Trotsky Read online

  Through the winter of 1939–40, Trotsky’s polemical battle against the Minority continued, thousands upon thousands of words, with major thrusts directed at Shachtman’s misreading of Bolshevik history and Burnham’s “brutal challenge” to Marxist theory. The effect they produced was entirely the opposite of what Trotsky intended. Even Cannon had to marvel at how “each contribution by the OM brought a worse reaction than the one previous.” In any case, minds had already been made up. As Burnham said, “The Finnish events were absolutely decisive.”

  Cannon was now eager to toss the “petty-bourgeois windbags” into the dustbin of history. Trotsky, however, still held out hope for unity. When the Minority announced that it would convene its own national conference in Cleveland at the end of February 1940, he advised Cannon that the proper response was “a vigorous intervention in favor of unity by the majority.” “Back to the Party!” he exhorted his wayward comrades. Cannon, meanwhile, was denouncing those same comrades as “enemies and traitors” who had to be “fought without mercy and without compromise on every front” and subject to “the most ruthless punishment in the form of a war of political extermination.”

  A special convention of the Socialist Workers Party was held in mid-April, with eighty-nine delegates and sixty alternates present, representing a total membership of 1,095. The Majority won every vote by the same total, 55 to 34. Shachtman announced that, backed by a large preponderance of the youth, the Minority had the support of at least half the membership and that it intended to form a separate party. Cannon could breathe a sigh of relief: the schism was accomplished. Stanley’s postmortem captured the general feeling of bitter regret on the Minority side: “The war broke out and we did nothing. The OM did nothing. One of the most important events of our epoch took place, and we were asleep. And we stayed asleep.”

  THE SPLIT FOUND Jan Frankel on the other side of the barricades. He moved from New York to Los Angeles to work for the Minority. A comrade there described him to Trotsky as sick, jobless, next to penniless, and extremely disheartened by the war, which had crushed his native Czechoslovakia. Frankel blamed the split entirely on Trotsky. “The present fight in the American Party has been carried out in the traditional manner of the old Iskra days when Lenin and the OM engaged in their bitter polemics,” he said. These methods were completely inappropriate to radical politics in the United States in the 1930s. “The proof is in the split.”

  Trotsky was shaken by the loss of yet another close comrade, and regretted that he could not sit down with Frankel and talk it over. Only one member of the Minority had so far made the pilgrimage to Coyoacán. She was Sylvia Ageloff, the Brooklyn social worker. She had come to Mexico City as a tourist, more or less. After she arrived, she wrote a note to Trotsky passing along greetings from her sister Ruth.

  Sylvia was invited to come to the house on Avenida Viena the next day, January 26, 1940, to join a discussion about the factional struggle with another visitor, Farrell Dobbs, the Teamsters organizer whom Cannon had recently brought from Minneapolis to manage the New York office. Sylvia was a minority of one that day, among Trotsky, Dobbs, the guards, and the staff. Chief of the guard Harold Robins said that her remarks “beautifully indicate the attitude of the petty bourgeois Menshevism of the minority.”

  The swaggering account of this meeting that Robins sent to New York, against the backdrop of Trotsky’s repeated warnings about Stalinist agents stirring the factionalist pot, raised anxieties there about Trotsky’s safety. Among those who felt a sudden sense of alarm was John Wright, Trotsky’s research assistant on the Stalin biography and a stalwart member of the Majority. Wright warned the staff in Coyoacán that “the factional struggle provides a perfect cover for the penetration of GPU provocateurs and assassins to Trotsky.” He urged that “utmost caution” be exercised. As an “absolutely iron bound” rule, even the most loyal visitor must be subjected to a personal search. “We are all very anxious on this point.”

  Sylvia was not a threat, of course, certainly not as a debater, a fact that had prompted an outburst of bravado from Robins on Trotsky’s behalf: “The old man is dying to have a fighting minority supporter and he would consider it a pleasure I am sure if you would send him one with a bit of guts in him.” It turns out that the GPU was already calculating along the same lines. As Sylvia left Trotsky’s home late in the afternoon of January 26, waiting by the police guard house to drive her back to the city was the Canadian businessman Frank Jacson, otherwise known to her as Jacques Mornard. The penetration agent was now just outside the gates.

  CHAPTER 10

  Lucky Strike

  On February 27, 1940, Trotsky sat down to write his last will and testament. “My high (and still rising) blood pressure is deceiving those near me about my actual condition,” he began. “I am active and able to work—but the end is apparently near.” Trotsky, who had recently turned sixty, was convinced he had advanced arteriosclerosis, to the point where, as he wrote in an addendum on March 3, “the end must come suddenly, most likely—again, this is my own hypothesis—through a brain hemorrhage. This is the best possible outcome that I can hope for.” In the event that his illness threatened to become protracted and make him an invalid, he said, he would exercise his right to determine his own time of death.

