Yael: One story that I really like about Trotsky in the US.
He often frequented a restaurant in the Bronx called the Triangle Dairy Restaurant. And he was hated because he never tipped the waiters.
Schwab: It’s like I refuse to perpetuate this system. You deserve a living wage. Yeah.
Exactly. And so he never tipped, but he kept going back there. And apparently one of the waiters spilled soup on him intentionally and everybody hated him…..
Schwab: Workers were like, we appreciate your solidarity, but you know what we’d appreciate more? Your money.
Yael: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Yael Steiner.
Schwab: And I’m Jonathan Schwab.
And this week, Yael , you have a story for me, right?
Yael: I have an epic for you
Schwab: An epic.
Schwab: Wow. Is this going to be a movie this summer from Christopher Nolan?
Yael: It could be. It probably should be. I would argue, and this is not a morality judgment This is just a legacy judgment. I would say that the person we are about to discuss is probably one of the 10 most important people of the 20th century, maybe even one of the five most important people of the 20th century.
Schwab: Whoa.
Schwab: Wow, okay, I know we have another episode planned for later this season that you can maybe make the same argument. So I’m curious to hear more about yours and then, I don’t know, maybe contrast the two when we get to that.
Yael: Interesting.
Yael: So we are going to be discussing a gentleman whose birth name was actually he really wasn’t a gentleman. We’re going to be discussing an individual named Lev Davidovich Bronstein who might be more familiar.
Schwab: I have Davidovich Bronstein and his real name is Bruce Springsteen.
Yael: Might be more familiarly known to you and others as Leon Trotsky?
Schwab: Him I’ve heard of.
Yael: Okay, I thought that you might have. The thing about Trotsky is that his name gets thrown around a lot. I knew who he was as a figurehead and what movement he represented and what time period he represented. But the actual details of his life are so fascinating. And I don’t think that there is any possible way to cover all of them in this short podcast.
So I’m hoping that our listeners have some familiarity with Trotsky. I’m going to go through a basic primer of him and the Russian Revolution. Spoiler alert, he is important in the Russian Revolution.
Did you learn about Trotsky in high school?
Schwab: Well, it was for sure taught. The question is whether I was paying attention, whether I retained that knowledge, for sure he was at some point a multiple choice question, so which group of people were associated with the Russian Revolution? And you look for Trotsky and Lenin and maybe one other guy.
Yael: Exactly. Okay, so Trotsky’s relationship with Lenin was very hot and cold.
Schwab: Yeah, and just so that people know, the Lenin we’re talking about is Vladimir, not John.
Yael: Yes, yes, L-E-N-I-N, Vladimir, not L-E-N-N-O-N, John. Also a very important person in the 20th century.
Schwab: Definitely. Maybe not top five, but yeah.
Yael: I guess it depends who you ask. So Lev Davidovich Bronstein, who later became Leon Trotsky, he chose the name Trotsky when he was escaping from Siberia, his first exile in Siberia. Trotsky was actually the name of one of his jailers in Odessa the first time he went to prison.
Schwab: Hmm, Interesting choice.
Bronstein slash Trotsky I’m just gonna call him Trotsky from now on was born in 1879 in southern Ukraine to Jewish parents.
Schwab: I will say, think that’s another fact that I would say I know is this important person to the Russian Revolution, I was aware, he’s Jewish.
Yael: Yes, he is Jewish, though he would like not to be. Religion in general, if you know anything about Marxism, which was the ideological underpinning of the Russian Revolution, Marx was not a fan of religion. He identified it with like a level one narcotic.
Schwab: Sure the opiate of the mass is, right? Yeah.
Yael: The opiate or the mass is that what it is level one narcotic. Yes, schedules, you’re right. I’m not really holding in hard drugs. I don’t know if that’s surprise to anybody here. OK.
Schwab: I think they’re schedules.
And just a quick review of Karl Marx, not Jewish, right?
Yael: Karl Marx was born Jewish. He was baptized at a very young age
Schwab: Hmm. listeners to this podcast will know, we still count those.
Yael: The Pope counts them too. So Marx was baptized at a young age and did not live as a Jew, but as will become a theme in Trotsky’s life. Whenever someone wants to blame a problem on Marx, he very much becomes a Jew. Same thing with Trotsky. Whenever they, you know, somebody is misbehaving, they automatically become a Jew in the historical record.
