Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky is present less as a character acting in the narrated scenes than as a figure assembled from émigré reminiscence, revolutionary writing, and Eduard Limonov’s ambitions. A story about a vanished New York émigré who reappears at the head of the Red Army makes Trotsky’s life seem to compress the upheavals of history into a single reversal. For Eduard, that reversal becomes more than an anecdote: it is a possible shape for his own destiny.

Identity and the New York stories

At Novoye russkoye slovo, a Russian-language daily in New York City, Trotsky survives in the recollections of editors who had emigrated after the Revolution. One elderly editor remembers his visits to the paper before the Revolution and recounts what happened later, when Trotsky lived in the Bronx. He lectured on world revolution to empty halls and, according to the story, offended restaurant waiters by refusing to leave tips. The details bring a future military leader down to the scale of rented rooms, unpopular manners, and an audience that does not come.

The anecdote’s decisive turn is an ordinary financial pursuit. In 1917, the editor says, Trotsky bought two hundred dollars’ worth of furniture on installment and then disappeared without a trace. When the loan company finally found him, he was commanding the army of the largest country in the world. The story does not explain the intervening history; its force lies in the abruptness of the contrast. A creditor looking for an overdue customer encounters a commander instead. In the newspaper’s quiet, old-fashioned surroundings, this remembered transformation gives revolutionary history a vivid, almost unbelievable scale.

From inherited condemnation to fascination

Trotsky’s stature is not a simple inheritance for Eduard. Throughout childhood, Eduard has heard that Trotsky was an enemy of the human race. Yet the story of his life enchants him. The contrast matters: a condemnation repeated as settled knowledge gives way to attraction when Eduard encounters a life presented as spectacle, risk, and ascent. The old editor’s account does not erase the childhood judgment so much as put a rival image beside it—one that makes Trotsky compelling precisely because he seems to have escaped the smallness of his circumstances.

What catches Eduard is not a rounded account of Trotsky’s politics or private life. The newspaper anecdote offers instead a sequence of reversals: empty lecture halls, an installment purchase, disappearance, and command. Its gaps leave the passage from obscurity to power open to imagination. Trotsky becomes a historical example through the very compression of the story: less a subject carefully explained than a life that seems to leap over the distance between failure and triumph.

Revolutionary writing and political allegiance

Later, in the park where he writes, Eduard meets Carol, who hands out leaflets for the Socialist Workers Party. She explains that the party represents American Trotskyists and partisans of world revolution. Eduard is already drawn to the cause in broad, insurgent terms: he sides with people and groups he sees as having nothing to lose, and he supports Trotsky without wanting to define that support as opposition to Joseph Stalin. The account presents this as a politically charged mixture rather than a settled doctrine.

Carol lends him Trotsky’s collected works, and Eduard grows increasingly admiring of their author. What he singles out is the bluntness of the language. He likes that Trotsky said, “Long live civil war!” and that he dismissed the comforting moral language of speeches about the sacred value of human life. Eduard also responds to Trotsky’s formulation that historical winners are right and losers belong in the dustbin of history. To him these are manly words: direct, unsentimental, and opposed to the pious restraint he associates with weaker politics. The writing supplies an idiom for the militancy he wants, not merely a label for a political camp.

The American Trotskyists and the model of destiny

The Socialist Workers Party meeting on solidarity with Palestine sharpens the difference between revolutionary language and revolutionary action as Eduard understands it. He expects the group to remain together after the meeting and take up an armed attack, a hijacking, or a bombing. Instead, people disperse, go home, or gather in small groups to talk, with the next meeting on the agenda. Carol is perplexed by his disappointment. Eduard’s expectations expose the gap between his appetite for decisive action and the party’s actual, cautious routines; they do not show that the group has made the violent plans he proposes.

He nevertheless returns to Carol and her friends, attends meetings, and agrees to distribute leaflets. His need for a family keeps him attached to a community whose political practice disappoints him. Trotsky’s collected works intensify that ambivalence: Eduard admires the revolutionary force he finds in the books while judging the American Trotskyists unable to carry comparable force into the streets, ghettos, or lives of the poor. Trotsky’s stature becomes the measure against which this local political experience falls short.

Narrative significance

The story of Trotsky’s rise returns to Eduard as a personal ideal. The old editor’s account links the young or displaced émigré in New York to the commander moving from front to front in an armored train. Eduard wants that kind of destiny for himself. The resemblance he seeks is not established as a prediction of what he will become; it is an aspiration, formed by the contrast between the humiliations of an obscure life and the sudden scale of revolutionary power.

Trotsky therefore joins two strands of Eduard’s experience: the émigré newspaper’s living memory of revolution and the political meetings where revolutionary commitment is spoken but, in Eduard’s eyes, contained. His remembered passage from a down-and-out New York existence to command gives historical change a personal, almost theatrical form. The figure who had been denounced in Eduard’s childhood becomes a standard for judging political courage and a fantasy of self-transformation. The book’s portrait remains mediated—through an editor’s recollection and Eduard’s reading—but that mediation is central to Trotsky’s significance here: he is the story that makes a different future seem imaginable.