Trotsky Read online

  Mourning their loss, Lyova’s parents grappled with the deeper mysteries. “Both of them have aged terribly in this one day,” Hansen wrote on February 17, the day after that blackest day. “Poor poor Natalia. She is absolutely prostrated. When the news was broken to the OM, he said, ‘This is the finish of Natalia.’ They have remained in their room without coming out, windows and doors closed, the room in darkness. They are utterly agonized.” As a precaution, the staff decided to remove the small automatic pistol that served as a paperweight on Trotsky’s desk.

  Trotsky’s grief was compounded by guilt for his censorious treatment of Lyova. How could it be otherwise, after the long stream of invective? “Slovenliness bordering on treachery” was how he characterized his son’s performance in a letter from February 1937. “It is difficult to say which are the worst blows, those from Moscow or those from Paris…. [A]lthough in recent months I have had to endure a lot, I have not experienced such a dark day as today, after receiving your letter. I opened the envelope confident that I would find the affidavits, but instead found excuses and promises.”

  Expressions of remorse would follow and help mollify his incomparable friend, but only until the next dressing-down. On one occasion, long-suffering Lyova struck back, reminding Trotsky of his limited resources—“sometimes I do not even have the money to buy postage stamps”—and objecting to the way his father belittled him to other comrades. “I thought that I could count on your support. Instead you are making me your butt and are telling all and sundry about my ‘criminal carelessness.’”

  These fulminations recurred to the end. Trotsky’s penultimate letter to his son, dated January 21, 1938, perhaps the last one Lyova read, conveyed his exasperation that the issue of the Bulletin that was to feature the Dewey Commission’s verdict had yet to appear in print. He called this an “outright crime” and once again threatened to move the journal to New York. Lyova’s last letter to his father, sent on February 4, accompanied proofs of this special issue of the Bulletin—though this package would arrive too late for Trotsky to be able to convey his relief and appreciation.

  Now, behind the blackened windows, Trotsky wrestled with his guilty conscience. Work on remodeling the Blue House had been halted, leaving the patio littered with brick, plaster, lime, and sand. On the morning of February 20, while inspecting the grounds, Hansen noticed that the French doors to Trotsky and Natalia’s bedroom were open. The OM was seated at a small table he had placed in the doorway for the light. He was writing Lyova’s obituary. “In the evening he was still there working under a lamp he had set up…. He worked very late.”

  The result was his affecting tribute, “Leon Sedov—Son, Friend, Fighter,” which sketched scenes from his son’s life, beginning with a pregnant Natalia confined in a St. Petersburg jail during the Revolution of 1905. “His mother—who was closer to him than any other person in the world—and I are living through these terrible hours recalling his image, feature by feature, unable to believe that he is no more and weeping because it is impossible not to believe…. Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us.”

  Trotsky’s testimonial was also a statement of partial contrition and self-exculpation. His intimate collaboration with his son had sometimes led to fierce clashes between them, he revealed, and not only over political matters. He admitted that Lyova had borne the brunt of the pedantic and exacting behavior that often made him insufferable to family and friends. “To a superficial eye it might even have seemed that our relationship was permeated with severity and aloofness,” he elucidated, laying down a marker for his future biographers. “But beneath the surface there glowed a deep mutual attachment based on something immeasurably greater than ties of blood—a solidarity of views and judgments, of sympathies and antipathies, of joys and sorrows experienced together, of great hopes we had in common. And this mutual attachment blazed up from time to time so warmly as to reward us three-hundred-fold for the petty friction in daily work.”

  Lyova was hunted by the GPU, who intercepted his mail, stole his papers, and listened in on his telephone conversations, Trotsky affirmed. “His closest friends wrote us three months ago that he was subject to a danger too direct in Paris and insisted on his going to Mexico.” But Lyova objected that while the danger was undeniable, it would be criminal of him to abandon his post in the midst of the battle. “Nothing remained except to bow to this argument.” This was how Trotsky preferred to remember the episode, from the perspective of a mere bystander.

