Leon Trotsky's description of
his month in Nova Scotia
April 1917

My Life
by Leon Trotsky

Chapter 23

In a Concentration Camp

— Beginning of quote from Trotsky's book —
On March 25, 1917, I called at the office of the Russian Consul General in New York. By that time the portrait of Czar Nicholas had been removed from the wall, but the heavy atmosphere of a Russian police station under the old regime still hung about the place. After the usual delays and arguments, the Consul General ordered that papers be issued to me for the passage to Russia. In the British consulate, as well, they told me, when I filled out the questionnaire, that the British authorities would put no obstacles in the way of my return to Russia. Everything was in good order.

I sailed with my family and a few other Russians on the Norwegian boat Christianiafjord on the twenty-seventh of March. We had been sent off in a deluge of flowers and speeches, for we were going to the country of the revolution. We had passports and visas. Revolution, flowers and visas were balm to our nomad souls.

At Halifax the British naval authorities inspected the steamship, and police officers made a perfunctory examination of the papers of the American, Norwegian and Dutch passengers. They subjected the Russians, however, to a downright cross examination, asking us about our convictions, our political plans, and so forth. I absolutely refused to enter into a discussion of such matters with them. "You may have all the information you want as to my identity, but nothing else." Russian politics were not yet under the control of the British naval police. But that did not prevent the detectives, Machen and Westwood, from making inquiries about me among the other passengers after the double attempt to cross-examine me had proved futile. They insisted that I was a dangerous socialist.

The whole business was so offensive, so clearly a discrimination against the Russian revolutionaries, in contrast to the treatment accorded to other passengers not so unfortunate as to belong to a nation allied to England, that some of the Russians sent a violent protest to the British authorities. I did not join with them because I saw little use in complaining to Beelzebub about Satan. But at the time we did not foresee the future.

On April 3, 1917, British officers, accompanied by bluejackets, came aboard the Christianiafjord and demanded, in the name of the local admiral, that I, my family, and five other passengers leave the boat. We were assured that the whole incident would be cleared up in Halifax. We declared that the order was illegal and refused to obey, whereupon armed bluejackets pounced on us, and amid shouts of "shame" from a large part of the passengers, carried us bodily to a naval cutter, which delivered us in Halifax under the convoy of a cruiser. While a group of sailors were holding me fast, my older boy ran to help me and struck an officer with his little fist. "Shall I hit him again, papa?" he shouted. He was eleven then, and it was his first lesson in British democracy.

The police left my wife and children in Halifax; the rest of us were taken by train to Amherst, Nova Scotia, a camp for German prisoners. And there, in the office, we were put through an examination the like of which I had never before experienced, even in the Peter and Paul fortress. For in the Czar's fortress the police stripped me and searched me in privacy, whereas here our democratic allies subjected us to this shameful humiliation before a dozen men. I can remember Sergeant Olsen, a Swedish-Canadian with a red head of the criminal-police type, who was the leader of the search. The canaille who had arranged all this from a distance knew well enough that we were irreproachable Russian revolutionaries returning to our country, liberated by the revolution.

Not until the next morning did the camp commander, Colonel Morris, in answer to our repeated demands and protests, tell us the official reason for the arrest. "You are dangerous to the present Russian government," he said briefly. The colonel, obviously not a man of eloquence, had worn an air of rather suspicious excitement since early morning. "But the New York agents of the Russian government issued us passports into Russia," we protested, "and after all the Russian government should be allowed to take care of itself." Colonel Morris thought for a while, moving his jaws, then added, "You are dangerous to the Allies in general."

No written orders for our arrest were ever produced. But, speaking for himself, the colonel explained that since we were political emigrants who obviously had left the country for good reason, we ought not to be surprised at what had happened. For him the Russian revolution simply did not exist. We tried to explain that the Czar's ministers, who in their day had made us political emigrants, were themselves now in prison, excepting those who had escaped to other countries. But this was too complicated for the colonel, who had made his career in the British colonies and in the Boer war. I did not show proper respect when I spoke to him, which made him growl behind my back, "If I only had him on the South African coast!" That was his pet expression.

