Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

Like the waves of the mighty oceans, the revolutionary impulse rose and fell in time to the cycle of economic development; between peak and trough might pass a man’s lifetime, or at least the best years of his youth. Who was left from the struggles of the 1870s? Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, Deutsch and maybe a handful of others. They were all spent, even Deutsch now. Nicolai Lenin had been right. The Old Gang had been so long in foreign exile that they had nothing to offer the new generation at home. They did not even speak the same language anymore; the best that could be said for them was that they still paid some sort of lip-service to social democracy. They had not collaborated with the bourgeoisie like Millerand and Juares in France, or recanted like Bernstein. Beyond that, they were indistinguishable from any of the other shambling old men. Their whole generation was the same: the best had died in the morning, still hot with their radicalism. The remainder had basked in the early afternoon, genial heroes resting from the Struggle; their revolutionary ardour gradually cooling as their declining years brought them to the chill evening of cautious conservatism.

Thirty years! he thought glumly.

How many of his comrades would still be alive in 1937, and if alive, still active? The Old Gang would be long dead, but what of Nicolai and Martov; Parvus and Potresov?

Potresov would never make old bones; of that he was certain. Aleksandr fretted too much: about the way he had disappointed his parents; about his need to be needed. Eventually he would leave the Party just as he had left his father’s house; because he could no longer bear to stay. He would enter the howling wilderness of despair that is only silenced by Death. At the finish, he might even turn informer to save his skin and end up like the priest Gapon. Like Gapon, Potresov had neither the faith that found solace in a monastery nor the intellect to graze contentedly in a university library.

Parvus also would drift away, chastened by his prison experience and drawn by his gambler’s desire for easy wealth. But at least he would not betray his brothers. However rich Parvus became – and it was quite possible that he could become a millionaire in whichever country and currency he chose to adopt – his old comrades would still be welcome to a good dinner and a bed for the night. In return, he would ask for nothing, save perhaps an advance warning as to where the next wave of strikes were to occur. No, his soul was as light as Potresov’s was dark. There was a merriment in his scurrilous nature that even his sternest judges had to smile at. In 1937, Trotsky reckoned, he would be sunning himself on the Promenade des Anglais, twirling his moustache and raising his hat in salute to the prettiest women as they passed him by.

Which only left Nicolai and Martov, and to know what they would be doing in thirty years’ time would be to know the fate of Russia. Nicolai would be old; nearly seventy. The years underground would have left their mark. Would he still be waking with a shout in the middle of the night and lying cowering in Krupskaya’s pudgy arms, believing that the O. were on the stairs? Or would that cold calculating machine he called his mind, which had split the Party time and time again in its ruthless hunt for power, finally shatter and drive him into the squalor of a public madhouse?

Trotsky was certain only of one thing: that Nicolai would never cease the revolutionary struggle. There would be no mellowing, no letting up. When Death came to claim Nicolai, he would brush it aside as being a theoretical irrelevance. Nicolai Lenin would never die. His ghost would haunt his political descendants: a perennial rebuke to those who undertook the easy path that deviated from the iron dictates of Party control. His was the fist and Martov’s the open hand.

And what of himself? What of Lev Davidovich Bronstein alias Yanovka alias Vikentiev alias Leon Trotsky? Neither political camp shared his vision. Neither could see that Socialism could be built in their lifetime but only as a global phenomenon. Martov would reject it out of hand as militant idealism and Nicolai (suspicious of intuition and wary of a challenge to his personal supremacy) would denounce it as infantile and tantamount to heresy. To make that great leap forward, transcending the illusion of national boundaries, telescoping the transitional period of bourgeois parliamentarianism into two or three years – perhaps even less – instead of having to endure the century of grinding exploitation that it took to form a skilled and politically conscious urban proletariat… To be prepared to do that would be inconceivable to them. He would be like a prophet dressed in goat skins and eating wild honey and locusts, his exhortations greeted either with scepticism or derision. Yet, having seen the Way, what else could he do? The only alternative was atrophy.