An interesting lacuna in the biography of Leon Trotsky and the history of the Bolshevik revolution is the role played in it by Freemasonry. It isn’t usually commented on in part because was widely commented from 1917 till 1945 or so (1) and died a quicker death than the point that the influence and power of the jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and the later Soviet Union was substantial and massively disproportionate.
However, despite this relative silence there is evidence that Trotsky was significantly involved with (and admired) Freemasonry. For example, his biographer Ronald Segal writes how during his imprisonment at Odessa he became very interested in Freemasonry, read extensively about it and even wrote an unpublished manuscript of a book on the subject.
He writes that:
‘Assaults on freemasonry, in the religious magazines, stirred his interest, and he obtained books on the subject from friends and relatives in the city. He began writing down his own ideas for a treatment of freemasonry. Successive chapters, carefully edited and copied on to the pages of a notebook, were smuggled into other cells, for his friends to read and offer comments.’ (2)
We also learn from Segal that:
‘He was always in consequence to hold his work on freemasonry in particular regard and correspondingly regret the loss of the manuscript.’ (3)
But what is Segal’s source for Trosky’s apparent love affair with Freemasonry?
None other than Trotsky himself who writes in his autobiography ‘My Life’ that:
‘The articles dealing with freemasonry in the theological magazines aroused my interest. Where did this strange movement come from? I asked myself. How would Marxism explain it? I resisted the theory of historical materialism for quite a long time and held to that of the multiplicity of historical factors, which, as we know, even to-day is the most widely accepted theory in social science. People denote as “factors” the various aspects of their social activity, endow this concept with a supra-social character, and then superstitiously interpret their own activity as the result of the interaction of these independent forces. Where did the factors come from, that is, under the influence of what conditions did they evolve from primitive human society? With these questions, the official eclectic theory does not concern itself.’ (4)
He then tells us how he came fascinated by Freemasonry and saw it as a ‘enlightening’ and ‘revolutionary’ force that prefigured his revolutionary Marxist ideals:
‘It was during that period that I became interested in freemasonry. For several months, I avidly studied books on its history, books given to me by relatives and friends in the town. Why had the merchants, artists, bankers, officials, and lawyers, from the first quarter of the seventeenth century on, begun to call themselves masons and tried to recreate the ritual of the medieval guilds? What was all this strange masquerade about? Gradually the picture grew clearer. The old guild was more than a producing organization; it regulated the ethics and mode of life of its members as well. It completely embraced the life of the urban population, especially the guilds of semi-artisans and semi-artists of the building trades. The break-up of the guild system brought a moral crisis in a society which had barely emerged from medieval. The new morality was taking shape much more slowly than the old was being cut down. Hence, the attempt, so common in history, to preserve a form of moral discipline when its social foundations, which in this instance were those of the industrial guilds, had long since been undermined by the processes of history. Active masonry became theoretical masonry. But the old moral ways of living, which men were trying to keep just for the sake of keeping them, acquired a new meaning. In certain branches of freemasonry, elements of an obvious reactionary feudalism were prominent, as in the Scottish system. In the eighteenth century, freemasonry became expressive of a militant policy of enlightenment, as in the case of the Illuminati, who were the forerunners of revolution; on its left, it culminated in the Carbonari. Freemasons counted among their members both Louis XVI and the Dr. Guillotin who invented the guillotine. In southern Germany, freemasonry assumed an openly revolutionary character, whereas at the court of Catherine the Great it was a masquerade reflecting the aristocratic and bureaucratic hierarchy. A freemason Novikov was exiled to Siberia by a freemason empress.’ (5)
We further learn of his unpublished manuscript on Freemasonry that:
‘As the prison rules demanded that a prisoner give up his old exercise-book when he was given a new one, I got for my studies on freemasonry an exercise-book with a thousand numbered pages, and entered in it, in tiny characters, excerpts from many books, interspersed with my own reflections on freemasonry, as well as on the materialist conception of history. This took up the better part of a year. I edited each chapter carefully, copied it into a notebook which had been smuggled in to me, and then sent that out to friends in other cells to read.’ (6)
We also learn of how dear to his heart his work on Freemasonry was in confirmation of Segal’s point that:
‘I felt, even at that time, that I was standing firmly on my own feet, and as the work progressed, I had the feeling even more strongly. I would give a great deal to-day to find that manuscript. It went with me into exile, although there I discontinued my work on freemasonry to take up the study of Marxian economics.’ (7)
Now it might be tempting to dismiss this as merely a hobby Trotsky had developed while in prison in Odessa and that it didn’t have a lasting impact on him and his ideas, but it very clearly did since even decades later Trotsky rued losing his unpublished manuscript on Freemasonry and how it had impacted him. It is distinctly odd for Trotsky to bemoan this if it were just a ‘prison hobby’ but it only makes sense if Trotsky was far keener on Freemasonry and its history than his biographers and fans usually give him credit for.
