TROTSKY IS DEAD
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came to reject the parental ideas, our very rejection was in the
terms he taught us. "I am not an orphan on the earth so long as
this man lives on it."
It is strangely moving to read today, in
My Life,
Trotsky's
account of how, as
a
schoolboy, he first came into contact with the
workingclass movement.
It happened in this way.. I was walking along the street with
a younger member of our commune, Gregory Sokolovsky, a boy
about my age.
It's about time we started," I said.
"Yes, it's about time," he answered.
"But how?''
"That's it, how?"
"We must find workers, not wait for anybody or ask anybody,
but just find workers and set to it."
"I think we can find them," said Sokolovsky. "I used to know
a watchman who worked on the boulevard. He belonged to the
Bible Sect. I think I'll look him up."
Towards the close of his life, in his testimony before the
Dewey Commission, Trotsky, again recalling this incident of his
boyhood, summed up his entire career and faith:
Ladies and gentlemen of the Commission! The experience of
my life, in which there has been no lack either of success or of
failures, has not only not destroyed my faith in the clear, bright
future of mankind, but, on the contrary, has given it an inde–
structible temper. This faith in reason, in truth, in human soli–
darity, which at the age of eighteen I took with me into the
workers' quarters of the provincial Russian town of Nikolaiev–
this faith I have preserved fully and completely. It has become
more mature but not less ardent. In the very fact of your Com–
mission's formation ... I see a new and truly magnificent rein–
forcement of the revolutionary optimism which constitutes the
fundamental element of my life.
From the schoolboy who went to seek out the workers ("not
wait for anybody or ask anybody, but just find workers and set to
it") to the veteran revolutionary, grand in his exile, confessing his
"faith in reason, in truth, in human solidarity," Leon Trotsky's
life was all of one piece.
A
career like his makes one believe, even
in
times like these, in the dignity and the capacities of the human
race.
