23. In a Concentration Camp¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 23: In a Concentration Camp
This chapter recounts Trotsky’s arrest and internment by British authorities in Canada during his return to Russia in April 1917, offering a searing indictment of Allied hypocrisy and the collusion between British imperialism and the Russian Provisional Government against revolutionary socialists. The narrative thrust is the exposure of the “democratic” Allies as enforcers of Tsarist-era repression, acting not on legal grounds but on political animus.
Trotsky describes how, after securing passports from the Russian Consul in New York and departing on 27 March aboard the Christianiafjord, he and five other Russian revolutionaries were forcibly removed at Halifax by armed British bluejackets. The pretext was that they were “dangerous to the present Russian government” and “dangerous to the Allies in general.” No written orders were produced. Trotsky contrasts this treatment with the perfunctory checks given to other passengers, framing it as deliberate discrimination against Russian revolutionaries. He draws a direct parallel to the Tsar’s Peter-Paul Fortress, noting that even there searches were conducted in private, whereas the British subjected them to public humiliation before a dozen men.
The chapter details conditions at the Amherst camp, an old iron foundry housing eight hundred prisoners—mostly German sailors and workers, with a minority of officers and bourgeois civilians. Trotsky emphasises the class divide within the camp: the officers, still maintaining conduct books, regarded him as an enemy, while the rank-and-file sailors and workers surrounded him with “ever-increasing friendliness.” He describes the camp as a continuous mass meeting, where he spoke about the Russian revolution, Liebknecht, Lenin, and the collapse of the Second International. The camp commander, Colonel Morris—a Boer War veteran who longed to have Trotsky “on the South African coast”—forbade public speeches, but five hundred and thirty prisoners signed a protest, a plebiscite Trotsky presents as ample compensation for the hardships.
Trotsky polemicises fiercely against the British ambassador to Russia, Buchanan, and the Provisional Government’s foreign minister, Milyukov. He cites Buchanan’s official slander that the arrested Russians were travelling “under a subsidy from the German embassy to overthrow the Provisional government,” and reproduces Pravda’s response—likely by Lenin’s hand—denouncing this as “a patent, unheard-of, and malicious slander.” Trotsky notes that Buchanan later admitted knowing nothing of the subsidy, and uses this to condemn the universal lying of the “great war for liberty.” He also dissects Buchanan’s memoirs, which claim Milyukov first requested the prisoners’ release, then withdrew the request to prolong their detention. Trotsky accepts this as truth, observing that Milyukov had coined the term “Trotskyism” in 1905 and was “heart and soul in favour of my arrest.” Only the intervention of the Soviet forced Milyukov to relent.
The chapter closes with Trotsky’s release on 29 April, achieved only after a standoff in which he and his comrades refused to leave their bunks until told their destination. The send-off from the German sailors and workers—an improvised band playing the revolutionary march, fraternisation across enemy lines in the midst of war—stands as a concrete refutation of the Allied narrative. Trotsky ends with a warning to the police officer Machen that he would question Milyukov in the Constituent Assembly, a threat Machen hopes will never be realised.