5. Country and Town¶
Core Argument¶
The first nine years of Trotsky’s life, spent entirely at Yanovka, bound him intimately to the countryside. There, he absorbed the rhythms of agriculture and the flour mill, witnessing firsthand the decay of the gentry and the relentless advance of capitalist aggrandisement. Yet the contrast with the town struck him with force upon his first return from school in Odessa: the house seemed shrunken, the bread grey, and a wall had grown between himself and his childhood. The conflicting influences of town and country coloured his entire school life. In town, relations were constant and regulated; in the country, everyone lived in open view, and his own behaviour became more unbalanced and quarrelsome. He recalls specific incidents: attempting to scythe and being mocked by a labourer; a barefoot woman waiting for a rouble owed to her; a peasant begging for his cow back; a police sergeant arresting two labourers for overdue passports. Assisting his father with bookkeeping and wage payments, he clashed over harsh terms and reacted against his father’s stinginess with porters, cutting himself off from the petty-bourgeois instinct of acquisition.
Nationality occupied no independent place in his mental equipment; as the son of a prosperous landowner, he belonged to the privileged class. Though a percentage quota cost him a school year, he was top of his grade and unaffected by restrictions. No open national baiting existed at school, but suppressed chauvinism surfaced: the history teacher Lyubimov sadistically interrogated a Polish boy about Catholic persecution of Orthodox Russians. This national inequality contributed to dissatisfaction with the existing order but never played a leading part.
The feeling of the supremacy of general over particular, law over fact, theory over experience, took root early, shaped by the town. He was indignant at superstitions, despairing when Yanovka people rejected Euclidean geometry for ‘practical’ methods, and when mechanic Ivan Vasilyevich insisted he could build a perpetual-motion machine despite the law of conservation of energy. This intellectual enmity toward empiricism, pragmatism, and ungeneralised ideology became the pivot of his social-revolutionary radicalism. During school years he held no political views but possessed an intense hatred of the existing order, derived from conditions under Alexander III, exploitation, national restrictions, and the humane Schpentzer household. Contact with classmates Rodzevich (son of a conservative colonel, later Black Hundred) and Kologrivov (who declared it duty to walk on one’s head if the chief ordered) revealed his oppositional mood. He began creating an idealised picture of Western Europe and America as a culture high in itself and universal, later part of his conception of ideal democracy. Life later beat rationalism out of him and taught him dialectics.