Fortuitous Poem by Leon Trotsky

The October Revolution found
My father a very prosperous man.

At the height of the civil war
Which raged with especial fury in the South
And was accompanied by constant changes of government,
The old man of seventy
Was obliged to walk hundreds of miles
To find shelter in Odessa.

The Reds were a menace to him because he was rich;
The Whites persecuted him because he was my father.

He had lost all his savings in the Revolution.

My father died of typhus in the spring of 1922,
At the very moment when I was reading my report
At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.