Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

“Shall I get you some tea?” suggested Sverchkov.

“Thank you Dimitri, that would be very kind. And I will see what words I can conjure up to describe our situation.”

Folding the piece of notepaper on his knee Trotsky resumed his letter to Natalya.

One of the women exiles, dressed up as a peasant woman, came to sell us milk; she played her part very well, but the owner of the house must have given her away to the soldiers and they immediately forced her to leave. The corporal was on duty at the time, worse luck. I remember how our little colony at Ust-Kut (on the Lena) used to prepare for the passage of every new lot of exiles: we tried to cook shchi, make pelmeni, in short we did exactly what the people at Demyanskoye did for us today. The passage of a large batch of exiles is a tremendous event for every little colony along the route, all of whose members are impatient for news from home.

Realising his mistake, Trotsky stopped writing. He had been with Alexandra at Ust-Kut, not Natalya. He considered the problem. He had only one piece of paper and he had written sufficient to merit the letter. If he crossed out the offending line she would only wonder what the bit was he had said. It would be better to leave it be; she would understand that his use of ‘our’ and ‘we’ had meant no disrespect to her. Alexandra Sokolovskaya and Natalya Sedova, he thought contentedly. They could not be more different.

The last memory he had of his wife Alexandra was of her sitting in the living area of their two small rooms in Verkholensk, cradling their four month old daughter Nina on her lap. In the room above, a mound of straw lay artfully arranged on his bed covered by the stained blanket that lent it the contours of a sleeping body. Alexandra had refused to look at him as he stood before her, making his clumsy speech of justification. All her passion had long been spent.

“Just get out,” she had told him. “Just go.”

The tears had been in his eyes, and not hers, as he had blundered out through their doorway and ran to the cart at the back of the merchant’s shop. He had had no illusions. With Zina two years old and Nina still at her breast, she would be open to any pressure that the authorities might care to apply. Eventually the police court had awarded Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya a further four years of exile for not reporting his escape. This, added to the original sentence of four years and then all those months in jail prior to their trial, accounted for nearly ten years of her life, and still she had not betrayed him or their comrades. Ten years, because she had trusted him and followed his lead. Undoubtedly Alexandra would smile at the news if he perished in Obdorskoye.

Well, let her, he thought with an inner shrug. I am partly the man she made me.

That summer, long ago in Shvigorsky’s market garden, it had been Alexandra that had brought him to Marxism, not the other way around. The five of them – Alexandra, her brothers Grigori and Illya, their friend Ziv and himself – would sit in the orchard on the hot dusty days and have interminable political discussions; he lying back and gazing at her body under half-closed eyelids as he listened to her brothers expound their latest theories. They had, indeed, all been poets then. He had read his verses aloud to them, hoping to impress her. If she was aware how much he had hungered for her, she had not shown it. Later she had told him that she had been unaware of his feelings, but he had never believed her.