Trotsky (12 page)

Trotsky understood that he could not afford to lose all patience with Diego, his sponsor and benefactor, the man who had secured him entry into Mexico and set him up in the Blue House rent-free. The painter also acted as guardian to the vulnerable exile. The first night of Trotsky’s stay in Mexico, when security arrangements had to be improvised, Diego went home to retrieve a Thompson submachine gun from his arsenal. He had his own reasons for maintaining vigilance. Several weeks earlier, at the Restaurant Acapulco in Mexico City, four gunmen approached his table and started an argument that was intended to culminate in his assassination. Frida leaped up in front of her husband and made a scene, denouncing the pistoleros as cowards, and they retreated in confusion. Afterward she was sick to her stomach, but her quick action had saved her husband’s life.

Diego would end up spending a considerable sum of money on Trotsky’s security, despite the fact that his own financial house was in perpetual disorder, another manifestation of his anarchic nature. Contrary to the allegations of his critics, Diego’s government-commissioned murals had not made him rich. In fact, the private commissions he accepted and which also brought him derision—oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings sold mostly to Americans—helped to offset the deficits he incurred on his fresco projects and to cover Frida’s substantial medical bills. He was able to raise money quickly in an emergency,
however, which proved vitally important to Trotsky in February 1938, when the GPU came calling at the Blue House.

It was late in the afternoon on Wednesday, February 2, when a man arrived at the door with several large packages that he claimed had been sent by the minister of communications, Francisco Múgica, Trotsky’s most powerful patron inside the Cárdenas government. The packages were said to contain fertilizer for the garden. Why the communications minister would want to donate fertilizer for the Blue House garden is not explained. Neither Trotsky, nor Van, nor Jesús Casas, the chief of the Mexican police garrison assigned to the house, was home when the attempted delivery took place, which might account for its particular timing.

The packages were refused and the deliveryman promised to return the next day with the proper credentials. Later a phone call to the minister revealed that the deliveryman was a fake. Under the circumstances, the only conclusion to be drawn was that the ploy constituted a probe in advance of an assassination attempt. Trotsky was irate that the impostor had been allowed to drive off and that no one could adequately describe his vehicle or had thought to write down its license plate number. Perhaps this is what Van had in mind, in a letter he wrote to Jan Frankel in New York, by the “clumsiness” of those who were present at the house. He added that Natalia “behaved with a criminal lightmindedness” and that Trotsky had not spared her feelings.

The alleged GPU probe now forced a decision to be made. For several weeks, suspicious activities had been observed at the adjacent house on Avenida Londres. A high wall separated the two properties, which made it difficult to monitor developments on the other side. The comings and goings next door were a considerable source of concern for Diego and Van, and now the situation had become intolerable. Diego decided that the surest solution to the problem was for him to purchase the house outright. Financially the timing was especially inconvenient for him. Frida was in the hospital. The previous month, in order to cut expenses he had moved out of his San Angel house-cum-studio and in with Cristina. Now, in order to respond to the emergency and cover the costs—upwards of $2,000—to purchase and renovate the new property and integrate it with the Blue House, Diego mortaged his home.

The purchase would take a few weeks, enough time perhaps for the Stalinists to execute their plan, so it was decided to have Trotsky go live at the home of Antonio Hidalgo in the fashionable Chapultepec neighborhood of Mexico City. On the assumption that the GPU might have an informant, even an unwitting one, among the Blue House staff, Trotsky’s absence had to be kept secret. So, on February 13, he quietly slid into the backseat of the Dodge, parked in the rear patio, and lay down on the floor. Van drove through the gate and out onto the street, waving to the guards as he passed. Once the car was safely out of sight, the passenger could sit up for the ride to his temporary sanctuary. Natalia, meanwhile, arranged pillows in Trotsky’s bed to make it appear that he was at home but unwell. The servants were told to stay clear of the bedroom, while Natalia pretended to take in tea to her ailing husband.

It would have been an especially unfortunate moment to be bedridden at the Blue House, which was being remodeled in advance of the acquisition of the neighboring property. As Hansen complained on February 14, “the house is in an uproar being changed around with doorways torn in walls, plaster and bricks over everything and everybody on each other’s nerves.” All the upheaval had put Trotsky on edge, leading to angry clashes with Natalia—reason enough to have him evacuated.

