isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

'PERMANENT REVOLUTION' 173
nearly all Ostyaks and Zyrians he was constantly drunk and
falling asleep, to the horror of the passenger who saw the sleigh
running into deep snowdrifts and feared pursuit. Himself without
food, drink, or sleep, Trotsky kept on thumping and kicking
the driver, tearing off his headgear, exposing him to the frost
and thus keeping him awake. As they passed by Ostyak huts,
which were happily very few and very far between, the driver
would stop and disappear; and the passenger would find him
either indulging with the Ostyaks and their wives and children
in wild bouts of drinking, or lying unconscious on the floor.
On the way, the leading reindeer strained its leg, and the others
were worn out. The animals had to be left behind and fresh
ones bought. This happened again and again, and Trotsky had
to join the Ostyaks in a hunt for reindeer.
Despite the discomfort and exasperation, he was happy to be
on the move, and he watched with wide eyes the awe-inspiring
beauty of the white desert and the ugliness and misery of life in
Ostyak huts. Most of the time he fought off sleep; and when they
halted in the open waste to make a fire and to melt the snow for
tea, he sat by the fire to jot down his observations, which he was
later to put into a book. Even the tension of this flight and the
terror of the tundra could not subdue the inquirer and the man
of letters in him. He took notes on the landscape; on the shape
of the woods; on the variety of the trails left on the snow by the
wolf, the fox, the ermine, the elk, and other beasts; on his conversations
with his driver; on the customs and manners of the
natives (who liked best to eat fish raw, while it was still fluttering
in their hands); on the abject slavery of their women; on hunting
for deer; on the behaviour of the hunters and the hunted;
and on a thousand other points.
As they approached the Urals, human settlements became
frequent, and the inquisitiveness of people encountered embarrassing.
He posed aternatcly as a merchant and as a
homebound member of a polar expedition. He had to use his
wits to find plausib](" answers when goods were insistently offered
to him for sale and when he ran into someone who had known
one or two members of the polar expedition to which he claimed
to belong. But nothing untoward happened, and at length he
reached Bogoslovsk, the terminus of the single-track railway.
A day later a train carried him westward from Perm through