Ritual and dogma of higher magic. Eliphas Levi, "the doctrine and ritual of higher magic." Period after imprisonment

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 it seems 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 the way 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 hands 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. It 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 forced, 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 blow, 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.

Pros: Heartfelt. Disadvantages: Subjectivism inherent in any autobiography. It's small, but it's there. Comment: The publisher is excellent. Done sincerely, in the Soviet way. The book itself is an amateur author. I am an amateur. An extremely underestimated person, due to propaganda. The right does not like the lion, and the left doubts him. History is written by the winners. This time Joseph was stronger.

Nepovinnykh Igor Vladimirovich0

Very talentedly written. It was not in vain that Trotsky dreamed of being a writer since childhood ... The inclinations of a writer were preserved for life. While reading this book, in places I recalled Mamin-Sibiryak. I don't know why I remember, but I remember. In general, from a purely literary and artistic point of view, I would divide the book into two parts. The first is a description of childhood, life in the native village, the characters and life of people, impressions and feelings fed by this life. This is a well-written, very interesting part of the book. Equally brilliant is the second "political" part of it. However, politics in this case did much harm to literature. At the same time, no one obliged the memoirist to be also a writer. A person describes life as best he can. In the case of Trotsky, you expect something extraordinary and, in principle, you get what you expected. Personally, I am frustrated by the naturally increasing pace of the political tension of the narrative, in which more and more often evil allusions to Stalin, political enemies and other "epigons" flicker. But this is my subjective perception. It could not have been otherwise, for literature, politics and life became an inseparable whole for Trotsky. Of course, he could not describe his life without bearing in mind the political conjuncture of the contemporary writing of the day and the complex of painful memories left after the political struggle. The book is replete with interesting pictures from the life of pre-revolutionary Russia and Ukraine. For the uninitiated, the description of the exile may also seem unexpected ... this humane, comfortable ... simply incredible in the light of the tsarist exile that followed the Gulag era, in which the "political" continued to work on their theories, prepared a revolution, wrote articles and argued ... argued ... argued ... Interesting and description of prisons. Yes, there were prisons... So Nehru wrote so much in the British prisons of India... Thank God there was no Stalin on them, otherwise what would we read... The book is easy to read and captures. Sometimes you just forget who wrote it - not a writer, but a revolutionary. And of course, this book is important as a historical source in which the picture of the October Revolution is revealed from a completely, for the majority, new side. My grandmother recalled that in the difficult pre-war years, my great-great-grandmother constantly repeated: “Well, where is Trotsky looking?” She was old and did not understand that Stalin had been at the head of the state for a long time, but it is significant that the name of Trotsky was imprinted in her memory .... Since it was he who made the coup, he, according to Lenin, was the most talented in the party, he was the creator of the Red Army, he was the second person after Lenin, but the bureaucracy turned out to be stronger ... Instead of strangling the secretariat of the Central Committee with all its intrigues and enmity Trotsky hesitated ... In fact, he was not interested in seizing power for the sake of power ... The revolution was his dream, he was worried about world-class problems, and squabbling for power with Stalin and Zinoviev, Radek and Kamenev was not interesting ... He preferred to write about art, rather than get involved in a squabble , one of the deliberate goals of which was its destruction ... This is an excellent and, in my opinion, very useful book. A special look at the revolution and the further evolution of the Soviet state, expressed by a Marxist-internationalist for whom the path chosen by Stalin seemed to be the path of national-patriotic, national-socialist, non-Marxist and treacherous ... It seems to me that Trotsky sincerely believed that the Soviet state could become different, not what it has become. And apparently, he did not understand how natural his fate and the fate of the Soviet country after the revolution was. Until the very end, he remained an idealist who believed in Marxism, a revolutionary romantic, convinced of the inevitable triumph of Marxism on a global scale. A highly creative polyglot. “Nature and people, not only in school, but also in the later years of my youth, occupied a smaller place in my spiritual life than books and thoughts.” P. 72. “I looked into myself and into the books in which I again sought myself or my future.” P. 72. “I carried the need and willingness to learn in all its sharpness and freshness through my whole life.” P. 186. About creative happiness in the tsarist prison and the Peter and Paul Fortress under the provisional government: “I feel great ... I sit, work and know for sure that they can’t arrest me in any way ... Agree that this is quite unusual within the borders of tsarist Russia ... ". P. 189. "Even in the carriage during the civil war, I found watches for the novelties of French literature." P. 190. “After all, I can't complain about my prisons. They were a good school for me. I left the tightly sealed loneliness of the Peter and Paul Fortress with a touch of chagrin: it was quiet there, so even, so noiseless, so ideally good for mental work ... ". P. 190. “Unter, standing in our prison car at the clock with a saber unsheathed, recited fresh revolutionary verses to us.” P. 193. “Our letters from the road were secretly lowered into the box by escort soldiers.” P. 194. “In prison, with a book or pen in hand, I experienced the same hours of supreme satisfaction as at the mass meetings of the revolution. I felt the mechanics of power more as an inevitable burden than as a spiritual satisfaction. S. 569.

