Trotsky (14 page)

During Trotsky and Natalia’s two-year sojourn in France, which began in the summer of 1933, father and son were able to confer directly on political and other matters, especially during the winter of 1933–34, when Trotsky lived in Barbizon, thirty miles outside Paris. Trotsky was later forced to move to Norway, which left Lyova alone to absorb the shock of the Moscow trial in August 1936. Lyova remembered these Old Bolsheviks as family friends from his childhood days. Lev Kamenev had been an uncle to him. Now prosecutor Vyshinsky railed against them as “scum” and “vermin.” The very fact of such a trial was astonishing; its outcome was inconceivable. On a Paris street, when Lyova read the news that all sixteen of the accused had been executed, he became hysterical, bawling uncontrollably, with no concern to hide his face. People stopped and stared as he walked by, crying like a child.

That autumn, when the Norwegian government, under pressure from Moscow, interned Trotsky and Natalia, the somewhat shy and in
secure Lyova was forced to emerge from his father’s shadow. The trial itself made this inevitable by charging both Trotsky and his son with having masterminded an elaborate conspiracy to bring down the Soviet regime. This frame-up needed to be exposed, and with Trotsky in confinement the responsibility fell on Lyova. With vital assistance from Van, he produced a careful refutation of the purge trial evidence under the title
The Red Book on the Moscow Trial,
published in French, German, and Russian. In Norway, Trotsky was allowed to read a copy. “I became completely engrossed,” he later wrote in admiration of his dead son. “Each succeeding chapter seemed to me better than the last. ‘Good boy, Levusyatka!’ my wife and I said. ‘We have a defender!’ How his eyes must have glowed with pleasure as he read our warm praise!”

Trotsky and Natalia in the patio of the Blue House, 1937.

Albert Glotzer Papers, Hoover Institution Archives

When the second Moscow trial began, Lyova’s parents were in distant Mexico. Once again, old comrades and family friends were arrested as “enemies of the people” and confessed the most fantastic of crimes, carried out with inspiration and assistance from abroad by Trotsky and Lyova. Victor Serge, the Brussels-born Russian Trotskyist writer who won his release from Soviet captivity in 1936 as a result of a campaign by left-wing writers and activists—a rare bit of good fortune—came to Paris and sought out Lyova. “More than once, lingering until dawn in the streets of Montparnasse,” he recalled, “we tried together to unravel the tangle of the Moscow trials. Every now and then, stopping under a street lamp, one of us would exclaim: “We are in a labyrinth of sheer madness!’”

It was around this time, in the first weeks of 1937, that Lyova began to have concerns about his safety. He sensed the presence of a spy in his midst, and he wondered if the GPU might try either to kidnap him or to kill him and make his death look like something other than murder. He published a statement in a Paris newspaper declaring that he was of sound health, both physically and mentally, and that were he to die suddenly, it would likely be as a victim of Stalin’s secret police.

Lyova’s relations with his father came under increasing strain as Trotsky and his staff prepared for the Dewey Commission hearings that April. Documents were urgently required, chiefly depositions from European witnesses in order to expose the many internal contradictions of the evidence presented in Moscow. Much of this burden fell on Lyova, who initially questioned the value of such a counter-trial. As Trotsky’s demands proliferated, so did his reproaches of his son for delays and incompetence. The success of the hearings in Coyoacán brought only partial relief, because the commission continued its investigations from New York City.

“I am a beast of burden, nothing else,” Lyova complained to his mother that summer. “I do not learn, I do not read.” He had precious little time and energy to devote to his studies of math and physics at the Sorbonne, his third attempt—after Moscow and Berlin—to complete an engineering degree. Money was a constant source of worry, both in Paris and in Coyoacán. To cover expenses he proposed to take a job in a factory, dismissing his mother’s suggestion that he earn a living as a
writer. “I cannot aspire to do any literary work; I do not have the light touch and the talent that can partly replace knowledge.”