Schwab: Right, right. People who dislike socialists say, you know, this is a Jewish invention. And then socialists are like Jews are the ultimate capitalists and they’re the source of the problem.
Yael: Exactly. We’re really all purpose scapegoats. So just to skip ahead to Trotsky from Marx, Trotsky was born on a farm in southern Ukraine. His father was from an almost entirely assimilated Jewish family, had no Jewish background whatsoever, other than the accident of birth. His mother was mostly assimilated, but came from a slightly higher class family and had some affinity to Jewish tradition. Trotsky did not speak Yiddish, nor did his father speak Yiddish. I’m not sure about his mother, which was very odd for Jews of the time living in the Pale of Settlement, which was the part of Russia where Jews were permitted to live.
That being said, probably because of his mother’s background and influence, young Trotsky, then Braunstein, was sent to a heder at the age of six.
A heder is a Jewish religious school. It’s a yeshiva for young boys. And it later literally means room because I’m assuming most of them were one room. But going to a heder and not speaking Yiddish is not ideal. So not only did he not understand what was going on, but he was probably too smart for his own good and he was… A troublesome student, in addition to not paying attention because he didn’t understand the language, he was probably rousing rabbles even at that age. He’s pulled out of the heder for disciplinary reasons sent to it.
Schwab: Fomenting revolution among fellow six-year-olds.
Yael: Exactly. Exactly. He was sent to a secular gymnasia. And then ultimately he is sent to live with relatives in Odessa. Odessa being probably the most cosmopolitan place he could have lived as a Jewish adolescent at that time. There were different types of people with different types of ideas constantly coming and going. And the family members, Jewish family members that Trotsky is sent to live with, hung in intellectual circles. They had socialist literature on their shelves. It was in their home that Trotsky first read Tolstoy and other really important writers of the day.
He then goes to university to study, I wanna say chemistry. To study something scientific, something technical, and he starts hanging out with other students and he ends up in a Marxist discussion circle of some kind, he at that point in his life was very much not a Marxist. He thought Marxists were dumb and he wasn’t afraid to say so, including to a woman named Alexandra Sokolovskaya who was to become his first wife.
Schwab: This is like me flexing on a very strange little like niche of information, but students majoring in hard sciences being involved in like on campus groups for for socialism or for Marxism seems very odd today,it’s not a rare thing that a student who was studying science would find their way into these really interesting conversations, as is portrayed in…and now we’re mentioning for the second time this episode, a Christopher Nolan film.
Yael: Oppenheimer? Huh. I didn’t even think about that. That is a really good point.
Yael: Young Trotsky, then still Bronstein, becomes somewhat radicalized. He was not yet a radical, but he joins one of the social democratic parties, which at that time was still not something you could do under the Tsar. And he is arrested, apparently meets somebody named Trotsky there, is sent to his first exile. While in prison, he marries Alexandra Suklovskaya.
An interesting thing, though she was not Jewish and Trotsky had no affinity for Judaism, is that a Jewish chaplain did officiate their wedding in his prison cell. They go into exile together. Exile in Siberia at that time was not great, but it was far better than it was later on in the 20th century under Stalin. Apparently the punishment of exile in Siberia at that time was basically we’re just gonna send you really far away. Once you’re there, you can have friends and hang out and read.
Schwab: Right. You can do whatever you want, but the fact that you’re in Siberia makes everything you’re doing so irrelevant.
Yael: Exactly. That being said, Trotsky, you know, has ideas and he wants to spread them. And he, you know, he’s become a well-known writer and his wife is very supportive of him. And he hears about some of the socialist foments that’s going on outside of Siberia. And with his wife’s encouragement, he escapes Siberian exile in the back of some kind of cart.
He never sees his wife again or the two daughters that he had with her. But she does encourage him to go. She is she’s very supportive of his intellectual activities. It is upon this escape that Trotsky ends up in London and meets Lenin for the first time.
He knocks on the door, Lenin’s wife answers the door. She goes to get Lenin by saying, the pen is here. That’s how well known he had become as a writer.
