2. Our Neighbours and My First School¶
Core Argument¶
In the second chapter of his autobiography, Trotsky reconstructs the social landscape of his childhood, using the neighbouring estates and families of the Kherson province as a prism through which to view the broader decay of the landed gentry. The Dembovsky estate, managed by the jovial but ultimately doomed Kasimir Antonovich, who was gored to death by a bull, illustrates the precariousness of this world. The author’s father, a figure of grim observation, noted that the landowning families—whether Polish, Russian, or Jewish—were all in terminal decline. The first generation had been successful, often criminal founders; the second became a decadent aristocracy; the third produced worthless, unbalanced individuals. The Ghertopanovs were reduced to a single mortgaged thousand acres, while the Jewish M-sky family, including the erratic Moissey Kharitonovich and his son David, who wore a bandage over a pierced cheek after a failed suicide, embodied this ruin. Only the German settlers stood more firmly, with Falz-Fein, the Sheep King, towering above them all.
The year 1885 marked the end of what Trotsky calls the formless, prehistoric epoch of his early life. He was six. Though the year was marked by crop failures and the first large labour disturbances in Russia, what struck him was the incomprehensible name of the year itself. That year, he nearly crashed into a ditch after the horses bolted; his father slapped him. A year later, a teacher named Shufer was hired to instruct him in Russian, arithmetic, and Hebrew. Trotsky was placed with Aunt Rachel in the colony of Gromokley, where the Jewish section was visibly poorer than the German. School left few vivid impressions, though he remembers the teacher’s wife throwing flour in Shufer’s face. He witnessed a mob dragging a woman through the street. His former nurse Masha gave birth to a child that died within a week. Trotsky began to write, copying and composing verse, and once hid a list of forbidden words in shame. During Christmas week 1886, mummers performed ‘Tsar Maximilian’; Trotsky tried to copy the monologues from the worker Prokhor but was sent to his room. Reading, he concludes, opened a new era in his life.