Trotsky Read online

  All the major Bolshevik leaders were observed beside Lenin’s open coffin—all, that is, except for Trotsky. Reporting from Moscow for The New York Times, Walter Duranty described a series of false rumors that Trotsky was about to return from the Caucasus and at last take his rightful place among the mourners. “More than once crowds assembled to greet him at the station, and official photographers were sent to wait chilly hours before the Hall of Columns to film his entry.” Trotsky’s absence generated not only puzzlement but also resentment among those who took it as a sign of disrespect.

  With Party and government officials journeying to Moscow from across the country—some from farther away than Tblisi—the funeral was postponed by one day until Sunday. No one informed Trotsky of the postponement, and he later concluded that Stalin had lied to him about the day of the funeral in order to keep him away from Moscow. Trotsky maintained that he could not possibly have arrived in time for a Saturday funeral: The distance from Tblisi combined with the severe weather conditions made it impossible. “I had no choice,” he explained.

  But Trotsky was no ordinary traveler. He was the head of the Soviet military. Extraordinary measures could have been taken in order to speed his journey to the capital. Max Eastman, who had befriended Trotsky and was living in Soviet Russia at that time, came to the conclusion that the embattled warlord had no desire to return to Moscow. His mysterious fevers were psychosomatic. What sickened him were the intrigues, the name-calling, and the backstage politics at which he proved to be completely inept. In Eastman’s view, Trotsky did have a choice. “In ten minutes he could have had a locomotive on the other end of the train and been on his way north to attend the funeral and make a funeral oration that might have been crucial, and would certainly have been historic.”

  The funeral was held on Sunday, January 27, on an arctic Red Square, where the temperature hovered at thirty-five degrees below zero. Starting at ten o’clock in the morning, thousands of mourners, bundled up against the cold, some carrying banners, flags, and portraits of Lenin, walked past the coffin and the makeshift mausoleum. The smoke from the bonfires merged with the frozen breath of hundreds of thousands of people to produce an icy fog that hung over the square, in Duranty’s phrase, “like a smoke sacrifice.”

  Confusion as to Trotsky’s whereabouts also hovered over Red Square. “To the last many believed he would come,” Duranty reported. “A dozen times came a cry from the throng around the mausoleum, ‘There’s Trotsky,’ or ‘Trotsky’s here,’ as anyone in a military greatcoat faintly resembling Trotsky passed before us.” But Trotsky was a thousand miles away, in Sukhumi, among the mimosa and the camellias in the bright, warm January sun. At the rest house where he and Natalia were staying, the veranda looked out upon enormous palm trees and to the sea beyond.

  At 3:55 p.m., as the Moscow sky darkened, Lenin’s coffin was lifted and carried into position by eight pallbearers: Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Molotov, Tomsky, Rudzutak, and Dzerzhinsky. At four o’clock, the coffin was lowered into the vault. At that moment, an explosion of sound erupted, as factory sirens, steamship whistles, train whistles—everything that could make noise—blared for three minutes, punctuated by salvos of rifle and cannon fire. The effect was deafening.

  At four o’clock precisely, every radio broadcast and every telegraph line in the country transmitted the same message: “Stand up, comrades, Ilich is being lowered into his grave!” Lying on the veranda covered with blankets, Trotsky heard the thunderous booms of an artillery cannonade coming from somewhere on the shore below and wondered about the reason. “It is the moment of Lenin’s burial,” he was told.

  Delayed by the snow, the Moscow newspapers began to arrive in Sukhumi carrying memorial speeches, obituaries, and articles about the funeral. The mail brought disconsolate letters from comrades in Moscow, none more anguished than that of seventeen-year-old Lyova. Bedridden with the flu and a high fever, he had left his sickbed to visit the Hall of Columns and see Lenin for the last time. There he waited and waited for his father to appear. His letter conveyed his agonized incomprehension. Trotsky tried to blunt the force of his son’s reproach by ascribing it to youthful despair: “I should have come at any price!”

  This was the historical terrain Trotsky was about to revisit when he fell ill in December 1938. His cryptogenic fever and related symptoms had plagued him during much of his time in France and Norway, but since arriving in Mexico he had managed to remain generally healthy. Under the stresses and strains of the first few months, he experienced episodes of nervous agitation, sweats, and the usual persistent insomnia. He lost ten pounds, in part because his colitis was aggravated by new foods and unfriendly bacteria. That September he complained about headaches and chest pains, as he did in the tumultuous days of February 1938, but on both occasions a medical examination detected no signs of a heart problem.

