17 Preparing for a New Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 17: Preparing for a New Revolution
Following his second emigration, Trotsky traversed émigré colonies delivering lectures that framed the 1905 Revolution as confirmation of permanent revolution, inextricably binding Russia’s fate to world revolution. In October 1908, he launched Pravda from Vienna, a bi-monthly smuggled into Russia. Among its key contributors was A.A. Joffe, who financed the paper while undertaking revolutionary work inside Russia, enduring arrest and exile before liberation in February 1917. Trotsky memorialises Joffe’s bravery and loyalty, noting his eventual suicide in 1927 after being hounded by Stalin’s epigones. Both men had anticipated the coming revolution.
Trotsky advanced a counterintuitive thesis: economic crisis depresses the working class after defeats, and only industrial revival restores its confidence. The 1910 boom vindicated this prognosis, bringing a wave of strikes, while the 1912 Lena goldfields massacre ignited mass protests. He later applied this framework to post-war Europe and China. Yet Trotsky candidly admits that Pravda never matched Lenin’s precision on Menshevism or party organisation; he underestimated the necessity of preparatory ideological selection. In 1912, he convened a unity conference excluding the Bolsheviks, forming a ‘bloc’ with Mensheviks that lacked common political basis. Lenin opposed this unity, and events proved him correct. Trotsky stresses that Bolshevism did not emerge fully formed; Lenin himself sought unity with Menshevik-Internationalists in 1917.
Between 1912 and 1913, Trotsky served as a war correspondent in the Balkans, reporting on the Balkan Wars. He attacked Slavophilism, chauvinism, and Bulgarian atrocities against Turks, provoking liberal protests. He formed lasting friendships with Dobrudjanu-Gherea and Christian Rakovsky, who in 1913 organised the Romanian Socialist Party, later joining the Communist International. Rakovsky financed revolutionary work from his inherited Black Sea estate, splitting his week between Bucharest politics and estate farming.
Trotsky wrote for the Kievskaya Mysl, a radical Marxist paper, under censorship constraints but never writing what he did not believe, with formal consent from Lenin’s Central Committee. In Vienna, the family lived in Hütteldorf then Sievering; his wife described the setting and the children’s bilingualism. The children favoured the Klyachko family and Marxist scholar Riazanov, receiving Lutheran religious instruction as a pragmatic choice. Trotsky’s parents reconciled with his fate; his mother died of actinomycosis at Yanovka. Earnings from journalism were modest; when Pravda work left no paying time, his wife resorted to pawnshops and they faced rent confiscations.