Trotsky Read online

  Milton possessed no secretarial abilities and could speak no foreign languages—even his Spanish, he confessed, was wretched. Nonetheless, Trotsky was persuaded of his suitability as a guard. On November 6 he wrote to Milton that in view of the recent “gangsterist activity of Stalin’s agents abroad,” his services were needed in Coyoacán. Just after Trotsky had reached his decision, however, Jan Frankel, arriving in New York from Mexico, preempted Milton’s appointment. Frankel endorsed an alternative candidate, Hank Stone, arguing that his engineering background would be an invaluable asset in organizing the defense of the Blue House.

  Frankel was persuasive, but the hesitation gave Trotsky an opportunity to reconsider the entire proposition. Even as he authorized the hiring of Milton, Trotsky was worried that a man sent down to serve as a pure guard, with no secretarial duties to distract him, would become bored and begin to feel more like a prisoner than a guard. The presence of a full-time guard, moreover, would mean an additional resident at the Blue House. A worker in the New York office, briefed by Frankel, warned colleagues that “the O.M. is extremely restive about being constantly surrounded and has been balking at security arrangements.” Which is precisely what Trotsky now proceeded to do. On December 1, he suggested a postponement of the “Milton, Stone matter” for two months, proposing in the meantime to rely on the Mexican comrades.

  One factor that influenced Trotsky’s decision was the performance of Joe Hansen, who had recently replaced Bernard Wolfe as his American secretary. The search for Wolfe’s successor had turned contentious because of Trotsky’s insistence that the new man be an experienced driver. He had become paranoid about ending up in a car wreck on Mexico’s hazardous roads. Reliance on Diego’s driver and on Cristina Kahlo was no longer practical. Frankel did not drive, and although Van had a French driver’s license, he was timid about using it. What the household needed was a driver able to negotiate the broken terrain in the countryside, elude pursuers, and take evasive action in the event of an ambush along the narrow, congested streets of Mexico City.

  The New York office was slow to appreciate Trotsky’s obsessive-ness on this subject. James Cannon, the leader of the Trotskyist party, was miffed when the person he recommended to replace Wolfe was rejected: “Fifty million Americans drive autos and it is reasonable to assume that comrade Gordon can learn in a week or two.” This made it clear to Trotsky that Cannon failed to understand his situation. In order to get the point across, the job was redefined as “secretary-driver,” and New York was instructed that the Old Man would settle for nothing less than “a chauffeur-comrade, sure, reliable and experienced.” This led to the selection of Hansen, who had learned to drive in the mountains out west and who could pass Cannon’s political litmus test.

  Hansen was born in the farming town of Richfield, Utah, and studied at the state university in Salt Lake City, where under the influence of one of his teachers, the Canadian poet Earle Birney, he was drawn to Trotskyism, joining the Communist League of America in 1934. Two years later he moved to San Francisco, where he reported on that city’s maritime strikes for The Voice of the Federation, the organ of the West Coast maritime unions, and for Labor Action, a paper put out by Cannon. Hansen knew some French, the language of the Coyoacán household. He could type and was trained in shorthand. He was married, but willing to endure an extended separation for the cause. As for Hansen’s ability to handle a car, New York demonstrated its confidence in him by arranging for him to deliver Trotsky a new Dodge Sedan, which he drove down from Ohio at the end of September 1937.

  Eager to make a good first impression, Hansen had the car washed in Mexico City before driving it up to the Blue House in the bright morning sunshine. The Dodge got a hearty reception, as did the driver. Trotsky threw his arms around Hansen in a warm embrace, which helped put the new secretary at ease. He had been warned that the Old Man could be very difficult to get along with. Three weeks later Hansen still could not get beyond his image of Trotsky as a towering historical figure. “This puts me on an uneasy edge,” he wrote to the comrades up north, “as if I were trying to get on friendly terms with a volcano. But he is kindness, courteousness, itself, and goes out of his way to make things easier.”

