On December 16, 1905, the Russian police broke into the building of the Free Economy Society of Saint Petersburg, where what would be the last session of the Soviet of Workers’ Delegates of the Russian capital was taking place. This culminated not only Russian Revolution of 1905, but also, to put it in the words of Isaac Deutscher, the epic of the first Soviet in history, a system of direct democracy through popular delegation born spontaneously in October of that same year. This creation of the Russian proletariat, which would be reborn with the Revolution of 1917had managed to stay active for fifty days, defying nothing less than the tsarist power.
In all, some three hundred Soviet delegates had been arrested, including Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and independents. They were accused of preparing the insurrection. Among the defendants stood out the figure of Leon Trotsky. He had not only held the position of highest authority of the Soviet after the arrest of the lawyer Gueorguy Khrustalyov-Nosar, its first president; at just 25 years old, the young Trotsky he had become the driving force of the Soviet, the speaker of electrifying speeches, the editor of its manifestos and resolutions, the director of its organ, “Izvestia” (“News”). In that display of vital energy unleashed by revolutions, time was also taken to write “Nachalo” (“Inception”), the Menshevik newspaper, with which figures such as August Bebel, Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg collaborated, and to write the editorials of the “Russkaia Gazeta” (“Russian Newspaper”), which in those crucial weeks had reached a circulation of 250,000 copies.
While awaiting trial, the detainees were sent first to the Kresty prison (“Crosses”, as it is known in Russian because of its architecture) and then to the Peter and Paul Fortress, built on an island bordered by the Neva River. The delegates were invested with such great prestige that their jailers treated them with consideration and respect: they were free to meet, walk in the courtyard, hold debates, receive books, write. Rosa Luxemburg herself came to visit them as soon as she was released from prison in Warsaw.
The trial against the Soviet it was delayed until September, and that allowed the prisoners to prepare their defense several months in advance. Trotsky’s turn was on October 17. With his dramatic and oratorical skills, he explained to the judges that the Soviet had not “prepared” an armed uprising, as the prosecutor maintained. “A mass uprising is not carried out, honorable judges, (at the will of some leader). He makes himself. It is the result of social relations and conditions, and not of a plan formulated on paper. A popular insurrection cannot be mounted. It can only be foreseen.” On November 2, the jury returned its verdict: the members of the Soviet were acquitted of the charge of insurrection; but Trotsky and fourteen other defendants were sentenced to the loss of their civil rights and deportation for life to Siberia, under surveillance.
In his gray prison suit, on January 5, 1907, Trotsky was sent with the other detainees to Obdorsk, a city located on the Arctic Circle, more than 1,600 km away. from the nearest railway station. The group undertook the train journey from St. Petersburg to Tyumen, in western Siberia, crossing the Urals. From there, escorted by fifty-two soldiers, the fourteen detainees were transferred by forty horse-drawn sleighs to the city of Tobolsk, where they were housed in the local jail. Days later, the convoy resumed its route and made two stops in as many Siberian cities: Samarovo and Beriózov. Until then, they had been traveling thirty-three days.
Faced with the prospect of being condemned to follow the fate of the Russian Revolution from the distant Arctic Circle, in Beryozov, Trotsky conceived his escape plan. The vicissitudes of the path of exile and the vicissitudes of the escape were narrated by Trotsky himself in “Tudá i obratno” (“Round trip”), published in 1907 by the Shipovnik publishing house of Saint Petersburg under the pseudonym N. Trotsky, a text that Siglo XXI editorial has just published in direct translation from Russian, with the title “The escape from Siberia in a reindeer sleigh”. Some sections of this story were incorporated by the author into the second part of the German edition of “1905. Results and perspectives” (1909), whose full version has not been found in Spanish for half a century. As it happens with certain epistolary novels, we must follow the thread of the first part (the road to “go” to Siberia) through a series of letters that Trotsky sends to a correspondent -who preserves anonymous- at each stop of his way. to Beriozov. The second part (“The Return”) takes the form of a chronicle, in which the narrator takes up details about Siberia from his notebook. Fearing his capture every minute and entrusting his life and freedom to the drunken coachman Nikifor, the fugitive Trotsky becomes, perhaps against his will, a traveling ethnographer. He wanders through sparsely populated places during the coldest season of the year, participates in a reindeer hunt, spends his nights by the fire, and makes notes about the lives of the Siberian peoples whose languages and customs he learns.
Twenty-five years later, Trotsky briefly returned to the theme of his second exile in “My Life” (1930), his famous autobiographical essay. There he warned in a footnote that in his first account of his events he had omitted the name of his accomplices so as not to compromise them before the tsarist police: “In my book” 1905 “I have tried to disfigure this part of The escape. In those days, a faithful account would have put the Tsar’s police on the trail of my accomplices. I trust that Stalin will not go after them anymore because of the help they gave me; furthermore, the crime has prescribed. And there is also the extenuating circumstance that in the last stage of the escape I was helped, as will be seen, by Lenin himself.”