  Trotsky became preoccupied with his health after a recent examination by his doctor, a German refugee named Alfred Zollinger. That, in any case, is how Trotsky explained to Natalia his decision to write a will. Should his Stalin biography earn him any income after his death, he wanted to ensure that the money would go to her, so that she could support herself and see to Seva’s education. Alarmed at the sudden blackness of her husband’s mood, Natalia spoke to Dr. Zollinger, who denied he had given his patient any cause for concern. Zollinger examined Trotsky again and tried to reassure him that his health was fine. His outlook brightened, although Natalia wondered if this was merely for her benefit.

  In vowing to avoid a prolonged state of illness, Trotsky was mindful of the fate of Lenin, who experienced a series of strokes that left him incapacitated in the year before his death, at age fifty-four. This fixation on Lenin had become second nature to Trotsky. After the two men put aside their differences in 1917, Trotsky was unable to resist the force of Lenin’s personal charm. “This magnetism is colossal,” the Bolshevik portraitist Lunacharsky testified in describing the remarkable spell Lenin cast over untold individuals, from intellectuals, such as the writer Maxim Gorky, to the humblest peasant visitor admitted to his Kremlin office. “People who come into his orbit not only accept him as a political leader but in some strange fashion fall in love with him.”

  Trotsky fell hard, perhaps owing to their long years of mutual animosity. Of course, Trotsky’s later veneration of Lenin happened to serve his purposes, and yet there is little doubt that it was genuine. “He was my master,” Trotsky said of the Party’s original Old Man. With an eye on how history would regard his relationship with Lenin—and knowing that Stalin’s historians were busy falsifying the record—Trotsky presented a series of carefully composed vignettes to commemorate their historic collaboration.

  Trotsky’s version of the story begins in London in October 1902. After escaping from Siberia and making his way across Europe, Trotsky arrives outside Lenin’s spartan two-story apartment building on Hol-ford Square, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood near King’s Cross. Although it is near dawn, the impatient young caller knocks vigorously on the outside door—three times, as he has been instructed. Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, hurries downstairs to greet him. “The Pen has arrived!” she announces from the doorway, then goes out to pay the cabbie while Trotsky shows himself inside. Lenin sits up in bed and listens raptly to the animated visitor’s report on the Russian revolutionary underground and the circumstances of his flight. As Trotsky describes Lenin, “the kindly expression of his face was tinged with justifiable amazement.”

  Fifteen years later, the two men join forces in the decisive hours of Red October. L
enin, who has been hiding in Finland in order to avoid arrest, returns to action on the night of the Bolshevik coup d’état. The scene is the imposing, neoclassical Smolny Institute, where the Congress of Soviets has convened and the Bolsheviks plan to declare victory in the name of the proletariat. Late in the evening, as they wait for the session of the congress to begin, Lenin and Trotsky try to get some rest in a room adjacent to the hall, making use of a blanket and pillows that have been put down on the floor for them. “We were lying side by side; body and soul were relaxing like overtaut strings,” Trotsky remembers. They were too excited to sleep, so they conversed in hushed tones, Lenin with “a rare sincerity in his voice.”

  The following year, the Revolution is in peril, as the White armies rise up and advance on Moscow, which has replaced Petrograd as the capital of Soviet Russia. In August, Simbirsk on the Volga falls to the Whites and, farther north, Kazan, the ancient Tatar capital, is under siege. Trotsky, who is about to leave for the front to command the Red forces, visits Lenin and finds him dispirited. “It’s a bowl of mush we have, and not a dictatorship,” Lenin laments. Trotsky assures him that his political commissars will enforce iron discipline on the Red Army, and then departs to prove his point.

  After the Reds recapture Kazan and Simbirsk in September 1918, Trotsky returns from the front and pays a call on Lenin, who is convalescing from gunshot wounds to the neck and shoulder after an assassination attempt by a disillusioned radical. “Lenin was in a fine humor and looked well physically,” Trotsky writes of their reunion. “It seemed to me that he was looking at me with somehow different eyes. He had a way of falling in love with people when they showed him a certain side of themselves. There was a touch of this being ‘in love’ in his excited attention. He listened eagerly to my stories about the front, and kept sighing with satisfaction, almost blissfully.” Trotsky’s achievement is not limited to the battlefield. “The game is won,” Lenin declares. “If we have succeeded in establishing order in the army, it means we will establish it everywhere else. And the revolution—with order—will be unconquerable.”

  The twin Bolshevik stars, their names inseparably linked in the public mind, still have their quarrels after 1917, some of them stormy. “Lenin and I had several sharp clashes,” Trotsky explains, “because when I disagreed with him on serious questions, I always fought an all-out battle.” Of course such episodes would later be used against Trotsky by his rivals in the succession struggle. “But the instances when Lenin and I understood each other at a glance were a hundred times more numerous.”

  In the period of mourning after Lenin’s death in January 1924, Trotsky takes great comfort in a private letter from Lenin’s widow. Krupskaya writes to say that a few weeks before the end, Vladimir Ilich dwelled appreciatively over a passage Trotsky had written comparing him and Marx as world-historical figures. “And here is another thing I want to tell you. The attitude of V.I. toward you at the time when you came to us in London from Siberia did not change until his death. I wish you, Lev Davidovich, strength and health, and I embrace you warmly.” To Trotsky, this simple, heartfelt letter stood as a refutation of all the combined slanders hurled against him by the epigones.