My wife was not formally a political emigrant because she had left Russia on a legal passport. But she was arrested just the same, with both our boys, respectively nine and eleven years old. I am not exaggerating when I say that the children were arrested. At first the Canadian authorities tried to separate them from their mother and put them in a children's home. Overwhelmed by such a prospect, my wife declared that she would never allow them to separate her from her boys. And it was only because of her protest that the boys were placed with her in the house of an Anglo-Russian police agent. To prevent "illegal" despatch of letters and telegrams, this functionary allowed the children to go out only with an escort, even when they were not with their mother. It was not until eleven days later that my wife and the children were allowed to move to a hotel, on condition that they report each day at the police station.

The Amherst concentration camp was located in an old and very dilapidated iron foundry that had been confiscated from its German owner. The sleeping bunks were arranged in three tiers, two deep, on each side of the hall. About eight hundred of us lived in these conditions. The air in this improvised dormitory at night can be imagined. Men hopelessly dogged the passages, elbowed their way through, lay down or got up, played cards or chess. Many of them practised crafts, some with extraordinary skill. I still have, stored in Moscow, some things made by Amherst prisoners. And yet, in spite of the heroic efforts of the prisoners to keep themselves physically and morally fit, five of them had gone insane. We had to eat and sleep in the same room with these madmen.

Of these eight hundred prisoners, in whose company I spent almost a month, perhaps five hundred were sailors from German boats sunk by the British; about two hundred were workers caught by the war in Canada, and a hundred more were officers and civilian prisoners of the bourgeois class. Our relations with the German prisoners became clearly defined according to their reaction to the fact that we had been arrested as revolutionary socialists. The officers and petty officers, whose quarters were behind a wooden partition, immediately set us down as enemies; the rank-and-file, on the other hand, surrounded us with an ever increasing friendliness.

The whole month I was there was like one continuous mass meeting. I told the prisoners about the Russian revolution, about Liebknecht, about Lenin, and about the causes of the collapse of the old International, and the intervention of the United States in the war. Besides these speeches, we had constant group discussions. Our friendship grew warmer every day. By their attitudes, one could class the rank-and-file of the prisoners in two groups: those who said, "No more of that, we must end it once and for all" — they were the ones who had dreams of coming out into the streets and squares — and those others who said, "What have they to do with me? No, they won't get me again."

"How will you hide yourself from them?" others would ask them. The coal miner, Babinsky, a tall, blue-eyed Silesian, would say, "I and my wife and children will set our home in a thick forest, and around us I will build traps, and I will never go out without a gun. Let no one dare to come near.

"Won't you let me in, Babinsky?"

"No, not even you. I don't trust anybody."

The sailors did everything they could to make my life easier, and it was only by constant protests that I kept my right to stand in line for dinner and to do my share of the compulsory work of sweeping floors, peeling potatoes, washing dishes, and cleaning the common lavatory.

The relations between the rank-and-file and the officers, some of whom, even in prison, were still keeping a sort of conduct-book for their men, were hostile. The officers ended by complaining to the camp commander, Colonel Morris, about my anti-patriotic propaganda. The British colonel instantly sided with the Hohenzollern patriots and forbade me to make any more public speeches. But this did not happen until the last few days of our stay at the camp, and served only to cement my friendship with the sailors and workers, who responded to the colonel's order by a written protest bearing five hundred and thirty signatures. A plebiscite like this, carried out in the very face of Sergeant Olsen's heavy-handed supervision, was more than ample compensation for all the hardships of the Amherst imprisonment.

