Trotsky (13 page)

There is no telling how things might have developed had Lyova not gone to live in Berlin in February 1931. The rationale behind this move was to facilitate Trotsky’s leadership of the movement by having Lyova represent him at its organizational nerve center in the German capital. There Lyova would take full control of the
Bulletin of the Opposition,
whose publication would be transferred from Paris. In order to secure a German visa, he enrolled as a student at Berlin’s Higher Technical School. This was no mere ruse, however, as he was intent on resuming his education toward an engineering degree cut short in Moscow. The family’s sadness must have been tempered with relief.
Perhaps the separation would make it easier for Lyova to serve as his father’s indispensable comrade.

As the years passed, the family would have plenty of occasions to consider what Lyova’s fate would have been had he managed to return to the Soviet Union in 1929. The decision to deny him a visa was made at the highest echelon. When informed of Lyova’s application, Stalin said with a sneer, “For him it’s all over. And the same for his family. Reject it.”

Before Lyova’s departure for Berlin, the family was joined on Prinkipo by Zina, the elder of Trotsky’s two daughters by his first marriage. She arrived from Moscow with her son, five-year-old Seva, a blond-haired boy with plumpish cheeks who spoke beautiful Russian, “with the singsong Moscow accent,” in Trotsky’s words. Many years later, Albert Glotzer, a young American Trotskyist who came to Turkey in this period, still remembered Seva’s high-pitched voice calling out to his grandfather, “Lev Davidovich!” boy was embarked on an extended period of upheaval, during which time he would lose, among others, his mother, his uncle Lyova, and then his grandfather, while he himself would barely escape death in the commando raid of May 1940.

It seems certain that Zina was already mentally unstable by the time she moved into her father’s house in Prinkipo. Her younger sister, Nina, had died of tuberculosis in 1928, a victim of the privations and persecution she was forced to endure because of her association with her father, who was in exile in Alma Ata during the final stage of her illness. Nina’s husband had been arrested and exiled, and she had lost her job. As Trotsky’s daughter, she had difficulty getting proper medical care. She died at twenty-six. Her two children were taken in by Trotsky’s first wife, Alexandra, in Leningrad.

Zina was also tubercular, and she received permission to go abroad for treatment. She was allowed to take along only one child, leaving behind her daughter from a previous marriage. Her husband, Seva’s
father, an outspoken Trotskyist, had been arrested in 1929 and deported to Arkhangelsk, near the White Sea. Zina suffered from chronic depression and seemed to believe that close contact with her father could provide a cure.

Of Trotsky’s four children, Zina most resembled him, both physically and in her emotional intensity. She worshipped her father, and yet they barely knew each other. He had left his daughters as infants when he made his first escape from Siberia in 1902, and had had little contact with them over the years. Now father and daughter were to live together under the same roof. This arrangement would last nearly ten months, during which time the tension between them mounted until the lid almost blew off.

In Moscow Zina had been active in Opposition politics and twice had been detained by the police. Arriving in Turkey, she hoped to be welcomed as one of her father’s trusted disciples. Trotsky, however, refused to entertain the idea, not least because Zina’s increasingly evident instability made it impossible to trust her with confidential information. Zina was told that as she intended to return to Moscow after her convalescence this arrangement was for her own protection, though she took it instead as a form of rejection. She was intensely jealous of Lyova for his close collaboration with Trotsky, and during the brief period they overlapped in Turkey the two half-siblings clashed. Even more perilously, Zina competed with Natalia for Trotsky’s affections, which led to angry scenes between father and daughter, and when Trotsky raised his voice, Zina fell apart. “To Papa,” she often said, “I am a good-for-nothing.”

Zina’s lungs responded to treatment, but her mental health deteriorated. She was prone to fits of anger and delirium. Trotsky began to encourage her to go to Berlin for psychoanalysis, a proposal she resisted until he prevailed. She departed from Turkey near the end of 1931, leaving young Seva behind. According to Zina, in their final conversation her father said to her: “You are an astonishing person. I have never met anyone like you.” “He said that,” she told Lyova, “in an expressive and severe voice.”

