Trotsky’s Dream of Lenin

In the year 1935, when Leon Trotsky was living in Western Europe as an exile from the Russian Bolshevik state that he had founded with Lenin, he kept a diary (Leon Trotsky, Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935, 1976, hereafter, Diary). In it he recorded the fluctuations of a chronic fever along with comments on current and past events in his life. Late in June the fever exacerbated, causing him to become gravely ill and to have a dream which he recounted in his diary on June 26th:

Last night, or rather early this morning, I dreamed I had a conversation with Lenin. Judging by the surroundings it was on a ship, on the third-class deck. Lenin was lying in a bunk; I was either standing or sitting near him, I am not sure which. He was questioning me anxiously about my illness. “You seem to have accumulated nervous fatigue, you must rest.” I answered that I had always recovered from fatigue quickly, thanks to my native Schwungkraft [animated energy], but this time the trouble seemed to lie in some deeper processes…. “Then you should seriously (he emphasized the word) consult the doctors (several names).…” I answered that I already had many consultations and began to tell him about my trip to Berlin; but looking at Lenin I recalled that he was dead [Lenin had been dead for over a decade]. I immediately tried to drive away this thought, so as to finish the conversation. When I finished telling him about my therapeutic trip to Berlin in 1926, I wanted to add, “This was after your death”; but I checked myself and said, “After you fell ill” (Diary: pp. 145-146).

Trotsky’s dream has not been mentioned in psychological studies of his personality, and it has only received superficial and cursory mentions in two of his biographies (Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940, 1963: pp. 250-251, hereafter, Deutscher; and Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Trotsky, 1977: pp. 367-368). This essay will first sketch the factual background to the dream: the relationships between Lenin and Trotsky, the history of Trotsky’s illness, and the events proceeding the dream; and will then collate these facts with the contents of the dream, to offer some interpretations of these contents.

Background

Lenin and Trotsky first met in 1902, when Lenin was 32 years old and Trotsky 23, and they were both dedicated Russian revolutionary Marxists. After being political friends, they became for many years bitter political foes who held different Marxist viewpoints. Then during the beginnings of the Bolshevik Revolution — in the years 1917-1922 — they put aside differences, renewed their early friendship, and formed what Trotsky called “our fellowship of work” in which they directed the events of the Revolution. Lenin, along with valuing Trotsky as his “ablest” lieutenant, was concerned about the latter’s health. In March, 1921, when Trotsky had an illness that a doctor thought was caused by improper nutrition, Lenin wrote a letter to several Bolshevik agencies, ordering them “to organize adequate nutrition for Comrade Trotsky according to the doctor’s orders…” (Leon Trotsky, My Life, 1931: pp. 480, 511, hereafter, My Life; Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, 1996: p. 267).

Trotsky, as early as 1918, came to regard Lenin as “the greatest man of our revolutionary epoch” (Leon Trotsky, On Lenin: Notes Towards a Biography, 1971: 193, hereafter, On Lenin). Whereas he adapted the attitude of an arrogant newcomer towards many members of Lenin’s Bolshevik party (he had only joined the party in August, 1917), toward Lenin he formed a special attitude of outward “tactful pliancy,” in which he regarded Lenin as his “master” from whom he “learned to arrive independently at the same decision” (Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 1967: p. 66; My Life: p. 394). Despite their feelings of mutual respect, Lenin and Trotsky were not socially intimate (perhaps because of a lingering residue from their years of political enmity, Deutscher: 50).

In May, 1922, Lenin had a stroke which incapacitated him physically and mentally. By the summer he had made a partial recovery, and in his first post-illness meeting with Trotsky he related how he had been unable to “speak or write, and had to learn everything all over again.” By the fall and winter, although he was able to attend meetings of the Bolshevik party’s political bureau, at the end of these meetings he gave Trotsky “the

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impression of being a hopelessly tired man. All the muscles of his face sagged, the gleam went out of his eyes…. His shoulders drooped heavily.” Trotsky added that “at such ghastly moments Lenin seemed to me a doomed man” (My Life: p. 507).

On March 10, 1923, Lenin had a second stroke that paralyzed his right side and left hand, and rendered him almost speechless. Throughout 1923, although he made some temporary improvements, he could not participate in political work, or meet with Trotsky or most of his other colleagues. He was cared for by his wife, sister, nurses, and a group of Russian and European doctors. Trotsky, who received reports on his condition from one of his doctors, was torn between not abandoning his hopes for his recovery and not wanting him to live on as a helpless invalid (My Life: pp. 507-508).

