Trotsky Read online

  Once again, Trotsky was placed at the center of the conspiracy, as was Lyova, now conveniently unavailable to defend himself. Trotsky’s study at the Blue House was transformed into a war room. Newspaper reports about the trial testimony were carefully scrutinized for contradictions and outright absurdities, which were then made the subject of daily press releases. For Trotsky, this was the third time around, and yet he could hardly believe his eyes as he read the fantastic confessions of the accused. “It all seems like a delirious dream,” he said. This time, however, he was not nearly so isolated. The Dewey Commission had recently delivered its verdict condemning the first two trials, and Dewey himself now denounced the third proceeding from New York, where for many beleaguered sympathizers of the Soviet Union the execution of Bukharin was the last straw.

  Lyova’s death and Bukharin’s trial gave a boost to the New York Trotskyists as they sought to raise the funds necessary to improve security at the Blue House. Trotsky personally took part in the effort, declaring, “I will not be accused that I offered a too easy victory to the G.P.U.” Two days after the trial ended, on March 15, Hank Stone, the first chief of the guard, arrived in Coyoacán.

  Stone, whose real name was Henry Malter, was a thirty-year-old military engineer and officer in the New York National Guard. He had been a Trotskyist since 1930, when he joined the Spartacus Youth League. In 1937 he volunteered to go to Spain with the Eugene Debs Column, which was conceived as a non-Communist alternative to the Abraham Lincoln Battalion but never went to Spain. Instead, Stone had to settle for an earful of his friend Harry Milton’s hair-raising tales of the civil war.

  Stone’s initial inspection of the Blue House revealed several problems that needed immediate attention, including an appalling shortage of the most basic supplies. There were no tools whatsoever, not even a hammer and nails, nor any tools or spare parts for the Dodge. There were no extra bulbs or fuses and only one flashlight, with dead batteries. A household that was bracing for a machine gun raid or a bomb attack lacked a decent first aid kit.

  Firearms were also in short supply. Two of the five handguns were found to be hors de combat. These did not include the guns of Trotsky and Natalia, which were in working order, though there was precious little ammunition for any of these weapons, none of which had been cleaned since Hansen arrived the previous autumn. “Some actually looked as though they had cobwebs inside the barrel,” Hank complained.

  So much for the existing arsenal. The local comrades promised a supply of new guns, but Stone became impatient and decided to go shopping. Purchasing guns in Mexico, he was happy to discover, was as easy as “buying bananas.” He bought three .38 Colt revolvers to supplement the new one he had carried down with him, and a hundred shells to add to his own total of fifty. A final acquisition was a .22 Colt to use for target practice, along with a thousand shells.

  The budget to support the guard was set at $100 per month, but soon Stone was reporting that he would need at least $150. In fact, during the next two years the guard fund was often low on cash or completely broke, and it became routine for the chief of the guard to harass New York about a long-promised sum of money. In a pinch, he could request a loan from Natalia, who managed the separate household fund supported by Trotsky’s publishing income.

  In the wake of the February events, New York arranged for the party’s Minneapolis organization to underwrite the guard at the Blue House. Minneapolis became a Trotskyist stronghold in 1934, during the city’s great truckers’ strike, a protracted and violent conflict that ended with the unionizing of the teamsters. That same year witnessed similar strikes at the Toledo car plants and the San Francisco docks, but only in Minneapolis, home of General Drivers Local 574, led by the notorious Dunne brothers, did the Trotskyists make inroads into American labor.

  Minneapolis agreed to contribute financially and also in kind, offering the services of two members of the local union defense guard. Their names were Bill and Emil, and although they were identified at the Blue House simply as the Minneapolis boys, in fact both were experienced picket-line fighters in their mid-thirties. Emil was a gentle giant. Hansen describes him as “a big meaty fellow with a dagger stabbed through a bleeding heart tattooed on his forearm, weighs about 230 or 240 pounds and carries a great paunch full of guts.” Bill was also built to defend his position, an impression reinforced when he smiled, disclosing the absence of six teeth in his left upper jaw.