  As to the cause of Lyova’s death, Trotsky held the GPU responsible. “This young and profoundly sensitive and tender being had had far too much to bear. Whether the Moscow masters resorted to chemistry, or whether everything they had previously done proved sufficient, the conclusion remains one and the same: It was they who killed him.”

  Trotsky and Natalia’s isolation came to an end after several days, though it would be several weeks before they rejoined the rest of the household at the dinner table. The period of mourning was convoluted by the onset of a protracted struggle with Jeanne over custody of Seva and of Trotsky’s archives. At first, relations were warm, with Trotsky inviting Jeanne to come live in Mexico as “our beloved daughter.” Before long, however, a chill set in. It emerged that Lyova, in a testament he produced in great haste before his departure for the clinic, had left Jeanne as the executor of Trotsky’s papers. As an adherent of the breakaway group of French Trotskyists, Jeanne was not inclined to relinquish these archives. As surrogate mother to Seva, moreover, she had become attached to the boy and did not wish to give him up. In the face of Jeanne’s intransigence, Trotsky, who at the outset seemed open to the idea that Seva should be raised in Paris, became determined to gain custody of his grandson.

  An agreement on the transfer of the archives was arranged within a few months, but the custody battle dragged on in court and was the subject of sensational press coverage. When the law eventually ruled in Trotsky’s favor, an overwrought Jeanne abducted Seva and hid him in a religious institution in the Vosges region of eastern France. He was rescued by Trotsky’s allies then nearly kidnapped by Jeanne’s confederates. It was not until August 1939 that the boy, then thirteen years old, was brought to Mexico.

  Throughout this ordeal, Natalia retained feelings of compassion for Jeanne, and the two women consoled each other in a tearful correspondence. Trotsky could not abide such divided loyalties, and the resulting marital strife was registered by Hansen in his telegraphic penciled notes: “The only times of anger between OM & N—his banging window shattering glass—The translation from Russian—Why don’t you (get a divorce) go & marry/live with some one else”—an outburst, Hansen seemed to recall, that had to do with Seva.

  One afternoon during those tempestuous days, while Trotsky was having a siesta, Natalia came to Van’s room very upset, with tears running down her cheeks. “Van, Van, you know what he told me?” she cried out. “You are with my enemies.” She quoted her husband in French then repeated his remark in the original Russian. Of course, Trotsky had his own reasons for being upset, Van allowed. “But the harsh fact remains that six weeks after Liova’s death, while Natalia was still devastated with grief, Trotsky had spoken to her in the most cutting and brutal terms possible.”

  Meanwhile, Trotsky’s most treacherous enemy continued to elude detection, as the French Trotskyists nominated the reliable Étienne—agent provocateur Mark Zborowski—to take Lyova’s place in Paris. From Moscow, Zborowski was given a new assignment: to penetrate Trotsky’s household in Coyoacán.

  CHAPTER 6

  Prisoners and Provocateurs

  In the course of their secret meeting on Prinkipo island in 1929, GPU agent Yakov Blumkin warned Trotsky that it would take at least twenty trained men to guarantee his safety. This number was well beyond Trotsky’s means. In Turkey he never had more than three or four comrades by his side—men selected, moreover, on the basis of their political fealty and secretarial abilities; guarding was their nigh
t job. The Turkish government supplied essential protection by stationing a half dozen policemen outside Trotsky’s home. Later, in France, where a clean-shaven Trotsky, with the collusion of the French government, lived mostly incognito, security was left to a few secretaries who doubled as guards.

  Mexico presented a more dangerous proposition. In Mexico, anyone could tell you, political disputes were apt to be settled at the point of a gun. Lyova was distressed when he learned that his parents’ next destination was, as he called it, “the country where one can hire an assassin for a few dollars.” Since the first Moscow trial in August 1936, the Mexican Communist Party had been loud in its condemnation of the renegade Trotsky. His alleged co-conspirators had all been executed for their crimes. Lyova’s nightmare was that a Mexican pistolero would finish Stalin’s work.

