Trotsky Read online

  As he wrote these lines in the late summer of 1938, Trotsky could not have imagined that before the year was out, he would be forced to count among his enemies the man he had recently eulogized as Red October’s greatest painter.

  Diego Rivera’s name had been appended to the manifesto for an independent revolutionary art, even though he had not written a single word of it. Rivera had consented to this arrangement, yet looking back on how the friendship with Trotsky unraveled, it appears that this was the start of the trouble. Not long afterward, Rivera began to behave like a man with something to prove, above all to Trotsky.

  Frida’s absence from Mexico, which seemed to disorient Diego, no doubt influenced the course of these events. In early October she left for New York to prepare for her one-person show at the Julien Levy Gallery, on Madison Avenue at 57th Street, opening on November 1. From there it was on to Paris, where Breton had arranged an exhibition of her work. The Paris show, called “Mexique,” placed Frida’s work among pre-Columbian sculptures, old paintings, Surrealist photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and Breton’s personal collection of what Frida called “all that junk”: masks, dolls, whistles, ornate frames, sugar skulls, pottery, and an assortment of retablos.

  An underlying source of friction between Trotsky and Rivera concerned the painter’s interactions with the local Trotskyists. The Mexican League numbered only about two dozen active members, which did not inhibit them from splitting into factions, as Trotskyists were prone to do. Rivera’s fame, money, and force of personality enabled him to impose his will on these comrades, although he had trouble making up his mind. His near-total absorption in his painting, meanwhile, left him little time to devote to routine organizational matters. The effect on the local Trotskyists was disruptive and demoralizing.

  During his first year in Mexico, Trotsky did not perceive a problem. On the contrary, he gushed to Hansen about the painter’s “incomparable political intuition and insight” and he waved off Jan Frankel’s warnings that Diego was a political wild card. By the summer of 1938, however, Trotsky’s opinion had changed. Rivera possessed an abundance of “passion, courage, and imagination,” he observed, qualities that made him “absolutely unfit” for everyday administrative work. Several times Trotsky said to Diego directly: “You are a painter. You have your work. Just help them, but do your own work.”

  In order to ensure Rivera’s disengagement, Trotsky arranged for the founding congress of the Fourth International, meeting in Paris in September 1938, to pass a resolution, which he helped draft, declaring that the painter would no longer be an active member of the Mexican League and would instead sit on the Pan-American committee. Comrade Rivera was a figure of international stature, too valuable to the movement to be allowed to squander his energies on the minutiae of local politics. So went the reasoning behind the resolution, yet its wording was brutal, making Rivera sound like an errant comrade being punished rather than promoted. Trotsky later lamented this choice of language, although he had endorsed it.

  Eastman, in his wide-ranging criticism of Trotsky’s personal deficiencies as a politician, underscored his “gift for alienating people.” Its source, he determined, was “failure of instinctive regard for the pride of others, a lamentable trait in one whose own pride is so touchy.” Eastman, whose own touched pride informed this judgment, might have added Rivera to the list of Trotsky’s casualties, but the case of this enfant terrible defies simple explanation.

  One day Diego came to a meeting at the Blue House carrying an essay he had written about art and politics which he proposed to read aloud. Trotsky demurred. His limited Spanish would enable him to comprehend only half the presentation, he explained, asking that the discussion be postponed until he had a chance to read the essay. Taking this as a snub, Diego accused Trotsky of wanting to get rid of him. “The idea of my wanting to be rid of Diego,” Trotsky marveled in a letter to Frida, “is so incredible, so absurd, permit me to say, so mad, that I can only shrug my shoulders helplessly.”

  It was at this unpropitious moment that the O’Gorman affair erupted. Juan O’Gorman was a painter and an architect, a friend of Diego and Frida who had designed their linked homes in San Angel. Commissioned to paint frescoes inside the terminal building of the Mexico City airport, he used the opportunity to editorialize by caricaturing Hitler and Mussolini and their confederates. These images confronted the Mexican government with a political dilemma.

  Trotsky and Diego Rivera, 1937.