Schwab: Like his reputation precedes him and yeah.
Yael: He did not agree with Lenin on a lot at that stage, but Lenin did put him on the editorial board of his socialist newspaper, and he thus becomes even more well known.
I’m skipping a lot of ideological back and forth.
This is around the time when the Bolsheviks emerge and there is a split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Trotsky more identified with the Mensheviks, Lenin more identified with the Bolsheviks. So they were not on the same page at this time. But we’re going to fast forward through all of that.
Schwab: Both of them are broadly on the page of just, I don’t know, like the means of production should be owned by the workers. Yeah.
Yael: Marxism. Yes. Seized by the workers. Yes. We actually didn’t mention that. So thank you for bringing that up for people. Main tenet of socialism is that the working class should own the means of production and that class struggle is at the center of everything that happens in the world.
And for Trotsky, who never really identified as a Jew, class was the important indicator of who you were. It was not nationalism and it was not religion. and part of what sends Trotsky on the trajectory of his life ultimately to being assassinated in Mexico in 1940 is that he was truly an orthodox Marxist.
Schwab: Whoa, spoilers.
Yael: There were times when others around him were more willing to compromise or make politically expedient decisions. And had he been willing to do that in some cases, he might have ultimately succeeded in the Soviet Union and maybe not have been eclipsed by Stalin because Stalin was much more of a shrewd politician. But Trotsky was really an ideologue. Like he really, really heeded to the text.
Schwab: I feel like there’s something very Jewish about that. That is like a trope or a narrative that has come up several times of like this person was a true believer. Of course, they rejected Judaism, but their belief was like in this system.
Yael: Well, Trotsky, very much like Jews today, actually, you know, we there’s so much variety in political belief among Jews today. And the reason why that can happen is because we are very privileged and we have equal rights in most places. Trotsky was a real beneficiary of that because Jews really only became involved in socialism or any other nascent political movement because they were starting to get civil rights. And when you start to get civil rights, you can go to school, you can learn, you can read, you can meet the people in power. Trotsky’s father didn’t know how to read. It was only because Jews were starting to emerge from the darkness in the Pale of Settlement at the specific time that Trotsky was born, that he was able to become part of any revolution. If he had been born 50 to 100 years earlier, I don’t care how many rabbles he was rousing as a six-year-old, I don’t think this would have happened.
Where were we? Okay. He meets Lenin. He meets Lenin in London.
Schwab: So he meets Lenin in London. Lenin puts him on the newspaper.
Yael: The quote unquote first Russian Revolution was in 1905. The Russian Revolution, by the way, was the overthrow of the Tsar. Russia had been ruled by a Tsarist family for centuries. And I don’t know if any of you saw Anastasia, but the Tsar at the end of the 1800s, early 1900s was from the Romanov.
Schwab: we gotta talk about…
Yael: family and what Trotsky and his compatriots
Schwab: Who also thought, just because this is one of my favorite history fun facts to talk about, we’re not this, like completely ethnically Russian family that were totally distinct from the rest of Europe.
Yael: Yes, there was a huge amount of intermarriage.
I have to say, I know almost nothing about the real Anastasia. I only know Meg Ryan.
Schwab: Oh, oh. Oh, well, let me tell you, the real Anastasia definitely, definitely escaped. She’s 100 percent was not was not killed along with the rest of her family. She’s still out there with JFK.
Yael: Yeah, totally.
Schwab: But anyway, so the Russian Revolution was overthrowing the Tsar, Nicholas II.
Yael: Yeah. First major agitation against the Tsar was in 1905 in something called Bloody Sunday, where a sort of routine march of workers was fired upon by the Tsar’s troops. And the ensuing chaos led the Tsar to institute the Duma, which was sort of the first quote unquote democratically elected government body of the people in Russia. That being said, it was advisory only and had no power. So it was sort of purely optical.
Schwab: Yeah, one of those things that in hindsight this is a half measure that clearly was never gonna work.
Yael: Exactly, which is why there is an argument as to whether or not we should really call the 1905 revolution the first Russian Revolution because it didn’t really overthrow anything. The real Russian Revolution is in 1917 and that truly does overthrow the Tsar. The Tsar abdicates and a few years later his entire family is killed, including or not including Anastasia, depending on, you know, which books you read.