  Now, in the winter of 1938–39, the fifty-nine-year-old exile began to experience symptoms of his old illness—lethargy, dizziness, headaches—although not the mysterious fever. He did not leave the house for more than two months that winter. His only exercise came from tending to his newly acquired rabbits and chickens, housed in coops and hutches in the back patio. When Frankel offered to send down an American doctor, Trotsky responded stoically: “Nothing is new other than an aggravation of the chronic things. The general name of my illness is ‘the sixties’ and I do not believe that in New York you have a specialist for this malady.”

  Writing and dictating helped Trotsky maintain his inner balance, so the loss, yet again, of his Russian typist was an additional setback. In December she became ill, then briefly returned to work, until a car accident on January 1 landed her in the hospital. Trotsky pleaded his hard luck case to his agent, who was able to convince Harper to pay out the fourth and final installment of the Stalin advance, which arrived in the middle of February. Still the typist failed to return, and Trotsky found it impossible to write by hand. In mid-March he again appealed to New York for help: “I am almost desperate.”

  Trotsky’s sense of despair was magnified by his feud with Rivera and the subsequent preparations to move out of the Blue House. The new residence, several blocks away at Avenida Viena 19, was in dilapidated condition. Painters and masons would have to be hired. The walls surrounding the expansive garden would need to be augmented and lights and alarms installed. A room would have to be made ready for grandson Seva, expected to arrive from Paris in the summer. These renovations would be expensive, and no longer was Diego on the scene to help out with a loan.

  In the first week of May, just as Trotsky was preparing to move into the new house, he found a Russian typist, barely qualified but acceptable. Four weeks later, he managed to send off another section of the manuscript, at which point he advised his agent that the coverage of the story after 1917 would be less detailed and more “synthetic” than the earlier chapters. He hoped to finish the book within a few months, he said, “if nothing extraordinary happens,” a reference to the ominous war clouds gathering over Europe.

  By now Trotsky was thoroughly disgusted with his subject and with the product he was turning out, and he wanted simply to be done with it. As he knew, the style of the work was ponderous and forbidding, marred by crude formulations such as “Stalinism is counterrevolutionary banditry.” The narrator’s tone was that of an aggressive prosecuting attorney, introducing hearsay and innuendo to demonstrate cruelty in Stalin or suggest duplicity, darkly hinting, based on no hard evidence, that the cunning Georgian was at one time an agent provocateur.

  The Man of the Apparatus remains a gray figure, with dull face, yellow eyes, and guttural voice. His outstanding qualities are insatiable ambition, exceptional tenacity, and “never-slumbering envy.” This hardly seems an adequate description of the man Lenin sized up as one of the two most capable Bolshevik leaders, together with Trotsky. That was in 1922, the same year that Stalin, with Lenin’s endorsement, was named general secretary of the Party. It was not long afterward, in
Trotsky’s account, that Stalin stepped out from behind a curtain onto history’s stage “in the full panoply of power.” He was already a dictator, although not even he realized it as yet. The outcome of the struggle to succeed Lenin was decided by the time of his death. Trotsky, in other words, never had a chance.

  Only one person could have stopped the Stalinist juggernaut, Trotsky suggested, and that was Lenin himself. In the final year of his life, Lenin became alarmed by the power Stalin had accumulated and sought to remove him as general secretary. He failed to do so only because he ran out of time. And his time was cut short, Trotsky now realized, by Stalin himself: In order to ensure his victory, Stalin had hastened Lenin’s death.

  How had Trotsky arrived at this shocking conclusion? He remembered that in the final year of his illness, Lenin had asked Stalin to obtain potassium cyanide for him to use should his suffering became unbearable. Stalin informed a Politburo meeting of this surprising request, conveyed to him by Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. No vote was taken, but the consensus in the room was that Lenin’s appeal must be rejected. At the time, Trotsky saw nothing sinister in this episode.

