Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

For the first six weeks, Trotsky spent his time shuttling between the communal rooms he shared with Vera Zasulich and Jules Martov in Sidmouth Street and Nicolai Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya’s living quarters at Holford Square; two households both alike in dinginess, but differing greatly in temperament and purpose.

Vera and Jules preferred the bohemian life, full of midnight visitors and diversions. For weeks their rooms would remain unswept, littered with piles of dirty laundry and overflowing ashtrays. In the midst of this confusion, and miraculously to Trotsky’s mind, they were still able to produce articles for Iskra and other publications: Jules dashing off fluently brilliant critiques of the latest developments in Russia while Vera, as she admitted, agonised over every paragraph she wrote. Not for them the hours toiling over tables of statistics; they preferred the clash and clamour of ideas and were regular habitués of the scruffy public houses where gathered London’s small colony of Russian exiles of all political hues. In comparison, life at Holford Square was orderly and uneventful to the point of monotony. On most mornings, Nicolai would pick up his battered briefcase full of manuscript paper and walk to the Reading Room of the British Museum, where he would use the extensive reference library to research his latest work. Returning to their rooms, he would eat the frugal meal that Nadezhda had prepared for him; after which, leaving his wife to clear away the dishes, he would read the deciphered messages she had received that day in preparation for the next Iskra editorial conference.

At first Trotsky thought that the difference between the two households lay only in their daily routines, which he characterised as order versus chaos. He knew which was the more conducive to his ambition of becoming a regular contributor to the paper. After a month of late nights, hurried deadlines and the continuing squalor of their rooms, he envied the order and discipline of Holford Square and had often to lock his door to stem the stream of interruptions from Jules, Vera and their visitors before he could settle down to write. Yet he saw little point in living like a monk and willingly joined in the pair’s nocturnal forays, hurrying after them as they walked briskly from one meeting place to another through the unfamiliar maze of narrow streets and alleys.

As the weeks passed and his surroundings became less alien, he began to detect that deeper fissures separated the two camps. Of these, the most obvious was that Vera came from an older and more distant generation than Nicolai and Jules. More significantly, Nicolai and Jules acted. They initiated policy discussions and strived to chart the party’s course. Vera and the older editors, on the other hand, seemed only capable of reacting to events as they arose. And there was something else, something in Vera that separated her from the other editors. A homesickness; a nostalgia for the sights, smells and sounds of the land she had been forced to flee more than twenty years before.

As a Russian socialist heroine, her credentials were faultless. Trotsky had read and re-read the correspondence she had conducted with Karl Marx. Not only had she written regularly to the Great Prophet, she had even argued with him! He was mistaken, she had written, to assume that the Russian situation was a ‘special case’; that it could not develop into a socialist state as would the other, more industrialised nations of Europe. Neither of them had given way. Refusing to hand them over to Edouard Bernstein, who had been named as Marx’s literary executor, and whom she did not trust, Vera had kept the letters partly because of their historical importance and partly, she had told him with a sad smile and a shrug, for sentimental reasons.

And there it was, as the English say, ‘in a nutshell’. Vera Zasulich was a sentimental socialist, and Nicolai Lenin and Jules Martov were revolutionary socialists. If Nadezhda Krupskaya was the Keeper of the Codes then, in his mind’s eye, Vera Zasulich had become the Keeper of the Scrapbook, hoarding anecdotes, memoirs and ephemera relating to the Movement’s history over the past three decades. She was the archivist par excellence and like all archivists she was rooted in the past. The Party’s future lay in the hands of the younger men like Jules and Nicolai.