Since then, we have learned that his correspondent during “the trip” was none other than Natalia Sedova, the Russian revolutionary he had met in 1902 during exile in Paris and who immediately became his life partner. We also learned that the escape plan was suggested to him by his friend and fellow militant Dmitri Sverchkov. That the doctor who taught him to fake sciatica was Dr. Viot, one of the members of the convoy. And that it was Faddei Roshkovsky, a veteran of the tsarist army who was serving a sentence of exile in Beryozov, who provided him with the connections with the two peasants who would accompany and guide him during his escape: Nikita Serapionovich, nicknamed “Goat’s Foot”, who he took out of the village hidden in a straw cart, and Nikifor Ivanovich, a Zirian who did not stop drinking but who knew the Siberian steppe better than anyone and spoke the different languages of the inhabitants with familiarity.
Yes Trotsky’s expressive gifts In his other autobiographical works – “Mis peripecias en España”, “Diario del exilio” or “Mi vida” – they do not need further confirmation, whoever reads this work will find a literary narrator in its purest form, capable of appealing to all resources of “suspense” to build an engaging story, in which a runaway reindeer, a sleepy coachman or a local who fires an inopportune question can spoil the escape plan at any time. Full of Chekhovian humor, the protagonist adopts successive masks to fulfill his goal (he pretends to be a sick person, a merchant and a railway engineer who is part of an expedition) and travels armed with the most diverse means of exchange, which allow him to give away tobacco , chocolates or a bottle of rum to facilitate the outcome of an unexpected meeting, leaving as a last resort (if the situation were to turn around) the revolver hidden in the suitcase. In this work, politics only appears implicitly, to the extent that the fugitive who tells the reader of his adventures is, in short, a revolutionary condemned to exile who seeks to cross the Urals to join his wife in Saint Petersburg and, once crossed the border with Finland, finally set foot on free territory. And, outside of any spoilers of the plot, we know that he arrived there. In Oggelvy, a small town near Helsinki, Trotsky found enough peace of mind to transform his travel notes into “Tudá i obratno”, which was published in St. full-time revolutionary steps. The rematch was to come in the following decade: days after his return to Russia in May 1917 he would be seen again at the head of the Petrograd Soviet… But that’s another story.
-Horacio Tarcus is a historian. Founder and director of CeDInCI (Center for Documentation and Research of the Culture of the Left).
The reading of Leonardo Padura
Two years ago, at the end of the 80th anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky, Leonard Padura, author of “The Man Who Loved Dogs”, the novel that best recounted the assassination of the Russian leader; he was amazed at the number of requests for interviews and articles he received from all over the world. “Trotsky and his thought were still valid, capable of transmitting something useful to us for our turbulent present?” This question and others like it head the foreword he wrote to “The Escape from Siberia in a Reindeer Sleigh.” A few lines further down, he himself answers that, unlike his assassins, Trotsky “has come out as a symbol of resistance and coherence.”
The text of “La fuga…” is an excellent way to delve into the most intimate personality of the political leader. “He gives us an observant Trotsky, profound, human, at times ironic, who looks around and expresses a state of mind or takes a photograph of an environment that, without a doubt, reveals itself to be extreme, exotic, almost inhuman”, explains about the style of this text that is translated for the first time into Spanish.
And he concludes: “(this) publication can be a tribute to the memory of a thinker, writer and fighter murdered more than 80 years ago who, in today’s world of such disbelief, still makes some think that utopia is possible. Or, at least, necessary.
Round trip
A fragment of Trotsky’s text translated under the title “The flight from Siberia in a reindeer sleigh” (21st century).
“The sun was dazzling. It was hard for me to open my eyes. Even through the eyelids, the snow and the sun poured into the eyes like incandescent metal. A cold and constant wind was blowing, so it was impossible for the snow to melt. (…) The forest remains the same as before: criss-crossed with animal tracks (…). Here, the hare splashed his useless ‘eses’. Hares leave many tracks, because they have no one to hunt them. I see a circle marked by the hare’s feet; the aligned footprints traverse it like axes and scatter in all directions. It would seem that there had been a nocturnal concentration and the hares, surprised by the patrol, would have scattered through the forest. Partridges also abound: the traces of their sharp little legs can be seen everywhere. Along the path the stealthy tracks of the fox extend in a straight line of about 30 paces. Down the slope of that snowy hill descend the tracks of a pack of wolves. One after another, they headed for the river, always scattering the same trail. Everywhere you can glimpse, barely perceptible, the footprints of wild moles. The slight stoat had occasion to leave its tracks in many places: they look like stamps stamped by the knots of a rope stretched in the snow. Here, a string of gigantic holes criss-crosses the road: they are the clumsy steps of the moose”.
Route map. The dotted line marks the deportation route; the scripted one, the escape route.
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