All the time we were confined in the camp, the authorities steadfastly refused us the right to communicate with the Russian government. Our telegrams to Petrograd were not forwarded. We made an attempt to cable Lloyd George, the British prime minister, protesting against this prohibition, but the cable was held up. Colonel Morris had become accustomed to a simplified form of "habeas corpus" in the colonies. The war gave him still more protection. He went so far as to stipulate that I refrain from trying to communicate through my wife with the Russian consul before he would let me meet her again. That may sound incredible, but it is true. On such a condition, I declined to meet my wife. Of course, the consul was in no hurry to help us, either. He was waiting for instructions, and the instructions, it seemed, were slow in coming.

I must admit that even today the secret machinery of our arrest and our release is not clear to me. The British government must have put me on its blacklist when I was still active in France. It did everything it could to help the Czar's government oust me from Europe, and it must have been on the strength of this blacklist, supported by reports of my antipatriotic activities in America, that the British arrested me in Halifax. When the news of my arrest found its way into the revolutionary Russian press, the British embassy in Petrograd (directed by ambassador Sir George Buchanan), which apparently was not expecting my early return, issued an official statement to the Petrograd press that the Russians who had been arrested in Canada were travelling "under a subsidy from the German embassy, to overthrow the Provisional Russian Government." This, at least, was plain speaking.

Pravda, which was published under Lenin's direction, answered Buchanan on April 16, doubtless by Lenin's own hand: "Can one even for a moment believe the trustworthiness of the statement that Trotsky, the chairman of the Soviet of Workers' Delegates in St. Petersburg in 1905 — a revolutionary who has sacrificed years to a disinterested service of revolution — that this man had anything to do with a scheme subsidized by the German government? This is a patent, unheard-of, and malicious slander of a revolutionary. From whom did you get your information, Mr. Buchanan? Why don't you disclose that? Six men dragged Comrade Trotsky away by his legs and arms, all in the name of friendship for the Provisional Russian Government!"

The part played by the Provisional Government in all this is less clear. One needs no proof to show that Milyukov, then minister of foreign affairs, was heart and soul in favor of my arrest; as early as 1905 he was waging bitter war against "Trotskyism"; the very term is of his coining. But he was dependent on the Soviet, and had to be all the more circumspect because his social-patriotic allies had not yet begun the baiting of the Bolsheviks.

Buchanan in his memoirs [My Mission to Russia, see below] says that "Trotsky and other Russian refugees were being detained at Halifax until the wishes of the Provisional Government with regard to them had been ascertained." According to the British ambassador, Milyukov was immediately informed of our arrest. As early as April 8, the British ambassador claims he conveyed Milyukov's request for our release to his government. Two days later, however, the same Milyukov withdrew his request and expressed the hope that our stay in Halifax would be prolonged. "It was the Provisional Government, therefore," concludes Buchanan, "that was responsible for their further detention." This all sounds very much like the truth. The only thing that Buchanan forgot to explain in his memoirs is: What became of the German subsidy that I was supposed to have accepted to overthrow the Provisional Government? And no wonder — for as soon as I arrived in Petrograd, Buchanan was forced to state in the press that he knew nothing at all about the subsidy. Never before did people lie as much as they did during the "great war for liberty." If lies could explode, our planet would have been blown to dust long before the treaty of Versailles.

In the end, the Soviet stepped in and Milyukov had to bow. On the twenty-ninth of April came the hour for our release from the Amherst concentration camp. But even in release we were subjected to violence. We were ordered to pack our things and proceed under convoy. When we demanded the why and wherefore, they refused to say anything. The prisoners became excited because they thought we were being taken to a fortress. We asked for the nearest Russian consul; they refused us again. We had reason enough for not trusting these highwaymen of the sea, and so we insisted that we would not go voluntarily until they told us where we were going. The commander ordered forcible measures. Soldiers of the convoy carried out our luggage, but we stayed stubbornly in our bunks. It was only when the convoy was faced with the task of carrying us out bodily, just as we had been taken off the steamship a month earlier, and of doing it in the midst of a crowd of excited sailors, that the commander relented and told us, in his characteristic Anglo-Colonial way, that we were to sail on a Danish boat for Russia. The colonel's purple face twitched convulsively. He could not bear the thought that we were escaping him. If only it had been on the African coast!

