Thirty years ago this month, Russian students, researchers, representatives of a newly formed independent mineworkers’ trade union and political activists gathered in Moscow for a seminar to resurrect the memory of Lev Trotsky.
They were joined by Trotsky’s devotees from western Europe, who arrived in the Soviet Union hoping to make their hero’s ideas relevant, just as democratisation, movements for national rights and a headlong rush to the market economy melted the country down.
I was one of them. I flew into Moscow Sheremetyevo airport, my suitcase loaded with Trotsky’s pamphlets denouncing Stalinism, reprinted by Hungarian Trotskyists exiled in France. The customs officials who inspected it were more concerned that I might be a black marketeer than that the pamphlets could be seditious.
