8. My First Prisons¶
Core Argument¶
In the January 1898 raids, Trotsky was arrested on a landowner’s estate where Shvigovsky worked as a gardener. Shvigovsky had hidden illegal materials overnight, but police arrived at sunrise as he retrieved them. He dropped the package behind a water barrel; the housekeeper buried it under snow. The papers remained hidden until summer, when a workman’s children discovered them and the terrified landowner handed them to the secret police.
Trotsky was first held in Nikolayev prison in a large, unfurnished, unheated cell with Yavitch. After three weeks, he was transferred to Kherson prison, where he endured three months of solitary confinement in a sealed cell with no books, paper, or pencil, surviving on bread and stew, infested with vermin. He composed revolutionary verses while pacing. His mother eventually sent parcels. Transferred to Odessa prison, he found better conditions with communication systems. There he read theological magazines, studied the Bible in four languages, and read Antonio Labriola’s Marxist essays, which convinced him against the theory of multiple historical factors. He spent nearly a year researching freemasonry, filling a thousand-page exercise book with excerpts and reflections on historical materialism, which he circulated to other prisoners via a ‘telephone’ system of strings and brooms. This manuscript was later lost in Geneva.
In prison, with limited literary resources, Trotsky used his work on freemasonry to test hypotheses formed while studying Labriola’s essays, for which he lacked the necessary prior knowledge. He made no new discoveries but arrived independently at methodological conclusions already established and applied in practice. This shaped his subsequent intellectual development. Later, in the writings of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov and Mehring, he found confirmation for what had been only guesses in need of verification. He did not absorb historical materialism dogmatically; the dialectic method revealed itself as a living spring within the historical process he was trying to understand.
Meanwhile, revolution was rising across the country. Student demonstrations were met with Cossack violence; liberals were indignant. Social Democracy strengthened and integrated with the labour movement. Revolution ceased to be a privileged intellectual pursuit. More workers were arrested. After two years, the four principal defendants in the South Russian Workers’ Union case were sentenced to four years’ exile in eastern Siberia. They were held for over six months in Moscow transfer prison, where Trotsky studied intensively, first heard of Lenin, and read his book on Russian capitalism. He wrote and smuggled out a pamphlet on the Nikolayev labour movement, published in Geneva. They were sent from Moscow prison in summer 1900, reaching their place of banishment in autumn.