Mr. Bronstein Goes to Canada

Amherst, Nova Scotia. Perhaps you've heard of it?

Lev Bronstein had.

In 1917, it seems that good Mr. Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, had been heading from New York to Russia by way of Halifax. In Halifax he had the misfortune of arousing the suspicion of the local constabulary. He refused, by virtue of his virtuousness, to answer any questions concerning himself beyond his name. He was much taken aback by the questions regarding his political motivations, as he knew the entire thing was "so clearly a discrimination against the Russian revolutionaries." While the other Russians complained bitterly to the British authorities, Mr. Trotsky saw no need to complain "to Beelzebub about Satan."

Mr. Trotsky, with five other Russians, was later arrested and taken to shore. During the arrest, Mr. Trotsky proudly noted that his son had struck one of the British officers in what he called "his first lesson in British democracy." While his family was left in Halifax, Mr. Trotsky was taken to a camp for German prisoners in Amherst, Nova Scotia. It was there that he underwent what he described as far worse treatment than he had undergone even at the hands of the agents of the Czar. In Russia, he declared, he had been strip searched in privacy while in Canada he was stripped in front of a dozen men. The whole thing was a sham, he declared, for the capitalists who had arranged the whole thing "knew well enough that we were irreproachable Russian revolutionaries returning to our country, liberated by the revolution."

While Leon Trotsky assigned devious and unjust intentions to the British, they were, in fact, motivated out of their alliance with Russia. They feared that introducing more Russian revolutionaries to a Russia that had already fallen from the hands of the Nicholas II and was in the hands of the Provisional Government would destabilize Russia even further. Not only that, but if the self-declared revolutionaries were to gain power they would, according to everything they had said and written, withdraw Russia from the Great War.

Was Trotsky "irreproachable"? Beyond his violent oratory and the 1905 revolution, at this point in his career he likely was. However, in 1918, when the Bolsheviks were in power, Trotsky strongly advocated the use of the measure he was so keen to condemn when it was used against him. Only, the Bolsheviks were not using internment camps, they were using extra-judicial concentration camps. All of the leaders of opposition parties were placed in these camps along with priests, White Guards, and anyone else who might oppose the Bolshevik government. While the gravest injustice against Trotsky was his strip-search in front of a dozen men, these camps resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

While Trotsky wrote that the police who held him imprisoned in Amherst were "criminal police types" he was among the strongest proponents of the Cheka, the Bolshevik's security arm. The Cheka were an undiscliplined military force who were above the law and who executed hundreds of thousands of prisoners without trials.

Trotsky, along with the other revolutionaries, felt that the peasant forces that opposed them were motivated by their ignorance of the revolution. Trotsky insisted that the "iron broom" was necessary "to clean" Ukraine and "sweep away the bandit hordes." Rather than being ignorant, these localized opposition forces were motivated by their enforced conscription and the constant and unfair requisitioning of goods. Lenin and Trotsky had supported the requisition of grain from peasants they dubbed "kulaks", or rich peasants, and were incensed at any resistance. They had the Cheka take even more food and seed from the peasants, and millions of peasants starved when their crops failed later on.

The Red Army had a high rate of desertion, which was eventually combated in a measure that Trotsky supported, by summary executions and the imprisonment of the families of deserters. Leon Trotsky was later forced out of government by Joseph Stalin, and was assassinated on Stalin's orders in Mexico in 1940.

Trotsky was imprisoned in Amherst for less than a month. It would have been better for the world, perhaps, if he had remained there for the rest of his life.