Trotsky in New York Walking Tour

With Jim Creegan and Alex Steinberg
Meet in front the main entrance of The Great Hall of Cooper Union, behind the statue of Peter Cooper, East 7th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues
A walking tour benefit for the Marxist Education Project

Q: Where was one of the future leaders of the October Revolution and founder of the Red Army when the Tsar was overthrown in the first (February) Russian Revolution?
A: New York City—living in the Bronx and working for a Russian-language newspaper on the Lower East Side.

Join Alex Steinberg and Jim Creegan for a historical walking tour of Lower Manhattan as we explore some of the places where Leon Trotsky visited and worked during his nine week stay in New York 100 years ago. Trotsky’s sojourn in New York, while brief, had lasting historical significance for both the future of Russia and the United States. We will explore the culture of the radicalized immigrant communities of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, of German, Russian, Italian and Greek immigrants who supported a thriving socialist movement in New York in 1917. This was a culture that sustained about a dozen foreign language daily newspapers, many of them having a radical socialist political orientation. The Yiddish language Jewish Daily Forward had a daily circulation of 200,000 at the time, rivaling the circulation of the New York Times. It was also a time of increasing ferment and struggle as America entered World War I on April 6, 1917 and Russia’s revolutionary wave was about to explode a few months later.

After beginning at Cooper Union, we will walk to 77 St. Marks Place, where the offices of the Russian language newspaper Novy Mir, were housed in 1917. Here Trotsky and other future Bolshevik leaders worked daily. From there the tour will take a walk to the building of the Jewish Daily Forward in Seward Park, which was the scene of a dramatic confrontation between Trotsky and more conservative socialists. As we walk we will pass by a number of places that were important in understanding the history of the social struggles of immigrants in a New York very different than the city we know today.

Alex Steinberg is an educator who has taught a number of classes with the Marxist Education Project. He wrote a review of the book, Trotsky in New York 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution, by Kenneth D. Ackerman, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, 2016

Jim Creegan is a participant in the Marxist Education Project, and a student of Marxism and Russian revolutionary history?