Advantages: The quality of the book is excellent, many interesting photographs Comment: Yes, this is how they lose outstanding writers ... Lyova, Lyova, then the revolutionary fashion pulled you to give your writing abilities to the service of the current era, and not to the high ideals of world literature. If he lived his entire adult life under the tsar and died there, they would praise him now and carry him in their arms like Pushkin and Gogol. They would erect monuments to you and read your opuses, quote at school, analyzing excellent images. And so famous only, perhaps, the canonical ice ax and various obscene jokes. The revolution devours its heroes, and it was swallowed up, though much later than the rest of the Leninist guard. Under Ilyich, you were used in the civil war, under Stalin, as a scarecrow on which all failures could be blamed. And, meanwhile, this man was talented, and in many ways talented. This work reads like an adventure novel. And it's hard to call it memoirs in general. Too cool and dynamically described events. Should historians believe him in relation to individual events and portraits of revolutionaries and other political figures? Quite. Trotsky, unlike the same Whites, is worth believing, since he worked side by side with Lenin and all the people whom he describes here, so he knows better plus writer's insight. Trotsky entered his own groove in the civil war, where all his organizational abilities were manifested. And then his time was up. The writer Leva also merged with the politician Trotsky. Brodsky was carried in his arms after leaving the USSR, a victim of the system, and no one wanted to see this, political exiles create many problems, unlike the creative elite. Tragedy, but he chose his own path. In any case, this reading is fascinating even for apolitical people, not to mention those who are fond of history.

Igor Chekunov0

I liked it very much. The book told a lot about Trotsky, about his views, beliefs, and so on. I first heard about Trotsky from my grandfather when he talked about polit. Lenin's testament. I was 5 years old at the time. And he became interested in Trotsky recently, at 15

The book is great! The edition itself is on good white paper, however, in my opinion, either the font could be a little larger, or the distance between the lines a little more. There are two inserts of ~10 pages with photos from the personal archive of the author himself, basically. The narrative is captivating - although it is a biographical work, it reads like a novel: all the facts are presented in sufficient detail, but at the same time literary, without frills and with appropriate subtle humor. It contains a lot of interesting details about the historical events of the early twentieth century, which I learned about from this book for the first time. For anyone who is interested in history or just wants to know more about what really happened in 1900-1930, the book will be very interesting. Didn't notice any prints. Recommend! Read on and you won't regret it!

Leon Trotsky

My life

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 is in 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 on a whole series of theoretical questions connected with the social development of Russia, and partly of all mankind, especially with those critical periods that 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 in essence will form the content of a special book in which I will try to sum up the most important theoretical results of the experience of recent 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, which are 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 part 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.

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. A 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 his 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 the future 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."