In the fall of 1923, Trotsky confronted a political and a medical crisis, each of which would become protracted. Stalin and other old-Bolshevik party members, in the course of politically maneuvering to become Lenin’s successors, dissembled their intentions by accusing Trotsky of wanting to become a dictator. In an October 26th speech to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, Trotsky replied that he had turned down positions of power when Lenin had offered them to him, and that he “feared above all making the impression that [he] was organizing a faction.” Later he revealed that the “very thought” of his replacing Lenin “made [him] shudder” (Valentina Vilkova, The Struggle for Power: Russia in 1923, 1996: p. 184; My Life: p. 482). His reluctance to change from Lenin’s ablest lieutenant to replacing Lenin as a leader probably originated in his unresolved oedipal conflicts with his authoritarian father (Peter Loewenberg, “Psychoanalytic Ego Psychology and Object Relations and Their Uses for the Historian,” The Psychohistory Review, 25, 1996: pp. 32-33).

And, then, late in October, after returning from a weekend hunting trip to the marshy country outside of Moscow, he became afflicted by a fever that physicians diagnosed as an infection of unknown etiology, that was unresponsive to medical treatments and greatly aggravated by mental stresses, and that persisted through 1923 and into 1924 (Diary: p. 145).

On January 21, 1924, Lenin died from a third stroke. Trotsky, in an article for the Bolshevik newspapers that was hurriedly written while he felt the sensations of fever, tersely and eloquently expressed his feelings of shock (“we were all awaiting recovery, and instead catastrophe came”), of being “orphaned,” and of determination to carry on Lenin’s teaching. “Tomorrow,” he wrote, “we shall still ask: is Lenin no more? Because his death will for long continue to seem impossible” (On Lenin: p. 203-204). He would continue, for a longer time than he could have anticipated, to think that Lenin’s death was “impossible.” Because Stalin deceived him about the date of Lenin’s funeral, and perhaps also because of his fever and reluctance to assume a leadership role, he was not among the many mourners who attended the January 27th funeral. At this time he was “shaken with gratitude” when Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, wrote him in a letter that in the last month of his life her husband had been moved by reading a comparison of Lenin and Marx that Trotsky had published. Krupskaya added that Lenin had continued to feel friendship for Trotsky from their 1902 meeting until his death (My Life: p. 510). (In her letter she made no mention of the years of political differences between Lenin and Trotsky).

In the months following Lenin’s funeral, Trotsky remained feverish and withdrawn from others, privately identifying with his dead leader while scorning his old-Bolshevik opponents and publicly mourning for Lenin by writing several warm and vivid recollections of the latter, centering on their first meetings and then on their “fellowship of work” in the Bolshevik Revolution. In April, 1924, these were published in a book, On Lenin: Notes Towards a Biography. In the “Foreword” to this book, Trotsky announced his future intentions of revising some of his recollections, adding new ones, and “perhaps” becoming Lenin’s biographer (On Lenin: 24). In an October 7, 1924, article on Lenin’s personality, “The True and the False” (published in the Bolshevik party newspaper, Pravda), he emphasized that his subject’s “essential characteristic was to embody a tense will striving towards a [revolutionary] goal.” One example of this was a solicitude for the health of political comrades, which Trotsky commented on as follows:

Lenin’s personal attentiveness towards his comrades was dictated by devotion to the cause — precisely to the same cause for which the comrades themselves gather around him. This attention which Lenin gave to them both as his co-workers and as

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individuals testifies once again to his singleness of purpose, to the tenseness with which his whole personality was geared to the achievement of his aim (On Lenin: pp. 158, 167).

In making these comments Trotsky no doubt was recollecting the attention that Lenin had shown for his 1921 illness and wishing that he had this attention for his present illness. About this time his Bolshevik opponents began a daily newspaper campaign of slandering his political past and his relations with Lenin, a campaign which exacerbated his fever, but to which he did not publicly reply.

Over the next three years his life was dominated by illness and struggles against his political opponents for Lenin’s legacy. Since his Russian doctors were unable to diagnose the causes of his recurrent fevers, which often “paralyzed” his important activities, they recommended that he take a medical trip to Berlin in the spring of 1926. There, after consulting with many German physicians, he had his tonsils excised, an operation which did not alter the subsequent course of his fevers (My Life: pp. 522-524). In his political struggles, he offered no resistance when his opponents followed up their campaign of slander by demoting him from his military and political positions after Stalin had become the majordomo and his main adversary. Although he displayed the utmost courage and tenacity in fighting for his political ideas, which he considered to be the ideas of Lenin, by the end of 1927 he was politically destroyed.

He believed that his defeat had resulted from what his Marxist outlook led him to conceptualize as “objective processes”: the decline of world revolutionary movements and the rise of bureaucracy in Russia, processes that had “foreordained” Stalin’s victory and that even Lenin could not have prevailed against. Thus, when Krupskaya said to him in 1927 that had her husband been alive “he would probably be doing time in a Stalin prison,” he agreed with her (My Life: p. 481). He could not seriously or for long consider the possibility that, in addition to objective historical processes, his defeat had been influenced by his reluctance about replacing Lenin as a leader and his arrogant attitudes that had estranged him from Bolsheviks who might have become his political supporters.