  Bernard Wolfe Slide Collection, Hoover Institution Archives

  The previous March, President Cárdenas had nationalized Mexico’s petroleum reserves and expropriated the equipment of the British and American oil companies, a coup that prompted Britain to sever diplomatic relations and to boycott Mexican oil. Germany and Italy replaced Britain as Mexico’s main oil purchasers. O’Gorman’s provocative murals threatened to cause a diplomatic confrontation that might lead to an economic crisis. In response, General Francisco Múgica, the minister of communications, gave the order to have O’Gorman’s inconvenient artwork destroyed.

  Rivera loudly condemned this act of “vandalism,” which he imagined to be a reprise of the Battle of Rockefeller Center. He denounced Múgica, who happened to be Trotsky’s most important ally inside the Cárdenas government, as a “reactionary bootlicker of Hitler and Mussolini.” Somehow he seems to have expected Trotsky to echo this vituperation, but Mexico’s most controversial exile saw the matter differently. The O’Gorman episode had nothing in common with the fate of the Radio City mural, he instructed Rivera. The obliteration of the airport frescoes, however repugnant, was carried out in the interest of national independence. “Mexico is an oppressed country and she cannot impose her oil on others by battleships and guns.” Rivera accused Trotsky of putting his asylum ahead of his principles.

  This is where matters stood toward the end of December 1938, when Rivera struck the match that ignited this combustible mix. Intending to compose a letter to Breton in Paris, he asked Van to come to San Angel to serve as his typist. In the course of dictating his letter, Diego began to speak critically about Trotsky’s “methods”—at which point Van stopped typing. Diego assured him that he intended to show the letter to Trotsky and he asked him to continue. “With any other person I would have left,” Van explains. “But the relations between Trotsky and Rivera were exceptional.” He decided to accept the painter’s word that he would talk to Trotsky. “We will have it out,” Diego promised.

  Returning to the Blue House, Van placed the letter on his desk, where it was discovered by Natalia. She brought it directly to Trotsky, who exploded in anger. Rivera’s indictment of Trotsky was based on two recent episodes in their dealings with the local Trotskyists. These were trifles, yet Rivera made them the basis of his complaint to Breton that Trotsky had carried out a “friendly and tender” coup d’état against him.

  Trotsky could easily demonstrate the falseness of the allegations. Using Van as his emissary, he asked Rivera to revise his letter. Rivera agreed and made an appointment with Van but canceled at the last moment; then he arranged a new time to meet and canceled again. “He was obviously going through an emotional crisis,” Van comments. “The words ‘friendly and tender’ in his letter to Breton show that he was still attached to Trotsky.”

  As the new year began, Rivera continued down this destructive path, launching a number of initiatives with small anarchist and trade-unionist groups hostile to the Trotskyists. Trotsky called these intrigues “purely personal adventures” by which Rivera intended to impress him with his political mastery. Together with Natalia, Trotsky visited him at home in San Angel and passed what he felt was as a “very, very good hour” with the painter; some time later, Trotsky met with him alone. After each conversation he assumed that their differences had been resolved, only to discover otherwise.

  On January 7, 1939, Rivera sent a letter of resignation to the secretariat of the Fourth International in New York. Trotsky refused to accept it, reasoni
ng that Rivera was too important to let go without one final attempt at reconciliation. Hoping to enlist Frida in this effort, he wrote to her in Paris, telling his side of the story and pleading that her help was essential. “Now, dear Frida, you know the situation here. I cannot believe it is hopeless.” But Frida saw things differently, boasting to friends in New York that Diego “told piochitas (Trotsky) to go to hell in a very serious manner…. Diego is completely right.”

  She may have reconsidered this opinion after her return from France in March. Within a few months she and Diego divorced, only to remarry the following year in San Francisco. There is no hint that Diego’s new willfulness was brought on by a discovery of his wife’s affair with Trotsky. Unable to consult Frida, Trotsky had no way of knowing this, however, and he may have been sweating it out.