So 1905, Lenin and Trotsky, they’re gaining intellectual influence. That being said, Trotsky is still agitating many of the people in power. He continues to get arrested. He continues to get sent into exile. He lives in a variety of places. but he ends up in the Bronx. I didn’t know that he ever lived here.
Schwab: Hmm. As somebody who lives in the Bronx, I was not aware.
Yael: That was big news to me. Over the course of his exile all over Europe, he somehow makes it to the Bronx for 10 weeks prior to the abdication of the Tsar. During those 10 weeks, he works at a socialist newspaper on St. Mark’s Place. At that time, so mid-1910s New York City, there were tons of Russian immigrant Jews in the city. The Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish Forward, had a comparable circulation to the New York Times.
And so for Trotsky, all of a sudden, once he was in the US, it kind of mattered that he was Jewish. Over the course of his first decade and a half of influence in the world, he did agitate against pogroms. That was kind of his only Jewish involvement. He did try to hold off violence against Jews within and without the party. He was very involved in something called the Bailis affair when in Russia, a Jew was put on trial for a blood libel for killing a young non-Jewish boy who was found in the Dnieper River because they said that he wanted his blood for Matzah. And this was pretty outrageous for the time, to happen in the 20th century was kind of crazy. And it drove Trotsky crazy. And he was very involved in the defense of Beilis. And Beilis’ conviction made him super, super angry. That being said,
Schwab: Which also is like a surprisingly common narrative like, here’s a person who gets involved in like writing a defense of a Jew who’s wrongly accused of something and this makes them more upset and they come to like, how many people are there who fit this description?
Yael: Whether or not you believe Judaism to be a religion or a peoplehood, it’s very hard to shed. I think any origin is hard to shed. And when Trotsky, who was a bad person, we have not gotten to the badness yet, but
Schwab: Yeah, okay.
Yael: But when Trotsky saw Jews being killed or persecuted for being Jews, I think it made him slightly more angry than when he saw other people being killed for no reason. Judaism may not have been statedly important to him, but I think he felt the kinship when bad things were happening. Ultimately,. The Tsar abdicates. Trotsky leaves the US to try to go back to Russia.
Just one comment on his time in New York. He really did make an impression in those 10 weeks. He was in constant contact with the editor and publisher of The Forward, Abe Kahan. This was during World War I and it was straddling the time when the United States entered the war. Trotsky did not want the United States to enter the war. He, as I mentioned, was such an orthodox ideologue. He didn’t think that countries should be fighting each other, he thought that classes should be fighting each other.
And the Jewish community in downtown Manhattan was firmly socialist and Kahan was probably the preeminent Jewish American socialist. The people there had real fidelity to the United States because they were refugees and now they were in this Goldena Medina. I think it’s also important that they were all Yiddish speakers and that Trotsky was not because I think even though they tried to throw off the yoke of religion, they were Jewish. The words that came out of their mouths every day made them Jewish. They had Yiddish theater, they had Yiddish papers. Just by virtue of the fact that they spoke their own language, they were their own people. And Trotsky didn’t have that.
Schwab: So like, was he not in the inner circle of like Jewish socialist American thinkers because of the language barrier?
Yael: Well, was only he was only here for 10 weeks. He wasn’t in their inner circle. When an editorial was published in the forward supporting the United States’ entry into the war Trotsky left his office on St. Mark’s Place, stormed in to the Forward office on East Broadway and was like what the hell and Kahan actually stood up for the pro war stance. I think he just he said Trotsky didn’t get it. Trotsky didn’t understand what it was to be American, an American socialist at least. One story that I really like about Trotsky in the US, and that I think speaks to his Judaism more than he realized is that he often frequented a restaurant in the Bronx called the Triangle Dairy Restaurant. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say a restaurant that calls itself a dairy restaurant, It has some sort of Jewish affinity. So Trotsky frequented this restaurant in the Bronx, the Triangle Dairy Restaurant, and he was hated because he never tipped the waiters.
Schwab: It’s like I refuse to perpetuate this system. You deserve a living wage. Yeah.
