, spent a year on the border of China, was exiled to Turkey in February 1929, I am writing these lines in Constantinople.

Even in this concise presentation, the outward flow of my life is by no means monotonous. On the contrary, by the number of turns, surprises, sharp conflicts, ups and downs, one can say that my life was rather full of "adventures." Meanwhile, let me say that in my inclination I have nothing in common with adventurers. I am rather pedantic and conservative in my habits. I love and appreciate discipline and system. Not at all for the sake of paradox, but because it is so, I must say that I cannot stand disorder and destruction. I have always been a very diligent and tidy schoolboy. These two qualities I retained in later life. During the years of the Civil War, when in my train I covered a distance equal to several equators, I rejoiced at each new fence made of fresh pine boards. Lenin, who knew about this predilection of mine, more than once teased him in a friendly way. A well-written book in which one can find new thoughts, and a good pen with which one can communicate one's own thoughts to others, have always been for me - and still are - the most valuable and close fruits of culture. The desire to learn never left me, and many times in my life I had the feeling that the revolution was preventing me from working systematically. Nevertheless, almost a third of a century of my conscious life is completely filled with revolutionary struggle, and if I had to start over, I would not hesitate to follow the same path.

I have to write these lines in emigration, the third in a row, while my closest friends fill the places of exile and the prison of the Soviet republic, in the creation of which they took a decisive part. Some of them hesitate, retreat, bow before the enemy. Some because morally used up; others because they do not find their own way out of the labyrinth of circumstances; the third - under the yoke of material repression. I have already experienced such massive withdrawal from the banner twice: after the collapse of the revolution of 1905 and at the beginning of the world war. I know fairly well, therefore, from life experience what the ebb and flow of history is. They are subject to their laws. Naked impatience will not speed up their change. I am accustomed to consider the historical perspective not from the point of view of personal destiny. To recognize the regularity of what is happening and to find one's place in this regularity - such is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, such is the highest personal satisfaction available to a person who does not dissolve his tasks in today.

L. TROTSKY

Chapter I. YANOVKA

Childhood is considered the happiest time in life. Is it always like this? No, the childhood of the few is happy. The idealization of childhood traces its lineage back to the old literature of the privileged. Prosperous, abundant, cloudless childhood in hereditarily rich and enlightened families, among caresses and games, remained in the memory, like a glade flooded with sunshine at the beginning of life's journey. The nobles in literature, or the plebeians who sang of the nobles, canonized this thoroughly aristocratic assessment of childhood. The vast majority of people, insofar as they look back at all, see, on the contrary, a dark, hungry, dependent childhood. Life hits the weak, but who is weaker than children?

My childhood was not one of hunger and cold. By the time I was born, my parental family already knew prosperity. But it was a harsh prosperity of people rising up from poverty and not wanting to stop halfway. All muscles were tense, all thoughts were directed to work and accumulation. In this everyday life, the children got a modest place. We did not know the need, but we did not know the bounty of life, its caresses. My childhood does not seem to me to be either a sunny meadow, like that of a small minority, or a gloomy cave of hunger, violence and resentment, like the childhood of many, like the childhood of the majority. It was a greyish childhood in a petty-bourgeois family, in the countryside, in a remote corner, where nature is wide, but morals, views, interests are meager and narrow.

The spiritual atmosphere that surrounded my early years, and the one in which my later conscious life passed, are two different worlds, separated from each other not only by decades and countries, but also by mountain ranges of great events, and less noticeable, but for an individual no less significant internal collapses. At the first draft of these memoirs, it often seemed to me that I was describing not my childhood, but an old journey through a distant country. I even tried to talk about myself in the third person. But this conventional form is too easily confused with fiction, that is, with what I would like to avoid in the first place.

Despite the contradiction of the two worlds, the unity of the individual passes through some hidden paths from one to the other. This explains, generally speaking, the interest in the biographies and autobiographies of people who, for one reason or another, have occupied a somewhat more extensive place in the life of society. Therefore, I will try to tell in some detail about my childhood and my school years, without foreseeing or prejudging anything, that is, without stringing facts on preconceived generalizations - just the way it was and how my memory preserved the past.

Sometimes I thought I remembered suckling my mother's breast. One must think, however, that I simply transferred to myself what I saw on younger children. I had vague memories of some scene under an apple tree in the orchard, which played out when I was about a year and a half. But this memory is also unreliable. The following incident remains most firmly in my memory: I am with my mother in Bobrinets, in the family of Ts., where there is a girl of two or three years old. They call me the groom, the girl - the bride. Children play in the hall on the painted floor, then the girl disappears, and the little boy stands alone at the chest of drawers, he experiences a moment of stupefaction, as in a dream. The mother enters with the mistress. The mother looks at the boy, then at the puddle next to him, then again at the boy, shakes her head reproachfully and says: “Shame on you” ... The boy looks at his mother, at himself and then at the puddle, as if it were something completely foreign to him. “Nothing, nothing,” says the hostess, “the children started playing.”

The little boy feels neither shame nor remorse. How old was he then? It must have been two years, but maybe three.

Around the same time, I came across a viper while walking with the nurse in the garden. “Look, Leva,” said the nurse, pointing to something shiny in the grass, “the tobacconist is buried in the ground.” Nanny took a stick and began to dig. The nanny herself was hardly more than sixteen years old. The tobacconist turned, stretched out into a snake, and crawled across the grass with a hiss. “Ai! ouch! cried the nanny, and, seizing my hand, quickly ran away. It was difficult for me to move my legs quickly. Choking, I later told how we thought we had found a tobacconist in the grass, but it turned out to be a viper.

I remember an early scene in the "white" kitchen. Neither father nor mother is at home. In the kitchen, except for the servants and the cook, their guests. The elder brother, Alexander, who came for the holidays, spins right there. He stands with both feet on a wooden shovel, as if on stilts, and dances on it for a long time on the earthen floor of the kitchen. I ask my brother to give me a shovel, I try to climb it, I fall and cry. My brother picks me up, kisses me and takes me out of the kitchen in his arms.

I must have been four years old when someone put me on a big gray mare, quiet as a sheep, without a saddle and without a bridle, only with a rope halter. Spreading my legs wide, I held on to the mane with both hands. The mare quietly drove me to a pear tree and passed under a branch that hit me in the stomach. Not understanding what this meant, I slid down the rump until I plopped into the grass. It didn't hurt, but it was incomprehensible.

I didn't have any store-bought toys when I was a kid. Only once from Kharkov did my mother bring me a paper horse and a ball. I played with homemade dolls with my younger sister. One day Aunt Fenya and Aunt Raisa, my father's sisters, made us several dolls out of rags, and Aunt Fenya drew eyes, mouth and nose with a pencil. The dolls seemed extraordinary, I remember them even now. On one of the winter evenings, Ivan Vasilievich, our engineer, cut out and glued a car with windows and wheels out of cardboard. The older brother, who arrived for Christmas, immediately declared that such a car could be made in no time. He began by pasting my wagon, armed himself with a ruler, pencil and scissors, drew for a long time, and when he cut it off according to the drawing, the wagon did not fit.