Trotsky Read online

  According to the doctors, the cause of death was an intestinal blockage, but Trotsky and Natalia could only assume that their son had been poisoned by the GPU. An autopsy turned up no sign of poisoning or any other evidence of foul play, yet Lyova’s relapse seemed unaccountable to his parents, who retained an image of their son as a vibrant young man. And if poison was not involved, then why had one of the doctors asked Jeanne, just before Lyova’s death, if he had recently spoken of suicide? Then there was the matter of the Russian clinic, a choice that must have seemed perverse, especially considering that one of the family’s most trustworthy friends in Paris was an eminent physician who could have arranged for Lyova to have the best medical care.

  Such were the perplexities that afflicted the grieving parents, who secluded themselves in their bedroom at the Blue House. Joe Hansen recalled hearing Natalia’s “terrible cry”—perhaps at the moment she was told the news. Otherwise silence reigned over the house. For several days, the staff caught only an occasional glimpse of Trotsky or Natalia, and the mere sight of them was heartbreaking. Tea was passed to them through a half-opened door, the same ritual as five years earlier when they learned of the suicide of Trotsky’s daughter Zina in Berlin. Yet for Trotsky the loss of Lyova was indeed incomparable. As he explained in a press release on February 18, “He was not only my son but my best friend.”

  LYOVA WAS ONLY eleven years old at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. He idolized his father, who once allowed the boy to accompany him to the front on his armored train. Lying about his age, Lyova joined the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, before reaching the minimum age and later moved out of his parents’ Kremlin apartment in order to live in a proletarian student hostel. When Trotsky led the Opposition against Stalin, Lyova plunged headlong into its activities, dropping out of technical school to become his father’s closest aide and bodyguard. “Lyova has politics in his blood,” Trotsky remarked approvingly. When the Opposition went down to defeat at the end of 1927, Lyova decided to leave behind his wife and son and join his parents in exile.

  On the evening of January 16, 1928, Trotsky, Natalia, and Lyova were preparing to depart a wintry Moscow by train for Central Asia. Their baggage had been taken to the station ahead of them, and the family gathered in the apartment Trotsky and Natalia had occupied since moving out of the Kremlin the previous autumn. They were joined by twenty-year-old Seryozha, whose aversion to politics had recently mellowed, in part due to his father’s tribulations. As the evening progressed, the family assembled in the dining room to await the police. The train was scheduled to depart at 10:00 p.m. As they nervously watched the clock, the appointed hour passed and they puzzled over this.

  Shortly afterward, a GPU official telephoned to inform Trotsky that his departure would be delayed for two days. This produced further puzzlement until friends arrived with the news that a “tremendous demonstration” by Trotsky’s supporters at the station had caused the postponement. They described an unruly scene of resistance around the railroad car reserved for Trotsky. His supporters set up a large portrait of their hero on the roof of the car, as people cheered and shouted “Long live Trotsky!” Demonstrators blocked the tracks and clashed with the GPU and the local police, which led to casualties on both sides and arrests.

  The mood at Trotsky’s apartment was suddenly buoyant. For the next few hours, jubilant supporters kept telephoning with descriptions of what had transpired at the station, and deep into the night family and friends turned over the possibilities. Late the next morning the doorbell rang and two women friends entered. A moment later the doorbell rang again and the apartment filled with GPU agents in civilian clothes—a surprise abduction was under way. Trotsky, still in his pajamas, was handed an arrest order but did not intend to cooperate. He and Natalia and the two guests locked themselves in a room, and tense negotiations ensued through the glazed glass door, until the agents decided to telephone for instructions. The calm was broken by the sound of shattering glass, as an arm reached inside to unlock the door.

  One of the GPU men on the scene, a former Red Army officer named Kishkin who had often accompanied Trotsky on his armored train, behaved oddly, as though distressed by the Red commissar’s reversal of fortune. As the agents broke through the door he kept repeating, “Shoot me, Comrade Trotsky, shoot me.” Trotsky replied coolly: “Don’t talk nonsense, Kishkin. No one is going to shoot you. Go ahead with your job.” They found Trotsky’s slippers and put them on him, then his fur coat and winter hat. Still he refused to move, at which point the policemen lifted him in their arms and began to carry him off.