  Mexico’s presidential politics managed to aggravate the Trotsky-Rivera imbroglio. President Cárdenas, elected in 1934, could not run again and was preparing his succession. He failed to get his party’s approval for a candidate of his choice, however, and was forced to select a conservative politician instead. This caused confusion on the left about which candidate to support in the next election, more than a year away. Hoping to influence the presidential succession, Rivera founded the Party of Workers and Peasants. Taking the controls of this vehicle, he executed what Trotsky called a “series of incredible zigzags” in search of “some political magic.” Trotsky now had to consider that people might think—and his enemies choose to believe—that he was collaborating with Rivera and thus breaking his promise to steer clear of Mexican politics. If only for appearances’ sake, he had to separate himself from the painter.

  Trotsky also decided that he could no longer remain under Rivera’s roof. “It is morally and politically impossible for me to accept the hospitality of a person who conducts himself not as a friend, but as a venomous adversary,” he wrote privately on February 14, one year after his guardian had mortgaged his San Angel home in order to reinforce security at the Blue House. Trotsky must truly have believed that the breach was irreparable, because he knew how difficult it would be to find an affordable home to rent that provided comparable security. Nor had the sense of danger abated. The daily El Universal had recently reported that about 1,500 former foreign volunteers in Spain—Poles, Germans, Austrians, and others—would be given asylum in Mexico in coming weeks. Trotsky assumed that these refugees had been selected by the GPU.

  While the search for a new house was under way, Trotsky proposed to pay rent for as long as he remained in the Blue House. Rivera rejected this offer, insisting that the house belonged to Frida and thus that the proposal to pay him rent was intended as an insult. Trotsky called this assertion ridiculous—“He wishes to impose his generosity on me”—and offered two hundred pesos as a modest monthly payment. Rivera accepted the money then refused it, so it was donated to the local comrades.

  In early March, Trotsky’s staff found a new house, located only a few blocks away, on Avenida Viena. It would need extensive cleaning and renovation before it could be occupied. In the intervening weeks, for the sake of security, the impending move was to be kept quiet. Secrecy was maintained until the second week of April, when Diego made public his break with Trotsky in an interview with the local daily Excelsior, a story that was picked up by The New York Times. Rivera’s tone was restrained and regretful. Off the record, however, he was heard to say that Trotsky’s interception of his letter to Breton was typical of the methods of the GPU. Diego’s promiscuous application of the GPU label had been troubling Trotsky for some time. In recent months he had similarly unmasked Hidalgo, Múgica, and O’Gorman, among other friends and enemies.

  “A tremendous impulsiveness, a lack of self-control, an inflammable imagination, and an extreme capriciousness—such are the features of Rivera’s character,” Trotsky wrote to the Pan-American committee in explanation of Rivera’s repudiation of the Fourth International. To Frankel in New York he wrote contritely: “You warned us many times about his fantastic political ideas.” Trotsky rehearsed for Frankel how Diego’s “fantastic mind” had concocted his “fantastic slander” and his “fantastic letter” to Breton. “We were very patient, my dear friend. We hoped that in spite of everything, we would be able to retain the fantastic man for our movement…. Now we must show this fantastic personality a firm hand.”

  Trotsky, who preferred to attribute his setbacks to the workings of larger historical forces, was not content to cite the dark side of Rivera’s artistic temperament. “In spite of the individual peculiarities,” he explained to Breton, “the painter’s case is a part of the retreat of the intellectuals”—by which he meant a retreat from communism. “Our painter is only more gifted, more generous and more fantastic than the others, but he is, nevertheless, one of them.”

  Had he lived a few years longer, Trotsky would have been forced to revise this analysis, as Rivera executed his fantastic political U-turn back toward the Mexican Communist Party and toward Stalin. After all of his Trotskyist sins, it would take Rivera several attempts before he was allowed back into the Communist fold. In other words, he had to perform more than the usual amount of groveling and self-criticism required on such occasions. In one application round, he told the tale of how he had secured Trotsky’s asylum in Mexico for the purpose of having him assassinated.