As we were being taken away from the camp, our fellow prisoners gave us a most impressive send-off. Although the officers shut themselves up in their compartment, and only a few poked their noses through the chinks, the sailors and workers lined the passage on both sides, an improvised band played the revolutionary march, and friendly hands were extended to us from every quarter. One of the prisoners delivered a short speech acclaiming the Russian revolution and cursing the German monarchy. Even now it makes me happy to remember that in the very midst of the war, we were fraternizing with German sailors in Amherst. In later years I received friendly letters from many of them, sent from Germany.

Machen, the British police officer who had brought about our arrest, was present at our departure. As a parting shot I warned him that my first business in the Constituent Assembly would be to question foreign minister Milyukov about the outrageous treatment of Russian citizens by the Anglo-Canadian police. "I hope," said Machen in quick retort, "that you will never get into the Constituent Assembly."

— End of quote from Trotsky's book —
Source: Chapter 23, "In a Concentration Camp"
My Life, by Leon Trotsky, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1930

Explanatory Notes

• Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940) a.k.a. Leon Trotsky, was leader, with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, of the 1917 October Revolution, and architect of the Red Army. He was Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs 1917-1918 and Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs 1918-1924. (In contemporary English-language documents, his name is spelled Trotsky or Trotzky, the two forms appearing with more or less equal frequency.)

• The Provisional Government was the short-lived Russian government led during its last four months by Aleksandr Feodorovich Kerensky (1882-1970). (It is sometimes called the Kerensky Government.) At the time of the February Revolution (which occurred in March 1917, according to our calendar) Kerensky was vice-chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (the municipal government of Russia's capital city). When the Provisional Government was formed he was initially Minister of Justice but he became Minister of War in May and Prime Minister in July 1917. Kerensky's Government came to an abrupt end in the October Revolution (which occurred in November 1917, according to our calendar).

• Professor Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov, a prominent Russian historian, was foreign minister in the Provisional Government, March-May 1917. (His name is spelled in various ways in contemporary documents: Milyukov, Milyukoff, Miliukov, Miliukoff.)

• Petrograd is another name for the city of St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia from 1712 to 1918. When World War One broke out in August 1914 it was decided to change the name of the Russian capital from St. Petersburg to Petrograd — Germany was now the enemy of Russia and the old name sounded too German. When Lenin died in 1924 the name of the city was changed to Leningrad. The name was changed back to St. Petersburg in 1991.

• The Fortress of Peter and Paul is the oldest building in St. Petersburg. When Peter the Great re-conquered the lands along the Neva River in 1703, he decided to build a fort to protect the area from possible attack by the Swedish army and navy. The fortress was founded on a small island in the Neva delta on May 27, 1703 (May 16 according to the old calendar) and that day became the official birthday of the city of St. Petersburg. The Swedes were defeated before the fortress was even completed. From 1721 the fortress housed part of the city's garrison and, for two hundred years, rather notoriously served as a high security political jail. One of its first prisoners was Alexis, Peter the Great's own son, accused of subversion and treason and subsequently tortured to death under Peter's supervision. Other famous prisoners interned here were the Decembrists (five hanged, over one hundred packed off to Siberia); Dostoevsky (subjected to a mock execution and exiled to Siberia); Lenin's older brother Alexander (hanged); the writer of revolutionary leaflets, Maxim Gorky (vilified as a hero of the socialist cause); and Leon Trotsky.