  One day shortly after Hansen’s arrival, Trotsky needed to pay a visit to the home of the Fernández family in the suburb of Tacuba, northwest of Mexico City and about a twenty-minute drive from the Blue House. This would be Trotsky’s first opportunity to assess the new car as well as the new driver. Hansen took the wheel, Van gave directions from the passenger seat, and Trotsky as usual sat in back. Hansen drove slowly because he was unfamiliar with the route, and he might have been distracted by the volcano in his rearview mirror. At each intersection, Van prompted him—“Left,” “Right,” “Straight ahead”—a performance that was repeated on the drive home.

  The next day, for some reason Trotsky found it necessary to return to the Fernández home, and once again Hansen relied on Van to guide him. Upon their return to the Blue House, Trotsky asked Van to follow him into his study. “Don’t you think we ought to send Hansen back to the United States?” Trotsky asked. Van did not hide his surprise. “He will never learn!” Trotsky exclaimed. Van pleaded Hansen’s case, explaining how difficult it was to memorize the complicated route to Tacuba, but Trotsky remained skeptical: “We shall see!”

  A few days later, while chauffeuring Natalia in the city, Hansen drove through a red light and was pulled over by a cop, who “gave me hell.” Trotsky was not inclined to let him off so easily: “LD much disappointed in my driving and refused to go down town.”

  All was forgiven, however, in the second week of October, when Hansen drove Trotsky and Natalia to Taxco. As the Dodge made its way along the winding highway down the plateau and then up the steeply winding roads into the mountains, Trotsky grew more and more confident that he had found his chauffeur-comrade. As Hansen boasted to his wife, “my driving through the mountains astonished him.” Trotsky praised the driver for his “courage and caution”—meaning that Hansen sped away from a car on his tail and stopped at railroad crossings. On the drive back to Coyoacán, Trotsky kept commenting in his thickly accented English, “The driver is good.” He now resolved to learn to say “Joe,” a syllable that gave him great difficulty.

  Out of all the American comrades who came to live in Coyoacán, Hansen ended up being Trotsky’s favorite. Certainly no other chauffeur was in his class. “With me we can have hairskin shaves from death and he thinks it’s just fun,” Hansen observed after nine months behind the wheel, “as the other day when a truckload of gasoline shot out of a blind alley and nearly plowed into us. I left rubber all over the road, and the Old Man came sliding out of his seat and onto the floor with the cushion and his hat flying into the front seat—and he thought it was more fun than firecrackers.”

  Natalia also admired Hansen’s driving, to the point where she refused to let anyone else take her to the market. On the evening of September 16, 1940, Mexican Independence Day, she asked him to take her for a drive. She had no particular destination in mind. More than three weeks had passed since they accompanied Trotsky on his last ride, in the back of an ambulance, its siren blaring as it raced to the hospital. The house now felt empty and quiet, and Natalia needed to escape.

  Hansen drove her through the countryside and then into the city, whose streets were jammed with holiday traffic. He steered only with his left hand because he had broken the right one subduing Trotsky’s assassin. The cast had recently been removed, but the hand was still swollen and tender and could not grip the steering wheel. As they drove along, Natalia struggled to hold herself together. She could get through the days somehow, she told Hansen, but the nights were terribly lonely. The bedroom was cold; there was nothing to do. “She kept crying as we drove along.”

  Every new recruit to Trotsky’s staff of secretaries and bodyguards quickly learned that although the gravest dangers lurked outside the high walls of the Blue House, the threats to domestic tranqui
lity were ever present. Life in the Trotsky household was marked by frequent periods of tension and petty strife which at times had the effect of undermining Trotsky’s security. Mealtimes offered the greatest challenge, because of the often objectionable food on the menu, but even more so because of Trotsky’s unpredictable behavior at the dinner table. The volcano might explode at any moment.

  The way Trotsky saw it, he was in an awkward position. All the most respected Marxists, starting with Marx and Engels, enjoyed wine and cigars, while the revisionists and other backsliders tended to be ascetics. Trotsky behaved like a revisionist. Hansen, sitting through another uninspired Blue House dinner, was consoled by this bit of self-deprecating humor. Trotsky, he reflected, was sensuous about ideas and historical processes rather than food, drink, or tobacco.

