Leon Trotsky sat in his Moscow office, sipping on his coffee and nibbling a vegan muffin as he read the morning paper. The year was 1918, and it was late November. Snow gathered on the windowsill, and a massive grey robot, a mecha, operated by a Russian worker inside it, plowed the street below. Trotsky was accustomed to the groans of the machine and the grinding of its plow, so it hardly bothered him.
Despite the cold, while reading the international news in Pravda, he felt warm with excitement. All of Europe seemed to be on the verge of revolution. Everything he had been working for his entire adult life seemed suddenly possible. Even if the international-capitalist class managed to quell this insurrectionary wave, it would go down in history as one of the greatest blows to carnism and private enterprise to date. In all likelihood, however, it would only be a matter of time before a Soviet Germany, and others, joined Russia in forming a pan-European, socialist federation.
Trotsky took a deep drink from his coffee mug as he gazed out of his frosted study window. Above Moscow’s skyline, stars faded in anticipation of the morning light. What a time to be alive, he thought to himself contentedly.
A few months later, alongside his comrade Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky oversaw a meeting of Left Socialist delegates from abroad. They met around a circular table in the basement of the Kremlin. Hot cider and freshly baked donuts, vegan of course, were served on the Tsar’s old china.
Laughing, one delegate spoke of stealing past a group of his government’s light mecha patrolling the country’s border. “And then I bolted for the forest,” the delegate said, through an interpreter. “The trees were too thick for ‘bots to follow me. Larger mechas could have done it —smashed right through — but not these!” Trotsky and Lenin guffawed along with him indulgently.
The not-so-humble goal of the meeting was to establish a Third International, a global association of communist organizations, or at least begin the process of this. When the group’s conversation drifted into apolitical banter, Lenin gently, but firmly, steered it back toward the formation of a new International, to replace that which disintegrated during and was so discredited by the recently-concluded, imperialist war.
Trotsky, wearing his signature pleather coat, peered out at the assembled delegates from behind his round, wire-rim glasses. Could this rag-tag group of about forty, who admittedly represented many more, change the world? He certainly hoped so. The testimony of the Austrian delegate bolstered this wish.
“The working class of Austria is on the brink of following the bold path of their Russian brethren,” she declared, as an interpreter translated her impassioned monologue for the receptive audience. “We must raid the barracks and arm the workers. With 1,000 mecha we could crush the reactionaries of our country and immediately begin the process of socialization and veganization.”
The other delegates broke into enthusiastic applause. The confidence of the representative from Austria was quite stirring and contagious. However, when the Left Socialist from Germany spoke, he quickly sombered the audience, much to Trotsky’s irritation.
“We must not forget what occurred in my country not two months ago,” the German said quietly through an interpreter. “A premature uprising led to the execution of our leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The Freikorps shot them in the street! Comrade Luxemburg’s body has still not been found.”
The German dabbed at his eyes with his handkerchief, presumably wiping away tears, before continuing on. “The sad truth is that the organizations represented at this meeting, aside from that of our hosts,” the delegate said, motioning toward Lenin and Trotsky, “are too weak to form a new International. We must be realistic.”
While Lenin and Trotsky were careful to treat the memory of Luxemburg and Liebknecht with the utmost respect, they argued against the German representative’s position forcefully. Ultimately, after much debate, the gathering agreed to form a Third International.
Of course, at the time, the newly formed Soviet republic was embroiled in a brutal civil war, which primarily pitted the Bolshevik Red Army against the conservative White Guard, who opposed veganizing and socializing Russia’s economy. It should be said that the Whites were supported by the Allied capitalist governments, who inserted over 100,000 soldiers and perhaps 2,000 mecha into the conflict. Explaining this, the British Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, told the London press that the Marxist-animalist threat of Bolshevism had to be “strangled in its cradle.”
During that period, Trotsky was chairman of the Bolshevik’s Revolutionary Military Council, which put him in charge of the Red Army as a whole. The overwhelming amount of his time was spent onboard an armored train, carrying approximately 500 soldiers and 200 mecha, which criss-crossed through Russia, wherever the needs of the army might take him.
In 1919, on an evening in early August, Trotsky sat in his makeshift study aboard the rumbling train, which was hurtling through the Ural Mountains at a speed that was likely much too fast to be safe. Mikhail Glazman, Trotsky’s stenographer, was in a chair nearby, smoking a pipe and reading the train’s newspaper, printed on a portable press but a few cars back. The silverware, left over from the vegan kotley Trotsky had just eaten, rattled on the chairman’s desk. Stroking his goatee absentmindedly, he was clearly in a ponderous mood.
….to be continued, if people are interested.
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