  Hank signed on for six months, Bill and Emil for three, though at the outset it seemed doubtful that the Minneapolis contingent would last more than a few days. The first indication of trouble was their stunned reaction when Hank broached the subject of nightly guard duty. Evidently their job description said nothing about a night shift. Soon it became obvious to Hank that while he had been warned to expect a prison regime in Coyoacán, Bill and Emil had been promised a Mexican vacation. They were quite willing to assist Hank in strengthening the front door and installing the new lighting and alarm systems. What they found objectionable were Natalia’s many requests for help cleaning the kitchen and maintaining the patio, as well as other chores, such as driving into town with the mail and doing the food shopping. This gave rise to bitter complaints about having to perform “women’s work.”

  Most troubling to Hank was Bill’s delinquency as a guard. The problem first came to light one evening shortly after Bill’s arrival, when Trotsky accompanied a guest to the front door at about 10:30 p.m. and found no guard on duty. When Hank questioned Bill about this, “he in polite terms told me to go jump in a lake.” The next night, when Hank came on duty to relieve Bill at 4:00 a.m., a Mexican comrade reported that the recalcitrant gringo had retired at 2:00 a.m. Confronted about this dereliction, Bill threatened to return to Minneapolis. “He has a very independent spirit,” Hank informed New York, “very good on a picket line—but of no value here. Here one demands discipline.”

  Food proved to be a major source of discontent. Bill and Emil were incredulous when they realized that their Mexican vacation meant bread without butter and coffee with milk instead of cream. Hank also grumbled about the food placed in front of him, but the teamsters threatened to strike. Since Lyova’s death, Trotsky and Natalia took their meals in their room, but Natalia continued to set the menu and resisted making adjustments for the sake of Bill and Emil. Hansen was amused by their plight: “They cannot endure any food except potatoes and gravy with whatever goes with potatoes and gravy.” Hank remained grim-faced: “Lack of butter on the table should not create a political crisis.”

  A new complication materialized in the third week of April in the person of Bill’s wife, Edith, who showed up unannounced and moved in with Bill. After listening to her husband’s tale of woe, Edith offered to cook. Hank relented and agreed to the operation of a separate kitchen for the guards in their spartan dwelling. The new arrangement lasted all of ten days. Edith, standing over the stove with a spoon in one hand and a Ladies’ Home Journal in the other, served meals up to two hours late. When Hank complained, Edith refused to cook anymore. Bill and Edith then began to eat all their meals in the city, which is where Bill spent most of the day.

  It was at this very time, toward the end of April, that George Mink was rumored to be in the vicinity. “I believe that a group of Stalin agents headed by ‘The Mink’ has arrived in Mexico, plotting to kill me,” Trotsky told Time magazine. A Philadelphia cabby who used to work with Mink begged to differ: “He hasn’t got the brains of a flea! He won’t kill nobody!” This was not the perception in Trotsky’s circle, where Mink was credited with having served as the GPU’s station chief in Spain. He was said to have murdered Andrés Nin, kidnapped Erwin Wolf, and arrested Harry Milton. A ten-year-old photograph of the jackal was located and sent down to Coyoacán, where it was used by the guards for target practice. To judge from Hank’s tales of woe, it is doubtful that the alert about Mink could have had much effect on security at the Blue House. For Bill and Emil, mention of the Butcher of Barcelona must have conjured up
visions of a choice cut of beef to go with their potatoes and gravy.

  Trotsky had been inspired by the prospect of being guarded by genuine American proletarians; instead, as a scandalized Van remarked about the Minneapolis boys, “Ils se conduisent ici comme dans une maison de bourgeois.” In Van’s estimation, Hank and Emil were satisfactory, while Bill was a disaster. His attitude demoralized the entire household, especially Hank, who at one point refused to communicate with Bill except through Van. Most distressing was Bill’s inclination to whistle, sing, and shout in the patio as he passed by the French doors to Trotsky’s study. A reprimand from Trotsky had no effect. When Bill said he would recognize no authority, this evidently included the former People’s Commissar of War.

  By the middle of May, Van feared that Trotsky would erupt and fire everyone on the spot. Hank’s demoralization was now complete. “I no longer consider myself chief of guard or anything of the sort,” he wrote to Frankel, who must have squirmed to read this statement in Hank’s latest dispatch, which asked that Milton be sent to Coyoacán.

