Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Trotsky was to become a hero of the anti-Stalinist Left in the West during the second half of the 20th century, his ruthlessness, arrogance, arbitrariness, and dictatorial nature being largely forgotten by his acolytes. He was the subject of innumerable academic studies and many fictional accounts (notably Joseph Losey’s 1972 feature film, The Assassination of Trotsky, in which he was played by Richard Burton). His last home, a fortified villa in Coyoacán, Mexico City, where Trotsky is buried, is preserved as a quiet and dignified museum in his memory. Yet in Russia, the Gorbachev regime never got around to rehabilitating him, although his image was allowed to appear on a postage stamp in 1987, while his son (Sergei Sedov, killed by the NKVD in 1937) was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988, and (from 1989) his books began to be republished and became once again available in Russian libraries.

TROTSKY’S TRAIN. The mobile command and propaganda center that L. D. Trotsky referred to merely as “the train” (formally known as “The Train of the Chairman of the Revvoensovet of the Republic”) was first formed at Moscow, on 7 August 1918. It initially consisted of 2 armored engines and 12 wagons, and was immediately dispatched for Sviiazhsk, on the Volga Front, with a unit of Latvian Riflemen on board. In the course of the civil wars, the train made 36 such visits to the various Red fronts and traveled at least 75,000 miles.

By late 1919, the configuration of Trotsky’s train had evolved to embrace two separate echelons that included several armored wagons (with turrets and embrasures for machine guns and cannon), flatbed trucks to transport armored cars and other vehicles (including Trotsky’s own command car, a Rolls-Royce that had been commandeered from the tsar’s garage), a telegraph station, a radio station, an electricity-generating wagon, a printing house (with presses), a library, a secretariat wagon, a kitchen, a bathhouse wagon, and even a special wagon for transporting a collapsible small aircraft. Also on board were a special guard unit of some 100 elite troops (mostly Latvians), who dressed in special red uniforms and hats of Red Army style (the budenovka), as well as cooks and other staff, mechanics, technicians, political agitators, and secretaries. By 21 January 1921, there were 407 people attached to the institution of “the train,” doing 80 different jobs.

The train was in action against White and other forces on 13 occasions during the civil wars, suffered 15 casualties (and 15 more “missing”), and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for its part in deflecting the advance on Petrograd of General N. N. Iudenich in October 1919. However, its role was not chiefly to fight. Rather, the train provided a secure and mobile base for the central army command, as well as serving, as Trotsky’s assistant Lieutenant Ia. Shatunovskii put it, as “a real school for Communism,” with the “militant brotherhood” of its highly disciplined staff acting as an example to the Red Army. Or, as Trotsky put it in his memoirs, albeit with some exaggeration: “The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October Revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement.”

Trubetskoi, Grigorii Nikolaevich (17 September 1874–6 January 1930). A graduate of Moscow University, where he defended his master’s thesis in 1896, the White politician Prince G. N. Trubetskoi (brother of the religious philosopher E. N. Trubetskoi and scion of an ancient noble family) made a career in the tsarist diplomatic service from 1896, working in the Russian embassies in Vienna, Berlin, and Constantinople, before retiring from the service in 1906 to devote himself to the cause of liberalism. He subsequently published many articles on foreign policy issues—in Moskovskii ezhenedel′nik (“Moscow Weekly”), which (together with his brother) he edited, and other liberal journals—that betrayed an element of pan-Slavism in his thought. He returned to the diplomatic service in 1912 and was appointed head of the Department of Near Eastern Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by his friend, the foreign minister, S. D. Sazonov. In June 1914, he was appointed special emissary to Serbia; in 1915, he was slated to be the future Russian governor of Constantinople; and in 1916–1917, he served as head of the diplomatic chancery at the headquarters of the Russian Army.