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 wasnt easy in Russia
before and after revolution.
However, I bade farewell to the orthodox
way of the schtetls 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 didnt 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 prisons
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
Lenas
Dont giggle, Mr. Rockefeller, we
all have our little secrets, havent
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
lifes 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.
tazara tazara tazara ...
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
tazara tazara tazara ...
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.
tazara tazara tazara ...
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
tazara tazara tazara ...
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 Germanys
Highest Army Command, didnt they?
They rolled from Switzerland across
enemy-territory in Germany, through
Sweden and Finland, in a sealed
train-coach, declared as ex-territorial
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