The Evening Star SATURDAY, MAY 12, 1934. A WANDERING JEW.

Evening Star, Issue 21718, 12 May 1934, Page 12

The Evening Star SATURDAY, MAY 12, 1934. A WANDERING JEW.

Poets and philosophers have expatiated since, the beginning of time on the felicity of living on islands. Men of action have taken a different view of them. Napoleon took the first chance of getting away from Elba, and he did not love St. It is unlikely that Leon Trotsky will enjoy the place of refuge that has been allotted to him opposite Rochefort, a haven so small that every square yard of it will be under a French lighthouse keeper’s eye. World shakers, or would-be world shakers, like to be more in the midst of affairs. If an island had been Trotsky’s wish he might have been satisfied with Prinkipo, in the Sea of Marmora, It was small, but the amenities of his surroundings there might have prompted the reflection that only man was vile. If a Wandering Jew had to be found at this time Trotsky, “ nc ” Braunstein, would deserve the title. Twice under the Tsars he was an exile in Siberia. When the Great War broke out he was editing a Russian Socialist paper in Paris. He became the right-hand man of Lenin only to see the Revolution work out, after that hero’s death, in making Stalin to all intents and purposes Tsar, and Stalin banished him to the Caucasus. After that came Prinkipo. But for a time, in the earlier years of the Great War, he was in New York. The flatHs still pointed out where he lived obscurely, under the name of Braunstein, and left hurriedly without paying his rent. That was no loss to the landlord, who sold his furniture.

■s“ There are two outstanding types among the Bolshevist leaders,” it has been said, “ the conspirator and the agitator, and, as Stalin exemplifies the former type, Trotsky represents the latter.” Stalin (born Djugashvili) never talks if he can help it; Trotsky, by voice or pen, has seldom ceased to pour forth propaganda. One is an Asiatic, from'Southern .Georgia, and the other a Jew, but Stalin’s type of Communism has never suited his rival; Communists abroad prefer the faith which has been successful. No community desires to have Trotsky as its guest. For some months past, it would appear, he has been living in the little French village of Barbizon, near Fontainebleau. A former French Government gave him permission to be there, and he does not seem to have caused any disturbance, but this Government prefers him off the mainland. The island it has given him may be his last recourse, because the British Government, to which he applied, has refused him asylum even in the Channel Islands, whence Victor Hugo fulminated against “Napoleon the Small ”; and the Irish Free Stqte, where also he has besought sanctuary, seems to have made no reply. Even Ireland might be made too lively if this stormy petrel were admitted. On a previous occasion Germany and Norway, also the Labour Government in England,’ denied him entry. In his autobiography Trotsky waxes very sarcastic against those refusals. “The pious Mr Clynes [who was Home Secretary at the time] ought at least to have known that democracy in a sense inherited the right of asylum from the Christian church, which in turn inherited it, with much besides, from paganism. It was enough for a pursued criminal to make his way into a temple, sometimes even to touch only the ring of the door, to be safe from persecution. Thus the church understood the right of asylum as the right of the persecuted to an asylum, and not as'an arbitrary exercise of will, on the part of pagah or Christian priests. Until now I had thought the pious Labourites, though little’informed on matters of Socialism, certainly well versed in the tradition of the church. Now 1 find that they are not even that.”

An English writer has described Trotsky’s sojourn on Prinkipo. “ The four inhabited islands [about eight miles from Constantinople] are enchanting places. The water around them is deep clear blue. Villas, which rise one above the othefc on the small hillsides, are white and clean, and have gardens that run down to the water.” Trotsky seems to have lived there in surroundings $f comfort. But the visitor, ,though he had written a play, including Trotsky as one of its characters, which was banned by the English censor after four performances, did not succeed in coming into personal contact with the exile. After countless questions had been put to him by a secretary, who kept dodging back into the house between his answers, each time “ locking the door as carefully as if I had come for the spoons,’? ami a final long consultation of parties within, the decision was brought to him that his credentials would be inquired into. *’ Will 1 leave my .address? Then in a day or two I can be written to, and perhaps if I am passing?” The great tear on Prinkipo, apparently, was a fear of bombs. The wonder must now be how Trotsky could have lived so quietly, almost unknown, at Barbizon. Still in his fifties, it is not credible that he should be losing his punch.