  In Lenin’s testament, which he dictated in December 1922 and which came to light after his death, he singled out Trotsky and Stalin as “the two most eminent leaders of the present Central Committee,” and voiced concern that their rivalry would cause a split in the Party. He called Trotsky the “most able” of the Bolshevik leaders, but qualified this endorsement by remarking on his “excessive self-confidence” and his “disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative aspect of affairs”—a euphemistic allusion to Trotsky’s well-known authoritarian manner.

  As for Stalin, Lenin warned that the general secretary had concentrated enormous power in his hands and expressed concern that he would know how to use it properly. Subsequent events, including Stalin’s insolent behavior toward Krupskaya, prompted Lenin to add a compelling postscript, dated January 4, 1923: “Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead.”

  This would seem to have tilted the scales in Trotsky’s favor, but Stalin and his allies were able to restrict the circulation of the document. When the text was leaked by the Left Opposition to Max Eastman and he published it in the West in 1925, Trotsky was pressured by Stalin into signing a statement repudiating Eastman and denying the very existence of Lenin’s testament. Trotsky took this step in order to avoid a premature clash, and he reversed it a year later when the factional struggle broke out in earnest, but it was an act of political expediency that continued to dog him. Indeed, at the very time he sat down to write his own testament, the Minority opposition in the United States had resurrected the story of Trotsky’s shabby treatment of Eastman, forcing him yet again to explain himself.

  Just at that moment, in February 1940, a living reminder of those fateful events, in the person of Max Eastman, accompanied by his wife, Eliena, arrived in Coyoacán. Trotsky had by now written him off for the Marxist movement, so the onetime comrade could be welcomed into the house for a conversation about the good old days. Eastman says they spent two “light-hearted” hours together, although he did probe Trotsky, delicately, on a certain sensitive topic, with unsurprising results. “His faith in the disguised religion, or ‘optimistic philosophy’ as he called it, of dialectical materialism was absolute,” Eastman confirmed. Yet this time, there was no angry explosion to drive home the point. In general, Eastman found that Trotsky had grown “more mellow,” despite his increasing isolation and the waning prospects for the success of his revolutionary project.

  Eastman’s visit, Dr. Zollinger’s examination, Lenin’s example—these provided the inspiration for Trotsky to take up his pen and write his own testament. After naming Natalia as his heir, he touched upon matters of politics and ideology. He expressed the conviction that a future revolutionary generation would rehabilitate him and his fallen comrades by repudiating the “stupid and vile slander of Stalin and his agents.” He thanked his collaborators over the years, too numerous to mention individually, although he made an exception for his closest comrade, Natalia. “For almost forty years of our life together she has remained an inexhaustible source of love, generosity, and tenderness. She experienced great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I take comfort in the fact that she has also known times of happiness.”

  He then reaffirmed his ideological faith: “For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism…. I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth.”

  As he wrote these lines, seated at his desk in his study, he looked over to his left, out through the French windows and into the patio, where he saw Natalia approaching. The scene inspired him to close on a lyrical note: “Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

  Four weeks later, toward the end of March 1940, Trotsky appeared to discover his Fountain of Youth in Veracruz harbor. On a three-day visit there, he took advantage of an opportunity to go deep-sea fishing, the first such outing since he arrived in Mexico. The experience seemed to revive his spirit—at least that is the clear impression conveyed by the photographs and motion pictures made of this excursion.

  Trotsky, dressed in a dark ja
cket and a soft white cap, is seen walking toward the boat, as he explains to one of his guards how he used to go fishing on the Sea of Marmara. Trotsky puts on his gear, then consults on the pier with the majordomo before they embark and set off. The chief of Trotsky’s Mexican police guard, Jesús Rodriguez Casas, is seen steering the boat. Trotsky, manipulating reel and rod, appears vibrant. His famous white goatee juts forward; his round tortoiseshell glasses are speckled with sea spray. Not since the Prinkipo days has he seemed so invigorated.

  Trotsky’s vacation in Veracruz was preserved for the ages by an American comrade named Al Young, who came to Coyoacán for what was supposed to be a brief visit but stretched into five months. Young was born Alexander Buchman to an affluent family in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1911. He earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland in 1933. After graduation, he escaped the unemployment rolls by moving to Asia, spending most of the next six years in Shanghai, where he worked for various foreign news agencies. A camera enthusiast, he extensively photographed and filmed daily life in Shanghai, including the Japanese invasion and occupation of the city in 1937.

  Trotsky fishing in Veracruz harbor, March 1940.

  Alexander H. Buchman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives

  As Young was leaving China in 1939, two Trotskyists he had gotten to know there arranged for him to visit Trotsky in Mexico in order to show him the nearly three hours of film he took in Shanghai. Young arrived in Coyoacán in November 1939 with his Leica and an 8mm Bell & Howell. As a member of Trotsky’s entourage, he took several hundred black-and-white and color photographs and some fifty-five minutes of moving images.