• Pravda (Truth) was founded in April 1912 as a mass-circulation working-class daily newspaper, published in St. Petersburg. Pravda had an average daily circulation of 40,000 issues rising at times to as high as 60,000 issues. Lenin directed the newspaper while living abroad. He wrote for it almost every day, and gave instructions and advice to its editors. Pravda was subjected to constant harassment by the Czarist government. During its first year of publication it was confiscated 41 times, its editors were prosecuted 36 times and were sentenced to terms of imprisonment totalling four years for their articles. Pravda was closed down on 8(21) July 1914, as a result of its constant agitation against the coming war now known as World War One. The paper was unable to resume publication until after the February Revolution (March 1917). Beginning with the issue of 5(18) March 1917 it was the official publication of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (the Bolshevik Party). On 5(18) April 1917, on his return from abroad, Lenin joined the Editorial Board of Pravda and became its Editor-in-Chief. On 5(18) July 1917 the newspaper offices were wrecked by the Cadets and Cossacks. Between July and October 1917 Pravda was persecuted by the Provisional Government and repeatedly changed its name, coming out as Lislok Pravdy, Proletary, Flaboehy, Raboehy Put. Beginning October 27 (November 9), 1917, the paper came out under its old name of Pravda. In November 2001, Pravda's English-language website is at http://english.pravda.ru/
The double dates refer to the two calendars. In each pair of dates the earlier date is given according to the Julian Calendar (the calendar used exclusively by the Russian Orthodox Church and thus the official Russian state calendar during the Czarist government), and the later date according to the Gregorian Calendar (adopted as the official Russian state calendar soon after the 1917 Revolution). Each date pair above gives two dates — referring to the same day — which differ by thirteen days because, in 1917, the two calendars were thirteen days apart (in 1703 the difference was eleven days). Since 1917, the official Russian calendar has been the Gregorian. This calendar ambiguity is the reason the October Revolution is dated in November, and the February Revolution is dated in March.

• Hohenzollern has been since the fourteenth century a name referring to a region of Germany. After 1945 it became part of the temporary state of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, which was included in the state of Baden-Württemberg in 1952. "Hohenzollern" was also the name of the ruling house of Prussia. The House of Hohenzollern began with Friedrich I, Elector of Brandenburg 1415-1440. From that time, the Hohenzollerns occupied the German Imperial throne until the fall of Emperor William II in 1918 at the end of the First World War.

Sir George William Buchanan
Great Britain's ambassador to St. Petersburg/Petrograd
1910-1918

Extract from a private letter from Buchanan to the British Foreign Office, dated 30 April 1917:

"...I have endeavoured to explain that it was not on account of their political opinions, but on account of the want of transport that some of the Russian political refugees have been prevented from returning to Russia..."

A few years later, Buchanan wrote:

— Beginning of quote from Buchanan's book —
I must supplement what I said in this letter (immediately above) by a short explanatory statement. The attacks made against us in the (Russian) Press on account of our detention of Russian political refugees had taken such a serious turn that they were even endangering the lives of some of the British factory owners (in Russia) whose position was already anything but secure owing to the uncertain attitude of the workmen. I had, therefore, to speak seriously to Milyukov and request him to take steps to put an end to this Press campaign. On his replying that the Russian Government was being similarly attacked, I said that this was not my concern, and that I could not allow my Government to be used as a lightning conductor to divert the attacks made on his Government. I then reminded him that Trotzky and other Russian political refugees were being detained at Halifax until the wishes of the Provisional Government with regard to them had been ascertained. On April 8, 1917, I had, at his request, asked my Government to release them and to allow them to proceed on their journey to Russia. Two days later he had begged me to cancel this request and to say that the Provisional Government hoped they would be detained at Halifax until further information had been obtained about them. It was the Provisional Government, therefore, that was responsible for their further detention till April 21, and I should have to make this fact public unless a statement was published to the effect that we had not refused visas to the passports of any Russians presented by the Russian consular authorities. This he consented to do...

— End of quote from Buchanan's book —
Source: Excerpted from pages 120-121 of My Mission to Russia, Volume Two by Sir George William Buchanan, published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1923

MI5 detained Trotsky on way to revolution

UK Public records: Russian was arrested on British orders in 1917
on a boat in Canada but released after intervention by MI6

Secret documents released today

The Guardian, 5 July 2001

Leon Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army, was detained on the orders of MI5 in a move which could have prevented him from playing any part in the Russian revolution and its aftermath, reveal hitherto secret documents released today.

