Trotsky—the satanic “Bronstein of Russian anti-Semites”—was deeply offended whenever anyone presumed to call him a Jew. When a visiting Jewish delegation appealed to him to help fellow Jews, he flew into a rage: “I am not a Jew but an internationalist.” He reacted similarly when requested by Rabbi Eisenstadt of Petrograd to allow special flour for Passover matzos, adding on this occasion that “he wanted to know no Jews.” At another time he said that the Jews interested him no more than the Bulgarians. According to one of his biographers [Baruch Knei-Paz], after 1917 Trotsky “shied away from Jewish matters” and “made light of the whole Jewish question.”

So, it is questionable whether Trotsky can be properly treated as an “eminent Jewish figure.” He certainly would have resented it. He had no idea what caused anti-Semitism, claiming it to be “one of the more malignant convulsions of capitalism’s death agony,” as if it had not existed in the Middle Ages, long before capitalism was born.

He was a renegade. This did not help him to make a successful career in the party. He was resented as a Jew as well as someone who during the decade preceding the Bolshevik power seizure relentlessly criticized Lenin and his followers. His prickly personality also was of no help, contrasting with Stalin’s joviality during the years the two struggled for power.

The situation for Jews in pre-1917 Russia, which shaped Trotsky’s personal and political trajectory, was very difficult. Except for rich merchants and those with a university degree, they were confined to the so-called Pale of Settlement. They were excluded from government posts and altogether treated as second-rate subjects. On occasion, they were victims of vicious pogroms in the course of which they were beaten and killed and their homes looted. This caused many of them to emigrate and the rest to turn to left-wing ideologies. The prevalent opinion was that the Bolsheviks were heavily supported by Jews, but the results of the only free elections held under Bolshevik rule, those to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917, revealed that the Bolshevik vote came not from the Pale of Settlement but mainly from the armed forces and the cities of Great Russia, where hardly any Jews lived. The census of the Communist Party conducted in 1922 showed that only 959 Jews had joined it before 1917. If subsequently the proportion of Jews in the Communist Party exceeded their proportion in the country’s population, so too was that the case in Italy under Fascism. It simply attests to the fact that the Jews are a very articulate and politically engaged people.

Rubenstein, the author of a life of the Soviet writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, has written a competent summary biography of his protagonist. The book adds little that is new to the existing literature, and it has some strange omissions. Trotsky’s role in the Civil War during which he commanded the Red Army—arguably his main contribution to the Bolshevik cause—is disposed of in a few cursory pages. I also found strange the author’s offhand assertion that under the Bolsheviks “the proletariat had succeeded in gaining control of the government.” Where and when? The workers had next to no influence on the policies of the Soviet government, which were managed by intellectuals.

In view of the murderous paranoia of Stalin, it is tempting to gloss over Trotsky’s own ruthlessness and to depict him as a humane counterpart to his rival. This is quite unwarranted. Without a question, Trotsky was better-educated than Stalin and was altogether a more cultivated human being. But his radicalism was not much different than Stalin’s. Rubenstein cites a statement by Trotsky as the motto of his book: “Nothing great has been accomplished in history without fanaticism.” Really? In art, in science, in economics? In fact, fanaticism, which is uncritical belief in something, has always obstructed true accomplishment.

Let us scrutinize briefly Trotsky’s views on such key issues as forced labor, terror, and concentration camps—the outstanding features of the Stalinist regime. On forced labor, Trotsky had this to say in 1921:

It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center, the allocation of that force in accord with the needs of a nation-wide economic plan.

I imagine that if Stalin was present at the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, at which Trotsky made these remarks, he must have nodded in agreement. In view of Trotsky’s own sentiments, it is likely that if he had succeeded Lenin, we would have witnessed in the Soviet Union much the same oppression of labor as he did under Stalin.

Trotsky had no qualms about introducing into Soviet Russia political terror. Barely two months after the Bolsheviks had seized power, he said:

There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class. This is its right. You are indignant … at the petty terror which we direct at our class opponents. But be put on notice that in one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of the great revolutionaries of France. Our enemies will face not prison but the guillotine.

He defined the guillotine (plagiarizing the French revolutionary Jacques Hébert) as a device that “shortens a man by the length of a head.” This grisly remark, incidentally, is cited by Rubenstein.