  On May 1, 1939, Trotsky’s household made the move to the new residence on Avenida Viena. Trotsky himself was transferred on May 5. At the moment of his departure, he approached his empty desk and placed on it two or three small items, gifts from Diego and Frida. One of these, a favorite pen, had been a present from Frida, who had contrived to get a sample of his signature and have it engraved along the pen’s barrel. He then turned and walked out of his study, under the gaze of Frida, who stood between two curtains holding a bouquet of flowers, in the self-portrait she had dedicated with all her love to Leon Trotsky.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Great Dictator

  It was March 1939, and Pavel Sudoplatov was being driven to an important meeting in the Kremlin in the company of NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, who sat beside him. Sudoplatov was head of the Administration for Special Tasks, an elite unit that specialized in sabotage, abduction, and assassination of enemies of the people on foreign soil. Sudoplatov’s predecessor had been arrested the previous November, and he feared his own arrest after being denounced by a colleague as a “typical Trotskyist double-dealer.” When Beria summoned him, he suspected the worst. The car entered the Kremlin through the Spassky Gate on Red Square, and drove down a dead end alongside the old Senate building. Only then did Sudoplatov realize that Beria was taking him to meet with Stalin.

  The two men entered the building and walked up the staircase to the second floor, then down a long, wide, carpeted corridor past offices behind tall doors, like rooms in a museum, Sudoplatov thought. “I was apprehensive and tense with enthusiastic excitement.” He could feel his heart beating as Beria opened the door and they entered an enormous reception room, from where they were led into Stalin’s office.

  Stalin, dressed in his trademark gray Party tunic and old baggy trousers, invited his guests to sit at a long table covered with a green baize cloth. Nearby stood his desk, its papers arranged in perfect order. On the wall behind the desk was a photograph of Lenin; on an adjacent wall were images of Marx and Engels. Stalin appeared focused, poised, calm. Sudoplatov was impressed by his self-confidence and ease. The steady gaze of the dictator’s honey-colored eyes gave the impression that he was listening to every word. Beria, dressed in a modest suit with an open collar, adjusted his pince-nez and came right to the point, recommending that Sudoplatov be appointed deputy director of the NKVD’s foreign department.

  Stalin frowned, a reaction that might have completely unnerved an uninitiated visitor, but Sudoplatov had seen this expression before. The pipe in Stalin’s hand, though stuffed with tobacco, was not lit. “Then he struck a wooden match with a gesture known to all who watched newsreels, an
d moved an ashtray close to him.” Stalin ignored Sudoplatov’s nomination and told Beria to summarize his foreign intelligence agenda. This was Sudoplatov’s third meeting with the Soviet leader, and once again he took note of Stalin’s gruffness, which he assumed was “an inseparable component of his personality, just like the stern look that came from the smallpox marks on his face.”

  As Beria spoke, Stalin rose from his chair and began to pace slowly back and forth in his soft Georgian boots. Sudoplatov’s promotion, Beria proceeded to explain, would enable him to mobilize all resources necessary for the liquidation of that most treacherous enemy of the people, the renegade Trotsky. Stalin must have been thinking it was high time.

  Ten years earlier, he had chosen to banish Trotsky from the Soviet Union. At the time, he was not yet powerful enough to have his vanquished enemy executed—not openly anyway, and he could not risk an assassination. Deportation, Stalin assumed, would cut off all potential avenues for Trotsky’s political comeback in the USSR. He probably figured that the exile would remain isolated, without friends or funds, and that he would become tainted by his foreign associations. Within a few years, however, as Trotsky denounced him relentlessly in interviews, articles, pamphlets, and books, Stalin came to regret having let the “chatterbox” out of his grasp.

  Trotsky knew this instinctively. “Stalin would now give a great deal to be able to retract the decision to deport me,” he wrote privately in 1935. “How tempting it would be to stage a ‘show’ trial! But the danger of exposure is too great.” Once again Trotsky underestimated his adversary, who then cast him in the role of mastermind of the elaborate conspiracies exposed in three spectacular show trials. Stalin’s bitterness about having allowed Trotsky to get away was assuaged by the exile’s usefulness as a satanic symbol of treason and heresy. Stalin could not have invented another scapegoat like Trotsky. And alarms about one and another “Trotskyist center” in the USSR would not have served Stalin nearly so well had the traitor not been alive and living abroad.