Trotsky 3
The final page of the illustrated Trotsky anecdote from Deutscher’s famous biography. There’s really no punchline. I guess Deutscher was trying to give the idea of future doom while giving rational reasons for Trotsky’s “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”-reaction to Stalin’s grumpy appearance. He writes:
The rough growl with which he had met Trotsky came as if from the depth of the Russian log cabin. (The Prophet Armed, Oxford University Press 1954, p. 210)
The anecdote may also be a bit difficult to decipher without insight into the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks within the Russian Social Democrat Party in the pre-revolutionary decades. Trotsky and Lenin didn’t spare each other in debates, and Stalin would use these remarks later to prove Trotsky’s disloyalty. Obviously this comic gives the impression of Stalin as a man of (violent) action, while Trotsky … I guess my answer to Deutscher’s mystery (why did Trotsky save this scene for so long in his memories, yet why didn’t he retell it earlier?) is that Comrade Lev Davidovich was too busy doing his thing too, you know, revolution and all that, that he didn’t spend much thought on the people whose toes he stepped on.
But I’m not even half-way through the first volume of Deutscher’s trilogy, so I might be surprised. And when other interesting scenes crop up, perhaps more comics will happen, too!
“And when other interesting scenes crop up, perhaps more comics will happen, too!”
Nothing could make more happy. I mean, almost nothing.
Haha, this comic is totally obscure to anyone who doesn’t know about the origins of Pravda … So I’m gong to be Horst and explain that Trotsky edited a newspaper called Pravda in Vienna. He was invited to take it over from the Ukrainian Spilka (Social Democratic Union) party in 1908, and it became popular among workers in Russia. In 1912 in Petersburg, the Bolsheviks started to publish a newspaper that was “coincidentally” also called Pravda, edited by Stalin (among many others). Trotsky’s Pravda was subject of lots of drama in early 1912, and after the Bolshie hijack there were no more Trotsky-Pravda issues, and Trotsky was very angry.