  His thinking began to change under the influence of the Moscow trials, with their bizarre accusations of poisonings by Kremlin doctors, under the direction of secret police chief Yagoda. At the time of the second trial in January 1937, his son Seryozha was arrested for allegedly attempting a mass poisoning of workers. A year later came Lyova’s mysterious death, the result, Trotsky assumed, of poisoning by the GPU. In February 1939, the death of Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, further fueled his suspicions. By now, Trotsky’s view of the more distant past had come into sharper focus. In 1922, Lenin had warned about Stalin, “This cook will prepare nothing but peppery dishes.” In fact, Trotsky now concluded, “They proved to be not only peppery but poisoned, and not only figuratively but literally so.”

  Trotsky had made this determination by the summer of 1939. At the time, he had been trying, without success, to earn money by selling articles to American magazines. His fortunes changed dramatically with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact on August 23 and the outbreak of war in Europe with the invasion of Poland a week later. Suddenly, he was in great demand as a commentator on world affairs. Life magazine, in its October 2 issue, which appeared as the Soviet and German armies were dividing Poland between them, published his appraisal of Stalin as a statesman.

  Perhaps emboldened by the Soviet dictator’s sudden ignominy as Hitler’s new ally, in a sequel article Trotsky presented the evidence for his belief that Stalin had poisoned Lenin. “I realize more than anyone else the monstrosity of such suspicion. But that cannot be helped, when it follows from the circumstances, the facts and Stalin’s very character.” Trotsky drew a direct connection between Lenin’s untimely demise and his own absence from the funeral. Stalin, Trotsky hypothesized, feared that he would recall Lenin’s request for poison the year before and suspect a link to Lenin’s death. Arriving in Moscow for the funeral, Trotsky might interrogate Lenin’s doctors, perhaps even demand a new autopsy. Stalin could not take such a risk, so he maneuvered to keep him away. Unfortunately for Trotsky, this kind of speculation was more suited to True Crime than Life, whose editors demanded more facts and less conjecture. In response, Trotsky accused Life of caving in to “the Stalinist machine.”

  TROTSKY’S MORBID SUSPICIOUSNESS had been exacerbated by the text of an anonymous letter he received at the beginning of May 1939, shortly after he moved into the new house. The letter, typed in Russian and mailed from San Francisco, was sent by someone who claimed to travel back and forth to the Soviet Union. The correspondent offered no further clues—genuine or fictitious—about his identity. His only motivation, he claimed, was to warn Trotsky about a possible assassination attempt.

  The writer said he had heard a radio news report that Trotsky was leaving Diego Rivera’s house for a larger dwelling, in connection with the expected arrival of his thirteen-year-old grandson. The radio report indicated that the boy was the son of the deceased Lyova, but the writer said he knew that Lyova had no children. He surmised, therefore, that Trotsky was expecting the arrival of a grandson from the USSR. “This has aroused in me great alarm.”

  The anonymous friend presented a series of terrifying scenarios for Trotsky to contemplate. The GPU might arrange for a provocateur to escort Trotsky’s grandson to Mexico: the impostor would claim that he had succeeded in deceiving the Soviet authorities by passing off the grandson as his own son. Or the GPU might contrive to send Trotsky a different boy posing as his grandson, with the assignment to kill him. Even if the real grandson were delivered, the writer warned, the GPU had had the time and the means to indoctrinate in him the necessity to commit a “heroic” act—in other words, an act of terrorism.

  This was followed by a list of emphatic instructions: Trotsky must not allow anyone escorting his grandson to enter his home, whatever trust he may have felt toward that person in the past. When Trotsky’s grandson arrived, he must be searched to ensure he was not carrying poison. The boy must not be allowed access to weapons. Nor should entry be permitted to the boy’s friends, who could supply him with a weapon or poison, or who might directly carry out a terrorist act.

  The writer closed by apologizing in the event that he had misheard the radio broadcast, or if his letter had the effect of spoiling Trotsky’s familial feelings toward his grandson. He asked that his communication be kept secret, because he planned to return to the USSR. “I wish you health and success in the struggle.”

  These alarms could easily have been dismissed as a prank or a provocation, but Trotsky, who a year earlier had brushed aside the danger posed by an eighteen-year-old girl Stalinist, decided that they deserved to be taken seriously. His hunch was that the writer was the same person who had sent him the anonymous warning about his Paris comrade Mark Zborowski several months earlier, a letter he had strongly suspected to be the work of a provocateur. As it happened, Trotsky’s guess was correct: the author of the second anonymous letter, like the first, was GPU defector Alexander Orlov.

