9. My First Exile¶
Core Argument¶
In his first exile, Trotsky was sent to the village of Ust-Kut on the Lena River, accompanied by Alexandra Lvovna, a fellow revolutionary whom he married in a transfer prison to prevent their separation. Life in exile was brutal: extreme cold, cockroach-infested huts, summer midges, and deep mud. Trotsky studied Marx, brushing cockroaches off the page as he read. Exile colonies maintained communication through letters and transfers. He briefly worked as a clerk for a millionaire merchant but was discharged after a billing error. He then began writing for the Irkutsk newspaper Vostochnoye Obozreniye, adopting the pen name ‘Antid Oto’ to inject a Marxist antidote into the legal press. Marxism became the foundation of his philosophy, and he developed the theme of the relation between the individual and society.
Trotsky observed the crisis of ‘legal’ Russian Marxism, where the intelligentsia used Marxism to break from Populism but then discarded its revolutionary conclusions, transforming into liberal bourgeois intellectuals. Revisionists like Bernstein gained influence. Trotsky argues that the struggle against Revisionists toughened Marxists into proletarian revolutionaries. He encountered the anarchist Makhaisky, whose critique gave him an inoculation against anarchism. Trotsky and other Marxists opposed terrorism, drawing a clear line between Social Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries. He received Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and the newspaper Iskra, which outlined a centralised party of professional revolutionaries. This made his own work seem provincial, and he resolved to escape exile.
After escaping, Trotsky left behind Alexandra Lvovna and their two daughters, the younger just four months old. She insisted he must go, prioritising revolutionary duty over personal hardship. She concealed his absence from the police for several days. From abroad, Trotsky could barely maintain correspondence with her. She was subsequently exiled a second time. Thereafter they met only occasionally. Trotsky states that life separated them, but their friendship and intellectual kinship remained indestructible.