Trotsky demonstrated that this was not empty rhetoric during the rebellion at the Kronshtadt naval base in February 1921. The sailors of Kronshtadt were early and prominent supporters of the Bolsheviks, helping them in October 1917 to seize power in Petrograd and later to defend that city from the Whites. But the sailors gradually became disenchanted with the new regime. In March 1921 they formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee and refused to obey Moscow’s orders. Upon arriving in Petrograd, Trotsky demanded that the mutineers throw themselves on the mercy of the Soviet government and ordered that the families of the mutineers be taken hostage; one of the regime’s appeals to the rebels threatened that if they continued to resist they would “be shot like partridges.” Trotsky organized the military assault on the island where the base was located: When some of the Red Army soldiers defected to the rebels, he ordered the execution of every fifth soldier who disobeyed orders. The island eventually fell. Trotsky was not proud of his role in this event, as demonstrated by the fact that in his memoirs he hardly mentioned it.

Though the fact is little-known, it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who introduced into Soviet Russia the concentration camp, an institution that under Stalin developed into the monstrous Gulag empire. Trotsky did this in May 1918 in connection with a rebellion of Czech ex-prisoners of war who, en route to the Far East to sail to the western front, rebelled when an attempt was made to disarm them. In August of that year, to protect the railroad line running from Moscow to Kazan, Trotsky ordered a network of concentration camps to be constructed to isolate “sinister agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites, and speculators” who were not executed or subjected to other penalties. Lenin fully agreed with these measures. By 1919, concentration camps were established in every provincial capital. In 1923, Russia had 315 concentration camps with 70,000 inmates.

These facts will not be found in Rubenstein’s book, which, without being an apologia, nevertheless tends to glide over the more savage features of Trotsky’s thought and behavior. My own judgment of Trotsky coincides with that of George Orwell, made in 1939 when Trotsky was still alive and cited in this book:

[Trotsky] is probably as much responsible for [the Russian dictatorship] as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind. The essential act is the rejection of democracy—that is of the underlying values of democracy; once you have decided upon that, Stalin—or any rate someone like Stalin—is already on the way.

I never thought that Jews would voluntarily live in this vast, distant part of Russia that extends from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and north beyond the Arctic Circle. But once when I was giving a talk in Providence, R.I., a woman named Eleanor Elbaum quietly approached me. “Would you like some Passover recipes from a Jewish family in Siberia?” she asked. She said her family had lived there for generations.

I had read about Dostoevsky and others being exiled to Siberia, and now I learned the Jewish Siberian story. In 1632 the first Jews were sent there from Lithuania, after being captured during the Russo-Polish war. In the early 19th century Jewish convicts from Moscow landed in Siberia too, sentenced to hard labor. In 1859, after the Crimean War ended, merchant classes of Russian Jews were permitted to settle outside the Pale, and some found their way to Siberia.

The next time I was in Providence, I stopped by Eleanor Elbaum’s brick home on a quiet residential street. She had made a few dishes that were waiting for me on her table. But first we talked.

“My great-grandparents on both sides came to Siberia after the Crimean War in 1859,” she said. “My great-great-grandfather was in the army and when the war ended he was permitted by the czar to move to Siberia from Lithuania.”

Her father, who was born in Ishim, Siberia, and served in World War I, went into the hotel business. He and her mother, who was born in the old Siberian town of Tomsk, married and lived in Vladivostok, Russia’s biggest port on the Pacific side of the country. In 1922, they  took a leg of the Trans-Siberian railroad to Harbin, Manchuria. Manchuria served as an escape route for Russian Jews after the revolution and remained one during World War II.

Elbaum, who was born in 1932 in Harbin and grew up in Japan during the World War II, knows about Siberia primarily through the food she ate as a child. “There was no discussion about Siberia when I was growing up,” she said. “My mother would make piroshky and pelmeni, the Jewish ravioli, and put them outside to freeze. They told me they didn’t need a freezer. They had a sort of igloo outside for the food.” Because it was practically impossible to buy fresh lemons, her mother would use sour salt when making jams and curing meat like brisket. They also ate typical Russian Jewish fare—cucumber and sour cream salad, cabbage rolls stuffed with meat and rice, borscht, kasha, and sauerkraut.

