An Extract from the Yarn

On Trotsky & Procrastination

By Josh Ireland

Some writers are frauds, a good number are competent, a select few are geniuses, but all of them are procrastinators. I was a procrastinator long before I was a writer; I think it was my talent for procrastination that made me believe I might have it in me to become a writer. And now that I am, theoretically, paid to put words on a page, procrastination still occupies the bigger part of my day. 

My most productive form of procrastination is looking at old photos, specifically of the men and women I’m writing about, even more specifically, the clothes that they wear. Some of this is adjacent to the pleasure one gets from scrolling through a chic person’s Instagram account, or a well-styled lookbook: it’s nice to look at interesting people wearing interesting clothes!

But I also see it as a useful avenue of historical and psychological enquiry. The aesthetic decisions that people make are as revealing about their personality and predilections as other sources, such as diaries or letters. When we dress we make a series of choices. Even when we think we’re not making a choice – perhaps because we dress conventionally, according to the fashions or conventions of our time or place; or because we tell ourselves that we don’t care about what we wear – we are showing people something about how we view the world and how we want to engage with it.

I have just finished writing a book about the assassination of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky by an idealistic young Spaniard called Ramón Mercader who was operating on the orders of Josef Stalin’s NKVD. One thing that stands out about them to me, beyond their ruthlessness and fierce attachment to extreme political positions, was that they both dressed with great care. Clothes were important to them.

Trotsky had a reputation as the neatest man to ever lead an insurrection. He was a man capable of being put off his stride by the way that his shirt cuffs protruded too far out of the sleeves of his suit after waving his hands around during a speech. But he was not merely fastidious. During the Russian Civil War this dandy swanked around battlefields clad head to toe in black leather. Later, he’d appear in Mexico dressed in a beautiful white linen chore jacket.

Mercader, too, liked dressing up, he had opinions about the meaning of elegance. Fighting in his own civil war, in Spain, he was spotted admiring himself in a pair of ‘fabulous’ leggings worn over café-au-lait trousers. After the murder, once he was in prison, he remained committed to looking good, a visitor noted his ‘khaki gabardine slacks with a sharp crease, yellow shoes, a silk sport shirt and an expensive suede jacket’.

In each man’s case, the significance of their exuberant relationship with clothing is slightly different. Mercader left no diaries or memoirs, he was not one of history’s great letter writers, and during the period of his life when he stepped into the spotlight, he was impersonating another man. In the absence of the normal range of documentary sources, the decisions he made about how he dressed suddenly feel like almost the most eloquent thing about him.

Trotsky is different. He wrote and spoke volubly. He had many opinions and expressed them all. And if he didn’t write those thoughts down, someone listening nearby probably did on his behalf. The problem with Trotsky is not a lack of information, it’s that we have too much of it. His clothes speak on behalf of a side of him that does not find expression in his writing, whether polemic or autobiography. They tell us little to nothing about his views on Marxist economics, but a great deal about his vanity, his creativity and his willingness to set himself apart from other people.

My sense of who these men were is modified and deepened by what I know about the hats, jackets, trouser and raincoats they wore.

Not least because this sort of self-indulgent peacockery was exactly the sort of thing that the creed they both believed in was supposed to be sweeping away. (It’s worth noting that Trotsky’s arch-rival Stalin, who had a genius for self-presentation, made a virtue of appearing in shabby, darned clothes.) The care they took in their appearance was not sufficient to undermine their revolutionary credibility, but it stands in interesting tension with it.

Do I like them more because they looked great? Well, no, I’m not sure it works like that. But do I understand them better? Yes, I think I do.

Josh Ireland is a writer and editor based in London. The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin's Greatest Enemy will be published in August 2025.