u/Top-Attention-6388

Son Telgraf – December 30, 1924

He wore a Red Army uniform. He was a heavily built man. The most striking features of his face were his flashing eyes and a greying goatee... We passed slowly in front of him. He framed us in his gaze down to the very last soldier of our convoy. Alongside him stood numerous Red Army commanders, people's commissars, and foreign revolutionary leaders. When the convoy marching behind ours came right in front of him, he roared with the howl of a wild gale uprooting a forest:

"Long live the doormen of commercial enterprises!"

We all turned our heads back to listen to the echo of this voice. The response was quite faint. A deep silence ensued. Suddenly, Trotsky took two steps forward, and then, like a falling thunderbolt, he bellowed: "Shout so loud that your voice is heard all the way in the House of Lords in London! Long live the doormen of commercial enterprises! Hurrah!" The response to this "hurrah" detonated instantly, like a battery opening fire...

My ears rang as if a dreadful drum were being beaten right beside them. By then, we had moved quite far from the parade area. Turning meaningfully around Red Square, we entered the back streets. An endless river of people ahead of and behind us was continuously flowing, splitting into branches. I asked the girl next to me:

"Why did the doormen respond so faintly at first?"

The university girl smiled and said: "In Russia, the doormen of apartments, houses, and commercial enterprises are among the least revolutionary elements. During the Tsarist era, the police used these men as their informants. In fact, it was the doormen who dispersed the famous student demonstration in Petrograd with their thick clubs. But what does it matter? They, too, will learn to shout loud enough to shake the House of Lords. Tell me, is this the first time you are seeing Trotsky so close?"

"From this close, yes, it's the first time." "Do you know anything about his life and personality?" "A little." "Would you like to know more?" "Yes." "Then listen to me, let me tell you."

And amid the most fiery clamor of revolutionary songs and the blazing winds of red flags, the university girl began to tell me about Trotsky:

"Trotsky is not his real name; it is the name written on his passport when he fled to London during Tsarist times. However, since his entire revolutionary fame began from that moment on, his real name has been forgotten. By profession, Trotsky is a journalist. Even today, we hardly have a better journalist than him in Russia. He possesses an inexhaustible eloquence and a voice that is impossible to silence. Look, from eight this morning until eight this evening, he has been greeting every organization passing before him by shouting its name without a single pause. You heard how he cried out. There must be at least twenty or thirty thousand organizations in Moscow, and greeting them all is quite a feat, I imagine. Trotsky is the second great leader of the revolution after Lenin. Trotsky was not a Bolshevik in the past. He joined the party when the revolution began. During the last ten years of the Russian Social Democratic Party's 20-25 year history, Trotsky clashed with the Bolsheviks, and especially with Lenin, many times. Today, he is a Leninist. However, in one of his works, he says: 'I arrived at Leninism through struggle.' Even after the revolution, he engaged in theoretical debates with Lenin multiple times. These theoretical debates are of great importance because these theories, born out of practice, would give a new direction to practice. The debates on 'workers' unions' were examined in all party cells; one person defended Trotsky's view, another defended Lenin's, and finally, after Lenin's view was accepted by the majority, Trotsky showed extraordinary practical organizational talent. It was he who turned the Red Army into a disciplined and organized force, and in recent years, it was he who reformed and organized railway transportation. He showed great merit during the most critical times of the revolution, often saving it. When the Whites came within 8 kilometers of Petrograd..."

Suddenly, a twenty-five-year-old man walking on the left interrupted the girl. Stepping right between the girl and me, he said in an agitated voice:

"Stop... Stop... Let me tell the rest... You were on the southern front at that time, I suppose, weren't you? Let me tell it, listen..."

I was astonished. This young man, who had been singing red songs at the top of his lungs right beside me for 8 hours and walking with his eyes closed as if he couldn't see his surroundings, was speaking to the girl and me for the first time. The girl noticed my bewilderment and laughed. The other man tightly grabbed my arm, narrowed his pale blue eyes, and began to recount in an excited voice:

"The Whites had come within eight kilometers of Petrograd and were going to enter the city three or four hours later. There was only one way of salvation for the Bolsheviks: to send the workers of the factory where I worked against the Whites. Yet, without exception, all of us were Mensheviks, and from the moment the revolution began, we had remained neutral toward any kind of civil conflict... We were going to remain neutral again... But..."

The young man paused, his forehead turned pale, and then drawing closer to me, he continued:

"But Trotsky came to the factory... And we—five thousand Mensheviks, staunch Menshevik workers—grabbed our weapons and rushed to the front under the Bolshevik flag... How did this happen? How else! They said, 'Trotsky is coming!' We all shouted, 'We don't want him, down with him!' But heedless and fearless, he stepped right among us. We gathered in the large square of the factory. Walking slowly, he climbed onto a ruined piece of machinery at the base of the high wall and suddenly turned his face to us. We were screaming at the top of our lungs, 'Get out of here!' With a sudden movement, he took off his torn, old hat. His black hair fell from both sides of his broad forehead onto his furrowed brows. His eyes blazed. The shouting gradually died down. He looked at us without making a single movement. We fell silent. He stood motionless. Trotsky’s blazing eyes grew wide, and I could no longer see anything but those two eyes... Then, in an instant, those eyes, burning like two massive furnaces, flared up as if stoked, and a roar resembling the clamor of thousands of bells echoed in my ears:

'Comrades... The enemy is 8 kilometers away; the revolution is in danger. To arms!...'

I don't know what happened, but the five thousand people filling the square, five thousand Menshevik workers, turned left like an army obedient to a command. Rushing through the gate Trotsky pointed to with his finger, they charged toward the trucks filled with weapons that had been prepared outside, and went to the front... I have been a member of the Bolshevik Party since that day, and every single one of those five thousand workers carries a wound or two left over from the civil wars today!"

The young man beside me suddenly fell silent. He let go of my arm... He moved back to my left and, closing his eyes as before, with his chin held high, he joined his voice with those singing red songs at full gallop.

Night was falling. The convoys returning to their districts were dispersing. Our convoy slowly dispersed as well. The streets were very bright. At the doors of cinemas and theaters, Red Army soldiers and sailors gathered with male and female workers carrying portraits of Trotsky and Lenin on the chests of their clothes. Tonight, all entertainment venues are free for them. As I parted from the girl, she fixed her faint, fiery eyes on mine and gave me an address. The address of a Komsomol club. We will meet there tonight. While eating, I kept thinking about Trotsky. Truly, he is a very prolific writer. He definitely has one or two articles every day in the Pravda and Izvestia newspapers. And what peculiar articles they are. Sometimes he makes a long and deep analysis of world politics. Sometimes he embraces the heaviest theories of Marxism, and sometimes he advises, 'let us not swear.' He wrote a new three-volume work on literature. He has important books on the army, strategy, and aviation... In short, it seems there is no subject he hasn't touched upon... In an article he dedicated to the youth recently, he said: 'You must gnaw the granite rock of science with your teeth!'"