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

60 THE PROPHET ARMED
who had only recently left Russia. Most of the editors were
living in London, in the borough of St. Pancras; Plekhanov
and Axelrod lived in Switzerland, but Plekhanov made frequent
trips to London. From this group, especially from Lenin's
home, ran all the threads to the underground movement in
Russia, whose agents appeared at Holford Square with messages
and went back with instructions. Thus, the young Trotsky
found himself transferred from Verkholcnsk straight into the
directing centre of Russian socialism and placed under the
constant influence of outstanding and contrasting personalities.
Zasulich and Martovshared with him their home, their meals,
and their thoughts. It was Vera Zasulich who had, the year
before Trotsky's birth, fired at General Trcpov, and had unwittingly
inspired the Freedom ef the People to follow her example.
After the jury acquitted her she escaped abroad, kept in touch
with Karl Marx, and, although she did not accept his teaching
without mental reservations, became one of the founders of the
Russian Marxist school. Disregarding Marx's doubts, she was
among the first to proclaim that the proletarian socialism he
had advocated for western Europe would suit Russia as well.1
She was not only a heroic character. Well read in history and
philosophy, she was essentially a heretic, with a shrewdly
feminine mind working by intuitive impulses and flashes rather
than by reasoning. In all the portraits of her drawn by contemporaries,
we also find the comic touches of the old-style
Russian Bohemian. 'She wrote very slowly, suffering truly all
the torments of literary creation'; and as she wrote or argued
she paced thoughtfully up and down her room, with her slippers
flapping, rolling cigarettes, chain-smoking, throwing butts on
the window sills and tables, scattering ash over her blouse, arms,
and manuscripts or into her cup of tea, and sometimes over her
interlocutor. To the young Trotsky she was the heroine of a
glorious epic-he had come to stay under one roof with the
living legend of revolution.
l\fortov was only a few years older than Trotsky. He, too,
was a Jew. The descendant of an old family of great Hebrew
scholars-his real name was Zederbaum-he had been one of
the initiators of the Bund, the Jewish Socialist party; but then
he abandoned the idea of a separate Jewish Labour party, and,
1
Ptrtpiska K. Manca i F. F. Eni:elsa s Russkimi Politicheskimi Deyaulami, pp. 240-2.