In Berlin, she continued to slide—with some assistance from the Kremlin. On February 20, 1932, the Soviet government deprived
Trotsky and all his family members abroad of their Soviet citizenship. For Zina, this meant that she would never again be able to see her daughter, her husband, or her mother. At the same time, she sensed her father drifting away from her emotionally, and increasingly she blamed her condition on the growing distance between them. Lyova saw her occasionally, and one such encounter left him shaken. “Zina is terribly oppressed, depressed, she looks utterly destroyed,” he wrote to Trotsky. “I pity her, Papochka, very, very much. It’s painful to look at her.” Lyova urged his father to write to Zina, but Trotsky was incapable of sending his daughter the kind of letter she was increasingly desperate to receive.

Trotsky, meanwhile, was angry that his daughter had left Seva in his care. “Mama is tied down both hands and feet by Seva,” he complained to Lyova in June 1932. “We must settle the question of Seva as quickly as possible.” Yet Van asserts that when he arrived in Prinkipo in October 1932 to take up his secretarial duties, he found a “gentle, quiet little boy, who went to school in the morning and made himself scarce in the house. Natalia was far from being ‘tied hands and feet’ by him.” Inconvenience aside, one can only speculate on the source of Trotsky’s discomfort. Glotzer recalls that at school Seva “suffered the usual little cruelties inflicted by children” because he was different. One day, he remembers, Trotsky asked him if he could teach Seva how to box. Their first lesson broke down almost immediately, never to be resumed.

Seva was reunited with his mother in Berlin in the final days of 1932, but his presence may have aggravated her condition, perhaps by exacerbating the feeling that her father had rejected her. Two weeks earlier, on December 14, she had written in her final letter to him: “Dear Papa, I expect a letter from you, if only a few lines.” On January 5, 1933, she barricaded herself in her apartment and turned on the gas taps. She had taken steps beforehand to arrange for Seva to be with friends and left instructions to explain to the boy that she was confined in a hospital for infectious patients. “Poor, poor, poor child. But nothing could be more horrible for him than a psychologically deranged mother.” The barricade she constructed inside the door of her apartment ensured that rescue was impossible. She was thirty-one years old.

In Prinkipo, when the news arrived by telegram Trotsky and Nata
lia immediately isolated themselves in their room. The household understood that something terrible had happened, but the nature of the tragedy was revealed only with the arrival of the afternoon newspapers. A few days passed before Trotsky emerged from his room and returned to work. “Two deep wrinkles had formed on either side of his nose and ran down both sides of his mouth,” Van observed. His first act was to compose an open letter to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in which he placed the blame for his daughter’s death on Stalin: by forever cutting off Zina from her family in Moscow, the dictator had driven her to madness and suicide.

This was how Trotsky explained Zina’s death to her distraught mother, Alexandra, then in Leningrad, but she refused to believe it. “I will go mad myself if I do not learn everything,” she wrote to him after receiving the news. As a radical young activist in the southern Ukraine in the 1890s, Alexandra Sokolovskaya had introduced Trotsky, then known as Lev Bronstein, to Marxism. The lovers had married in a Moscow transit prison in 1900, submitting to this bourgeois ceremony in order to be sent jointly into Siberian exile. There, two years later, convinced that her husband was destined for greatness, she encouraged him to escape and pursue his ambitions among the Russian Marxist émigrés in Europe. She remained a loyal Trotskyist through the 1920s and raised two fervent Oppositionist daughters. Now she had lost them both.

“Where is my bright radiant darling,” Alexandra grieved, “where is my Zina?” She quoted a letter Zina sent her a few weeks before her death in which she blamed her illness on her father’s indifference toward her. “Papa never writes to me,” she complained repeatedly. “He will never write to me again.” Nor did she believe she would ever be able to see him again.

“I wrote to her that it was not so tragic as it seemed to her,” Alexandra recounted to Trotsky, “that much is explained by your character, by the difficulty you have expressing your feelings, although often you understand that this has to be done.” Unlike Trotsky, Alexandra was not inclined to attach any special significance to Zina’s loss of her Soviet citizenship. Zina was a “public person” whose life was never focused on her husband or her children. She prized above all her father’s “tender
solicitude, but she did not get enough of it.” Psychoanalysis, it was obvious to Alexandra, was hardly appropriate for someone like Zina. “She was by nature very reserved, and getting her to talk was very difficult. This was a quality she acquired from both of us. And yet here she was forced to talk about things that she didn’t want to talk about.”

