Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

She had been the first. He fancied that he could still recall the warm perfume of her body; the pale smoothness of her shoulders that gleamed in the evening light; her gasping breath as he entered her; the delicious tingling pain as her fingernails, claws now, raked his bowed back. And then the final unburdening, the little death that marked the end of his long childhood. There in the orchard, lying next to her in the long grass heavy with the evening dew, with the sweat rapidly cooling on his body, he had taken his first breath as a man, and had smiled to himself, because Shvigorsky had been wrong after all. With Lev Davidovich Bronstein, politics came first; everything else followed after.

That was the year that he had come to bloom. He had learnt so many things; mostly about himself. Once he had assumed the leadership of the Nikolayev group he found that he had less time to think about the importance of individuals and had to devote more time to the overall struggle. Alexandra still gave herself to him – they often worked late at the shed that housed the hectograph press – but it was unclear to him even then whether she was giving herself to him as a person or, on a more primitive level, to the leader of their pack. And, as the reputation of the cell spread (even reaching the ears of the founders of Iskra far beyond the Empire’s western frontiers) he discovered that there was a type of woman who was attracted by the scent of leadership, however slight, in much the same way that a dog came to a whistle.

That Alexandra knew of these infidelities he had long stopped doubting, although at the time he had been able to convince himself that she had been fooled by his excuses.

Sex, politics and betrayal, he thought now as he waited for Dimitri Sverchkov to return. They go together like a sleigh and ponies.

The most serious row he had ever had with Ziv, who he had suspected was himself half in love with Alexandra, had been not about theoretical points of doctrine but the danger posed by his infidelity. His promiscuity was irresponsible, Ziv had argued; a threat not only to himself but all who were connected with the South Russia Workers’ Union, as the group now called itself, as distinct from the moribund Union of Southern Russian Workers. What if Alexandra, stung by his unfaithfulness, informed the police that the shadowy master figure responsible for the purple inked leaflets and broadsheets that daily flooded the local factories was none other than the truant student L.D. Bronstein? What would he do then?

He had dismissed the idea, confident that, whatever Alexandra might do, she would not sink to becoming an informer. But Ziv had persisted. If not Alexandra, what about her brothers? Had not Lev noticed a certain coolness had sprung up between them all? Either Illya or Grigori might be goaded by the thought of their sister’s betrayal into sending the police an anonymous note, and he would never know.

This possibility had struck him as being more likely, and he had thought deeply about the matter after he had made his peace with Ziv. Alexandra would never betray him, he told himself, because in him she saw something that that she herself lacked: an inner fire that could not be doused by threat of punishment. But her brothers…

Not for the first time did it occur to Trotsky that the process of creation had been markedly unequal to the allotment of personal courage. True, Alexandra had rejected the bourgeois concept of marriage and had now become the mistress of a young and increasingly effective agitator, but that was as far as she would go out of step with the world. Whereas for him, it was only the first stage. He felt a nameless ambition growing within him. He knew not where it was leading him; only that it would not permit him to ignore such a block to its progress.