Trotsky Read online

  Trotsky was thus able to avoid the fate of the Bolshevik old guard slaughtered in Stalin’s Great Terror. Still, in Mexico he lived under a death sentence. Two more Moscow show trials followed, and on each occasion Trotsky was again effectively made the chief defendant in absentia. His comrades and his family were swept up in the Terror and disappeared into the prisons and the camps.

  Trotsky knew that Stalin could never forgive the fact that he had openly ridiculed him among the Communist elite as a mediocrity and denounced him in a session of the Politburo as the “gravedigger of the Revolution.” Trotsky also understood that Stalin could not allow the alleged mastermind of the grand conspiracies, unmasked in the purge trials, to go unpunished. Yet in Trotsky’s mind, Stalin’s desire to have him killed was about more than just settling old scores or carrying out the verdict of the Moscow trials. He assumed that Stalin perceived him the way Trotsky perceived himself: as a political force to be reckoned with. As Trotsky said about Stalin shortly after the raid, he “wants to destroy his enemy number one.”

  Trotsky was predicting that the world war would unleash an international proletarian uprising that would deal a deathblow to capitalism, already staggering under the effects of the Great Depression. The revolutionary wave would spread to the USSR, where the toiling masses would unite to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy that had long maintained a stranglehold on the first socialist state. Trotsky and his followers, rallying under the banner of the Fourth International—the rival to Moscow’s Communist International, or Comintern—would be called upon to lead the struggle to restore workers’ democracy to the Soviet Union.

  If this sounded far-fetched, Trotsky reminded skeptics that the cataclysm of the First World War had created the conditions that enabled the minuscule Bolshevik Party to take power in Russia. Any Marxist-Leninist worth his salt understood that the revolutionary shock waves accompanying the Second World War were bound to be far more destructive. So said Trotsky, who supposed that Stalin feared such a scenario and dared not allow his nemesis to remain at large.

  Whatever Stalin may have believed about Trotsky’s political prospects, he had motivation enough to want to silence his most prominent critic. And it just so happened that Trotsky’s host country had recently welcomed to its shores the kind of men who could help make this happen. When the Soviet Union came to the aid of the Spanish Republic against General Francisco Franco’s invading Falangist armies in the civil war that erupted in 1936, Moscow made Spain the international recruiting and training ground of the NKVD. The Republic went down to defeat in 1939, and many hundreds of NKVD recruits and fighters from the International Brigade, which the Comintern had organized, took refuge in Mexico—Madrid’s most loyal ally in the Western Hemisphere. Trotsky warned of a gathering danger.

  To defend against the threat, the American Trotskyists, headquartered in New York, dispatched reliable comrades to the Coyoacán household to serve as guards, drawing heavily on the Minneapolis Teamsters, a Trotskyist stronghold, for funds and volunteers. Their chief priority was the safety of the Old Man, but they were also worried about his personal archives, which he had been allowed to take with him into exile in 1929. With the help of these voluminous files, Trotsky had exposed the Moscow trials as a sham, and he continued to draw on them to write his biography of Stalin. The purpose of the May 24 commando raid on Trotsky’s home, it seemed clear, was not only murder but arson: The bullets were meant for Trotsky, the incendiary bombs for his papers.

  The race was now on to prepare for the next assault. The villa must be transformed into a fortress. Turrets must be constructed atop the walls, double iron doors must replace the wooden entrance to the garage, steel shutters must cover the windows, bomb-proof wire netting must be raised, and barbed-wire barriers must be moved into position. But even as these fortifications began to rise up, the NKVD decided to resort to its fallback plan. The assignment of liquidating enemy number one would be entrusted to a lone operative who had managed to penetrate Trotsky’s inner circle. The fatal blow would culminate a labyrinthine process that had begun more than three years earlier, as Trotsky sailed for Mexico.

