²⁹ „During his lessons in the coupé of the battered saloon-car, Lenin had discussed the essence of liberation-wars as well …”

Emiljewitsch — Emil Belzner, our joy rider! The „Drive to Revolution” held you in its grip, didn’t it? The Russian Foreign Commissar, Tschitscherin, received from you — according to your own statement — in June 1927 in Baden-Baden — on sixteen or seventeen pages a terse, completely reality-oriented sketch of your experiences within the train of the Siberian convicts in spring 1917. The document, however, disappeared in the revolutionary apparatus of censorship.
Forty years later, your pen dotted down the odd search for Inès Armand. The poetic search for your revolutionary Muse came to an end for you, the very young war-deserter, behind the frontline at Tauroggen in East Prussia …

²⁹ „Beyond the border, some natives, some Jews too. However, it was unmistakeable that I had crossed into foreign country. After only two kilometres everything completely different. The destruction caused during the first war-weeks was similar in a brotherly sense, but more pronounced on this side. Charred huts, collapsed roofs, provisionally erected shelters for man and animal. No grievances, unspeakable indifference. And in the middle of all, the pomaded dash of the German base, the cream-lickers of the army’s provision, deeply despised by front-line soldiers.
‚Pay attention, my boy!‘ Lenin’s dame shouted from her Latvian white horse high up in the skies. Tauroggen (1691-1793 Prussian) was only half the size of Bruchsal, but in those days, it seemed to me gigantic. I don’t know why. Troops, horse-spans, supply-vehicles, all of this was not the reason. Perhaps, it was a mixture of pausing and feeling abandoned which took hold of me, creating a mood of being forlorn. Because, Petersburg/Petrograd was still far away ...
… ‚We are not travelling to futuristic liberation wars‘, Lenin had said. ‚Those liberation wars we are going to attend are different from those in 1813. The Poscherun-Mill near Tauroggen saw, end of 1812, the Convention of Tauroggen, signed by Russia’s General Diebitsch and Prussia’s General York. This convention declared Prussia’s auxiliaries for Napoleon as neutral in his campaign against Russia. Militarily, it made sense: the Russians encircled the Prussians.
Why is it that so-called ‚liberation wars‘ never became liberation wars? Because, the masses of the people, which did rise against Napoleon, had not yet developed enough consciousness! Why turned the revolutionary war of the European peoples into a reactionary war of European cabinets? Because, there was not yet a revolutionary party spearheading the masses! If the art of uprising would have been known then, the rise of the Russian and the European peoples against Napoleon would have been, at the same time, an uprising against the oppressors in their home-countries.
However, as we have nowadays in Germany a monarchic type of Social Democracy, as these Social Democrats seem to have forgotten their original resoluteness, to be wangled now as emergency-helpers of the reaction — probably, most likely, certainly, ha-ha, hm-hm, ho-ho —, thus the so-called ‚liberation wars‘ got stuck within monarchic ‚liberation wars‘ against the Napoleonic competition for power. Freedom should have been obtained by fighting along an inner front-line. What was the liberation-wars worth? Not worth a rush! Always the same: the watchword ‚freedom‘ is being used to fight for more servitude on behalf of the same old oppressors … Let me alone with futuristic ‚poems for freedom‘: these idiots, these ignorant scribblers who weaken the eagerness to struggle, this decadent left-over of the bourgeoisie provides nothing else than joy for all bankers.‘”

Comrade Trotsky, you are nodding! You agree with Lenin’s words?
But, pay attention, whilst tracking down his revolutionary Muse, our Emiljewitsch seems to have discovered that point which threw you off track …

²⁹ „Where was she? Where would she be after having silenced the telephone centre of the Winterpalais, to cut off the Petrograd-Moscow lifeline of the monarchist Headquarters? She taught the diploma-theologian, the deacon, she gave lessons to Koba-Sosso, Josef Dschugaschwili, Stalin, the passion-actor ...”

Stop! Too many names for one man! You have to enlighten us regarding your know-how as collected in the revolutionary train.

²⁹ „It is a rather unknown episode in the life of the emerging dictator or the ‚Red Tsar‘ as Josef Dschugaschwili was to be known later-on. It is an episode in his life as a party-theologian when he, in fact, received distinctions during his theologian studies in Tiflis. He had, as a seminarist, pilfered Cyrillic apocrypha of Early Christianity from the grated library of the ‚Blue Monastery‘, and he was stumbling along when the revolution crossed his way; and he decided to become a revolutionary by profession. He turned the cross into a skeleton key for all property stolen from humanity.

