During his two-month stay at No. 3, Trotsky tried to settle down to book work. No state publisher would take his writings, so he appealed to an independent-minded old comrade David Ryazanov, founder-director of the Marx–Engels Institute, who commissioned him to translate the classics of ‘scientific socialism’. At night, wearing felt boots to keep out the cold, Trotsky would rise from the pages of Marx to pace the room like a prisoner. At the end of the year he was given notice that he was to be exiled to Kazakhstan. His host Alexander Beloborodov (the man who had sent out the command to murder the imperial family in July 1918) was informed at the same time that he was to be sent into exile in Komi in the north.
The Soviet caricaturist Boris Efimov remembered visiting No. 3 in February 1928, just after the announcement of Trotsky’s impending deportation. The well-known critic and art historian Vyacheslav Polonsky, who had suggested the visit, had given Efimov some books for Trotsky, telling him to take no notice of the secret policeman in the stairwell. Trotsky opened the door himself, and graciously took Efimov’s coat. He showed him into a small study off the hallway, and they sat down to talk. Trotsky encouraged Efimov to keep up his work – caricature was of vital importance in such ‘odd’ times, he said – and lamented that Efimov’s brother had gone over to the ‘Thermidoreans’. The apartment smelled strongly of borscht, and soon a woman’s voice from the kitchen summoned Trotsky to the table. As Trotsky helped him on with his coat, Efimov was so overcome by embarrassment at the attentions of the great man that he could not get his arm into his sleeve. ‘Safe journey, Lev Davidovich!’ Efimov said, ‘safe return …’ and they embraced. When the secret police guard at the bottom of the stairs saw the young caricaturist leaving without his parcel of books, he reached for the telephone. Trotsky carefully packed up all his books and papers for the journey. Stalin soon regretted having allowed him to take them with him into exile.
When Trotsky reaches the scene of his deportation in his autobiography, My Life, to frame the historical pathos of the moment, he turns the narrative over to a spectator: his wife, Natalya Sedova. When the men from the OGPU (the secret police) came to take him to the railway station, Trotsky refused to go quietly; he would not allow Stalin to present his exile as voluntary. The family locked itself inside one of the rooms in the apartment. (On this particular night, Trotsky was wearing indoor slippers rather than felt boots, emphasising the violation of his temporary home.) The agents shouted orders through the door, telephoned their masters for instructions, and finally smashed their way in, reaching uniformed arms through the broken door glass. One of them shouted, ‘Shoot me, Comrade Trotsky, shoot me,’ and Trotsky told him to calm down and stop talking nonsense. The agents rammed on his boots, fur coat and shapka and lifted him through the door and down the stairs, locking his two grown sons inside the apartment. They forced their way out, and one of them, Lyova, ran up and down the staircase ringing doorbells, shouting, ‘They are carrying Comrade Trotsky away.’ ‘Frightened faces flashed by us at the doors and on the staircase,’ Sedova recalls; ‘in this house only prominent Soviet workers were living.’
In the course of the next decade, ‘prominent Soviet workers’ would learn to keep the doors closed, not to look out when they heard the heavy tread of boots on the common staircase at night, the commotion of arrest in a neighbouring apartment, or the sound that Mandelstam’s wife remembered all her life, the sound of the 1930s, the heave and whine of old lifts in ‘the hours of love and peace’.
Thinking about the meaning of the scene on the staircase, I sense that this house was not merely a setting for history, but a player in the drama. These apartments were velvet cases fashioned for the families of the bourgeoisie, for love and peace and the accumulation of possessions. Years later, Trotsky decided that the deep cause of his loss of power was the rapid development of bourgeois tastes among the revolutionaries. After the Civil War, the ‘philistine in the Bolshevik’ had been liberated. Unlike Trotsky, in his own image of himself, the others had not ‘absorbed the philosophy of revolution into their flesh and blood, so that it dominated their consciousness and co-ordinated with their sensory world’. Even before Lenin’s death, Trotsky observed, the leading Bolsheviks had begun to behave like a social elite: ‘the nomads of revolution went over to settled living, the philistine characteristics, sympathies and tastes of self-satisfied officials were aroused and developed’. They began to attend the ballet and hold drinking parties in their homes, at which they would pull to pieces anyone who happened to be absent. ‘Gossiping over a bottle of wine or returning from the ballet, one smug official would say to another: “He can think of nothing but permanent revolution.”’ Amid the splendours and comforts of No. 3, the prospect of permanent revolution stimulated little more than defensive ennui in the nomads of 1917.
Though for Trotsky Molotov embodied the apparatus of the totalitarian-bureaucratic dictatorship, he gave his opponent credit for revealing ‘a little more freedom from the ritual phrase than other Soviet leaders’. They shared a revolutionary appetite for the category of future time, free of the clutter of the present and the past, in which their weaker comrades had learned to take pleasure like ‘the most finished snobs’ of the world bourgeoisie. ‘Human personality begins for socialism not with the concern for a prosperous life’, Trotsky wrote in The Revolution Betrayed, ‘but on the contrary with the cessation of this concern.’ Trotsky’s acute denunciation of the byzantinism and police rule of the mid-1930s in that book persuaded Stalin that it was time to solve with murderous finality the problem of ‘Trotskyite’ opposition within the Party. Both Trotsky and Molotov professed belief in Marxist revolution as a threshold in history, a doorway to a bright future, to which Lenin’s vanguard party held the keys. History was moving inevitably in a certain direction, according to internal laws that could be discovered through the study of ‘scientific socialism’. Over the threshold, led by the Party, mankind would leap, as Engels had promised, from the ‘kingdom of necessity’ to the ‘kingdom of freedom’. In that coming kingdom, the ‘extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself’, who will become at last the master of history, no longer its victim, in control of himself, and in control of external nature. When society seizes the means of production from the property-owning class, the production of commodities is done away with and, simultaneously, the mastery of product over producer. There will be no more need for money or the state. Only then, according to Engels, would the dehumanising struggle for individual existence disappear. The bourgeois order is anarchy. It must be replaced by the systematic organisation of communism, when man will at last emerge into full humanity, as conscious lord of nature, no longer dominated by dead matter, by things. For dependence on things, and human relationships based on things, Marx taught, were the greatest threats to ‘mastery over one’s destiny’, unworthy of a rational creature. For Trotsky and for Molotov, despite all their lethal disagreements, Marxism was not only a map of the future, but a moral system, a guide to personal virtue. ‘Marxism is an objective science,’ Molotov said, ‘it calls bad things bad and good things good. It demands genuine uncompromising struggle for the good.’ He had always chosen revolutionary duty over his family, whom he loved ‘body and soul’, he reflected late in life, and though he thought objectivity about his own life a ‘theoretic impossibility’, his conscience was satisfied.