Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

It’s two days now since we left Tobolsk. Our escort consists of thirty soldiers under an NCO’s command. We left in huge troikas but after the second halt the number of horses pulling each sleigh was reduced from three to two. It was a marvellous morning, clear bright and frosty. Forest all around, still and white with frost against the clear sky. A fairy tale setting. The horses galloped at a mad pace – the usual Siberian rhythm.

As we were leaving the town (the prison is on the outskirts) a crowd of local exiles, forty or fifty persons, stood awaiting us… but we were driven away at great speed. The people here have already made up legends about us. Some say that five generals and two provincial governors are being taken into exile; other, that it is a count with his family; still others that we are members of the State Duma. And the woman in whose house we stopped last night asked the doctor:

“Are you ‘politicals’ too?”

“Yes, we’re ‘politicals’ too.”

“But then you’re surely the chiefs of all the ‘politicals’!”

Laying down his pen carefully upon the chipped edge of the saucer that served as an inkwell, Trotsky blew vigorously upon his fingers. The temperature in the room was barely above freezing point. The prison authorities in Petersburg had allowed them to keep only their overcoats, underclothes and footwear: all their other street clothes had been taken from them. In their place they had been issued with loose fitting grey prison uniforms that chafed the skin and did little to keep out the cold. Beneath these threadbare clothes his young body was gripped with spasms of uncontrollable shivering.

Wrapping his arms around himself, Trotsky thrust his fingers under his armpits, seeking the last vestiges of his body’s warmth as he read through what he had written. The cold made concentration difficult. He had lost nearly all sense of feeling in his toes. He considered whether or not he should remove his boots. His greatest anxiety was that during the night they would be stolen, either by one of the soldiers or by the man who owned the house in which they had been billeted. He knew that some of his fellow exiles thought him vain for wearing boots more suitable for strolling along the Nevsky Prospekt than for a sentence of enforced settlement within the Arctic Circle. Already his footwear had entered the vernacular of the journey. Someone had only to say, “As smart as Trotsky’s boots!” to raise a laugh. Their mockery didn’t bother him, but the boots undoubtedly were tight and his feet were now numb. He decided that he would take the boots off tonight and sleep with them under his pillow.

Re-reading his description of their passage through the forest, he nodded to himself. Natalya would appreciate that. She was always accusing him of only noticing what she called the ‘material dimensions of matter’. (“LD, a good socialist should be worldly enough to recognise both the value and the cost of such intangibles as nature and art.”) Objectively, much of the landscape through which he had been transported had been beautiful, with the clean ridges of snow taking the shapes and textures of freshly whipped meringue. Lifting his eyes from the letter, he gazed at the patterns on the darkened glass of the window in front of him. Little beads of ice swirled and spread, like ferns pressed flat against the pane.

If Natalya was here instead of me, he thought, she would have drawn that. She would not have needed to write.

Truly there were other modes of expression that could be used. Alas, he was only skilled in the written word and, as poor as it was, it had to suffice.