  Trotsky’s indifference to food was by now an old story to Van, who testified that, “During the seven years that I had meals with him three times a day, seated at his right, I never heard him make a remark about the food.” This sounds implausible, yet Van also records Trotsky’s bitter complaint about life’s daily routines: “To dress up, to eat—all these miserable petty things that one has to repeat from day to day!”

  There were generally two types of meals at the Trotsky household. The first were those that took place in near total silence, with Trotsky “lost somewhere in the clouds a million miles from the table,” as Hansen put it. He seemed to be the only one at the table not conscious of the eating sounds. It was after one such meal that Hansen informed his wife: “LD has many of the habits you didn’t like in me—coldness, silence, oppression.”

  Dinner at noon was served one dish at a time, starting with soup, followed by potatoes, a vegetable, a meat dish, salad, and then the inevitable apple compote. Sometimes there was fresh fish from Acapulco. As a rule, no alcohol was served, except for a glass of wine on November 7. The fare sounds unobjectionable, but the staff without exception rated the food along a scale of bland to distasteful. Newcomers quickly learned that one had better clean one’s plate, lest the Old Man and Natalia’s feelings be hurt or their inquiries result in a visit to the doctor. When Trotsky finished his meal and left the room, jaws unclenched, tongues loosened, and the conversation flowed freely. Supper was, by comparison, light and mercifully brisk.

  The second type of meal found Trotsky in a gregarious mood, and he would start to tease individuals at the table—about their name, their country of origin, their pronunciation of some foreign term, etc.—sometimes to fantastic lengths. On occasion the kidding would take a detour, and all of a sudden it was time to determine who was responsible for some slip-up. Those on the receiving end of this bantering, as Hansen called it, had to accept it cheerfully. Van noted that Trotsky’s friendly jesting had an edge that often left friends and associates feeling wounded. One of his victims was Max Eastman, who perceived this trait as another of the vanquished revolutionary’s character flaws. Trotsky, he observed, knew “no laughter but of mockery.”

  For Hansen the endurance test that passed for mealtime at the Blue House was a special source of concern because his wife, Reba, was planning to move down from Salt Lake City and become one of the inmates, as the staff members called themselves. “You must understand that the place is a good deal like prison,” he warned her, “and the psychological pressure becomes terrific on everyone, small items are blown up into elephants, and the OM is like a volcano. For any length of time whatsoever the situation would become unendurable.”

  A major offender when it came to inflating elephants was Natalia, who was high-strung and used to having things her own way, especially in the kitchen. It was there that she and Rae Spiegel, Trotsky’s Russian typist from New York, got into frequent scrapes. The cook and maid, Rosita, a full-blooded Indian who spoke no French and thus strained to comprehend Natalia’s instructions, could be heard pining for the warmer climes of her native Tampico.

  Trotsky managed to avoid these skirmishes, although on one occasion he happened to get drawn in, and with dramatic results. The incident involved Van’s wife, Gaby, who arrived from France at the beginning of November 1937 with their three-year-old son. As she had at the household in Barbizon, Gaby helped out in the kitchen. A few weeks after her arrival, while she was preparing lunch, she took exception to what she felt was Natalia’s overbearing manner toward Rosita. Voices were raised, and when Trotsky came upon the scene he blew up completely. Harsh words had been spoken, and Van’s wife and child were soon on their way back to France. Van was devastated. Rosita wept over the separation of the family. Hansen was exasperated: “It really takes a hay rack of patience to keep things going smoothly in the house.”

  The atmosphere was far more relaxed at the modest home of the prodigious Fernández family in Tacuba, where Trotsky, Natalia, and members of the staff were frequent guests. The family patriarch, a schoolteacher in his fifties, and three of his sons, Octavio, Carlos, and Mario, were members of the local Trotskyist group. More than comrades, the family became warm friends of Trotsky and Natalia, offering them the only family setting they experienced during their time in Mexico. A special attraction for the secretaries was the home cooking of Mama Fernández, which was strong on chilies, tamales, and atole. Here the guests were introduced to fresh pulque, an alcoholic drink made from the fermented juice of the maguey plant and with the disconcerting appearance of watery milk. Trotsky avoided pulque as well as the beer, and his sensitive stomach would not allow him to eat spicy foods.