In the early afternoon of February 16, 1938, the third day of his exile from Coyoacán, a telephone call brought the news that transformed the date into what Trotsky later described as “the blackest day in our personal lives.” Lyova was dead in a Paris hospital, one week after an emergency appendectomy. Both the Associated Press and the United Press had the story on the wire. Van, who took the call, was thunderstruck. No one in the household was aware that Lyova was even ill. Measures were taken to ensure that Natalia was kept away from the phone and the afternoon newspapers, while Van and Diego tried to call Paris. The shocking news having been confirmed, they immediately drove to Trotsky in Chapultepec, arriving near dusk.

When they entered the room, Diego broke the news. Trotsky’s face hardened. “Does Natalia know?” he asked. When Diego replied in the negative, Trotsky said emphatically, “I shall tell her myself!” They left
immediately for Coyoacán, Van behind the wheel, Diego beside him, and Trotsky sitting in back, silent and erect.

Natalia was surprised to see her husband enter the house and aghast at his appearance. He was all bent over and his face was ashen; suddenly he was an old man. “What is it?” she asked in alarm. “Are you ill?” “Lyova is ill,” “Trotsky replied in a low voice, “our little Lyova…”

T
rotsky and Natalia were stunned by the sudden loss of their elder son, Trotsky’s favorite, who was named after his father. “Goodbye, Leon, goodbye, dear and incomparable friend,” Trotsky wrote in a moving tribute several days after Lyova’s death. “Your mother and I never thought, never expected that destiny would impose on us this terrible task of writing your obituary.” This was not the only passage in Trotsky’s eulogy where poignancy was allowed to obscure grim reality. The truth is, Trotsky and Natalia had substantial reason to fear that they would outlive Lyova—indeed all of Trotsky’s children and grandchildren. Such an outcome was foreshadowed by an incident that took place in Moscow twelve years earlier.

A stormy scene erupted in the Politburo on October 25, 1926, a moment that would prove to be a turning point in the fortunes of the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. For several months their faction had carefully upheld a fragile truce with the Party’s majority, led by Stalin and Bukharin, but events now conspired to shatter the accord. Lenin’s political testament, suppressed in the Soviet Union since his death in 1924, had just been published in
The New York Times,
including the explosive postscript that sounded the alarm about the danger to the Party posed by Stalin and called for his removal as general secretary. The Opposition leaders, who had heretofore helped suppress circulation of the document under the pressure of Party discipline, decided to endorse the
Times
version of the testament as authentic. This infuriated Stalin, who used the occasion of the Politburo
meeting to launch a blistering attack on his rivals, demanding their complete submission.

When Stalin was finished, Trotsky rose to protest against this diatribe, warning that Stalin’s malevolence posed a threat to the very existence of the Party. In that moment, Trotsky appears to have been overwhelmed by a feeling of liberation, as though someone had untied his hands. Turning to Stalin, he pointed an accusing finger at him and declared: “The First Secretary poses his candidature to the post of gravedigger of the revolution!” Stalin turned pale and became flustered, then rushed out of the hall, slamming the door behind him. The meeting ended in an uproar. The next morning the Central Committee voted to remove Trotsky from the Politburo.

Trotsky’s outburst had dramatically escalated the crisis. His own allies were dismayed that he had needlessly insulted Stalin. Immediately after the Politburo session, several comrades convened at his Kremlin apartment, where Natalia awaited his return. Among them was Yuri Pyatakov, who was especially upset. “You know I have smelled gunpowder, but I have never seen anything like this!” he said, gulping down a glass of water. “This was worse than anything! And why, why did Lev Davidovich say this? Stalin will never forgive him unto the third and fourth generation!” When Trotsky entered, Pyatakov confronted him: “But why, why have you said this?” Exhausted but calm, with a wave of his hand Trotsky brushed the question aside. The damage had been done; the breach with Stalin was irreparable.

Trotsky would recall this episode several years later, as reports of the arrests and deportations of his family members in the USSR reached him in France. “At the time,” he wrote in his diary in 1935, “the words about my children and grandchildren seemed remote, rather a mere turn of phrase. But here we are—it has reached my children and my grandchildren…what will become of them?”

Now, in February 1938, in shock from their most tragic loss, Trotsky and Natalia once again had occasion to recall Pyatakov’s oracle and to contemplate Stalin’s vengefulness. Yet the enigmatic circumstances surrounding Lyova’s death cast doubt on the culpability of the gravedigger in the Kremlin. Whether Lyova died a natural death or was murdered is a mystery unlikely ever to be resolved.

Earlier that month, Lyova had published a special issue of the
Bulletin of the Opposition
devoted to the recently issued not-guilty verdict of the Dewey Commission. The publication of the
Bulletin
came as a relief both to Lyova and to his father, who had become impatient by its delayed appearance. In his February 4 letter to Trotsky accompanying a copy of the proofs, Lyova gave no hint of his failing health: the sharp abdominal pains, the loss of appetite, the lassitude.