Sharon Hudgins’ wonderful saga, The Other Side of Russia, A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East, gives a vivid account of life there in the late 1990s, when she spent several years in the region. “Now it has changed completely,” she told me. “But when I lived there it must have been like it was in the late 19th and early 20th century.” There were few middle men. You would get what little food was available off of farmers’ trucks. The staples were beets, potatoes, cabbage, onions, and leeks; they were kept in root cellars until late in the season. Berries, lemons, and even flour were scarce. They couldn’t count on having sugar either, and if it did appear, it was often laced with impurities.

After a childhood in the Far East, Elbaum—who speaks Russian, English, and Japanese and understands French—made her way to California for college, then to Toronto, where she met her husband, and they eventually settled in Providence. Now she frequents farmers’ markets, where she buys strawberries, cherries, apricots, and blueberries for her jams. When she was a child, these jams constituted dessert, eaten with a spoon and served with tea. Each time Elbaum puts out her canning jars, she spends a few moments remembering her parents and wondering about their life in Siberia.

Whenever she meets Russians they tell her that the best food is in Siberia. “I really don’t know what they have in mind when they say that,” she said. “I just remember that whenever we complained about having something too often, like chicken, my father would remind us to feel lucky to eat chicken. I tried so many times to get my parents to talk about the past. That generation just wiped out segments of their lives.”

As she told me her story, I looked around her house for more on Siberia—artifacts, books—but she there was little. All she had were the stories from her parents and the recipes her mother made.

On her table was a Passover candy she grew up with, a candy made from Siberian nuts and honey, the precursor to our commercial peanut brittle and fruit-and-nut bars. I have seen similar candies in other Jewish homes made with radishes, carrots, and beets; no matter how different the mixture, it always includes honey and ginger. You can also add cranberries, chocolate chips, chopped apricots, whatever you want. I love old recipes like this; they give a hint at what life before the commercialization of so many food products.

Elbaum served us tea in glasses, and with it she brought out Siberian chremsel. It’s a matzoh fritter of sorts, probably based on a blinchiki, eaten in Siberia and perfect for breakfast during Passover. I have eaten chremsel before, made out of fried potato and matzoh meal and stuffed with meat. I’ve also made a doughnut-like chremsel with nuts that I serve for dessert at Passover. I had never seen one like this before, made from matzoh meal and stuffed with tart blueberry, cranberry, or any other fruit jam, then browned and baked with a little more jam, fresh blueberries or cranberries (it should be a little tart), and honey. It’s delicious—and all the more so for the remarkable journey the recipe took from its birthplace in Siberia (or maybe Lithuania), across Manchuria to Japan, California, Toronto, and then to Providence, Rhode Island.

SIBERIAN CHREMSEL

I recommend making this dish the night before and baking it before breakfast.

1 ¼ cup matzoh meal, about
3 large eggs
5 tablespoons honey
Vegetable spray or oil for frying
1 cup blueberry jam, prune or apricot lekve, or cranberry sauce (you want a little tart and sweet together)
1 cup fresh blueberries or cranberries
1 cup sour cream

1. Bring 1 cup of water to a boil in a saucepan. Put the matzoh meal in the water, remove from the fire, and beat as you would for a gougere or put it in the food processor. Let cool slightly.

2. Beat in or process 1 egg at a time, mashing well to eliminate lumps.

3. Remove  to a bowl, and add 1tablespoon of the honey. Let rest overnight in the refrigerator.

4. Put vegetable spray on your hands and on a board or counter-top. Take a tablespoon of dough and press in your hand into a large circle, keep moving from one hand to the other because it sticks. Put a heaping teaspoon of the jam in the  center. Then, taking a knife, carefully enclose the jam to make a ball, making sure it is completely sealed. As you finish the chremslach, put them on the greased board.

5. Put a little oil or spray a frying pan and heat to medium. Add the chremslach and fry them, adding more oil if needed. Drain on a paper towel and put in a Pyrex pan large enough to hold them in one row.

6. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and then put ½ cup jam and the blueberries or cranberries, the remaining 4 tablespoons of honey and ¼ cup water in a bowl and mix well. Pour over the chremslach and bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Serve immediately with sour cream on the side.

Yield: about 12 chremslach

NUTS IN HONEY AND SUGAR

¾ cup sugar
5 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon ground ginger, or to taste
1 pound walnuts, roughly chopped
Matzoh meal for sprinkling

1. Mix the sugar, honey, and ginger together in a large saucepan. When it is bubbling and syrupy, remove from the heat, add the walnuts, and quickly mix to coat the nuts in the syrup.

