Posted by Duncan on January 18, 2014 at 12:12:43 user Duncan.
(Well they're interesting to me, anyway!)
First of all, has anybody ever heard anything to suggest that AR (or ER) maintained any contact with Trotsky after they came to England? I had certainly never heard anything of this kind, but I stumbled across a reference to Trotsky trying to get his biography of Lenin published in England (and in English) in 1938. When discussing the possibility with Gollancz publishers, he said that the book would be introduced and edited by Arthur Ransome. I'm intrigued as to whether Trotsky was just assuming this might be an option (and thought it would help get the book published) or whether there had been any correspondence on the matter. The Lenin and Trotsky archives stored in the US do have a file of correspondence intriguingly labelled "Arthur Ransom" [sic] but I assume most of that will be from the period where we know about the relationship.
The other interesting point is about Zelda Kahan. Who, I hear you ask? The left-wing student who leant AR some socialist literature at Yorkshire College and encouraged him to sign up to the Clarion for a while. Because of a mis-spelling in AR's Autobiography (if I remember correctly) I had not placed Zelda Kahan as Zelda K Coates - one of the leading lights of the early period of the Communist Party of Great Britain. As a Chemistry graduate from Yorkshire College, she went on to study as a post-graduate in London.
AR mentions that if he had maintained the acquaintance he would have got to meet Bolshevik exiles in London before he ever went to Russia (including Lenin and Radek, as it happens). It seems an astonishing coincidence that these two very different people should have studied together, gone to London at similar times, likely had some acquaintances in common then (many of AR's "Bohemian" chums would have been part of the relatively small world of Socialist London at that time) but that they should then meet these great figures of the Russian Revolution in each other's countries (Kahan was Russian). She wrote extensively about the Revolution and the early period particularly and appears as herself in Ten Days that Shook the World. I'm not suggesting that AR knew her better than previously suggested, but I do find it all intriguing!