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Since this was printed, eight long years have passed. Trotsky has lived here and there in Europe, always kindling the flame of "Trotskyism" which is after all Communism. Today Trotsky is in Mexico— the ideal country for an assassination— and Stalin continues to disappoint the many Stalinists who continue to clamor for his extermination—but why should Stalin have Trotsky done away with?
The ruthless Dictator is practical. He and Trotsky are always spitting in each other's face, but at an Oriental bazaar the rug dealers think nothing of a little saliva—and J. Stalin is to his grim fingertips an Oriental, a Georgian brigand, bomb-thrower and safe-blower who is now on terms of diplomatic friendship with fellow Dictators, Presidents, Kings. If, by invoking Trotsky as a conspirator against himself, Stalin can conveniently bump off such Old Bolsheviks in Russia as do actually get in his way from time to time, so much to the good. If there were no Trotsky, or if Trotsky should be assassinated, the Ogpu would have to invent another Trotsky to serve purposes not wholly different from those served in England by what is called "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition."
Trotsky & Trotskyism, Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born 57 years ago in the Ukraine of peasant parents so prosperous that today in Russia they would be exterminated as kulaks. At only 19, this brilliant little Jew was already in the custody of Tsarist police as a revolutionist of mark. Bronstein's various escapes from Siberia were always theatrically brilliant, in contrast to the methodical escapes at the same period of Djhugashvili who is now called Stalin. Bronstein, when Tsarist Russia finally got too hot for him, escaped on a forged passport in which he whimsically gave himself the name of his last jailer, "Trotsky."
Straight went Trotsky to seek famed Lenin who then lived in London, writing in the Reading Room of the British Museum the revolutionary tracts which were to alter the world. Trotsky, always impatient, rushed immediately to Lenin's house and routed him out just before dawn. The majestically calm genius of Lenin and the excited, flashing genius of Trotsky led then and there to a long, foggy, disputatious walk in the vicinity of Westminster Abbey.
During the War the safest place in Europe was Spain, but Trotsky is physically no coward, and it was only to find outlet for his pacifism that he went to Spain. Pestered there by the police, he soon skipped on to Manhattan. After writing his immortal philippic on chewing gum in the subway, Leon Trotsky, on hearing that the Kerensky Government had seized Russia, returned the furniture he had been buying on the installment plan, borrowed his passage money and streaked for Petrograd. In this city (the Tsarist capital which is now Leningrad) at the time of the abortive Russian revolution of 1905, Trotsky had briefly figured as the president of the historic "First Soviet." A soviet is merely any representative group or council of workmen who have decided to call themselves a soviet.