  Bill and Emil were scheduled to be released on June 15, but conspired to skip out four days early. Their departure brought a collective sigh of relief; and yet, as these things happen, the goodbye was sad. The night before, the Fernández family threw a party for them and loaded them down with mementos. Trotsky presented each of them with an autographed photo. Natalia gave them presents, as did Rosita, whose cooking the boys found so uninspired, as well as Armando, the boy helper. Hansen describes an emotional send-off: “The cook cried, Armando cried, and the cook’s little boy, Alfonso, too—his great black eyes spilling tears on his cheeks like the overflow from a dark pool.”

  Dry-eyed, Hank stayed on until mid-August, working with a new American guard, Chris Moustakis, recently of Boston, who had a master’s degree in history from Harvard. Having driven down to Mexico in a Plymouth Coupe in search of adventure, he became friends with Hansen, who admired his automobile and recruited him to the cause.

  Thanks to Hank, the Blue House was now equipped with an elaborate alarm system, made conspicuous by the clutter of switches and alarms spread throughout the house. Visually more impressive was the effect of the floodlights positioned all along the top of the high blue wall. At night, in the inky darkness of Coyoacán, the house stood out like a fort—or a prison. As a security precaution, two cedars and a pine rising above the wall on the street side had been cut down; the great cedar in the main patio now stood alone. The police, meanwhile, had replaced their small wooden shelter outside the house with a more permanent structure made of bricks and covered with stucco, with slots for guns on all four sides.

  Summer rains now drenched the patio, and Trotsky was relieved to have some peace and quiet. The deliberations about who should take Hank’s place only rankled him. From Coyoacán, Sara Weber, his Russian typist off and on since the Prinkipo days, warned New York that LD was “getting fed up with the entire matter. One of these days all the little irritations and annoyances will just get the better of him and he will flatly refuse to have anyone ‘guard’ him.”

  Yet every time Trotsky may have been tempted to let down his guard, along came a reminder of the perils of complacency. In July 1938 it arrived in the shape of a headless corpse floating in the Seine.

  The victim was a twenty-eight-year-old German by the name of Rudolf Klement. As a young student from Hamburg, he arrived in Prinkipo in 1933 to serve as Trotsky’s secretary, then followed him to France. He was secretary designate of the inchoate Fourth International, whose founding congress was planned for later that summer. He vanished on July 13. When his beheaded remains were identified several days later, it strengthened Trotsky and Natalia’s belief that Lyova had died at the hands of the GPU.

  Among the Trotskyists in Paris, a dark cloud of suspicion had thickened around Mark Zborowski, the man they called Étienne. He had first come under close scrutiny after the theft of Trotsky’s archives on the night of November 6 and 7, 1936. Zborowski was one of only a few comrades who knew the location of these files, and at a tense meeting to sort the matter out, only a strong endorsement from Lyova spared him from an investigation.

  The timing of this theft was deliberate: in Moscow the success of the operation was reported to Stalin that same day, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Not long afterward, Nikolai Yezhov, Yagoda’s successor as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, presented Stalin with select items from the haul: “I am sending you 103 letters taken from Trotsky’s archive in Paris.” Among this trove was Trotsky’s correspondence with Max Eastman for the years 1929 to 1933.

  Zborowski regularly supplied Moscow with articles from the Bulletin of the Opposition before they appeared in print, and with copies of Trotsky’s letters and manuscripts, including portions of his book-length indictment of Stalin, The Revolution Betrayed, which turned up on Stalin’s desk before its publication in Paris in the summer of 1937. That August came Zborowski’s triumph, when Lyova went to the south of France and entrusted him with a small notebook containing the addresses of Trotskyists living outside the Soviet Union. “As you know, we have dreamed about getting hold of it for a whole year,” an exultant Zborowski wrote to his superiors using his code name, “Tulip,” “but we never managed it before, because SONNY would never let it out of his hands. I enclose herewith a photo of these addresses.”

  During Lyova’s absence from Paris, Zborowski stood in for him in negotiations to arrange a meeting with Ignace Reiss, the first of the GPU defectors. In making his break with the Kremlin, Reiss, the illegal resident in Belgium, had turned for help to the Dutchman Henk Sneevliet, a Communist member of parliament and trade union leader who had once been a close comrade of Trotsky’s. Sneevliet, working through Zborowski, invited Lyova to meet Reiss on September 6 in Reims, France—which is where the defector might have met his end had a GPU mobile squad not machine-gunned him to death a day earlier on a rural road outside Lausanne.

