AND HIS NAME WAS JOEY STEEL
lol yeah, he was on his own for part of the journey. Out of everyone’s accounts of exile, I’ve always liked Trotsky’s writing the most. He was prolific and had a good sense of literary structure. The book 1905 is really good, mostly talks about his exile to Siberia and his escape back to Moscow. The most interesting parts are when he’s huddled together with other exiles, who are things like petty criminals or victims of ethnic cleansing or whatever. And here’s Trotsky as this like educated nerd with little nerd glasses and the others will ask him stuff like “Is it true you live where the Tsar lives?” “Have you met the Tsar?” And he’s so out of his element.
I always think about this part, where Trotsky was huddled together in a house with a bunch of fellow exiles (mostly country bumpkins and peasants) and he’s acting as like an impromptu doctor, because he’s the only one with any formal education:
quote
[Trotsky]: “Would you mind if I asked what party you sympathize with?”
[Exile]: “Me? I’m a social democrat by conviction … because the social-democratic party puts everything on a scientific basis.”
I felt like rubbing my eyes. The depths of the taiga, a dirty native hut, a crowd of drunken Voguls, and here was some petty merchant’s clerk telling me that he was a believer in social democracy because of its “scientific basis!” I must admit I felt a sudden upsurge of party pride.
(by social democracy they mean communism, because words like Marxism and socialism had been censored for decades by this point and weren’t totally in common use anymore)
