That was the catchword for our V.I.P.-caring unit! …
We welcome … Gospodin Lew Dawidowitsch Bronstein!
Exactly ninety years ago you had your last grand appearance via railway — 1917 in Petrograd!

„Yes, but then I had called myself for fifteen years already: Trotsky!”

Born in 1879 … just five years after you, Mr. Rockefeller, in Janowka a schtetl in the Ukraine, fifth child of the Jewish peasant David Bronstein …
Trotsky instead of Bronstein? Getting rid of a Jewish name?

„Why should I do such a thing? I remained to be known as a Jew throughout my life, and I tell you that wasn’t easy in Russia — before and after revolution. However, I bade farewell to the orthodox way of the schtetl’s Judaism rather soon. To detect the hypocrisy as practised by my parents, you know, there was very helpful my extended exposure to life in the port-city of Odessa; I always stood for a universal, assimilated Judaism. In 1898, I got arrested for the first time because I was a Jew …”

That was around the time when your father, Mr. Rockefeller, took the light to the strangest folks in the remotest parts of the world …

„... A carpenter, called Nesterenko, gave me away to the Tsarist police. They didn’t like that kind of enlightenment, which I tried to spread — the ideas of international Socialism.
During an intermediate imprisonment in Moscow, I married Alexandra Lwowna Sokoloskaja ... And, because she learned to share my convictions, she also shared my banishment to Irkutsk in Siberia … two daughters we had together, and I had to leave all three of them behind when an occasion offered itself to escape … a passport was falsified, using the name Trotsky which was how the prison’s superintendent in Odessa was called.” …

Your sense of humour is news to us …

„As Trotsky I came to know Wladimir Iljitsch Uljanow in London, he had invited me to work with him. You see, only then he called himself Lenin. Many of us had chosen cover names. Wladimir Iljitsch, it was said, had taken his from that Siberian river Lena — to have been banished to Siberia meant in Tsarist Russia to be a recognized opposition leader.
But, it may have been rather in memory of his child-minder who was called Lena. When he was asked as a little boy, whose child he was, he supposedly answered ‚Lenin’ which is Russian for ‚Lena’s’ …
Don’t giggle, Mr. Rockefeller, we all have our little secrets, haven’t we?

I came to know your United States of America as Trotsky as well, and right at the beginning, I stumbled across a small heap of ‚black’ problems your praised country was busy to accumulate.
From 1903 onwards, I lived together with Natalija Sedowa, whom I met when she was studying art in Paris — you see, when you are a revolutionary, your family-bonds tend to be as inconstant as your political alliances …
However, Natalija Sedowa did connect her life’s journey with mine; together we experienced new banishment in Russia, new escape, the restless wandering of emigrants from one country to another …
I have been war-reporter in the Balkans; I was among the activists in Constantinople when the revolution reached the Osmanic Empire. In Switzerland, I signed — together with Lenin — the International Socialist Anti-War Declaration.
The year 1916 saw us in the ‚praised country’ — in New York!
We rented an apartment in a worker-class quarter and we paid instalments for some furniture. The rooms for eighteen Dollars a month offered a comfort, which was unheard of in Europe: electrical light, gas-driven oven, bathroom, telephone, one lift to get the food up, and another one to get the garbage-box down. All this, immediately prejudiced our boys in favour of New York. Their life cantered for a while around the telephone. Such a warlike instrument had been to our disposal neither in Vienna nor in Paris.
The housekeeper was a Negro. My wife paid him three months rent in advance but could not get a receipt since the owner of the house had taken the receipt-book for inspection the previous evening. Two days after we had moved in, we were told that the Negro had vanished, taking some of the rent-money. We were alarmed, that was a bad start. But, our belongings were still in place, and when we opened the wooden box with our table-ware we did find — to our greatest surprise — our dollars, carefully wrapped in a piece of paper.
The housekeeper had taken only money from those tenants who were in possession of a proper receipt. The Negro had no mercy with the house-owner but he did not want to cause harm to the tenants. Truly, that was a wonderful man. I and my wife were touched deeply, and he continues to live in our memory.”

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We would like to pipe up the fact that we have the privilege to greet you in Africa, comrade Trotsky — if you allow us to address you that way — because, here in Africa there are still some veterans of liberation movements around who insist to be addressed like that.
… And, you are on the „Great UHURU Railway“ — a railway which uses the Kiswahili-term for FREEDOM, and which was completed thirty years ago as a symbol of international solidarity between nations in Asia and in Africa …

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„Well, as you already mentioned it, I travelled by train already ninety years ago — in May, 1917, to Petrograd, to the October-Revolution …
I came from New York, and then — when our ship to Russia had to stop in Halifax, in Canadian Nova Scotia, I came to know somebody who liked to remember his time in Africa …
Together with my family, I was taken to an internment camp. We had a World War of which, at that time, no one had a hunch that much later it would be called the First one.
The commander was a Colonel Morris who had served in the British colonies and during the Boer-War in South Africa.
He did not like the way I lacked military rituals, and I heard him growl behind my back: I should have met him in South Africa … This seemed to have been a phrase which he liked most.”

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Ninety years ago, trains seem to have played a special role during the Russian revolution, comrade Trotsky. One month before you arrived, Lenin had come by train to Petrograd …

„Well, he indeed proclaimed the April-Thesis from the tender of a locomotive, summarizing possibilities and needs to bring the Russian revolution to a point so that workers, peasants and soldiers could grab the power…”

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From the tender of a locomotive — what an impressive picture ...

„... quite often painted in oil!”

However, the picture of international railway-solidarity was a bit different then: Lenin, Inès Armand, Karl Radek and some other prominent communists returned to Russia with the support of Germany’s Highest Army Command, didn’t they?
They rolled from Switzerland across enemy-territory in Germany, through Sweden and Finland, in a sealed train-coach, declared as ex-territorial …