AND HIS NAME WAS JOEY STEEL
Trotsky: long and winding promo about how he is the smartest, the most cunning, the best technical wrestler communist on the planet
Stalin: *glass shatters*
Trotsky was jailed by a Trotsky?
he escaped jail by hiding in a hay bale in a wagon too. Pre-revolution Russia was a cartoon.
Reminds me of when Lenin was on the lam and let someone in from a storm who turned out to be a soldier who was looking for Lenin (but did not know his appearance)
you just reminded me of the 1907 Tiflis Bank robbery. Around 20 Bolsheviks planned to steal a bunch of money being transported by wagon, Stalin was among them. Also there was that guy Kamo, one of Stalin’s friends, whose other pseudonym was hilariously “The Caucasian Robin Hood.” So everyone disguised themselves as peasants, with hidden guns and grenades, except Kamo. He dressed up like an imperial cavalry officer and was driving a fancy stagecoach. The disguise actually worked. After the robbers set off bombs and started shooting at cops/guards, several of them loaded up some money on the stagecoach for Kamo to make the getaway. He was stopped by an actual cavalry officer, but he then said something like “Don’t worry, the money’s safe with me. Get to the square!” Then he took the money to the hideout.
None of them got caught.
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)
Don’t know about you, but I am un chien
