13. The Return to Russia¶
Core Argument¶
In September 1904, Trotsky formally severed his ties with the Menshevik minority, having already withdrawn from active participation months earlier. Throughout the preceding year, he had clashed with Menshevik leaders over two fundamental questions: the correct attitude toward liberalism and the proper relationship with the Bolshevik faction. Trotsky argued for uncompromising resistance to liberal attempts to harness the masses for their own ends, and demanded the reunification of the two wings of Russian Social Democracy. The Bloody Sunday massacre of 22 January 1905 galvanised his decision to return to Russia. Travelling on a false passport via Munich and Vienna, he arrived in Kiev, where he wrote proclamations for the underground press and met Leonid Krassin, a Bolshevik Central Committee member who managed secret printing operations and later coordinated armed units. In St. Petersburg, Trotsky worked alongside Krassin while maintaining contact with a revolutionary Menshevik circle.
During a summer sojourn in Finland, Trotsky crystallised his theory of permanent revolution. Russia, he argued, faced a bourgeois-democratic revolution centred on the agrarian question; only the Social Democracy, acting through the industrial proletariat, could lead the peasantry. The proletarian party would seize power before its Western counterparts, and once in control would be compelled to adopt socialist measures. From this analysis flowed the demand for a provisional revolutionary government in which the proletariat would play the decisive role. Krassin submitted Trotsky’s theses as an amendment to Lenin’s resolution at the Bolshevik congress; Lenin endorsed the amendment, and it was adopted.
In late September, Trotsky retreated deeper into the Finnish interior to an isolated pension called ‘Rauha’—‘peace’. The pension was nearly deserted. A Swedish writer and an English actress fled without paying; the proprietor chased them to Helsingfors while his wife lay dying upstairs, kept alive only by champagne. She died in his absence. The head waiter went to find the husband. Only a young boy remained to serve. Heavy snow fell. Trotsky was alone with the dead woman above him, writing and pacing in absolute silence. Each evening, the postman brought St. Petersburg newspapers. Reading them, the strike appeared to be growing and spreading from town to town. The rustling papers sounded like an avalanche. Trotsky demanded his bill, ordered horses, and left ‘peace’ to meet the revolution. That same evening he was making a speech in the great hall of the Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg.