88
u/WarBoruma Revolutionary Communists of America Apr 14 '26
Yeah, trotsky was a dork. I'll take "fork found in kitchen for 400", Alex.
Read on trotsky in the Triangle Dairy, in the bronx I believe, if you want a good laugh. Guy literally helped lead revolution, but got tossed out of his favorite dairy for not reading the room and applying a little tact.
Edit: Spelling 😞
30
u/firefighter430 Marxism-Leninism Apr 14 '26
22
u/Scared-War-9102 Apr 14 '26
It’s funny because Trotskyism isn’t even a terrible ideology in terms of content itself but the man just reeks of Elon Musk energy, like a non-colonizer version
22
u/WarBoruma Revolutionary Communists of America Apr 14 '26
Whoa there, talking good on trotskyism? You're treading dangerous waters, pal.
/s, lmao
4
8
u/Danko_on_Reddit Apr 16 '26
I identify as a Trot because I agree with core principles of internationalism and continuous revolution but knowing who Trotsky was as a person, from both his own writings and what others have written about him, I see why he got an ice pick to the skull.
6
8
u/Ent_Soviet Apr 15 '26
Dude did fine work as a field commander- tried to ride that popularity into politics but it turns out most folks who were involved in politics thought he was annoying and not that well read on theory.
He was like a kid that won the state championship football game and doesn’t understand why that doesn’t impress his peers 10 years later or afford him special status.
2
u/rako17 Aug 15 '26
War Boruma, Ben Katchor discussed it in his book The Dairy Restaurant. Then on Katchor's website he issued a correction that said in part:
One often heard legend, passed down as family lore, centered around his ideological objection to tipping restaurant waiters and their retaliation through poor service, insults and the spilling hot soup. The unvarying repetition of details suggests a yet-to-be-discovered common source. This legend eventually found print form as a humorous piece of historical fiction with anti-Communist overtones that appeared in a 1965 issue of Esquire magazine. This clearly fictitious account somehow found its way into recent academic studies of Trotsky and his time in New York City.
He then gives a proof that it's fiction.
On a side note, the classic tipping practice in Soviet restaurants was just to leave the coin change as a tip, eg. $0.01 to $0.99. I don't know if that extended back into the Tsarist imperial era, but it easily may have. It lasted for years into the post Soviet period and may still be true there.
Trotsky was only for a couple months in the US and particularly temporary residents have a habit of keeping their home country practices. It seems to me plausible that he did that, because I did that same thing when I came back to America. A restaurant manager confronted me about it very dramatically, and it really really was shameful and I felt so bad.
2
u/WarBoruma Revolutionary Communists of America Aug 15 '26
You have my utmost gratitude for telling me this. Although, I've discussed that story many times before your correcting the story for me. I'm a bit embarrassed to learn it was fiction.
Sounds like there needs to be a change on the wikipedia article from which I originally learned the fictional story.
2
u/rako17 Aug 15 '26
Friend WarBoruma,
There is a body of Apocrypha about Trotsky's time in NYC. There are claims that he was in one or more movies from that time as an extra too.
Here is the link to the story and the disproof: https://dairyrestauranthistory.com/corrections-to-the-dairy-restaurant.html
Realistically when you cross cultures, you are likely to get "fo pas." For instance, English rarely uses informal "thou" anymore, but Spanish, Greek, and Russian do. English only uses formal single "you" and plural "you". So in Russian and other languages I mishmash thou and you together (tu', usted). The result is that sometimes people with whom I speak get offended, thinking I'm disrespectful, or their feelings get hurt, thinking that I'm suddenly being cold and formal to them.
Here's another one: In the ex-USSR, a college kid, whom I barely knew, from the Caucasus had mashed potatoes on a plate. I told him as a compliment, "That looks tasty." He said, "You can eat some." So I had maybe 1/3. Then he said, "Eat more." I said, "Really? Don't you want some?" He replied with encouragement, "Eat, eat." So I finished it. Later he told me, "Americans are impudent." Surprised, I asked him, "Why?"