2. Wet a wooden cutting board slightly to prevent sticking. Spread the nuts on the board in a rectangular shape and use another moistened board to push down on the nuts and pack them tightly. As the bars cool, sprinkle with matzoh meal. Once they’ve cooled, cut bars into 1-inch squares.

Note: The matzoh meal will stop the bars from sticking to each other when stacked for serving.

Yield: about 36 one-inch squares

Joan Nathan is the author of Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, among other books.

To the small but influential group of his American admirers, Trotsky appeared as a kind of Soviet Garibaldi or George Washington, fighting for freedom against an evil empire. The problem, as Robert Service shows in his new biography Trotsky, is that Trotsky himself was one of the men chiefly responsible for that evil. In the October Revolution of 1917, he was second only to Lenin in leading the Bolshevik coup to success. In the years of civil war that followed, Trotsky, as commissar for the Red Army, designed the campaigns that inflicted horrific suffering on the civilian population of Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. None of the Soviet leaders outdid him in zeal for collectivization and terror, or in his commitment to spreading the Communist revolution across Europe and the world. Service, one of the leading historians of the Soviet Union and the author of biographies of Lenin and Stalin, sums up his verdict on Trotsky this way: “He was close to Stalin in intentions and practice. He was no more likely than Stalin to create a society of humanitarian socialism.… He reveled in terror.”

How, then, did Trotsky become a symbol, to some of the most intelligent American leftists, of a more humane and democratic Communism? In part, as Service writes (and the Farrell essay demonstrates), it was because of “their naivety. They were blind to Trotsky’s contempt for their values…. Like spectators at a zoo, they felt sorry for a wounded beast.” But for the Jewish intellectuals who clustered around Partisan Review, he was an especially irresistible figure, since Trotsky himself was the most powerful Jewish intellectual who ever lived. While this part of Trotsky’s legacy is incidental to Service’s book, it is a significant chapter in the political history of American Jews, and Trotsky helps explain both the allure and the danger of the mass murderer who was affectionately known to his followers as “the Old Man.”

He was born in 1879 as Leiba Bronstein—the name Trotsky was a nom de guerre, like Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) and Stalin (Iosif Dzugashvili). Bronstein’s parents, unusually for Jews in the Russian Empire, were farmers; they belonged to a colony of Polish Jews who had settled in the Ukraine, as part of a czarist project for dispersing and assimilating the Jewish population. As Service shows at the beginning of his book, this meant that Bronstein “did not have a life associated mainly with fellow Jews.” His parents were not devout, and Leiba was sent to a Lutheran German school in Odessa.

Very quickly, like many young, secular Jews of his generation, Bronstein was drawn to the Communist revolutionary movement—partly out of Marxist idealism, partly out of disgust at the reactionary and anti-Semitic czarist government. He was only eighteen when he was arrested, with other members of his small, amateurish revolutionary cell, and exiled to Siberia. As with so many Russian radicals, however, Siberia was less a prison for Bronstein than a kind of finishing school. Bronstein married a fellow prisoner, Alexandra Sokolovskaya—also Jewish, like several other members of his cell—and had two children. He made contact with other Communists, and began to read the clandestine newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), which he received hidden in the binding of an innocuous book.

Iskra was edited from London and Geneva by a group of Communists including Vladimir Lenin, and Bronstein decided he had to join them. With surprising ease, Trotsky—as he was now known on his forged or stolen passport—escaped from Siberia and crossed Europe, presenting himself in London as a new recruit to the cause. (It is ironic that, compared to the later brutality of the KGB and the Gulag, the czarist police system looks like benign neglect.)

It soon became clear that Trotsky was a brilliant writer: at their first meeting, Lenin greeted him with the words: “Ah, the Pen has arrived!” And it was by his pen that he became to known to revolutionaries inside and outside Russia, writing for Iskra and other illegal, but widely read, publications. In 1905, when the first Russian Revolution broke out, Trotsky smuggled himself back into St. Petersburg, where he discovered that he was equally magnetic as a platform orator. Still just 25, he became head of the Petersburg council, or Soviet; when the revolution was crushed, he was arrested again and escaped again.