  Natalia hurriedly pulled on her snow boots and fur coat and walked out to the landing. The door slammed behind her and she heard a commotion on the other side of it. A moment later she watched as the door flew open and her two sons burst out, followed by the women guests. “They all forced their way through with the aid of athletic measures on Seryozha’s part.” Descending the stairs, Lyova frantically tried to rally support, ringing every doorbell and crying out, “They’re carrying Comrade Trotsky away!” His efforts were hopeless. “Frightened faces flashed by us at the doors and on the staircase,” Natalia remembered.

  Seryozha sounds like a real bruiser. At one point during the drive to the train station the policemen had trouble containing him inside the speeding car. He tried to jump out near the workplace of Lyova’s wife in order to alert her to her husband’s unscheduled imminent departure. As frigid air rushed in through the open door, the agents struggled to restrain the young athlete and appealed to Trotsky to convince his son to relent.

  When they arrived, Trotsky had to be lifted out of the car and carried into the station, which was nearly empty: this time there would be no protesters to obstruct his departure. A desperate Lyova tried to recruit supporters from among the scattering of railway workers, shouting, “Comrades, look! They’re carrying Comrade Trotsky away!” A GPU agent named Barychkin, someone who used to accompany Trotsky on his hunting and fishing trips, grabbed Lyova by the collar and tried to cover his mouth with his hand. Natalia says that Seryozha intervened with “a trained athlete’s blow in the face,” which forced the policeman to retreat. This was no proud mother’s idle boast. Several years later Trotsky recorded in his diary that Natalia was tormented by the thought that this “thoroughly corrupted and depraved” GPU man would be allowed to take his revenge on Seryozha in his prison cell. “He will remind Seryozha of that now,” she told her husband.

  Trotsky, Natalia, and Lyova were placed in the railroad car for the first stretch of the journey to Alma Ata, in Kazakhstan. During the ensuing year of internal exile—Lyova’s apprenticeship in the art of conspiracy—he served as his father’s liaison with Trotskyists throughout the USSR. Trotsky wrote proudly of his son’s contributions in this period, “We called him our minister of foreign affairs, minister of police and minister of communications.” When Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union the following year, Lyova decided to accompany his parents, although he was not formally exiled himself. On Turkey’s Prinkipo island, he assisted Trotsky in the writing of his autobiography and his history of the Russian Revolution, served as editor of the Bulletin of the Opposition, and helped direct the assortment of parties and groupings that constituted the incipient international Trotskyist movement.

  A few months into his Turkish exile, Lyova became homesick for Moscow and his family, and he decided to attempt to return to the USSR. He applied at the Soviet consulate in Istanbul, but several weeks later he was informed that his request had been rejected. He now had no alternative but to continue as his father’s aide-de-camp. Relations between Trotsky and Lyova were never easy, and they became increasingly fraught under the pressures of working together in isolation in a foreign land. Anyone who served as Trotsky’s secretary could testify that he was difficult to please, but only Lyova knew how difficult it was to please his father. Sensitive by nature, Lyova was deeply wounded by his father’s carping criticisms of his efforts as “slipshod
,” “slovenly,” and worse. Trotsky was aware that his severity could be oppressive, but apparently he did not fully grasp its toll.

  Lyova’s involvement with a woman placed a further strain on his relationship with his father. She was Jeanne Molinier, the wife of Raymond Molinier, at the time one of Trotsky’s most valued French followers and a frequent visitor to Prinkipo. At the end of one of the couple’s visits, Raymond returned to Paris alone, and not long afterward Lyova and Jeanne began an affair. Jeanne at first considered it no more than a fling, while Lyova took the matter so seriously that he even threatened to commit suicide unless Jeanne agreed to live with him. Trotsky strongly disapproved of the liaison, and a few years later, when the French Trotskyists split into two rival groups, he had even more reason to do so, as Jeanne sided with the renegade faction led by her former husband against the orthodox group under Trotsky and Lyova.