In February, 1929, Trotksy was deported from Russia, and then lived the next six-and-a-half years of his life in Turkey and France. As a man without a country, he was ostracized from having contacts with those who lived in Russia. In these years he thought about Lenin in various — always passionate — ways, applying what he called “Bolshevik-Leninist” ideas to his voluminous writings on current politics and in his attempts to politically organize his diverse groups of sympathizers. In his two major books — My Life and The History of the Russian Revolution (1932-1933) — he gave delineations of the roles of himself and Lenin in Bolshevik history. Trotsky’s writings refuted the falsifications of Stalin that prevailed in Russia, and influenced the opinions of readers outside of Russia. He frequently spoke about writing a biography of Lenin, and by the mid-1930s he had completed the first volume, The Young Lenin, depicting Lenin’s first 23 years, up to the year 1893. In his diary, in an entry for April 10, 1935, he recollected the emotional details of a September, 1918, talk with Lenin: how, as he recounted his first successes in the Russian Civil War as the commander of the new Red Army, Lenin had listened with “excited attention” and then had seemed to be looking at him “with somewhat different eyes as if he was falling in love” [emphasis by Trotsky] (Diary: p. 84). This memory, which was so intensely remembered after 17 years, was his most affectionate recorded memory of Lenin.

In May and early June, when he and his wife Natalia were living in the small French Alpine village of Domène, he began to experience a period of increased exacerbations of his fever that made him feel that his resistance was becoming weaker, and that his “liquidation” was approaching (Diary: p. 119). (Febrile illnesses had, previously, killed four of his childhood siblings, his father, and one of his daughters.) His exacerbations were probably caused by different mental stresses: news from Russia of persecutions of Trotsky’s youngest son and his first wife; being without money; his often intense and acrimonious correspondence and meetings with individuals who were affiliated with his Bolshevik-Leninist organizations (because he was afraid that his diary might be examined by the police, he made only infrequent and vague references to these political activities in its entries); harassments by rightists and leftists; and the growing threat of being deported by the French government to a remote French colony.

He was saved from this threat when, on June 8th, he was granted a six-month temporary

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residence by the government of Norway. He then recorded in his diary how he and Natalia traveled from Domène to Paris and afterwards to Antwerp in Belgium, meeting briefly with his oldest son and political confident, Leon Sedov; his nine-year-old grandson, Seva; and groups of political supporters. After overcoming a reluctance to accept him by the Norwegian government (which feared he might engage in revolutionary activities), borrowing money to pay for his travels because he was penniless, and obtaining the necessary visas for himself and Natalia who were both stateless individuals, he and she and two secretaries sailed from Antwerp to Oslo on the small Norwegian ship, the Paris. His only diary comment on the June 15-18 voyage was that the whole trip was “ideal” because no one “took any interest” in him (Deutscher: pp. 290-292; Diary: pp. 138-142).

At Oslo Fjord he was met by Olav Scheflo, a sympathetic Norwegian journalist who drove him and his party in a car to a hotel near Oslo where they rested for several days. On his arrival the Norwegian National Farmer’s Union protested his admission, he was attacked by Norwegian fascists and local supporters of Stalin, and the government restricted his area of residence and asked him to pledge to refrain from political activities. On June 23rd he and Natalia settled into two rooms of the country home of Konrad Knudson, which was located 40 miles north of Oslo. Knudson was a Socialist member of the Norwegian parliament, whose moderate political views were remote from those of Trotsky, but who accepted the latter as a tenant when all other Norwegian homes were afraid to offer acceptance (Deutscher: pp. 292-293; Diary: pp. 142-144).

In a June 24th diary entry, after recording some of the attacks against his residing in Norway, he added, “Worst of all is the illness. Ten days of travel and living in hotels passed well, and I seemed to have revived. But now everything has come back at once: weakness, temperature, perspiration, inner physical emptiness…. It’s an affliction, there’s no other word for it.” He went on being sick, and on the early morning of June 26th had his dream of conversing with Lenin. A dream which he thought important enough to write down in detail immediately upon awakening.

Interpretations

Because of Trotsky’s censorship from his diary of many of his political activities, much important information relating to his dream remains unknown. However, by drawing on the information that has been given in this essay, and by focusing on the contents of the conversation between Lenin and Trotsky and the reasons for their being third-class passengers on a ship, it is possible to postulate several of the psychological and political meanings of the dream.

