10. My First Escape¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 10: My First Escape
This chapter recounts Trotsky’s flight from Siberian exile in the autumn of 1902, an episode stripped of romantic pretension and rendered instead as a series of gritty, often absurd, practical difficulties. A peasant friend smuggles him and a woman translator of Marx out of Verkholensk under hay in a cart, while a dummy is left in his bed to deceive the police. The journey is physically punishing—Trotsky counts every bump on his back—and culminates in a mundane train ride west, where he reads the Iliad and drinks endless tea. At Samara, he is formally inducted into the Iskra organisation under the pseudonym ‘Pero’ (Pen), assigned by Kler (Krzhizhanovsky), who later abandoned revolutionary work after 1905, only to rejoin the party after it had seized power—a trajectory Trotsky identifies as typical of the intelligentsia who now form the backbone of Stalin’s regime.
The chapter provides crucial historical context for the state of Russian Social Democracy at the turn of the century. The first party congress in Minsk (1898) had failed to create a centralised party; arrests had destroyed nascent organisations, and the movement had become fragmented and provincial. The so-called ‘Economist’ tendency had emerged, prioritising economic struggles over political slogans. Iskra waged a militant campaign against this provincialism, advocating a centralised revolutionary party built from ‘professional’ revolutionaries, bound by ideological unity. Trotsky’s own travels—to Kharkov, Poltava, and Kiev—reveal the ineffectiveness of isolated trips; persistent organisational work was needed.
The escape narrative becomes a series of near-comic mishaps. At Samara station, a student (now a head of the Oil Syndicate) gives him the wrong departure time; Trotsky arrives breathless as the train departs, attracting police attention. At the frontier, a gymnasium student who sympathises with the Socialist-Revolutionaries initially refuses to guide him, enraged by Iskra’s polemics against terrorism—a revealing moment of ideological friction. The crossing itself is farcical: a Ukrainian peasant carries him through water to inflate his fee, then warns him against Jews; a cart overturns in October mud; a rooster’s piercing cries nearly betray them to border guards. Trotsky loses his glasses and curses his fate.
Arriving in Vienna with insufficient funds, he seeks out Victor Adler, the Austrian Social Democratic leader. The doorman, Fritz Austerlitz, thunders that even news of the Tsar’s assassination would not justify disturbing Adler’s Sunday rest. Trotsky persists, and Adler—a stooped, tired man with intelligent eyes—receives him, aided by his Russian daughter-in-law. The chapter ends with Trotsky’s passage assured, but the tone is wry and unheroic: escape dissolves into logistics, mud, and a rooster’s shrieks. The polemical undercurrent is clear: against the provincial Economists, against the Socialist-Revolutionaries’ terrorism, and against those like Krzhizhanovsky who later abandoned the revolution only to rejoin it after victory.