  CHAPTER 1

  Armored Train

  On the night of January 1, 1937, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Norwegian oil tanker Ruth greeted the New Year by blaring its two sirens and twice firing its alarm gun. The tanker carried no oil, only 1,200 tons of seawater for ballast and two very special passengers: Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary exile, and his wife, Natalia. In fact, the Trotskys were the ship’s only passengers, strictly speaking, although a Norwegian policeman was on board to escort them. They had sailed from Norway on December 19, after four miserable months of house arrest, which Trotsky said had aged him five years. In spite of this, the couple carried with them warm memories of a marvelous snowy land of forests and fjords, skis and sleighs.

  They would sail another week or so before reaching their new home, Mexico—although they were in the dark about what awaited them there, even the port of arrival. The tanker steered an irregular course. The Norwegian government was eager to be rid of Trotsky but anxious to deliver him without mishap—such as what might result from an NKVD bomb—so the ship’s departure had been shrouded in secrecy. On board, Trotsky and Natalia were forbidden to use the ship’s radio. They were cut off from the outside world.

  At the start of the voyage, the seas were rough, and Trotsky found it difficult to write, so instead he avidly read the books about Mexico he had bought just before their departure. Once out on the Atlantic, the seas turned calm, in fact remarkably so for that time of year, and Trotsky began to work intensively, writing an analysis of the Moscow trial that had made him a pariah in Norway and almost everywhere else. Only Mexico had opened its doors to him—“mysterious Mexico,” Trotsky called it, wondering to what extent it deserved its reputation for political violence and lawlessness.

  The passengers’ sense of apprehension rose with the temperature; as the ship entered the Gulf of Mexico on January 6, the cabins grew stiflingly hot. It was early Saturday morning, on January 9, when the tanker finally entered the harbor of Tampico. The oil derricks reminded the couple of Baku, on the Caspian Sea, but otherwise this was terra incognita. They had no idea who or what was waiting for them onshore, and Trotsky warned the captain and the police minder that unless they were met by friends, they would not disembark voluntarily.

  Toward 9 a.m. a tugboat approached the Ruth, and as it drew up alongside, Trotsky and Natalia caught sight of a familiar face, friendly and smiling, and their worst fears evaporated. The man they recognized was Max Shachtman, an American Trotskyist who had visited them over the years in Turkey, France, and then Norway. He was the first friend Trotsky had laid eyes on in more than two months, and when he stepped aboard the Ruth, the two men warmly embraced.

  Shachtman was accompanied by the artist Frida Kahlo, introduced as Frida Rivera, wife of the celebrated muralist Diego Rivera. Ill health had kept Rivera off the flight from Mexico City. Frida, darkly beautiful in tightly braided hair and dangling jade earrings and wearing a rebozo and a long black skirt, stood out among the suits and uniforms of the government, military, and police officials there to receive Trotsky. Even the uniformed officers seemed relaxed and friendly, and they made the visitors feel safe and welcome.

  A second boat trailed after the tug carrying representatives of the press, who were impatient to interview and photograph the Great Exile. Trotsky was eager to speak, and he answered questions for two hours straight, talking mostly about the Moscow trial. The thumbnail briefing he received from Shachtman, combined with the nature and tone of the reporters’ questions, lifted Trotsky’s spirits. As Natalia remarked, “the whole New World seemed to have been incensed by the Moscow crimes.”

  Close to noon, the tugboat brought the Trotskys ashore. Photographers and a newsreel cameraman captured their walk down the wooden pier. Trotsky had performed a number of dramatic entrances and exits over his tumultuous political career, typica
lly adopting a demeanor of stern arrogance. Now, however, as he stepped onto Mexican soil, he looked somewhat tentative and uncertain of himself. Dressed in a tweed suit and knickerbockers, carrying a cane and a briefcase, he projected an image of civilized respectability, looking not at all like a defiant revolutionary. And at five feet eleven inches tall, he hardly resembled the Soviet cartoon image of him as “the little Napoleon.” Only when he removed his white cap and exposed his irrepressible white hair did he suggest his old fanatical self. Natalia, conservatively attired in a suit and heels, also looked the part of the harmless bourgeoise, although she seemed frail and uneasy.