Yael: Exactly. He was like, this is nonsense. The proprietor of this restaurant should be paying you a sufficient wage. It shouldn’t be on me. And so he never tipped, but he kept going back there. And apparently one of the waiters spilled soup on him intentionally and everybody hated him.
Schwab: Workers were like, we appreciate your solidarity, but you know what we’d appreciate more? Your money.
Yael: So he made a name for himself in the 10 weeks he was here,
Schwab: Yeah, but also I feel like that so perfectly captures what you’re trying to say of like, he’s an ideologue and he’s like anti-practical. Like, you’re not helping.
Yael Exactly.…Even though Trotsky only lived in the Bronx for 10 weeks, I do find it hilarious that the Bronx Home News, which was a local paper at the time of the Russian Revolution, published a headline, Bronx Man Leads Russian Revolution.
Yael: Classic. He tries to go back to Russia when he hears that the czar abdicates because he’s like, oh, it’s coming. The revolution is coming. Trotsky developed this idea of permanent revolution. He believed that for workers’ revolution to work, it needed to be widespread among all the countries of the world. But Russia was behind. They hadn’t even gotten to the bourgeois revolution part.
Schwab: This sounds like one of those things where he has a whole plan for exactly how everything in the world should work. Is anyone else part of this plan?
Yael: So there were other people in the party who agreed with him, but again, a lot of them were more practical. f when he gets back to Russia, which by the way, he is waylaid because the British arrest him in Nova Scotia on his way back to Russia and he’s put in a prisoner of war camp. Not really sure how he gets out.
But he does get back to Russia and he does become Lenin’s right hand man in the October Revolution, which is the real Russian Revolution where the Soviet, which literally means like the assembly, the group of workers becomes the government, the party, the communist party becomes the government of the Soviet Union. Trotsky saw the writing on the wall. He was very prescient. Even in the early 1900s, he could see that, without the right economic revolutions in place, this permanent revolution that he was agitating for, there were too many open loops. And when it didn’t unfold seamlessly, what would happen is that one person would take power and become a dictator, which is…
Schwab: Which is what happens.
Yael: exactly what happens.
So at the beginning of his ideological journey Trotsky was very wary of that. Once he gets back to Russia post-Russian Revolution and he has power because he’s Lenin’s right-hand man, he’s a little less wary of it for a short time.
Schwab: Hmm. All of a sudden, he’s like, if I’m in power, maybe power’s not that bad.
Yael: Right, so the party has become the government and Lenin, he first wants to make Trotsky his home secretary, but Trotsky, all of a sudden, his Jewishness wore on him and he said, I don’t want to give anyone any excuse to agitate against our domestic policy, so don’t make me the home secretary, because some people don’t like Jews, and I don’t know if you remember or not, I’m a Jew. So it was actually as a hedge against antisemitism, so he becomes the foreign secretary, which means that he is the delegate who signs the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which I believe ends World War I.
Schwab: Interesting. Yeah. Right.
Yael: He also becomes the head of the Red Army. He really creates the Red Army, and he also becomes the head of transportation. So he doesn’t think he’s a fascist, but he kind of is.
But as the head of the Red Army, which, by the way, they’re now fighting a civil war, so the the party has become the government, but not everybody is in the party and not everybody wants the party to be the government.. So they’re fighting the White Army. They’re fighting Ukrainians. It’s basically we’ve taken out the Tsar, but now we need to take out everyone who doesn’t agree with us because again, permanent revolution. So Trotsky becomes the head of the Red Army and he is fierce and bad. Evil, one might say. He sets an example for any of the troops that don’t want to fight by killing one out of every 10 members of those regiments. I’m saying like, for as long as you don’t fight, I’m just gonna kill every 10th person. He also took hostages from family members of family members of people who didn’t wanna fight. It was very bloody.
Schwab: Again, fits with this picture you’ve painted. Very ideological, not looking to compromise. You need to get on board with this program.
Yael: Exactly. He even said like he was killing workers it was cutting out necrotic tissue to save the whole of the body, which is something that.
Schwab: Yeah, for the purpose of the larger thing. It’s fine to not tip people. It’s fine to slaughter many, many people. Like this for the greater purpose.
Yael: He very, very much was an advocate of the ends justifying the means. And he also acknowledged that the means could be whatever the party wanted them to be.