  There is no telling how things might have developed had Lyova not gone to live in Berlin in February 1931. The rationale behind this move was to facilitate Trotsky’s leadership of the movement by having Lyova represent him at its organizational nerve center in the German capital. There Lyova would take full control of the Bulletin of the Opposition, whose publication would be transferred from Paris. In order to secure a German visa, he enrolled as a student at Berlin’s Higher Technical School. This was no mere ruse, however, as he was intent on resuming his education toward an engineering degree cut short in Moscow. The family’s sadness must have been tempered with relief. Perhaps the separation would make it easier for Lyova to serve as his father’s indispensable comrade.

  As the years passed, the family would have plenty of occasions to consider what Lyova’s fate would have been had he managed to return to the Soviet Union in 1929. The decision to deny him a visa was made at the highest echelon. When informed of Lyova’s application, Stalin said with a sneer, “For him it’s all over. And the same for his family. Reject it.”

  Before Lyova’s departure for Berlin, the family was joined on Prinkipo by Zina, the elder of Trotsky’s two daughters by his first marriage. She arrived from Moscow with her son, five-year-old Seva, a blond-haired boy with plumpish cheeks who spoke beautiful Russian, “with the singsong Moscow accent,” in Trotsky’s words. Many years later, Albert Glotzer, a young American Trotskyist who came to Turkey in this period, still remembered Seva’s high-pitched voice calling out to his grandfather, “Lev Davidovich!” boy was embarked on an extended period of upheaval, during which time he would lose, among others, his mother, his uncle Lyova, and then his grandfather, while he himself would barely escape death in the commando raid of May 1940.

  It seems certain that Zina was already mentally unstable by the time she moved into her father’s house in Prinkipo. Her younger sister, Nina, had died of tuberculosis in 1928, a victim of the privations and persecution she was forced to endure because of her association with her father, who was in exile in Alma Ata during the final stage of her illness. Nina’s husband had been arrested and exiled, and she had lost her job. As Trotsky’s daughter, she had difficulty getting proper medical care. She died at twenty-six. Her two children were taken in by Trotsky’s first wife, Alexandra, in Leningrad.

  Zina was also tubercular, and she received permission to go abroad for treatment. She was allowed to take along only one child, leaving behind her daughter from a previous marriage. Her husband, Seva’s father, an outspoken Trotskyist, had been arrested in 1929 and deported to Arkhangelsk, near the White Sea. Zina suffered from chronic depression and seemed to believe that close contact with her father could provide a cure.

  Of Trotsky’s four children, Zina most resembled him, both physically and in her emotional intensity. She worshipped her father, and yet they barely knew each other. He had left his daughters as infants when he made his first escape from Siberia in 1902, and had had little contact with them over the years. Now father and daughter were to live together under the same roof. This arrangement would last nearly ten months, during which time the tension between them mounted until the lid almost blew off.

  In Moscow Zina had been active in Opposition politics and twice had been detained by the police. Arriving in Turkey, she hoped to be welcomed as one of her father’s trusted disciples. Trotsky, however, refused to entertain the idea, not least because Zina’s increasingly evident instability made it impossible to trust her with confidential information. Zina was told that as she intended to return to Moscow after her convalescence this arrangement was for her own protection, though she took it instead as a form of rejection. She was intensely jealous of Lyova for his close collaboration with Trotsky, and during the brief period they overlapped in Turkey the two half-siblings clashed. Even more perilously, Zina competed with Natalia for Trotsky’s affections, which led to angry scenes between father and daughter, and when Trotsky raised his voice, Zina fell apart. “To Papa,” she often said, “I am a good-for-nothing.”

  Zina’s lungs responded to treatment, but her mental health deteriorated. She was prone to fits of anger and delirium. Trotsky began to encourage her to go to Berlin for psychoanalysis, a proposal she resisted until he prevailed. She departed from Turkey near the end of 1931, leaving young Seva behind. According to Zina, in their final conversation her father said to her: “You are an astonishing person. I have never met anyone like you.” “He said that,” she told Lyova, “in an expressive and severe voice.”