The papers show that had it not been for the intervention of an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, — who believed the evidence against him was provided by an agent provocateur — the leading revolutionary might have had no place in history.

Papers made available at the Public Record Office show how MI5, and the French and Spanish security services, monitored Trotsky's movement in the months leading to the revolution in February 1917 which overthrew the Tsarist regime...

(In late March, 1917) the MI5 agent dispatched a message to London saying Trotsky had set sail "with $10,000 subscribed by Socialists and Germans" on the way to Petrograd, now St Petersburg.

The agent ordered the ship to be detained when it stopped at Halifax in Canada. Trotsky was arrested with five Russian comrades. There he could have remained, had it not been for the intervention of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

Claude Dansey, an MI6 officer, had also just landed at Halifax. "I told Captain Malkins, the Naval Control Officer, that I believed the new Russian government would at once ask for Trotsky's release, and that we should be unable to hold him, and that, unless they were very certain of the source of information against him it would be much better to let him go before he got angry," he noted.

Dansey was told by the MI6 station chief in New York, William Wiseman, that the information against Trotsky had come from a Russian agent "in whom he had great confidence."

However, Dansey reported: "I then asked him a few questions about the man, and from what I gathered, there is a strong possibility that he was an agent provocateur, used by the old Russian Secret Police. I told Wiseman he had better be discharged at once, and he said that he was going to do so."

Within four weeks of his arrest, to MI5's chagrin, Trotsky and his fellow revolutionaries boarded another ship heading for Russia...

Source: The Guardian, 5 July 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,516859,00.html
National Newspapers Division, trading as Guardian Newspapers Ltd, publishes national daily and weekly newspapers seven days of the week in the UK and overseas. These include The Guardian, The Observer, Guardian Weekly, Guardian Europe, the Mail and Guardian in South Africa, Money Observer, Guardian News Services, and the flagship Guardian Unlimited service on the Internet.

The Intelligence Services Act 1994 defines the role of MI6 as:
(a) to obtain and provide information relating to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands; and
(b) to perform other tasks relating to the actions or intentions of such persons...[in relation to] the interests of national security, with particular reference to defence and foreign policies...the interests of the economic well-being of the UK...or in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime.
Source:
http://www.five.org.uk/security/mi6org/mi6org.htm

The Security Service, also known as MI5, originated in 1909 as the internal arm of the Secret Service Bureau tasked with countering German espionage. In 1931 it assumed wider responsibility for assessing threats to national security which included international communist subversion and, subsequently, fascism. In 1952, in the early stages of the Cold War, the work of the Service and the responsibility of the Director General were defined in a Directive many of whose provisions were later incorporated in the Security Service Act 1989...
Source:
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/uk/mi5/

See: The official website of the Security Service (MI5):
http://www.mi5.gov.uk/

Note: There is an interesting document in the Dalhousie University Library in Halifax:
Wightman, F. Carman, Amherst, N.S.
MS-2-307 — Transcript of an Interview with John Bell re: Internment of Leon Trotsky in the Amherst Internment Camp, April 1918.
34 pages, Amherst, 1974

Links to Relevant Websites

Trailing Trotsky: A Russian Revolutionary in Canada
by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
http://pei.cbc.ca/features/trotsky/

Chapter 2: Trotsky Leaves New York... Trotsky was removed
by Canadian and British naval personnel from the S.S. Kristianiafjord
at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on April 3, 1917, listed as a German prisoner
of war, and interned at the Amherst, Nova Scotia, internment station
for German prisoners...
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/chapter_02.htm

My Life, by Leon Trotsky: Complete text (in English translation)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1930-lif/index.htm
Chapter 23: In a Concentration Camp
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1930-lif/ch23.htm

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Leon Trotsky's description of his month in Nova ScotiaApril 1917

My Lifeby Leon Trotsky