Schwab: It’s so fascinating to me because this is also deeply steeped in a, like in an anti religious fervor, right? Like religion is like this old system. And then, you know, this is the will of the party. Therefore, it must be done. And like, you know what? That really sounds an awful lot like religion. It’s like you’ve you’ve just like replaced one orthodoxy with another.
Yael:
So I want you to bear that in mind. We are going to come back to that at the very end when we talk about Trotsky’s ideological legacy. So he has the two daughters. I skipped over the fact that he has a second wife, by the way, he never…
Schwab: But we know he has the two daughters from the first marriage who he never saw again. He gets married again, I assume.
Yael: He never ended the first marriage, so he’s legitimately a bigamist.
Schwab: Okay, civil unions and marriage are all just a tool of the class elite to perpetuate capitalism.
Yael: It’s true. it’s all hegemonic power that we need to overthrow. You’re 100 percent right.
He maintained correspondence with her for many, years. Like, she was cool with what was going on. He marries another woman named Natalia Sedova and has two sons with her. So he has four children total, unfortunately all of whom predecease him. He thinks that one of his sons is murdered by Stalin. It’s not clear.
Schwab: Alright.
Yael: He goes in for a routine appendectomy and then like a day or two later dies. And Trotsky is convinced that it was a Stalinist assassin who was involved in that. One of his daughters died of tuberculosis. One unfortunately ended her own life and one was arrested and sent into exile and I believe died in exile or was arrested and killed one one was definitely killed by the Stalinist regime. But yeah, he’s he is married to Natalia Sedova throughout this entire time.
He is a awful evil murderous leader of the Red Army throughout the Russian Civil War.
Schwab: And he also, unless we skipped it, he did not have any previous military experience, it sounds like.
Yael: No, no, no, none, none. But what he did was he traveled from front to front during the Russian Civil War on something called the armored train, which was heavily fortified and had bedrooms and offices and ultimately at a certain point in time was able to carry two airplanes. Like he, he really took to military leadership. He wore a special kind of leather jacket.
What do they say? Power corrupts? Absolute power corrupts absolutely? He is not exempt from that.
Trotsky also created the Cheka, which was like the first communist secret police, basically the precursor to the KGB. He executed people he deemed to be cowards. He went full throttle into this military dictatorship thing.
At the same time, Lenin is still in charge.
Yael: But, you know, Lenin, his health is not good. Stalin is coming up the pike, maybe as a competitor to Trotsky, as a successor to Lenin.
Schwab: So Trotsky is like, theoretically is a viable candidate to take over.
Yael: it’s either going to be Trotsky or it’s going to be Stalin. Lenin dictates his testament while he his health is failing and he is basically on his deathbed and he writes about both Lenin and Stalin. He does characterize Trotsky as too much of an ideologue. He does characterize Stalin as too rude to be a good leader.
Ultimately, in the testament, it seems that he makes clear that he wants Trotsky to be his successor. He thinks Trotsky is the most sophisticated thinker with respect to the ideals of the party. What happens is at the time that Lenin dies, Trotsky is away somewhere, um, recovering from an illness, I think a virus of some kind, and Lenin dies. And he’s far, he’s far away from where Lenin’s funeral is going to be. And he doesn’t think that he, it’s impossible for him to get back in time for the funeral. Stalin deliberately does not communicate to Trotsky that the funeral is being put off for a few days.
Schwab: Yeah, of course.
Yael: He withholds that piece of information and it’s a really, really bad look for Trotsky. Like, what are you doing? You didn’t make it. didn’t even… Not only did you not make it, you didn’t even try. But the funeral is put off for some time. Trotsky definitely could have made it back had he tried. He didn’t even try because he got this misinformation from Stalin. Stalin through.
Schwab: Which also just seems like a rookie mistake, even just not the funeral. Like there’s going to be a power vacuum. You need to be there.
Yael: Well, that was the thing. Stalin was a much more shrewd politician. Yes!
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Trotsky’s like, if I’m the right candidate, then I will win it. I don’t need to convince anyone. I don’t need to show up.