What is telling is how Trotsky observes how:
‘The work on freemasonry acted as a test for these hypotheses. I made no new discoveries; all the methodological conclusions at which I had arrived had been made long ago and were being applied in practice.’ (8)
In other words, Trotsky’s study of Freemasonry and its history – which became his unpublished manuscript on the subject – was a vital part of his political development into the bloodthirsty Marxist intellectual and government minister that he was to become.
Indeed, Trotsky observes the importance of his work on Freemasonry in prison in his ideological formation in ‘My Life’ when he writes that:
‘My work in the history of Freemasonry had fortified me in a realization of the subordinate place of ideas in the historical process.’ (9)
Put another way Trotsky realized in his study of Freemasonry and its history that the historical process is more than ideas, but rather is based on the material and as such the role of political conspiracy (i.e., Lenin’s theory of the Vanguard) is far more important than 'the idea’ so-to-speak.
This all indicates that Trotsky was substantially influenced by his study of Freemasonry’s ideas and history despite his academic biographers simply omitting it from their work. (10)
Yet Trotsky also has another substantial encounter with Freemasonry that no has ever been able to really explain other than Freemasons helping Trotsky out.
At the end of his short three month stay in New York in 1917 Trotsky left for Russia – then in the chaos of the February Revolution – with the mysterious $10,000 that almost certainly came from jewish bankers, (11) but was detained in April 1917 in Halifax by Canadian customs who believed – possibly correctly as it happens – that Trotsky and his party of (largely jewish) Marxist revolutionaries were in the pay of the German Imperial government – who Canada was at war with as part of World War One – but then suddenly Robert Miller Coulter – who was a ‘liberal and a Freemason’ (12) as well as Deputy Postmaster General of Canada - sent a government cable to the Canadian Customs Service to require that Trotsky, his $10,000 and his party were released from custody to allow them to travel on to Russia. (13)
This was predictably successful, but it is rather too coincidental in that Trotsky was – as we have seen - greatly influenced by the ideas of Freemasonry and its history and then at a pivotal moment a high-ranking Freemason in the Canadian government intervenes on Trotsky’s behalf to allow his passage onwards to Russia against the interests of the Canadian government (which would be to keep Russia in the war not send a noted opponent of Russia’s involvement in the war [i.e., Trotsky] to Russia where he might [and did] wreak havoc).
Trotsky is uncharacteristically mum and incurious on the subject writing that:
‘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 to out me from Europe, and it must have been on the strength of this blacklist, supported by reports of my anti-patriotic activities in America, that the British arrested me in Halifax.’ (14)
Despite attempting to blithely claim that the Provisional Government in Russia had ‘secured his release’ due to intervention by the ‘revolutionary movement’ and ‘Soviets’ (i.e., the workers and soldiers councils). (15) This is almost certainly untrue since we have the Canadian government cables to do with Trotsky’s release and the Provisional Government doesn’t strongly figure in the consideration whatsoever. (16)
The likelihood is that Coulter being a Freemason is more than coincidence as his was the decisive voice in the matter (17) and the fact is that Trotsky was inexplicably released to travel onwards to Russia in April 1917 by a Freemason after spending a large amount of time two decades earlier studying and writing about Freemasonry, which he credits as a pivotal moment in his ideological development.
Therefore, we can say – although we cannot prove it although there is some evidence trending that way – (18) that Freemasonry likely played a significant role in bringing about the Bolshevik Revolution, but the scope of that role has yet to be full documented or identified despite some modern attempts to do so. (19)
References
(1) For example: Nesta Webster, 1921, ‘World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization’, 1st Edition, Small, Maynard & Company: Boston; Nesta Webster, 2000, [1924], ‘Secret Societies and Subversive Movements’, 1st Edition, Christian Book Club of America: Palmdale and Friedrich Wichtl, 1943, [1919], ‘Weltfreimaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik: Eine Untersuchung uber Ursprung und Endziele des Weltkrieges’, 14th Edition, J. F. Lehmann’s Verlag: Munich
(2) Ronald Segal, 1979, ‘The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky: Traitor, hero or prophet?’, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, p. 29
(3) Ibid., p. 30
(4) Leon Trotsky, 1930, ‘My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator’, 1st Edition, Thornton Butterworth: London, p. 106
(5) Ibid., pp. 106-107
(6) Ibid., pp. 107-108
(7) Ibid., p. 108
(8) Ibid.
(9) Ibid., p. 114
(10) For example, see the lack of mention of it whatsoever in Isaac Deutscher, 1954, ‘The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York and Robert Service, 2009, ‘Trotsky: A Biography’, 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge
(11) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/leon-trotsky-and-the-origins-of-his
(12) Anthony Sutton, 1981, ‘Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution’, 1st Edition, Veritas: Morley, p. 31
(13) Ibid., pp. 27-31
(14) Trotsky, Op. Cit., p. 243
(15) Ibid., pp. 243-244
(16) Sutton, Op. Cit., pp. 27-31
(17) Ibid.
(18) As suggested by George Katkov, 1967, ‘Russia 1917: The February Revolution’, 1st Edition, Longmans: London
(19) For example: Juri Lina, 2002, ‘Under the Sign of the Scorpion: the Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire’, 2nd Edition, Referent: Stockholm