Lyova was depressed, and perhaps, as speculation has it, his condition impaired his judgment, which led him to enter a Russian clinic pretending to be a French engineer. Van, whose French upbringing and acquaintance with Lyova make his testimony authoritative, calls this disguise “a ridiculously transparent pose,” even had Lyova been in perfect health. “In two minutes, other Russians could not have failed to realise that he was Russian.” It turns out, however, that the transparency of Lyova’s deception, and the fact that he ended up roaming the corridors speaking delirious Russian, probably made no difference. The fact is, the moment he set out from his apartment on rue Lacre-telle for the clinic, his closest comrade picked up the telephone and alerted the GPU.

His real name was Mark Zborowski. In the movement he went under the pseudonym Étienne. His GPU code names were “Mack” and “Tulip.” He was born in Russia, near Kiev, in 1908 and later emigrated with his parents to Poland, where at some point in the 1920s he took up radical politics, joined the Communist Party, and served time in prison for organizing a strike. In 1928, he and his wife moved to France, where he seems to have become something of a professional student, first in Rouen, then in Grenoble, then in Paris at the Sorbonne, where he decided to specialize in ethnology, eventually obtaining a degree at the École des Hautes Études. Perennially hard up for money, he was easily recruited by the GPU. By befriending Jeanne he was able to infiltrate Lyova’s circle, making himself useful and, before long, indispensable as Lyova’s personal assistant. One quality that set him apart from the other Trotskyists in Paris served to ingratiate him with Lyova: the two men could converse together in Russian.

Looking back on Zborowski long after his identity as a spy had been exposed, Van remembered a man with a “sullen, frowning face” and a “colorless manner,” who behaved “rather like a mouse. He did not make himself conspicuous in any way…. There was nothing you could grapple with in him, except his insignificance.” As it happens, Lyova suspected that the mouse might be a rat. His doubts about Zborowski would come in waves lasting five or six days, but after each wave re
ceded, their friendship was restored. Lyova never told Trotsky about his suspicions, which over time seem to have evaporated entirely.

So complete did Lyova’s trust become that he granted Zborowski access to his mailbox and to Trotsky’s most confidential files, some of which were stored in Zborowski’s apartment. Before leaving Paris for a few weeks in August 1937, Lyova wrote to his father: “In my absence, my place will be taken by Étienne, who is on the closest terms with me here, so the address stays the same and your missions can be carried out as if I were in Paris myself. Étienne can be trusted absolutely in every respect.” Based on this and similar evidence, Van judged Lyova’s blindness toward Zborowski to be “astonishing”—although Van himself had to confess, “I never had any special suspicions about him.”

It seems that Zborowski’s role was limited to that of informant and finger man, as in November 1936 when thieves made off with a portion of Trotsky’s archives stored in an apartment on rue Michelet—files that ended up in the Kremlin. Zborowski kept Moscow thoroughly acquainted with the activities of Trotsky and Lyova, who were assigned the unimaginative code names “Old Man” and “Sonny.” Lyova came to confide in Zborowski and these confidences were passed along to Moscow in top secret reports. One item in particular must have come under special scrutiny. At the end of the second Moscow trial, in January 1937, Lyova is supposed to have remarked to Zborowski: “There’s no reason to hesitate any longer, Stalin must be killed.” This sounds like one of Lyova’s emotional outbursts, but Zborowski framed it as an endorsement of assassination.

To judge from these police files, in the month of November 1937 Lyova was experiencing some kind of mental crisis. One explanation for this was a letter he had received from his father rejecting a proposal put forward by Lyova’s comrades that he leave Paris for Mexico. Lyova learned of Trotsky’s decision at a time when he had begun to fear for his life. The source of his alarm was the circumstances surrounding the recent defection of Ignace Reiss, a Soviet spy based in Europe. Reiss went into hiding after being ordered to return to Moscow, the first of several such desertions by men who had good reason to believe that their next trip home would be their last. Having orchestrated the murders of many of Lenin’s closest comrades, Stalin was now intent on
exterminating those who knew about his crimes, starting with the inquisitors behind the show trials. Reports began reaching agents abroad about a bloodbath of their old comrades in the Cheka—the original name for the Soviet secret police—a purge that extended to the upper reaches of the GPU.