  As Trotsky sailed from Norway in December, Lyova dispatched longtime secretaries Jean van Heijenoort and Jan Frankel to Mexico, proposing that Frankel devote himself exclusively to matters of security. His first letter to his parents in Coyoacán reveals Lyova’s obsession with the topic: “The question of life and death has never as yet been posed so directly as today.” He urged his father to organize a rigorous security regime. One of his recommendations was that Trotsky live incognito and reside at Diego Rivera’s home only officially. He also proposed an electric alarm system “like the ones they use in American banks”—a bit of wisdom he probably picked up watching gangster movies.

  President Cárdenas, having granted Trotsky asylum, had a strong interest in keeping him alive. His government stationed a police garrison of a half-dozen men on the street outside the Blue House. It also authorized selected local Trotskyists to carry firearms, and in the early days these Mexican comrades were drafted two or three at a time to guard the house from inside the high blue walls. The Trotskyist leadership in New York planned to replace these recruits entirely with trustworthy Americans who could double as secretaries.

  Trotsky’s top priority during the initial months in Mexico was to expose the Moscow trials as a frame-up. Brains being in greater demand than brawn, the New York office selected Bernard Wolfe, a twenty-two-year-old New Haven native and Yale graduate, to serve as his American secretary. The future author of numerous pornographic, science fiction, and other novels, Wolfe was regarded among the comrades as an effective stylist in English. He could also read German and French. In Coyoacán he would put these abilities to considerable use, notably during the Dewey Commission hearings in April.

  Trotsky and his secretaries in the patio of the Blue House, 1937. From left: Bernard Wolfe, Jan Frankel, Trotsky, Jean van Heijenoort.

  Albert Glotzer Papers, Hoover Institution Archives

  The three secretaries—Van, Frankel, and Wolfe—divided the night shift into three watches, with the middle shift, from midnight to four, considered the most demanding. The Blue House was drafty and without heat, and it could get chilly at night 7,500 feet up on the plateau, with temperatures dipping into the forties. Seated at the twenty-foot-long lemon yellow dining room table cluttered at one end with typewriters, books, and papers, Wolfe preoccupied himself nightly by disassembling and then reassembling the Luger he had been issued. One night, Trotsky entered the dining room on his way to the bathroom and noticed the guts of Wolfe’s handgun spread out on the table in front of him. He spoke softly but his tone was grave. “You know, in the Revolution we lost more people than the enemy could claim credit for. Many young comrades killed themselves with their guns and suicide was very far from their minds.” Wolfe tried to put him at ease: “You don’t have to worry about me, L.D., I always take the clip out and make sure the chamber’s empty, there’s no danger here.”

  By the time the summer rains began to fall, the search was under way for a sturdier man to replace Wolfe. By then the question of Trotsky’s security had begun to loom larger. This partly had to do with the unfolding events in Spain, where the civil war between the Nationalist forces under General Franco and the Loyalist militias of the Republic was entering its second year. Franco’s armies received the military backing of Germany and Italy, while the Republican government—a Popular Front coalition of liberals, socialists, communists, and anarchists—relied on weapons and advisers from the Soviet Union, including a sizable contingent from the GPU. Otherwise, the Republic looked to the support of tens of thousands of volunteers from numerous countries, mostly Communists, who made up the International Brigades, including nearly 2,800 Americans who fought with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Britain and France, wary of a confrontation with Hitler and Mussolini, chose to stand aside from the conflict.

  Stalin had a complicated political agenda in Spain. He wanted to get credit for Soviet military support to the Republic, yet not go so far as to get drawn into a direct clash with Hitler. He was also intent on preventing the emergence in Spain of an alternative model to Soviet Communism. Toward this end, he set out to neutralize the non-Communist forces fighting on behalf of the Republic and hoping to transform the civil war into a socialist revolution. These included anarchists, syndicalists, Trotskyists, and others heavily concentrated in the northeast, in Catalonia, whose government in Barcelona was affiliated with the central government in Madrid.

