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

WAR AND THE INTERNATIONAL
refused to board it, and, after new protests and a few anxious
moments, was allowed to stay until the arrival of a ship bound
for the United States. His Italian friends now wrote him that
they hoped soon to obtain the Italian and Swiss visas. 'When
I am already at Cadiz', he remarked, 'the whole of Europe
becomes hospitable to me.' On 20 December he was allowed to
leave, again under police escort, for Barcelona whither his wife
and two sons had arrived from Paris. From Barcelona he sailed
with his family on a ramshackle Spanish ship, crowded with
well-to-do deserters and destitute 'undesirables' from all
European countries. The neutral flag of the ship at least offered
some protection from German submarines. On the last day of
the year, the ship passed Gibraltar.
'This is the last time', Trotsky wrote to Alfred Rosmer, 'that
I cast a glance on that old canaille Europe.'
On a cold, rainy Sunday morning, 13 January 1917, he
disembarked in New York harbour. The colony of Russian
Socialists enthusiastically welcomed the author of the Zimmerwald
Manifesto; and there was no end to greetings and ovations.1
Trotsky 'looked haggard; he had grown older; and there was
fatigue in his face', says the Russo-American Communist
M. Olgin, who had visited him in Vienna five years before.
'His conversation hinged around the collapse of international
socialism.' This was also the theme of the lectures which,
shortly after his arrival, he delivered to Russian, Finnish,
Latvian, German, and Jewish Socialists in New York, Philadelphia,
and other cities.
With his family he settled in a lodging rented (for 18 dollars
a month) in the Bronx, 164th Street. The cheap apartment
offered the family unaccustomed luxuries: for the first time in
his life, the future leader of the revolution had a telephone in his
home. Various American writers have given highly coloured
descriptions ofTrotsky's life in New York: one remembered him
as a stan·ing tailor, another as a dish-washer in a restaurant,
and still another as a film actor. Trotsky denied these stories;
and the memoirs of people like Ziv and Olgin who were at the
he noted in his diary: 'Gigantic scrcwjacks will be needed in order to rai!e the
1
culture of the ma..es.'
A. Ziv, op. cit., pp. 68-6g.