Inès Armand, tasked by Lenin, took care for a while to get him further education. From time to time, she would introduce him, as a private teacher, as a preacher, or for the provision of extra-lessons, to distinguished, influential residences where one could pick up interesting bits of information. It happened that he, camouflaged as a pope, would meet gendarmes or Cossacks who were looking for him, and he would baptize them and even sell them holy pictures from his bible. That was the master of the Trans-Siberian Express, who also would, for the underground work of the party, detour certain money-transports from banks …

Inès Armand and Radek narrated the comedy, which was underscored by demonic laughter of the one who was awake and sleeping at the same time:
Easter 1912. The Tsar and his court had come to their royal property in Livadia along the Crimean coast, three kilometres from Yalta. Koba, in-between two deportations and in the Christian age of thirty-three years, had come from Yalta as a ‚pope‘ to perform, together with a troupe of amateur actors, scenes from a Byzantine-Greek mystical drama, ‚Birth, Teaching, Passion and Resurrection of the Saviour‘, in the great park of Under-Livadia …
Focal point, that afternoon, was the scene of resurrection. Josef Dschugaschwili seemed to have fallen back into his time as a faithful seminarist. He was standing there like the most patient Passionate of the world. Although, when one of the torturers tried to fix his crown of thorns from behind with a stick, thereby causing a scratch on his left ear, he did turn his face, full of forgiveness — but, at the same time, he took note of the torturer’s face. It belonged to an insignificant watchmaker from Yalta: that night all of his watches disappeared from his shop-window.
On the Tsar’s balcony, everybody was deeply moved by the troops’ performance. When, at the end of the resurrection scene, Josef Dschugaschwili had jumped from the grave, in his hand the red flag of resurrection, now appearing with a deep bow in front of the balcony, the whole court stood, bells were ringing, Turkish and Christian music-bands caused an unbelievable noise, cannon-boats down in the bay fired salute, and through the beginning evening gun-smoke mixed with the scent of roses from nearby gardens was wafting along.
The Tsar ordered the protagonists to come closer; each was to be presented with a golden pocket-watch. His wife dropped tears when she saw the coloured nail-marks on hands and feet of the resurrected. Then it happened that Josef Dschugaschwili, when he grabbed for the pocket-watch that he dropped the red flag of resurrection and that the Tsar bowed down, took it, rolled it carefully, and handed it back like a relic. Finally, the Tsar, as Head of the Holy Synod, made the sign of the cross above the repentant, successful sufferer …”

„Ha, Stalin, the convert! Do you know, that his toes …”

Not a good idea, comrade Trotsky … the one with the toes! Better follow Emiljewitsch’s continued story about his search for his revolutionary Muse ...

²⁹ „After such a successful resurrection, Stalin had to be introduced to his next tasks and to the widening of his authority; she did it. She was, indeed, impressed by the military and the rhetoric-artistic genius of Trotsky, however, for the strengthening and clamping of the revolution’s future she placed her stakes on the man from Georgia. Under him, a species of diplomatically clever, professional revolutionaries would grow. Permanent revolution was not only for the next five years, it was thought as a permanent and creative element of life for the coming history of mankind.
Obviously, because she had decided that way, Trotsky calls Inès Armand only ‚a leading collaborator of the party, who was very close to Lenin, politically‘. Surely, it did not pass him that her inspiration meant a lot to the revolution, and this was much, much more than one could read from his chronicling words …”

Comrade Trotsky? Inès Armand preferred Stalin? What went wrong?

„Ah, I can help with this information as well:
²⁹ It had a somehow comical reason why Stalin did not like Trotsky. At a late hour, Trotsky had once asserted that Stalin’s toes were grown together or webs had grown between them. The former theologian took this as an insinuation, as an effort to label him as an Anti-Christ, thereby playing with the peoples’ superstition. Such is the way that conflicts start to be groomed. Later, of course, it was about power; toes and webs had developed into an ideological case …”

… And whilst we continue to roll through the world’s history, the consequences will still haunt us!
As you will have discovered, comrade Trotsky, all of us are somehow railway-freaks. Perhaps, it would be fitting if you could tell us how two unusual trains played their role in the success of the Russian revolution?