Yael: That is exactly what happened. Trotsky knew what was in Lenin’s Testament. He knew that Lenin wanted him to succeed him, but he thought it was tasteless to bring that up and to tell people. So he basically let Stalin happen. You know, spoiler alert, Stalin killed millions of people.
Schwab: Which might be the worst thing that he did.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Stalin bad.
Yael: We are going to rush through the next two decades in which there are major Stalinist purges of Jews, of people who don’t 100 % agree with Stalin. Stalin becomes the dictator that Trotsky had prophesied in the early 1900s because there was no permanent revolution. Stalin believed in a one country revolution. And he said, we can do it on our own.
And when we can do it on our own, that means that we have to force rapid industrialization, rapid collectivization, which is how lots of people starved to death and lots of people got killed because Stalin basically what Trotsky would again, I don’t know that Trotsky, if we had gone with like Trotsky’s perfect idyllic revolution, who knows what would have happened? But Trotsky would tell you, I could have told you this was gonna happen.No one is allowed to own anything. The collective owns everything. People are not incentivized to work the land because they no longer own the land. And so tons of people die of starvation. Tons of people die because they are imprisoned or purged by a mercurial, murderous dictator. And Trotsky is maybe kind of would say I told you so.
Schwab: And he lasts a surprisingly long time, it sounds like, because I know there’s this very famous thing of like a picture, it’s Stalin and a bunch of other people, and just like over time, this picture is like edited before there was software, right? Like just let’s like removes people from the picture,
Yael: So Stalin gets rid of Trotsky. He first goes into internal exile in the Soviet Union, then goes to external exile, I believe, first in Turkey. And then he wants to get out. He has four very productive years writing in Turkey. Again, I just imagine him in this villa like, in this random small town in Turkey with young people coming in and out just catering to his every whim because they’re so taken with the master. And he tries to get out of Turkey. He wants to go live in a whole bunch of places, and none of them will let him live there.
He is friends, presumably originally through correspondence, but who knows, with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, very famous artists in Mexico. Frida, perhaps mostly known for her unibrow. Yeah, but.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, And her art.
Schwab: Her very distinctive look.
Yael: Yes, her art. And they convinced the Mexican president to allow Trotsky and Natalia Sadova to come to Mexico. And they live in the Casa Azul, the Blue House, Frida and Diego’s house for the rest of their lives. They get to Mexico, they have also very fruitful intellectual output, tons of young people, including American socialists doing their bidding. He is writing a biography of Stalin when he dies. So lots going on there. While he is there, he has an affair with Frida Kahlo.
Schwab: Wow, okay.
Yael: Huge. I didn’t know that either.
Schwab: That’s like the first thing maybe in this episode, but also maybe ever where I was about to say like, wait, is that true?
Yael: He legitimately had an affair with Frida Kahlo. Both of their spouses knew about it and seemed to get over it.
Yael: He has this affair with Frida, but in his writing, he makes it very clear that his heart still blooms for Natalia Sadova. You know, their love never diminished. Of course, he writes like these very lurid and expressive missives to his wife and is just a very prolific writer and has all these big emotions.
Diego doesn’t love that Trotsky slept with his wife.
Schwab: This guy’s living in his house.
Yael: So yeah, they kind of, think, I don’t know if they moved to a house that’s like on the same property, but there’s a little bit of a reconfiguration though. The relationship is not terminated. Like they still have a relationship with each other going forward.
But Trotsky was not the most careful and like naive, I think in the same way where he thought maybe the whole thing with becoming Lenin’s successor would work out. He has a lot of security guards but he doesn’t vet all the young socialists who are coming through to sort of have tea and take notes for him and do his bidding.
Schwab: Yeah, right. Which again is like the opposite of you know like a figure like Stalin is notoriously paranoid. Like maybe Trotsky should have been a little more paranoid.
Yael: Stalin had three groups of people actively trying to assassinate Trotsky because I think Trotsky was such an intellectual powerhouse that he was always a threat like Stalin was the most authoritarian had the most power ruled with an iron fist behind an iron curtain and he was still super paranoid about Trotsky. I think he thought that Trotsky’s understanding of Marxism and agitation for a permanent revolution was always going to be a threat to him.