Since then, I regretted eating his food. In his view, it was rude for me to eat his food the way that I did.
So some version of the dairy tipping incident sounds plausible to me, just at face value being in that type of position.
A lot of Soviet things like customs and products were inherited, even if transformed, from the Tsarist era, and I wouldn't be surprised if minimal restaurant tipping was one of them.
The Soviet or Russian idea was or is that the restaurant should pay the waiter correctly for providing their labor in the service, and that therefore there is no need to tip or role for tipping unless the waiter did something amazing or excessive, like free food. That is, what we think of as the tip in the US would come out of the customer's bill in the USSR. This is like the argument that the joke story has Trotsky make about why he doesn't tip.
2
u/rako17 Aug 15 '26
Friend War Boruma,
There are a whole bunch of apocryphal stories about famous people, the more famous and far back in time the stories go, the more opportunity there is for tall tales. Think of George Washington skipping a coin across the Potomac.
When Nikita Khrushchev visited the US, he had a US government arranged tour. His hosts had him attend a performance of the Can Can. I read that he privately thought that they wanted to make him look bad, like he was lecherous, by attending the show. I don't know if that was their intention.
Supposing that the story about Trotsky failing to pay tips is true, my guess is that Tsarist Russia, where Trotsky was from, had the same arrangement that the USSR and immediate post-USSR did. Wait staff get paid a standard wage. The guide books explain that their native custom is for customers to just pay wait staff a tip in the form of leftover coin-type change. I asked wait staff in a bunch of different places if I should tip them, and they said things like "If you want" or "You don't have to", and people explained to me that the wait staff get paid. Their word for tips literally means "teas" or "for tea". It reminds me of how in China and US Chinese restaurants there is a custom of providing complimentary tea. If you get complimentary food like that, it's polite to pay for it, but still, it's complimentary.
The US system of making wait staff rely on tips to get by seems kind of odd by comparison. As I understand it, restaurants give waiters a minimal wage like a dollar an hour (or nothing?) and then the waiter brings the food to the customer and usually does some other services like food preparation. Then, officially on the receipt there is no stated charge required for the wait service, but only an unstated expectation that you will voluntarily pay. Supposing that the tip is voluntary, the implication is that the service that you are tipping them for is also an optional part of your ability to get your food. So, theoretically, you could just tell the restaurant hostess that you will serve yourself instead of the waiter. But realistically the hostess is going to tell you that in her restaurant, the waiter has to be the one to serve you.
To put yourself in a fresh off the boat Old World visitor's shoes, imagine by comparison that you stayed for a few months in another US State where people expected you to pay all kinds of tips or voluntary payments on things that you didn't consider normal to tip for. A friend made a lot of trips to downtown Las Vegas and told me that people expect you to tip everywhere for all kinds of things that you normally wouldn't. There are men standing in Vegas bathrooms wearing suits whom you can to tip for taking care of the bathroom.
De facto if Trotsky came to live in the US long enough, life circumstances would practically pressure him into voluntary restaurant tipping.
It's kind of like the situation with Walmart. A lot of customers are not really shopping at Walmart because they see it as shutting out small businesses and underpaying employees. But they end up shopping there anyway because it's so convenient.
My idea was that I should just pay US waiters my coin change, but after the Manager corrected me, I just give in an accept it: I like US waiters and they rely on my tips and I want them to be happy, so I pay a tip. The US government also taxes waiters nowadays based on a kind of low expected tip rate, so even if you don't tip them, they still get taxed as if you did. It's a weird situation, because they are relying on optional payments in providing their service and the government taxes them on the assumption that they got the optional payment.
I don't know if French waiters rely on tips, but it reminds me of the cultural issue about waitering and rudeness. Supposedly in France, especially in high end restaurants, waitering is considered a high end respectable profession. The waiter is supposed to be exacting, like a professional, luxury artist. Supposedly this carries over the waiters' demeanor and can make them seem rude to Americans, and, I imagine, vice verse.