  After dinner came dancing. Young comrades were called up and the Indian girls next door were invited over. The radio played a marimba band, and the living room was transformed. “Damn, can they dance,” Hansen marveled, bewitched by the movements of the two blossoming Fernández daughters, Graciela and Ofelia, lithe and exotic. “They whooped it as if the meat were still smoking from the kill.” Inevitably, the girls pressed the paleface visitors to dance the rumba. Resistance was difficult, and when a foot-tapping Trotsky was on hand to take the side of the girls, impossible.

  For Trotsky’s secretaries, these festivities often had to conclude early, either because the OM and Natalia wished to retire for the night or because there was a guard shift to cover. Hansen made a point of reassuring his wife that his sole nighttime companion was a handgun. “It is heavy, powerful, accurate, sure action, with very good safety devices. It has not yet worn a hole in my pocket, but I have grown used to the weight and feel undressed when I lay it aside. At the slightest noise at night I awake with its heaviness in my hand.” This might be mistaken for coded language had Hansen not specified that the gun in his hand was “a beautiful PARABELLUM automatic.” This was the same Luger that his predecessor used to dismantle at night. It had gotten rusty, but a rod and some oil had cleaned it up nicely.

  Guard duty at the Blue House took only a few hours out of the day, but the toll could be significant. Sleep deprivation was a persistent condition. The nightly barking and howling of the neighborhood dogs could put nerves on edge, though the greater challenge was fending off boredom. The danger came into sharper focus on February 2, 1938, when the phony deliveryman came calling with his package of fertilizer. It was in reaction to this bomb scare that Diego bought the property next to the Blue House. At the same time, the staff prepared to implement security measures that had long been put off, such as the installation of an alarm system. Also back on the agenda was the recruitment of a full-time guard. Once again Trotsky signaled his approval, only to retreat and call for a postponement. This time, however, Van and Hansen became exasperated by his vacillation and asked New York to overrule him.

  The decisive event came two weeks later, on February 16, with the news of Lyova’s death. When Trotsky emerged from mourning on the twenty-second, he authorized the hiring of the new guard. In New York, Hank Stone was already packing his things. By now, however, the New York office had decided that one guard was no longer enough to meet the threat. A garrison of three comrades was required, operating independently of Trotsky’s secretaria
l staff and on a separate budget. The guards would be lodged in the small house just acquired next door and be provided with their own automobile. The money needed to pay for this and other essential security measures had yet to be identified, but there was no time to waste and Trotsky should not be given an opportunity to change his mind.

  The residents of the Blue House anticipated a frontal attack. Every contingency had to be considered. Van made inquiries about procuring gas masks and a machine gun. As it turned out, however, the next assault assumed a familiar form. In Moscow, another show trial had begun.

  The “Trial of the 21,” the third and most grotesque of the Moscow show trials, opened on March 2, 1938. The most high-profile defendant was Nikolai Bukharin, at one time a popular figure and a favorite of Lenin. A leading Bolshevik theorist, Bukharin was for years editor of Pravda, and in the 1920s the leader of the Party’s right wing. Among his co-defendants in the dock were some fellow Old Bolsheviks and, a strange sight, Genrikh Yagoda, the former head of the GPU. The fact that the man who had exposed the Trotskyist conspiracy in the first trial had now been unmasked as Trotsky’s agent was one of the more bizarre features of this extraordinary spectacle.

  The indictment had a familiar ring. The defendants were accused of forming a “Right-Trotskyist Bloc” for the purpose of overthrowing the Soviet regime and restoring capitalism. Toward this end and acting in conjunction with the intelligence services of Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and Poland, they had conspired to carry out a variety of criminal acts, including sabotage, murder, and mass poisonings of workers. Bukharin, among his many other crimes, was charged with plotting to assassinate Lenin in 1918. All the defendants eventually confessed their guilt, and all but three were executed immediately, including Bukharin, the rest within a few years.