The dream was Trotsky’s attempt to defend against his anxieties about his illness, and his loneliness in his new place of refuge, by reestablishing a relationship with Lenin, a Lenin who eleven years after death is virtually alive, shows none of the stigmata of his years of cerebral strokes, and who for most of the dream closely and “anxiously” questions Trotsky about the latter’s symptoms. In his replies Trotsky first expresses his fear that his illness involves “deeper processes” that portend his death. After Lenin has urged him to counter this fear by “seriously” (Lenin’s emphasis) consulting several doctors, he recounts to Lenin that his many consultations with physicians — up to his 1926 visit to Berlin — have been ineffectual. (His diary does not record that he has consulted any doctors since his present exacerbation of illness began in May). In their conversation, Lenin, by his close questioning, shows what Trotsky in 1924 had described as the “tense will” and “personal attentiveness” that the Bolshevik leader reserved for a valued political comrade. Trotsky, in his replies to this questioning, shows the desire of a patient to explain his illness to a trusted physician.

They converse on the third-class deck of a ship where they appear to be alone (although Trotsky’s recollections of their 1917-1922 talks sometimes convey the impressions that they had been alone, these talks usually occurred at political functions where others were present) and where they are physically close to each other. Trotsky is either standing or sitting, perhaps because (as he will note in his diary) he cannot decide which position is best for his fever, while Lenin is “near” him, “lying in a bunk” (Diary: p. 159). The reasons for Lenin being in this reclining position are not known.

To understand how they came to be third-class passengers it is necessary to discuss Trotsky’s views about being in third class and about what would have happened had Lenin not died in 1924. It is not known what ship’s class Trotsky occupied during his voyage to Norway on the Paris (occurring eight days before his dream) or whether he observed the third-class passengers on the Paris. On one occasion in 1916-1917, when

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he was a second-class passenger on a ship sailing from Spain to America, he visited the third-class passengers and later he would painfully recollect their hunger and depressed and sullen feelings as they sailed “from a poverty that [was] bitter and hateful to another shrouded in uncertainty” (My Life: pp. 268-269). Perhaps his dreaming of being in third class expressed his depressed view of himself as an individual who was homeless, impecunious, sick, and aging (in his diary, after noting that he was 55 years old, he commented that “old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man”), and who was now seeking refuge in a country where the reception of him had been constrained, uncertain, and protested, and where he lacked any significant influence.

It has been mentioned how he had agreed with Krupskaya’s 1927 prediction that had her husband lived after 1924 he would have been defeated by Stalin and served time in prison. Trotsky continued to believe this prediction, up to and after his dream, repeating it in an article, “How Did Stalin Defeat the Opposition?”, that was written in November, 1935 (Leon Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1935-1936), 1977: p. 178, hereafter,,, Writings). In dreaming of Lenin as being his companion in third class, Trotsky was inferring that this companionship had come about because Lenin had been defeated by the same historical forces that had defeated him; that instead of being in Stalin’s prison, Lenin had become, like him, a political exile from Stalin’s Russia; and that Lenin’s attentiveness about his illness arose, in part, because of their having suffered similar anti-Stalin experiences. The dream is silent about further details and complexities of their third-class companionship: how they came to meet and for how long, what they did after the boat’s voyage ended, and, in addition to Trotsky’s illness, what other subjects they talked about.

Trotsky’s pleasure in dreaming about having a companionship with a living and healthy Lenin begins to come to an abrupt and cruelly realistic end when, as he is recounting to Lenin his 1926 medical trip to Berlin, he realizes that by 1926 Lenin was dead. However, so great is the force of his wish to be with a living Lenin, that he goes on telling the dead Lenin about his trip. At the end of his telling, which is also the end of his dream, while he wanted to say to Lenin that his trip was “after your death,” he could only say “after you fell ill.” These last words show Trotsky’s continuing mental conflicts over accepting the finality of Lenin’s death — a conflict that he had first expressed 11 years previously by writing that Lenin’s “death will for long continue to seem impossible.”

Although he does not appear to have made any further comments on the dream, he was influenced by it in two ways. First, after recording the dream in his diary on the morning of June 26th, he observed his wife fixing up their Norwegian living quarters; and this observation, along with his conflicts over whether Lenin is his companion in a dream, stimulates him to enter in his diary a tender and detailed appreciation of the attributes of his wife as his companion. “Even now,” he writes, “she does not cease to amaze [his emphasis] me by the unspoiled, integral, artistic quality of her nature” (Diary: pp. 146-147).

The second influence of the dream was that — as his fever continued — he slowly, and with reluctance, began to act on Lenin’s insistence that he “seriously” consult physicians. (His actions were also influenced by the debilitating nature of his fever and probably by the insistence of his wife). Less than a month after his dream, he told several visitors that he was expecting to be seen by two doctors (whether he was then really seen is not known). In September he met with a doctor from Czechoslovakia, and afterwards with Norwegian doctors in a hospital in Oslo. None of the doctors that he met helped him; but in December, for unknown reasons, his health became better (Writings: p. 53; Diary: pp. 147-148, 159; Deutscher: pp. 296-298).

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