An American socialist infiltrates their crowd and he makes it possible for someone to try to shoot at Trotsky and Natalia in their bedroom while they are sleeping. But they miraculously survive. Like, think Natalia pushes him off the bed and they’re not hit. One of their grandsons was with them at this point in time after his parent had been killed. He had eventually made his way to Mexico to live with his grandparents, again, brutal leader of war communism killed thousands of people, but really doting and loving grandfather was that one of among his happiest times. so his grandson witnessed this assassination attempt, but Trotsky survives.
But again, doesn’t get paranoid enough and ultimately another young person infiltrates the gang and ingratiates himself so much to Trotsky that he asked Trotsky he asks Trotsky to read some of his writings and he goes into his study into the study with Trotsky and Trotsky starts reading some of his writings and this guy takes a mountain axe out of his jacket and axes Trotsky in the middle of his head. He survives the initial attack, but dies within the day. Sedova finds him on the floor of the study, bleeding out of the middle of his head with a mountain axe in his head, which apparently had been bought in some sort of local mountaineering shop. So it’s an inauspicious end for a complicated man everything you read about him tries to cast him as this like old man living in Frida Kahlo’s cabin, like a villa in Mexico at the end of his life who just gets killed by some angry young person when really like this guy killed thousands upon thousands of people, was ultimately responsible for Stalin gaining power, even though he was Stalin’s enemy.
Yeah, it’s the way that people talk about Trotsky is very odd because he is a hero to many. There are a lot of people in this world who want peace, who still view Trotsky as a hero, like I think they themselves are sort of lost in the ideology the same way that Trotsky was. I think they believe and it’s just like, it didn’t work out because we didn’t do it exactly the way Trotsky told us we needed to do it. Despite the fact that Trotsky ended up becoming the head of the Red Army that violently killed thousands upon thousands of people.
Schwab: Right, and you’re like, let’s remember this part. It wasn’t just the pen, right?
Yael: But exactly, right. They prioritize the pen over the armored train.
Because this is a Jewish history podcast, I want to add a few things about Trotsky being Jewish. I mentioned that because I am so deeply steeped in the hegemony of my Jewish upbringing that I thought that Trotsky probably…had no reason to believe that Lenin’s funeral would be postponed because he was Jewish. I also read that into something else, which was that when Trotsky’s son who went in for the routine appendectomy and then maybe or maybe not was killed by a Stalin sent assassin dies, all the biographers tell you that Trotsky and Natalia Sedova disappear into their room for a week. And then
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yael: Then, he emerges unshaven. And I’m just like, you can never, you can never get rid of the Jew inside you. It just, doesn’t, it doesn’t go, I was like.
Schwab: It sounds like… Yeah.
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And it sounds like, mean, that the Jew inside you, the the pintala Yid, as it’s sometimes described, like this Yiddish idea, like, when when that person who rejects religion like comes to a a Shabbos table and they’re inspired by it. that like Jewish soul inside of Trotsky comes out.
Yael: So even today, we’re gonna go back to something you said at the beginning,
Yael: Even today, when people are against socialism and Trotskyists, they will often, you know, classify it as Jewish socialism, you know, which is easy to do because in America, Jews were much more heavily involved in socialism than they were in Russia. In Russia, Jews were not that big a part of the socialist movement. Trotsky was obviously an outlier but by the numbers, they were a really, really small percentage of the socialists, not the case in the United States.
Fascinating character that we obviously skipped a boatload about.
So please, please write to us because we love hearing from you. But please don’t write to us saying, Yael, I’ll skipped a lot of stuff because I know that I skipped a lot of stuff. But in addition to writing us, please recommend us to your friends. Send this episode or another episode that you love or all of our episodes to a friend. Subscribe like.
Schwab: Yeah, sounds like there’s so much to it.
Yael: As the kids say, smash the like button below. So thanks again for listening and read up about Trotsky. He may not have wanted to be a Jew, but he certainly was one.
Schwab: Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.
Yael: If you like this show, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please give us a rating and review.
Schwab: Check out unpacked.media for everything unpacked related and subscribe to our other podcasts and our YouTube channel. Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds@unpacked.media. This episode was hosted by me, Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: and by me, Yael Steiner. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson. Our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht. We’re produced by Jenny Falcon and Rivky Stern. Thanks for listening. See you next week.