On February 9 Lyova’s appendicitis became acute. In part out of mistrust toward the French Trotskyists, he decided to avoid the French hospitals and instead chose to enter a small private clinic owned and run by Russian émigré doctors and staff. The clinic employed both Red and White Russians, spanning the entire spectrum of political enmity toward Trotsky, with the inevitable Stalinist police informants among them. Lyova registered at the clinic under the false identity of a French engineer, using his companion Jeanne’s family name, Martin. Evidently he was unconcerned that his illness or the effects of the anesthesia might induce him to speak in his mother tongue.

Emergency surgery took place that same evening and the patient appeared to be recuperating well, until the night of February 13 and 14, when he was seen wandering the unattended corridors, half-naked and raving in Russian. He was discovered in the morning lying on a cot in a nearby office, critically ill. His bed and his room were soiled with excrement. A second operation was performed on the evening of February 15, but after enduring hours of agonizing pain, the patient died the following morning. Lyova was a week shy of turning thirty-two.

According to the doctors, the cause of death was an intestinal blockage, but Trotsky and Natalia could only assume that their son had been poisoned by the GPU. An autopsy turned up no sign of poisoning or any other evidence of foul play, yet Lyova’s relapse seemed unaccountable to his parents, who retained an image of their son as a vibrant young man. And if poison was not involved, then why had one of the doctors asked Jeanne, just before Lyova’s death, if he had recently spoken of suicide? Then there was the matter of the Russian clinic, a choice that must have seemed perverse, especially considering that one of the family’s most trustworthy friends in Paris was an eminent physician who could have arranged for Lyova to have the best medical care.

Such were the perplexities that afflicted the grieving parents, who secluded themselves in their bedroom at the Blue House. Joe Hansen recalled hearing Natalia’s “terrible cry”—perhaps at the moment she was told the news. Otherwise silence reigned over the house. For several days, the staff caught only an occasional glimpse of Trotsky or Natalia, and the mere sight of them was heartbreaking. Tea was passed to them through a half-opened door, the same ritual as five years earlier when they learned of the suicide of Trotsky’s daughter Zina in Berlin. Yet for Trotsky the loss of Lyova was indeed incomparable. As he explained in a press release on February 18, “He was not only my son but my best friend.”

L
YOVA WAS ONLY
eleven years old at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. He idolized his father, who once allowed the boy to accompany him to the front on his armored train. Lying about his age, Lyova joined the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, before reaching the minimum age and later moved out of his parents’ Kremlin apartment in order to live in a proletarian student hostel. When Trotsky led the Opposition against Stalin, Lyova plunged headlong into its activities, dropping out of technical school to become his father’s closest aide and bodyguard. “Lyova has politics in his blood,” Trotsky remarked approvingly. When the Opposition went down to defeat at the end of 1927, Lyova decided to leave behind his wife and son and join his parents in exile.

On the evening of January 16, 1928, Trotsky, Natalia, and Lyova were preparing to depart a wintry Moscow by train for Central Asia. Their baggage had been taken to the station ahead of them, and the family gathered in the apartment Trotsky and Natalia had occupied since moving out of the Kremlin the previous autumn. They were joined by twenty-year-old Seryozha, whose aversion to politics had recently mellowed, in part due to his father’s tribulations. As the evening progressed, the family assembled in the dining room to await the police. The train was scheduled to depart at 10:00 p.m. As they nervously watched the clock, the appointed hour passed and they puzzled over this.

Shortly afterward, a GPU official telephoned to inform Trotsky that his departure would be delayed for two days. This produced further
puzzlement until friends arrived with the news that a “tremendous demonstration” by Trotsky’s supporters at the station had caused the postponement. They described an unruly scene of resistance around the railroad car reserved for Trotsky. His supporters set up a large portrait of their hero on the roof of the car, as people cheered and shouted “Long live Trotsky!” Demonstrators blocked the tracks and clashed with the GPU and the local police, which led to casualties on both sides and arrests.

The mood at Trotsky’s apartment was suddenly buoyant. For the next few hours, jubilant supporters kept telephoning with descriptions of what had transpired at the station, and deep into the night family and friends turned over the possibilities. Late the next morning the doorbell rang and two women friends entered. A moment later the doorbell rang again and the apartment filled with GPU agents in civilian clothes—a surprise abduction was under way. Trotsky, still in his pajamas, was handed an arrest order but did not intend to cooperate. He and Natalia and the two guests locked themselves in a room, and tense negotiations ensued through the glazed glass door, until the agents decided to telephone for instructions. The calm was broken by the sound of shattering glass, as an arm reached inside to unlock the door.