  Orlov was now living in Los Angeles, still under a false name. In the spring of 1939 he was in San Francisco with his wife and daughter visiting the Golden Gate International Exposition. Orlov may have sincerely believed that young Seva was to be brought from the USSR. More likely he was feigning ignorance as a way to help obscure his identity, in which case his purpose once again was to arouse Trotsky’s suspicion against the spy Zborowski, who might be asked to escort Seva to Mexico. Whatever the case, the warning was meant in deadly earnest. The notion of a teenage boy being reprogrammed into a parricidal killer might seem far-fetched, but Orlov could tell hunting stories that would send shivers up your spine, including one about a booby-trapped box of chocolates.

  At the time Orlov mailed his letter, he tried to reach Trotsky by telephone. He called in the evening asking for Natalia or for a secretary who spoke Russian. The call came on a different telephone system from the one installed in the new house. In order to take the call, Natalia would have had to go outside. It was after dark. Trotsky figured it was probably a hoax, and he had to assume it was a plot. Two days later the anonymous letter arrived from San Francisco in two copies, one each for Trotsky and Natalia.

  Trotsky sent a copy to Frankel, saying it appeared to be legitimate. What possible motive could the GPU have in sending him such a letter? He supposed that the author was Walter Krivitsky, another Soviet defector living in hiding in the United States. If both anonymous letters came from the same source, Trotsky told Frankel, then the first letter merited more serious consideration. He wondered why he had not been informed of the results of the investigation of Zborowski he had ordered.

  As Trotsky puzzled over the identity of his anonymous well-wisher, in room 735 of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NKVD in Moscow, spymaster Sudoplatov was putting together a team of operatives to carry out the “action” Stalin had assigned to him. To head the task force Sudoplatov recruited Leon
id Eitingon, Orlov’s deputy and successor as chief of Soviet intelligence in Spain. Eitingon was a logical choice because the operatives would be recruited from the agency’s Spanish network.

  The details of the operation were finalized on July 9, 1939. The plan to assassinate Trotsky was code-named Operation Utka, Russian for Duck. It envisioned an assortment of possible methods: “poisoning of food, of water, explosion in home, explosion of automobile using TNT, a direct strike—suffocation, dagger, blow to the head, gunshot. Possibly an armed assault by a group.” Which is to say, whatever it took to achieve the stated goal: “the liquidation of Duck.” Sudoplatov and Eitingon identified the Spanish comrades who were to carry out this very special task. They requested a budget of $31,000 over six months. In the first days of August, Stalin authorized the operation.

  CHAPTER 9

  To the Finland Station

  On August 8, 1939, Trotsky’s grandson Seva arrived in Coyoacán from France. He was escorted by Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, old friends of Trotsky and Natalia. Alfred, Trotsky’s contemporary and one of the founders of the French Communist Party, was a supporter of the Left Opposition until he broke with Trotsky in 1930 and withdrew from politics. The two men, whose friendship survived their political break, had not seen each other since a visit to Prinkipo in 1929. Trotsky and Natalia felt relieved to be reunited with Seva, now thirteen years old and perhaps their sole surviving family member. And they were rejuvenated by the appearance of their old friends. There was much reminiscing about Paris at the turn of the century and much discussion about Europe in the looming shadow of war.

  Two days later, the family and their guests headed to Taxco for an extended stay, taking advantage of an arrangement Trotsky had with the pioneering American historian of Latin America, Hubert Herring. Herring put his Taxco home at Trotsky’s disposal in exchange for his participation in Herring’s occasional Mexico seminars. The Taxco idyll was interrupted on August 21 by the shocking news that Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was headed to Moscow to conclude a nonaggression pact between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Two days later, in a festive late-night ceremony in the Kremlin, Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, put their signatures on the Nazi-Soviet pact, as a beaming Stalin looked on jubilantly. The world was stupefied. The Nazis and the Communists, supposedly ideological opposites, had declared their mutual friendship. The treaty cleared the way for Germany to invade Poland, whose security had been guaranteed by Britain and France. War in Europe, long anticipated, was now imminent.