  When he read the news, Trotsky was incensed at Sneevliet. A GPU defector who could have drawn back the curtain on the Moscow trials had been murdered in obscurity. Worldwide publicity, Trotsky argued, would have shielded Reiss from assassination. Instead, Sneevliet had acquiesced in Reiss’s plan to delay any public announcement until after his impassioned letter of resignation reached the Central Committee in Moscow. Reiss was unaware that the staff member at the Soviet embassy in Paris to whom he had entrusted the mailing of his letter had betrayed him, setting off a manhunt.

  Trotsky saw deviousness, as well as ineptitude, in Sneevliet’s handling of the Reiss affair. Sneevliet had not only failed to inform Trotsky in a timely way about the defection; he even appeared reluctant to bring Lyova into direct contact with Reiss. Yet while Sneevliet does give the impression of being the controlling sort, he also had the feeling that Lyova’s comrades in Paris could not be trusted. And in the wake of Reiss’s murder, Sneevliet’s misgivings came to focus on Zborowski.

  In October came another defection, that of Walter Krivitsky, the chief of Soviet military intelligence in Europe. Krivitsky, who was stationed in the Netherlands, was a childhood friend of Reiss’s. The two men had discussed their disillusionment with Moscow after the execution of the defendants in the first show trial in August 1936. They returned to the subject in the spring of 1937, as the terror began to ravage the ranks of the secret police and the military. Krivitsky resisted Reiss’s suggestion that they simultaneously break with Moscow, arguing that in spite of everything, the USSR still represented the best hope of the international proletariat.

  Reiss’s murder helped Krivitsky overcome his doubts; in fact, his friendship with the dead defector left him little choice. He applied to the French government for political asylum, which brought with it police protection. Reiss’s widow, meanwhile, suspected that Krivitsky had had a hand in her husband’s death—or at least had failed to warn him of the danger. For his part, Krivitsky, in attempting to establish contact with her through the French Trotskyists, became
convinced that they had been infiltrated by the GPU. During a tense meeting at the office of Trotsky’s Paris lawyer, Gérard Rosenthal, with Lyova, Sneevliet, and Reiss’s widow in attendance, Krivitsky warned: “There is a dangerous agent in your party.”

  Krivitsky was wary of the Trotskyists for other reasons, as Lyova learned during a series of strenuous meetings with the reluctant defector in the final weeks of 1937. Trotsky and Lyova wanted Krivitsky to make a full and public break with the Kremlin, but he was torn about what to do next and eager to justify his past. Lyova lent him a sympathetic ear, thereby drawing the ire of Trotsky, who was impatient to seize the moment. After Lyova pressed Krivitsky to endorse the Fourth International, Krivitsky broke off their relations. Although Krivitsky had come to like and respect Lyova, he found little to admire about his milieu. Trotsky, the man, was a formidable figure, politically the equivalent of a government, he said later, whereas his followers were mere children.

  The rupture may have saved Krivitsky’s life. That autumn, Lyova assigned Zborowski to be the defector’s contact and escort. The two men ended up taking walks together, probably conversing in their native Polish, and “Tulip” undoubtedly supplied his GPU handlers with information about the traitor’s movements. On one occasion they wandered into Père Lachaise cemetery, where Krivitsky noticed some dubious-looking characters off in the distance and for a moment was convinced that the shooting was about to begin. Why their fraternization did not precipitate Krivitsky’s murder is a mystery, perhaps best explained by Zborowski’s instinct for self-preservation.

  Lyova’s death in February 1938 may have been a victory for the GPU, but for Zborowski it meant the loss of his chief defender. He used his position as “Sonny’s” successor to deflect suspicion away from himself. The principal target of his intrigues was Sneevliet, who, Étienne now dutifully reported to Trotsky, had been spreading the story that Reiss’s murder had resulted from Lyova’s negligence. Predictably, Trotsky became outraged at the “slanderer” Sneevliet for besmirching his dead son’s reputation.