One of the GPU men on the scene, a former Red Army officer named Kishkin who had often accompanied Trotsky on his armored train, behaved oddly, as though distressed by the Red commissar’s reversal of fortune. As the agents broke through the door he kept repeating, “Shoot me, Comrade Trotsky, shoot me.” Trotsky replied coolly: “Don’t talk nonsense, Kishkin. No one is going to shoot you. Go ahead with your job.” They found Trotsky’s slippers and put them on him, then his fur coat and winter hat. Still he refused to move, at which point the policemen lifted him in their arms and began to carry him off.

Natalia hurriedly pulled on her snow boots and fur coat and walked out to the landing. The door slammed behind her and she heard a commotion on the other side of it. A moment later she watched as the door flew open and her two sons burst out, followed by the women guests. “They all forced their way through with the aid of athletic measures on Seryozha’s part.” Descending the stairs, Lyova frantically tried to rally support, ringing every doorbell and crying out, “They’re carrying
Comrade Trotsky away!” His efforts were hopeless. “Frightened faces flashed by us at the doors and on the staircase,” Natalia remembered.

Seryozha sounds like a real bruiser. At one point during the drive to the train station the policemen had trouble containing him inside the speeding car. He tried to jump out near the workplace of Lyova’s wife in order to alert her to her husband’s unscheduled imminent departure. As frigid air rushed in through the open door, the agents struggled to restrain the young athlete and appealed to Trotsky to convince his son to relent.

When they arrived, Trotsky had to be lifted out of the car and carried into the station, which was nearly empty: this time there would be no protesters to obstruct his departure. A desperate Lyova tried to recruit supporters from among the scattering of railway workers, shouting, “Comrades, look! They’re carrying Comrade Trotsky away!” A GPU agent named Barychkin, someone who used to accompany Trotsky on his hunting and fishing trips, grabbed Lyova by the collar and tried to cover his mouth with his hand. Natalia says that Seryozha intervened with “a trained athlete’s blow in the face,” which forced the policeman to retreat. This was no proud mother’s idle boast. Several years later Trotsky recorded in his diary that Natalia was tormented by the thought that this “thoroughly corrupted and depraved” GPU man would be allowed to take his revenge on Seryozha in his prison cell. “He will remind Seryozha of that now,” she told her husband.

Trotsky, Natalia, and Lyova were placed in the railroad car for the first stretch of the journey to Alma Ata, in Kazakhstan. During the ensuing year of internal exile—Lyova’s apprenticeship in the art of conspiracy—he served as his father’s liaison with Trotskyists throughout the USSR. Trotsky wrote proudly of his son’s contributions in this period, “We called him our minister of foreign affairs, minister of police and minister of communications.” When Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union the following year, Lyova decided to accompany his parents, although he was not formally exiled himself. On Turkey’s Prinkipo island, he assisted Trotsky in the writing of his autobiography and his history of the Russian Revolution, served as editor of the
Bulletin of the Opposition,
and helped direct the assortment of parties and groupings that constituted the incipient international Trotskyist movement.

A few months into his Turkish exile, Lyova became homesick for Moscow and his family, and he decided to attempt to return to the USSR. He applied at the Soviet consulate in Istanbul, but several weeks later he was informed that his request had been rejected. He now had no alternative but to continue as his father’s aide-de-camp. Relations between Trotsky and Lyova were never easy, and they became increasingly fraught under the pressures of working together in isolation in a foreign land. Anyone who served as Trotsky’s secretary could testify that he was difficult to please, but only Lyova knew how difficult it was to please his father. Sensitive by nature, Lyova was deeply wounded by his father’s carping criticisms of his efforts as “slipshod,” “slovenly,” and worse. Trotsky was aware that his severity could be oppressive, but apparently he did not fully grasp its toll.

Lyova’s involvement with a woman placed a further strain on his relationship with his father. She was Jeanne Molinier, the wife of Raymond Molinier, at the time one of Trotsky’s most valued French followers and a frequent visitor to Prinkipo. At the end of one of the couple’s visits, Raymond returned to Paris alone, and not long afterward Lyova and Jeanne began an affair. Jeanne at first considered it no more than a fling, while Lyova took the matter so seriously that he even threatened to commit suicide unless Jeanne agreed to live with him. Trotsky strongly disapproved of the liaison, and a few years later, when the French Trotskyists split into two rival groups, he had even more reason to do so, as Jeanne sided with the renegade faction led by her former husband against the orthodox group under Trotsky and Lyova.