Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

“Trotsky! Outside, now!” the Doctor shouted. “And you, Comrade, sit down where I can see you.”

With a nonchalance he did not feel, Trotsky shrugged and obediently left the room, walking through to where the soldiers were sitting, smoking their pipes around a small makeshift hearth.

“Any trouble in there?” enquired the sergeant.

Trotsky shook his head.

“No,” he lied, “I just came to ask if I could go out to the gornitsa.”

The sergeant kicked the boot of the soldier sitting next to him and ordered him to escort Trotsky outside. Trotsky noted with dismay that the sergeant had chosen one of the Faction to act as his escort. Grumbling loudly, the man picked his rifle off the floor and lumbered out after his prisoner.

Although the wind had abated, the snow was still falling heavily. Together, the two men trudged past the line of sleighs already covered by a deep layer of fine solid white crystals. Opening the door of the stable, the guard motioned Trotsky inside then ordered him to wait whilst he fumbled for a match. Seeing an old oil lamp lying on its side, Trotsky bent down and picked it up, noting as he did so how the guard’s rifle had not followed his movements.

So that is how it is, he thought. The mistakes are beginning already.

Holding the lamp high for the soldier, he waited until it was lit before he walked deeper into the stable.

“Halt!” ordered the soldier. “That’s far enough. You can do it there.”

Setting down the lamp, Trotsky opened his coat and began unbuttoning the front of his trousers. Nearby, one of the ponies moved restlessly, disturbed by the presence of humans.

“What’s the matter now?” asked the soldier impatiently. “Can’t you find it?”

“In this weather?” Trotsky joked. “No, I’ve found it alright. It just won’t work.”

“Try whistling.”

“I can’t whistle.”

“Oh, one of those, eh?” sneered the guard. “Well then, in that case I’ll whistle for you. What would you like?”

Trotsky smiled to himself in the darkness.

“There’s one tune that always works. Never fails, in fact.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that, then?”

“‘God save the Tsar’. Whenever I hear that, I always piss myself laughing.”

“Is that right?” growled the guard.

Coming closer, he raised his rifle and, resting it on Trotsky’s shoulder, pressed its muzzle roughly against his cheek.

“How about I blow your fucking head off instead?” he whispered menacingly. “That way, we’ll get rid of all your shit as well.”

With his teeth bared in a rictus-like grin, his prisoner began to urinate against the stable wall.

“There you go!” encouraged the guard. “Soldier and peasant, working as one.”

Chapter Eight

Thursday 8th February 1907

Great Tobolsk Highway

When they had returned to the izba Trotsky, unwilling to return so soon to the scene of the recent confrontation, asked the sergeant’s permission to retrieve his notebook from the floor of the upper room.

Why do I always do this? Trotsky asked himself as he climbed the ladder into the attic. It is always the same pattern. Driven by luck and my own opportunism, I find myself in an advantageous situation with people wanting to like me and depending on me for leadership. Then, inevitably, I make a mess of things and end up with nothing except a crowd of disappointed friends who have been hurt by my actions. Why is it, since I know the lesson so well, that I don’t learn from it?

Sitting disconsolately on the musty matted straw on the floor he admitted to himself that it seemed, at that precise moment, that his life had been a catalogue of successive failures. First there was his own family: Momma, Poppa, Alexander and all the rest of them on the farm, where it had all started. Even as a child he had gone one step too far; carried a joke on for too long; had become overexcited and tiresome. How many people had that hurt? A half dozen perhaps, no more. Then there had been the Spentzers, where he had boarded during his stay at the Realschule… Yes, he could count them; after all, they were still “family”. There had been no need to steal the father’s books and sell them, yet he had done so. Then he had gone to another family, then onto Shvigorsky’s garden. The pattern repeated itself until finally he had become leader of the Union, only to be responsible for its collapse and the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of their supporters.