  In Berlin, she continued to slide—with some assistance from the Kremlin. On February 20, 1932, the Soviet government deprived Trotsky and all his family members abroad of their Soviet citizenship. For Zina, this meant that she would never again be able to see her daughter, her husband, or her mother. At the same time, she sensed her father drifting away from her emotionally, and increasingly she blamed her condition on the growing distance between them. Lyova saw her occasionally, and one such encounter left him shaken. “Zina is terribly oppressed, depressed, she looks utterly destroyed,” he wrote to Trotsky. “I pity her, Papochka, very, very much. It’s painful to look at her.” Lyova urged his father to write to Zina, but Trotsky was incapable of sending his daughter the kind of letter she was increasingly desperate to receive.

  Trotsky, meanwhile, was angry that his daughter had left Seva in his care. “Mama is tied down both hands and feet by Seva,” he complained to Lyova in June 1932. “We must settle the question of Seva as quickly as possible.” Yet Van asserts that when he arrived in Prinkipo in October 1932 to take up his secretarial duties, he found a “gentle, quiet little boy, who went to school in the morning and made himself scarce in the house. Natalia was far from being ‘tied hands and feet’ by him.” Inconvenience aside, one can only speculate on the source of Trotsky’s discomfort. Glotzer recalls that at school Seva “suffered the usual little cruelties inflicted by children” because he was different. One day, he remembers, Trotsky asked him if he could teach Seva how to box. Their first lesson broke down almost immediately, never to be resumed.

  Seva was reunited with his mother in Berlin in the final days of 1932, but his presence may have aggravated her condition, perhaps by exacerbating the feeling that her father had rejected her. Two weeks earlier, on December 14, she had written in her final letter to him: “Dear Papa, I expect a letter from you, if only a few lines.” On January 5, 1933, she barricaded herself in her apartment and turned on the gas taps. She had taken steps beforehand to arrange for Seva to be with friends and left instructions to explain to the boy that she was confined in a hospital for infectious patients. “Poor, poor, poor child. But nothing could be more horrible for him than a psychologically deranged mother.” The barricade she constructed inside the door of her apartment ensured that rescue was impossible. She was thirty-one years old.

  In Prinkipo, when the news arrived by telegram Trotsky and Natalia immediately isolated themselves in their room. The household understood that something terrible had happened, but the nature of the tragedy was revealed only with the arrival of the afternoon newspapers. A few days passed befor
e Trotsky emerged from his room and returned to work. “Two deep wrinkles had formed on either side of his nose and ran down both sides of his mouth,” Van observed. His first act was to compose an open letter to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in which he placed the blame for his daughter’s death on Stalin: by forever cutting off Zina from her family in Moscow, the dictator had driven her to madness and suicide.

  This was how Trotsky explained Zina’s death to her distraught mother, Alexandra, then in Leningrad, but she refused to believe it. “I will go mad myself if I do not learn everything,” she wrote to him after receiving the news. As a radical young activist in the southern Ukraine in the 1890s, Alexandra Sokolovskaya had introduced Trotsky, then known as Lev Bronstein, to Marxism. The lovers had married in a Moscow transit prison in 1900, submitting to this bourgeois ceremony in order to be sent jointly into Siberian exile. There, two years later, convinced that her husband was destined for greatness, she encouraged him to escape and pursue his ambitions among the Russian Marxist émigrés in Europe. She remained a loyal Trotskyist through the 1920s and raised two fervent Oppositionist daughters. Now she had lost them both.

  “Where is my bright radiant darling,” Alexandra grieved, “where is my Zina?” She quoted a letter Zina sent her a few weeks before her death in which she blamed her illness on her father’s indifference toward her. “Papa never writes to me,” she complained repeatedly. “He will never write to me again.” Nor did she believe she would ever be able to see him again.

  “I wrote to her that it was not so tragic as it seemed to her,” Alexandra recounted to Trotsky, “that much is explained by your character, by the difficulty you have expressing your feelings, although often you understand that this has to be done.” Unlike Trotsky, Alexandra was not inclined to attach any special significance to Zina’s loss of her Soviet citizenship. Zina was a “public person” whose life was never focused on her husband or her children. She prized above all her father’s “tender solicitude, but she did not get enough of it.” Psychoanalysis, it was obvious to Alexandra, was hardly appropriate for someone like Zina. “She was by nature very reserved, and getting her to talk was very difficult. This was a quality she acquired from both of us. And yet here she was forced to talk about things that she didn’t want to talk about.”