Of course, had Zina remained in Russia, Alexandra understood, tuberculosis would have killed her. “Our daughters were doomed,” she declared, and she feared that the same was true of their grandchildren. “I look at them in horror. I no longer believe in life, I don’t believe that they will get to grow up. All the time I expect some new catastrophe.” She wondered whether Trotsky would assume care for Seva.

“It was hard for me to write this letter and it is hard to send it off,” she concluded. “Forgive me this cruelty towards you, but you should know everything about our kinfolk.”

Trotsky’s response to this letter sought to explain and console. He wrote it in his own hand and gave it to Van in a sealed envelope, which he himself had addressed “in his fine handwriting.” The letter was sent by registered mail, according to Van, with proof of delivery requested. “The return receipt never came back.”

Van says that Trotsky’s appearance changed markedly in the first half of 1933. “The two furrows that had appeared on his face after Zina’s death did not disappear and, with time, grew deeper.” His hair grayed considerably, and he began to comb it to the side “instead of wearing it proudly brushed back.” Within those few months, “his features became what they would remain till his death.”

It was also at this time that Trotsky shed the habit of casually remarking about his adversaries, “You know, they should be shot”—a practice he probably adopted during the Revolution, when it was more than just a manner of speaking. “After the spring of 1933,” Van claims, “the word vanished from his vocabulary. He would no longer allow himself this kind of irony.”

Two years later, in the spring of 1935, with the Great Terror under way, Alexandra was arrested and exiled to Siberia. She was shot in 1938.

Trotsky’s sons-in-law, already in exile, were rearrested in 1935 and sent farther on. Both were later shot, Seva’s father in 1936.

That same year, Trotsky’s sister, Olga Kameneva, four years his junior, who was at one time an official in the Soviet foreign ministry, was arrested and imprisoned shortly after her former husband, Lev Kamenev, was executed in the wake of the first Moscow trial. Her two sons were shot in 1936; she was shot in 1941.

Trotsky had an older sister, Elizaveta, who died of natural causes in the Kremlin in 1924. He had an older brother, Alexander, a former director of a sugar factory with whom he had maintained only distant relations since the early 1920s. The elder Bronstein was “unmasked” in February 1938 as an agent of his brother, “the bandit chieftain Trotsky.” He was shot in April. Natalia’s brother, Sergei Sedov, was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to five years in a camp, where he died the following year.

After the arrest of Alexandra, her daughter Nina’s orphaned children were placed in the care of Alexandra’s ailing sister in the Ukraine. They disappeared without a trace.

Zina’s death in Berlin in January 1933 occurred as the National Socialists were storming their way to power in Germany. On January 30, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. A month later came the Reichstag fire which the Nazis used as the pretext to arrest communists and socialists and suspend civil liberties, as they moved toward the establishment of a one-party state. Lyova and Jeanne barely managed to escape Germany, fleeing to Paris, which became the new headquarters of the sparse and struggling Trotskyist movement.

As Trotsky’s chief lieutenant in Berlin and then Paris, Lyova carried a tremendous load. He served as his father’s liaison with the many and fractious Trotskyist groups, edited and published the
Bulletin of the Opposition,
and acted as Trotsky’s literary agent in Europe. Himself penniless, he constantly worried about his parents’ lack of funds. From Moscow he received despairing letters from his wife, Anna, a daughter of the proletariat, who wrote of the hardships suffered by her and their
boy, Leon, and who threatened to commit suicide. She would be arrested and shot one month before Lyova’s death. Their son would vanish completely. Lyova’s relationship with Jeanne was volatile and often contentious. In early 1935 they became surrogate parents to Seva, who arrived from Vienna where he had been sent to live with friends of the family after his mother’s death. Now nine years old, he had forgotten his Russian and French; at school in Paris he was taunted as “le Boche” (the German).

Devotion to his father kept Lyova going, yet his father often made his life miserable. “I think that all Papa’s deficiencies have not diminished as he has grown older,” Lyova wrote to his mother, “but under the influence of his isolation…have gotten worse. His lack of tolerance, hot temper, inconsistency, even rudeness, his desire to humiliate, offend and even destroy have increased.” Having thus unburdened himself, Lyova decided not to mail this indictment, but in any case his mother would not have disagreed with it. “The trouble with father, as you know, is never over the great issues, but over the tiny ones,” she observed, resigned to her husband’s arbitrary ways. “What is to be done—nothing can be done,” was a refrain of her letters to her son, and on one occasion she commiserated, “I am writing as you are, with my feelings and my eyes closed.”