  At the dock, a Packard was waiting for them. It belonged to the head of the local garrison, General Beltrán, who was the boss of Tampico and had been asked by President Cárdenas to do everything possible to facilitate Trotsky’s arrival. Cárdenas had arranged for Trotsky to travel to Mexico City by airplane or by train, whichever he favored. The plane was waiting to take off, but reports of bad weather ruled out flying. The train was still en route from the capital, so the guests were checked into a hotel for the day. From there, Trotsky sent a telegram to President Cárdenas expressing his gratitude and pledging to honor the terms of his asylum. Trotsky and Natalia then retired to their room, reeling from culture shock and frustrated by their ignorance of the Spanish language.

  El Hidalgo (The Nobleman), the luxury train that President Cárdenas sent to transport Trotsky to Mexico City, rolled into the Tampico station at eleven o’clock that evening. On board was George Novack, acting secretary of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, the miscellaneous collection of liberals and socialists that had initiated the campaign to find Trotsky a safe haven. Novack arrived in the company of a Mexican lieutenant colonel and a captain of the regular army, a contingent of soldiers from the Presidential Guard, civilian representatives of the Cárdenas administration, and a Russian-language interpreter for Trotsky.

  Fifteen minutes later, Trotsky and Natalia, along with Novack, Shachtman, Frida, and the soldiers and officials from Mexico City boarded the train. They were joined by General Beltrán and a number of the most important officials from Tampico, as well as local police officials and detectives. The train, which had once belonged to former President Pascual Ortiz Rubio, was armored with bombproof steel plates and bulletproof windows. President Rubio had had good reason to insist on special protection. On February 5, 1930, his first day in office, as he was leaving the National Palace, a man fired a handgun into his automobile, one of the bullets shattering Rubio’s jaw.

  Trotsky and Natalia and their friends were placed in the middle car of the train; the car in front of theirs was occupied entirely by soldiers. The train finally pulled out of Tampico at four o’clock in the morning, as the passengers dozed. When daylight came, they looked out on a sunbaked landscape dotted with palm trees and cacti, mountains blazing in the distance. Trotsky’s curiosity about the scenery competed with his thirst for information as he huddled in a compartment with Shachtman and Novack, who brought him up to date on what had been happening in the world during his three-week voyage from Norway.

  Trotsky’s command of English was unsure, so he spoke mainly in German. His comrades described for him how the Moscow trial had sparked a bitter controversy among American liberals and labor leaders. Not long after the Nazis took power in Berlin in 1933, Moscow directed Communists everywhere to support “progressive” governments and antifascist causes. This new Comintern strategy was called the Popular Front. In the United States, the Communist Party had lined up behind the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while many American liberals, seeing the Soviet Union as a bastion against the rising Nazi tide, reached out to the Communist Party.

  The Zinoviev-Kamenev trial of August 1936 troubled many liberals, who suspected the Kremlin of having orchestrated an elaborately staged frame-up. Liberal and socialist skeptics, with the encouragement of the American Trotskyists, formed a committee whose purpose was to lobby democratic governments to grant Trotsky asylum and, once this was achieved, to arrange for him to be given a fair hearing before an international commission of inquiry. The overwhelming majority of the committee’s members did not support Trotsky’s political views, and some were extremely hostile to them; rather, their fundamental sense of justice told them that he deserved the right of asylum and the chance to defend himself.

  Novack showed Trotsky the committee’s letterhead, with its roll of seventy names running down the left side of the page. The most prominent politician on the list was the head of the U.S. Socialist Party, Norman Thomas, one of the committee’s founding members. The previous June, the small American Trotskyist party had merged with the Socialist Party, hoping to capture its left wing before eventually splitting off with an enlarged group of cadres. The appearance of Thomas’s name, therefore, was not unexpected. The identity of another of the committee’s initiators, John Dewey, took Trotsky by surprise. He thought it must be a different person with the same name, so when he was assured that it was in fact the John Dewey, the famous philosopher, “his whole face was illuminated with satisfaction,” according to Novack, “and he said in the most pleased tone with a waggish shake of his head: ‘Das ist gut! Sehr gut!’”

