6. The Break¶
Core Argument¶
The 1890s marked a decisive political rupture in Russia, a decade whose official date was set by the famine of 1891. The labour question moved to the centre of national life as capitalism developed stormily under Witte’s industrial protectionism, financed by the Franco-Russian alliance. The intelligentsia shifted decisively towards action: young Marxists and a revived populist movement emerged, and Struve’s first legally printed Marxist work appeared in 1893. When Alexander III died in 1894, the new Tsar Nicholas II dismissed the Zemstvo’s constitutional aspirations as ‘nonsensical dreams’, confirming the autocracy’s intransigence.
Trotsky, then in his mid-teens, was politically backward. Odessa lagged behind other cities; he knew neither Marx nor Engels. His vague oppositionism was shaped by the stagnant atmosphere of the 1880s. In Nikolayev in 1896, he encountered Marxism and populism through former exiles and the gardener Shvigovsky. He initially resisted socialist ideas, playing the sceptic, but within months swung leftward. He broke with his family, refused material support, and lived communally with Shvigovsky. They organised a library campaign, a mutual instruction university, and a society for distributing books, though a gendarme infiltrated their circle. Trotsky wrote an unsuccessful polemical article against Marxism. He struggled to master ideas unsystematically, reading Mill, Lippert, Chernyshevsky and Mignet, and was repelled by Marxism partly because it seemed a completed system.
Trotsky and the elder Sokolovsky brother temporarily left the commune to write a play. The play had a social theme, set against a generational conflict. Though both authors only half-trusted Marxism, the populist character was weak while the young Marxists embodied courage, youth, and hope. A crushed older-generation revolutionary loved a young Marxist girl, who rejected him with a speech on populism’s failure. They wrote together, correcting each other, or divided acts into sections. Sokolovsky revised the crushed hero’s speeches in the evenings; Trotsky returned from lessons or Shvigovsky’s. They completed the first act with a proper curtain effect and drafted the remaining four acts, but gradually lost enthusiasm and abandoned the project. Sokolovsky took the manuscript to another lodging. After their arrest, he tried to locate it through relatives, hoping to finish the drama in exile, but the manuscript had vanished, probably burned by those who housed it upon the authors’ arrest. Trotsky notes he can accept this loss, having lost far more valuable manuscripts later.