In
Memory: L. D. Trotsky
(Murdered August 21, 1940)
Victor Serge
H.
WAS HARDLY FORTY-FIVE
when we began calling him
"!he
Old Man," as we had Lenin at a similar early age.
All
his life he
gave one the feeling of a man in whom thought, action and his
personal life formed a single solid block, one who would follow
his road to the end, on whom one could always absolutely depend.
He would not waver on essentials, he would not weaken in defeat,
he would not avoid responsibility or lose his head under pressure.
A man with so profound an inner pride that he became simple and
modest. Proving his powers at an early age (he was president of
the first Petersburg Soviet in 1905, at 28), he was from then on
sure of himself, and was able to look at f arne, government posts,
the greatest power, in a purely utilitarian way, without either con·
tempt or desire. He knew how to be harsh and pitiless, in the spirit
of a surgeon performing a serious operation. During the Civil
War and the terror, he could write a sentence like: "There is noth·
ing more human, in a time of revolution, than energy."
If
I had to define him in one word, I would say he was a doer.
Yet he was also attracted by research, by contemplation, by poetry
and creation. Fleeing from Siberia, he could appreciate the beauty
of the snowstorms; in the thick of the 1917 revolution, he specu·
lated on the role of the creative imagination in such events; during
his Mexican exile, he admired the amazing forms of the cactus
plant and made expeditions to dig up fine specimens for his garden.
A religious unbeliever, he was sure of the value of human life, the
greatness of man, and the duty of serving human ends.
I never knew him greater, and he was never dearer to me,
than in the dingy rooms of workers in Leningrad and Moscow,
where I used to watch him, a few years earlier one of the two
undisputed chieftains of the revolution, talk for hours in order to
convince a few factory workers. Still a member of the Political
Bureau, he was on the road to losing his power and probably also
388