  Catalonia was the home of the POUM, the Spanish initials for the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, led by Andrés Nin. Nin, one of the founders of the Spanish Communist Party, had worked for the Comintern in Moscow in the 1920s, when for a time he served on Trotsky’s staff and cast his lot with the Left Opposition. Trotsky had since broken with Nin, accusing him of centrism and “treachery” for taking the POUM into Spain’s Popular Front government and then joining Catalonia’s ruling coalition. This did not prevent Moscow from branding the POUM a Trotskyist organization.

  In the first week of May 1937, the GPU made its move in Barcelona, spurring the Communists and the local police to launch an attack against the anarchists and the POUM, even as Franco’s armies were attacking the city. During these May Days, Barcelona was the scene of intense street fighting that left hundreds dead. It was a civil war within the civil war. On June 16, Nin and most of the POUM leadership were arrested. Nin subsequently disappeared, as did many others, including Erwin Wolf, a citizen of Czechoslovakia who had served as Trotsky’s secretary in Norway for a year. Like Nin, Wolf was presumed to have been kidnapped and killed by the GPU.

  The fighting in Spain had a special resonance in Mexico, the only country other than the USSR to declare its support for the Republic. Mexico provided a haven for political refugees from the conflict, who began to arrive on its shores in the summer of 1937. This ongoing emigration was viewed warily at the Blue House, where the new arrivals, not all of them Spaniards, were perceived as potential recruits to the GPU.

  One individual who attracted particular interest among the Trotskyists both north and south of the Rio Grande was an American by the name of George Mink. Although he claimed to be American-born, Mink was believed to have come from Russia. As a Communist union organizer and goon squad enforcer among the longshoremen on the East Coast, he reportedly traveled back and forth between Moscow and the New York waterfront. For several years he had been employed by the Yellow Cab Co. in Philadelphia. In 1935 he was arrested in Copenhagen for the attempted rape of a hotel maid, at which time he was discovered to be carrying forged passports for purposes of espionage. Sentenced to prison for eighteen months, he served out most of his term before being deported to the Soviet Union. From Moscow he was sent to Spain.

  Comrades escaping Spain told bloodcurdling tales of Mink’s monstrous deeds, although few claimed to have actually seen him there. By the summer of 1937 Mink had acquired a considerable notoriety as a GPU executioner. In Europe he was known as the Butcher. It was believed that after the Communist purge in Catalonia, he had left Spain for America. By autumn, rumor had him heading to Mexico.

  By then the Blue House was on high alert because of an attack campaign directed at Trotsky by the Mexican Communists and the trade union organiz
ations. Posters and newspaper articles accused the exile of plotting to overthrow President Cárdenas and install a fascist dictatorship. The goal of this slanderous campaign was to compromise Trotsky’s asylum so that he would be turned over to Moscow, but Trotsky had to assume that an additional motive was to prepare the atmosphere for his assassination.

  At this same time, unsettling reports began to reach Coyoacán about the police investigation of the murder in Switzerland of GPU defector Ignace Reiss. Although the two trigger men had escaped, accomplices were arrested, and it emerged that one of the killers had been in Mexico City earlier in the year and the other had been living in an apartment building in Paris next door to Lyova.

  This confluence of ominous developments convinced Trotsky that it was time to enlist a full-time American guard for the Blue House. A leading candidate for the job was quickly identified in Harry Milton, born Wolf Kupinsky, an American Trotskyist who had just returned from Spain. Milton had fought with the POUM militia in northeastern Spain, where he got to know George Orwell. While at the front in Hu-esca, Orwell took a sniper’s bullet in the throat. In his civil-war classic, Homage to Catalonia, he recounts how an American sentry came to his aid: “Gosh! Are you hit?” That American was Milton, who called for a knife to cut open Orwell’s shirt, a procedure that led to the discovery that the bullet had passed through his neck.

  Milton landed in prison during Barcelona’s May Days, and was able to win his release only after organizing a hunger strike among the prisoners. Arriving in New York, he made a generous contribution to the legend of George Mink’s exploits in Spain. Milton had not seen Mink in Barcelona, but he had known him for years in New York and would have no trouble recognizing the stocky, thuggish former taxi driver.