  Things were indeed looking up, and the mood turned festive in the bright morning sunshine, as the soldiers of the Presidential Guard launched into a series of ballads from the Mexican Revolution. Trotsky asked Shachtman and Novack to perform something from the American radical songbook, so they belted out “Joe Hill,” a tribute to the Swedish-American songwriter and labor activist executed by a firing squad in Utah in 1915 after a controversial murder trial. Frida Kahlo then lightened the mood by singing Mexican folk songs. The softness of her voice resonated with the parched panorama of palms, cacti, and agaves rolling by.

  DIEGO RIVERA WAS livid that he was unable to accompany Trotsky to Mexico City. He was suffering from kidney trouble, and his doctor had ordered him to bed. Rivera was not only Mexico’s most famous artist; he was also its most prominent Trotskyist, and he played the crucial role in arranging Trotsky’s new sanctuary. The members of the American committee assumed that the Roosevelt administration would not seriously consider an asylum request, but great hopes were placed on Mexico, a revolutionary country with a radical president. In early December 1936, Anita Brenner, the Mexican-born American writer, art critic, and historian who opened a window onto Mexico’s artistic renaissance of the 1920s, sent Rivera a telegram on behalf of the committee, asking him to take up Trotsky’s case with President Cárdenas.

  At that moment, the president was in the Laguna region, north of the capital, overseeing his government’s land redistribution program. Rivera caught up with Cárdenas in the city of Torreón and petitioned him directly in his own name to grant Trotsky asylum in Mexico. To Rivera’s great surprise, Cárdenas gave his approval, contingent only on Trotsky’s agreement not to involve himself in Mexico’s political affairs. In New York, on December 11, the committee cautiously announced the good news, warning that President Cárdenas would now come under tremendous pressure to reverse himself. The committee declared its intention to contact labor and liberal organizations in Spain, France, Britain, and Latin America to urge them to send messages of congratulations to the president on his “splendid decision.” Enlightened Americans were encouraged to do the same. But the committee’s concerns were unwarranted, because President Cárdenas was not a man easily intimidated.

  Lázaro Cárdenas rose to prominence as a military leader, ascending through the ranks of the revolutionary army and then, as General Cárdenas, assuming major commands in the 1920s, when he was a loyal supporter of President Plutarco Elías Calles. He served as governor of Michoacán from 1928 to 1932, where he proved to be a radical social reformer. Despite this, Calles, as Mexico’s kingpin, selected him to run for president in 1934 on the assumption that he would be able to control his protégé.

  President Cárdenas soon disappointed Calles. His admin
istration claimed to represent “the Revolution” and vowed to make good on the unfulfilled promises of justice and equality spelled out in Mexico’s revolutionary constitution of 1917. A top priority was agrarian reform. The president moved to eliminate the large estates, or latifundios, and to distribute their land to collective farms. Very much a hands-on leader, Cárdenas spent a considerable amount of time traveling the country, overseeing his agrarian and other reforms, which is why Rivera had to journey to La Laguna in December 1936 to petition him about Trotsky.

  To establish his authority, President Cárdenas had to cultivate left-wing and labor support, starting with the Confederation of Mexican Workers—known as the CTM, its Spanish initials—the largest confederation of unions in the country. The CTM rallied to Cárdenas’s side in 1935, when strongman Calles and his supporters challenged the president’s authority. In April 1936, Cárdenas had Calles arrested on conspiracy charges and exiled to the United States. The Mexican Communist Party had opposed Cárdenas’s candidacy for the presidency, but was drawn into the anti-Calles coalition, and then backed Cárdenas in the name of the Popular Front, as instructed by Moscow.

  President Cárdenas invited Trotsky to Mexico because he believed it was the proper thing to do. “Yet the gesture also served to demonstrate his independence vis-à-vis the Stalinist left. No one in the Cárdenas administration openly supported Trotsky, but a number of its leading officials were sympathetic to Marxist ideology and were drawn to Trotsky’s ideas and stirred by his tragic fate. Shachtman was repeatedly struck by this during his discussions with cabinet officials in the week before Trotsky’s arrival. The minister of interior was especially forthright. “We are only too pleased to do this for Comrade Trotsky,” he said. “To us he is the revolution itself!” Shachtman responded that the Mexican government had acted nobly. “It was only our duty,” the minister replied, prompting another round of handshakes and gracias.