Personally I like to be nice to wait staff and want their days to be happier.
The situation also reminds me of the haggle customs in the East, but in reverse. The US does have haggling, like at Pawn Shops, but I'm not very used to it. If you go to a craft market in the US, you could theoretically try to haggle, but usually people just pay the price marked on the product. So if you are used to haggling a price downward in your home country and you just give waiters your loose change, I could see how mentally you are unprepared when you come to the US to voluntarily choose to pay significant optional fees for waiter services.
Kind Regards.
21
47
u/Bogotazo Apr 14 '26
Despite his brilliance, there's a reason party cadre were ultimately convinced this guy was too annoying to lead the project.
2
Apr 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/memepopo123 Apr 16 '26
I mean tbf all the big ones you remember were widely considered very charismatic…
2
Apr 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
8
u/memepopo123 Apr 16 '26
Well yeah. Thats not my point. My point is that to convince a ton of people (especially illiterate peasants) to follow you in a plot to overthrow the existing power structure and start a new one from scratch, you need to be “a good time” to some degree.
11
10
u/HikmetLeGuin Apr 16 '26
A lot of things that we experience as children seem a lot more threatening to us than they really were.
I remember my kindergarten teacher criticizing me for something, and it seemed like the worst, scariest thing.
Today, looking back, I realize it probably wasn't that bad, and it just seemed much more intimidating than it was meant to be, because I was very small and inexperienced in the world.
1
u/rako17 Aug 15 '26
It would be great to be able to read the rest of the story, on page 236.
The preceding story at the top of page 235 describes Frunze's personal loyalty to Trotsky, implying that he was not so personally off putting.
I have read the converse type of story about Trotsky with little girls: I read a biographical story by a Russian or Russian Jewish lady who was friends with one of Trotsky's girl relatives when she was a kid and he was already a Soviet leader. The girls were playing in an apartment together and one of them dropped glass and broke it on the floor. He was super nice, sweet and caring about its telling them to be careful about it and he cleaned it up for them.
I just take the scarf incident in the OP to be the converse of the glass clean up incident, where in both cases he is being supervisory, chaperon-like or parental. He complimented the mother, and then repeated it, so he was basically positive about them; it was just a martial chaperonelike thing.
The OP is an excerpt from page 235 of Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina's "This I Cannot Forget".
In Solidarity
-10
u/One-Firefighter-6367 Neosocialism of 21st century Apr 15 '26
I dont see anything wrong. No, really, I do not see anything wrong. If the kids mom failed it must be objectively and honestly told. Parents arent geniuses everytime
5
u/HikmetLeGuin Apr 16 '26
Young kids often find criticism from adults to be a much scarier thing than it actually is.
Trotsky probably just intended to teach the kid something, but the little boy found it intimidating.
Happened to me too, when I was a child. My uncle would make a half-joking comment to me, and I felt all nervous and self-conscious. Or a teacher would tell me I did something wrong, and it felt humiliating, like the worst thing in the world. Looking back, it was nothing.
3
u/One-Firefighter-6367 Neosocialism of 21st century Apr 16 '26
Yes, that is true and very much could be that way
8
•
u/AutoModerator Apr 14 '26
This is a space for socialists to discuss current events in our world from anti-capitalist perspective(s), and a certain knowledge of socialism is expected from participants. This is not a space for non-socialists. Please be mindful of our rules before participating, which include:
No Bigotry, including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism...
No Reactionaries, including all kind of right-wingers.
No Liberalism, including social democracy, lesser evilism...
No Sectarianism. There is plenty of room for discussion, but not for baseless attacks.
Please help us keep the subreddit helpful by reporting content that break r/Socialism's rules.
💬 Wish to chat elsewhere? Join us in discord: https://discord.gg/QPJPzNhuRE
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.