358
IRVING HOWE
they readily mastered ... -these men and women combine an
unusual range of culture with an unusual range of social ex–
perience and, stripped of so many of the trimmings with which
human beings have swathed themselves, have, in survlvmg,
kept the sense of those things that are vital to the honor of
human life.
In
the spring of 1897 Bronstein and his friends organized a
clandestine group, the South Russian Workers' Union, which held
political discussions and issued leaflets about conditi'Ons in local
factories; the writing and hectographing, at the rate of two hours a
page, was done by Bronstein himself. Inevitably the police closed
in, and early the next year most of the members of this embryonic
radical movement were arrested; some were subjected to flogging
and Bronstein was kept for several months in lice-ridden solitary
confinement. Next he was transferred to an Odessa prison, where
he remained a year and a half, and then sentenced to four years
in Siberia.
But most of the important Russian Marxists were then living
as exiles in Western Europe, debating their political course in rela–
tion to the seemingly invincible monolith of Czarism and preparing
to establish an organization that might ensure tighter relations be–
tween themselves and the scattered illegal groups in Russia. Eager
to meet and learn from such Marxist leaders as Plekhan'Ov, Martov
and Lenin, young Bronstein escaped from Siberia in the fall of 1902,
made his way secretly across Russia and, taking the pseudonym by
which the world came to know him, managed to smuggle himself
across the frontier.
Once in Europe, Trotsky immediately threw himself into the
political life of the Russian emigres.
In
London he met Lenin for
the first time, and the two men took long walks through the streets
of the alien city, exchanging political ideas and impressions of the
underground in Russia. Trotsky began to write articles for
Iskra
dis–
tinguished by revolutionary enthusiasm, but florid and immature in
style: the hard aphoristic brilliance 'Of his later prose would come
only from an accumulation of experience and a conscious self–
discipline. By the time the Russian Social Democratic Party held its
Second Congress in
1903,
Trotsky, though still in his early twenties,
was a figure of some importance. He refused to align himself com-