By 1917, Trotsky’s peregrinations and expulsions had led him to New York, where he arrived “to a hero’s welcome among emigrant socialist sympathizers from the Russian Empire,” especially Jews—he wrote a series of articles for the Forverts, the socialist Yiddish daily. Indeed, one of the ironic themes of Service’s Trotsky is the way the revolutionary kept finding himself in Jewish milieux, despite his adamant refusal to claim a Jewish identity. As Service explains, in his chapter “Trotsky and the Jews,” he followed an orthodox Marxist line on matters of nationality and religion: “In his own eyes, he had ceased to be a Jew in any important sense because Marxism had burned out the fortuitous residues of his origins.” He detested Zionism and the Jewish socialist Bund. Yet it is striking how many of Trotsky’s closest comrades were non-Jewish Jews, just like himself. One might even say, though Service does not pursue the subject this far, that the aggressive rejection of Jewish particularity was the form in which Trotsky, and many Jews like him, lived their Jewishness.

When the czar was overthrown, in February 1917, Trotsky immediately began planning to get back to Russia, and he arrived at Petersburg’s Finland Station on May 4, a month after Lenin. Service traces the complex, ever-shifting circumstances of that revolutionary year, the advances and feints and retreats of the Bolsheviks, until they finally seized the capital, under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership, in October. Then came the years of triumph and power and cruelty; and then came the great fall, which turned Trotsky the commissar into the socialist martyr described by Farrell.

Starting in 1923, as Lenin was crippled by strokes, Trotsky and Stalin waged a bureaucratic and propaganda war over who was entitled to succeed him. Trotsky entered the battle with many advantages. His highly visible role in the Civil War had made him iconic; he was still a brilliant and popular writer. Most important of all, he was Lenin’s own choice. The ailing leader dictated a “testament” in which he warned that the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky had the potential to split the Communist Party, and he came down firmly on Trotsky’s side: “Stalin is too crude and this inadequacy…becomes intolerable in the position of General Secretary.”

The real question, as Service convincingly frames it, is why Trotsky, given all these advantages, allowed Stalin to outmaneuver him so decisively—to the point that, by 1928, Trotsky had been stripped of office, expelled from the Party, and finally exiled from the USSR. Service concludes that Trotsky, perhaps unconsciously, did not really want to replace Lenin as sole leader of the country; that is why he “lacked the decisiveness for a concerted advance on power.” While Stalin expertly manipulated the Communist Party apparatus, packing the Politburo with his supporters, Trotsky remained aloof, arrogant, inflexible. When it came to making speeches to big crowds or writing scorching pamphlets, no one could beat Trotsky. When it came to making friends and allies, he could not be bothered.

And there was one other factor in Trotsky’s failure of will. In 1917, just after the revolution, Lenin had wanted to appoint him as Commissar for Internal Affairs, which would have made him head of the secret police. Trotsky refused, on the grounds that “it would be inappropriate for a Jew to take charge of the police in a society pervaded by anti-Semitism. If Jews were seen to be repressing Russians, a pogrom atmosphere might be provoked.” For the same reason, he initially resisted taking charge of the Red Army, and rejected the invitation to become Lenin’s second-in-command in 1922. “The party’s leadership was widely identified as a Jewish gang,” Service writes, and “Trotsky continued to believe that his own prominence in government, party and army did practical damage to the revolutionary cause.”

If Trotsky allowed Stalin to get the better of him at the crucial moment, it may have been because he still feared the consequences of a Jew heading the Soviet government. Of course, such scruples made no difference to the enemies of the Jews. By the time Hitler took to power, thanks in part to the Germans’ fear and hatred of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Trotsky had long since been made a non-person in Stalin’s USSR. The rabbi who made the famous quip was right: “It’s the Trotskys who make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins who pay the price.”

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

Sam, one of the frustrated antiheroes of Keith Gessen’s new novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, spends most of his twenties attempting to write “the first great Zionist epic.” His peer Mark is stuck in Syracuse, stymied by his efforts to finish a dissertation on the Russian Revolution. The novel’s third protagonist, Keith, is preoccupied by the outcome of the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

Set in the first years of this century, Gessen’s debut novel began as a series of short stories, and it is garnering great reviews. Nextbook spoke with Gessen, a founder of the intellectual culture magazine n+1, about his satirical take on these intellectually voracious but often pathetic characters, his (and Sam’s) troubled relationship with Israel (about which you can read an excerpt here), and his admiration for the men who founded Dissent and Partisan Review.

Photo © Anne Diebel.