AND HIS NAME WAS JOEY STEEL
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.
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)
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.
Stalin initially called himself Koba, which is like someone calling themselves Robin Hood
I was going to tell a story relating to that name, but I first went to look it up and, as far as I can tell, the story was an anticommunist invention. God fucking damn it everything is a lie.
The story was about “Bukharin’s Last Plea,” which I now cannot find evidence for existing in the archives despite that being exactly where it should be based on the story (having supposedly been found in Stalin’s desk after he died).
Yeah, I’ve heard about that one. Stalin reportedly kept a letter from Bukharin in his desk saying “Koba, why do you need me to die?” kept next to other famous letters like Lenin’s one calling Stalin rude for arguing with Krupskaya, that one where Tito says “please stop sending guys to kill me,” plus a few others that I don’t remember. It’s cartoon villain stuff, saying Stalin kept all his most evil accomplishments close in his desk to bask in their glow or something.
The Bukharin’s last plea thing first got reported in 2006 and its primary source was never found, just reported on by two Russian historians. One of whom is Roy Medvedev, who is one of those weird types of Russians who put their faith in socialism in…Vladimir Putin somehow.
I’m not sure if I’d say that he “puts his faith in socialism” since he was around for plenty of the USSR and was a dissident and antistalinist! Then again, Khrushchev claimed to be a Marxist despite being a fucking collaborationist in terms of professed beliefs, so maybe that’s just the failure of Soviet education in Marxism.
I can believe, if the letter was real, that Stalin would keep it for his entire life due to the guilt, but it doesn’t seem to be or else it would a) have been reported on sooner and b) be in the damn archive! Of course, the two historians give it the cartoon villain characterization you describe except for the Lenin one, which they admit was for a more human reason. I don’t see why he’d even bother with the Tito one except that it (if it was real) would be an excellent show of rhetoric. I think only the Lenin one was real of the three though.
And there are conflicting stories, but in the one that mentions there being five letters, the other two were forgotten by Khrushchev, who was telling this to a third party who told this to the historians, so you remembered all of the ones that were attested.
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*
Biggus Dickus
