At this particular congress, however, Lenin’s victory was short-lived. Several groups combined their strength against him and before long he found himself representing the minority view on most matters. Nevertheless, Lenin continued calling his followers “the Bolsheviks” and any who opposed him “the Mensheviks.”
Background of Leon Trotsky
One of those who now opposed Lenin was a young, twenty-three-year-old zealot named Leon Trotsky. At a future day Lenin and Trotsky would join forces, but at this congress of 1903 they stood in opposite camps. Let us pause in our narration to consider briefly the early life of Trotsky.
In many respects the background of Lenin and Trotsky was similar. Both had come from substantial families, both had been well-educated, both had become disillusioned and had engaged in revolutionary activity and both had served sentences in Siberia.
Leon Trotsky had been born to the name of Lev Bronstein. His father was a Kulak or rich peasant. Originally, Trotsky’s father had been a fugitive from the Tsar’s anti-Jewish campaign and had fled from city life to settle in a farming district near the Black Sea, where there was more religious tolerance. However, as the members of the family prospered, they gradually dropped the local synagogue as well as the observance of the Jewish Sabbath. Finally, the father came out openly in favor of atheism.
When Trotsky went away to school, he carried along with him these sympathies for materialism which he had gained from his father. These attitudes soon began to bear fruit. Toward the completion of his school, Trotsky was not only exhibiting the cynicism of a confirmed materialist, but he was also showing strong signs of becoming a political radical. Although this tendency was most displeasing to Trotsky’s father, nothing would dissuade him. Boisterous scenes erupted between the two whenever Trotsky went home for vacations and after a few years Trotsky was completely alienated from his family.
Under these circumstances it was not at all difficult for Trotsky to find a place in his mind for Marxism when it was finally presented to him. His conversion was further facilitated by the fact that he was taught Marxism by an attractive young woman six years his senior whom he later married. Her name was Alexandra Lvovna.
Trotsky was only nineteen when he and Alexandra decided to help organize the South Russian Workers’ Union. Among other things, Trotsky was assigned the task of printing an illegal paper. As might have been expected, this soon led to his arrest. Trotsky spent the next three months in solitary confinement and after a series of assignments to various prisons; he ended up in Siberia where he was joined eventually by Alexandra. They were both sentenced to serve four years in a cold, barren region where there were few settlements. Two children were born to them during this exile.
Trotsky escaped in 1902 by burying himself in a peasant’s load of hay. He reached the Siberian railroad and then used a fake identification paper to pass himself off as “Trotsky”—the name of his late jailer! He used this name from then on. With the help of several Marxist comrades, he made his way to London and arrived there in time to participate in the Social-Democratic Congress which we have already mentioned. Sometime later he was joined by his wife and children.
Upon their first meeting Lenin and Trotsky struck it off well. Lenin described Trotsky as a revolutionist of “rare abilities.” Trotsky reciprocated by suggesting that Lenin be made the chairman of the congress. During the congress, however, Trotsky saw enough of Lenin to make him apprehensive about the cold, blue-steel razor edge of Lenin’s mind. He was shocked by the reckless indifference Lenin exhibited as he lopped off some of the oldest and most respected members of the party when they opposed his views. (Trotsky’s gentle concern for the feelings of fellow comrades in 1903 stands in sharp contrast to his position in 1917-1922 when he personally supervised the ruthless liquidation of many hundreds of comrades whom he suspected of deviating from established party policy.)
As it turned out, Trotsky’s temporary opposition to Lenin in 1903 did not hurt his revolutionary career. In the years immediately following, Trotsky developed into a brilliant writer and public speaker and he became a well-known personality in Western Europe long before Lenin. He is described as a handsome, arrogant, anti-social intellectual who sometimes offended his fellow-Marxists because of his flare for elegant clothes. The down-sweep of his nose and moustache won for him the title of “The Young Eagle.”
Now let us return to the swift course of events in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement.
The Russian Revolution of 1905
By 1903 the political situation in Russia had become explosive, Tsar Nicholas II did not realize it, but he was to be the last of the Tsars. As an administrator, he had turned out to be amazingly weak. When he was a young man he had been very pleasant and friendly, and Russian liberals had hoped that after he ascended the throne he would adopt the badly needed reforms which his country required in order to take its place among the progressive nations of the world. But in this they were disappointed. Nicholas II perpetuated the imperialistic policies of his father, Alexander III, and enforced the stringent domestic policies of his grandfather who was assassinated. In fact, to satisfy his own expansive ambitions, Nicholas II plunged Russia into a senseless war with Japan in 1903. Almost immediately he found the Russian forces suffering humiliating defeat.
This Russo-Japanese War lasted a little over two years and as it neared its mortifying conclusion, the economic and political pressure on the Russian people split the seams of the Empire asunder. Government officials were assassinated, mass demonstrations were held, and a general strike was called which eventually idled more than 2,500,000 workers. The Tsar used every form of reprisal available to suppress the uprising, but mass arrests, mass imprisonment, and mass executions failed to stem the tide. The entire population was up in arms; bankers, peasants, professors, and illiterates walked side by side in the demonstration parades.
A typical example of the Tsar’s clumsy maneuvering which brought on the revolution was the Winter Palace Massacre. This event occurred on Sunday, January 22, 1905, when a priest named Father George Gapon led a parade of several thousand unarmed workers to the front of the Winter Palace to present a peaceful petition for the amelioration of labor conditions. As the marchers drew near they could be seen carrying large portraits of Nicholas II which they waved back and forth while lustily singing “God Save the Tsar.” It was a strange scene. The obvious poverty of the workers stood out in vivid contrast to the magnificent splendor of the Tsar’s Winter Palace, which was a large and extravagant structure capable of housing more than 6,500 guests in its richly decorated apartments.
But the Tsar did not come out to welcome them. Instead the marchers found the palace completely surrounded by massed troops. At first the workers were apprehensive about the situation, but they felt reassured when there was no command to disperse. Then suddenly they heard the hoarse shout of a staccato military command. Immediately the Tsar’s troops opened direct fire on the crowd. The withering volley leveled the front ranks to the ground while the remaining marchers trampled one another as they fled in terror trying to escape. The troops continued firing until the crowd completely dispersed. Approximately 500 were killed outright and 3,000 were wounded. This became notorious in Russian history as “Bloody Sunday.”