Trotsky in New York, 1917

July 4, 2016
D.C. lawyer and author Ackerman (Young J. Edgar) takes the obscure story of Leon Trotsky’s 10-week stay in New York City in early 1917 and succeeds in painting a picture of a man on the cusp of greatness. When Trotsky arrived with his family in January, he was entrenched in an ideological schism with Lenin, precipitated by the 1915 Zimmerwald conference that divided European socialists over the socialist response to WWI. Trotsky was virtually unknown in America outside of certain émigré circles, but he quickly insinuated himself in the activities of the Socialist Party of America, becoming a thorn in the side of its leader, Morris Hillquit, and undermining Hillquit’s vision of what the party should be as well as its level of militancy in opposing WWI. Ackerman shows how, in that span just preceding the Russian Revolution, Trotsky managed to plant the seeds of dissent that would eventually splinter the SPA. Whether writing at his office on St. Mark’s Place or radicalizing German prisoners of war while briefly detained in Canada on his way back to Russia, Trotsky was a tireless believer in the revolution he would soon help bring to his homeland. His brief stay in N.Y.C. may remain a historical footnote, but Ackerman clearly demonstrates the forcefulness of Trotsky’s revolutionary spirit. Agent: Ron Goldfarb, Goldfarb and Associates.

July 15, 2016
An account of the two months in 1917 when Leon Trotsky "found refuge in the United States," where he experienced the "last gasp of the Belle Epoque.""BRONX MAN LEADS RUSSIAN REVOLUTION." This unlikely headline ran in the Bronx Home News in November 1917. The spring revolution in Russia that had deposed the czar saw Vladimir Lenin stuck in Zurich and Trotsky in New York City, where he was writing for a Russian-language socialist newspaper. An escaped convict in Russia and persona non grata in most of wartime Europe, Trotsky had been deported earlier in the year from Spain to the neutral United States, which viewed him as just another unknown Eastern European immigrant. He was in the U.S. just over two months when the Kerensky government declared an amnesty for political prisoners. Trotsky immediately joined a flood of exiles returning to his homeland, where, by the end of the year, he was Commissar of Foreign Affairs in the revolutionary communist government. During his brief American sojourn, the irrepressible Trotsky jumped with both feet into local politics, where his fiery speeches and articles provoked a split in the American Socialist Party as it considered its response to the onrushing war. Attorney and amateur historian Ackerman (Young J. Edgar: Hoover and the Red Scare, 1919-1920, 2007, etc.) creates a lively portrait of this tireless agitator adjusting his personal life and his politics to a strange country a few months before the Bolsheviks seized power at home. In boisterous prose well-matched to his topic, the author also convincingly evokes the social ferment of New York's huge immigrant community: polyglot, united in hatred of the czarist government, and receptive to socialism but arguing endlessly and urgently about political theory and strategy. Ackerman succeeds in presenting Trotsky's little-known weeks in New York as an absorbing adventure, though much greater adventures lay ahead.An entertaining and informative account of a footnote to the life of one of the 20th century's most charismatic leaders.

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