Reiss made contact with Trotsky’s allies and informed them that Stalin had decided to “liquidate Trotskyism” outside the USSR. He described the methods of torture and blackmail used to extract the purge trial confessions and portrayed doomed Trotskyists facing death with cries of “Long live Trotsky!” Reiss declared his loyalty to the Fourth International.

The liquidation of Trotskyism abroad, it turned out, began with Reiss himself. On September 4, 1937, his bullet-ridden body was found on a Swiss road near Lausanne where he had been lured to his death. The police ascertained that the gang that killed him had been tailing Lyova and had earlier in the year laid a trap for him near the Swiss border, an appointment with death that his ill health prevented him from keeping. The investigation revealed that the GPU was receiving detailed information about Lyova’s movements and activities, including the fact that he had arranged a rendezvous with Reiss two days later in the northern French city of Reims. Had Reiss eluded his killers in Switzerland, a GPU hit squad was waiting for him in Reims.

Against this sinister background, Lyova’s friends in Paris wrote to Trotsky and Natalia in early November 1937 urging them to persuade Lyova to get out of France and join them in Mexico. Lyova was sick, exhausted, and in danger, yet convinced he was “irreplaceable” in Paris and must “remain at his post.” This was not the case, they insisted. “He is able, brave, and energetic; and we must save him.”

Trotsky probably withheld these admonitions from Natalia. He replied to these friends that Lyova would be forced to lead the life of a
“demi-prisonnier”
in Mexico, which should serve him only as
“le dernier refuge.”
Trotsky also wrote directly to Lyova to quash the idea of his withdrawal from Paris. In the event that the French government decided to expel him, “Mexico always remains a possibility,” he assured his son; in the meantime, however, Lyova could count on the protection of the French police, which had assigned him a special guard after the
Reiss murder. Whatever his feelings were about the prospect of moving in with his father, Lyova may have been discouraged by his preemptive settlement of the matter.
“Voilà, mon petit,
this is what I can tell you,” Trotsky concluded on an eerily fatalistic note. “It isn’t much. But…it’s all. Naturally, you should keep whatever money you can collect from the publishers. You will need it.” He signed off in his own hand:
“Je t’embrasse. Ton Vieux.”

A GPU report from this period depicts “Sonny” as alcoholic and depressed. On one occasion, after several continuous hours of boozing, he apologized to “Mack” and “almost in tears begged his forgiveness for having suspected him of being an agent of the GPU when they first met.” He also confessed that he had “lost all faith” in his father’s cause as early as 1927, and that wine and women were now more important to him than anything else. Secret police reports of this type, written to satisfy the spymasters back in Moscow, must be approached with a great deal of skepticism. But if what Zborowski told his GPU handlers approximated the truth, it indicates that Lyova was in a downward spiral when appendicitis struck.

The Soviet intelligence officer who later organized Trotsky’s murder claimed that he and his colleagues were stumped when they learned of Lyova’s death. No one stepped forward to take the credit; no decorations were given out in secret ceremonies in the Kremlin. Nor, decades later, did the partial opening of the KGB archives help to clarify matters, though perhaps the orders to liquidate “Sonny” were issued verbally or the written evidence was destroyed once his case was closed. If so, this raises the question of what incentive there was to eliminate Trotsky’s son at a time when his most trusted comrade was a Soviet police informant. Or was Lyova’s murder—if murder it was—simply a way to lash out at Trotsky?

Mourning their loss, Lyova’s parents grappled with the deeper mysteries. “Both of them have aged terribly in this one day,” Hansen wrote on
February 17, the day after that blackest day. “Poor poor Natalia. She is absolutely prostrated. When the news was broken to the OM, he said, ‘This is the finish of Natalia.’ They have remained in their room without coming out, windows and doors closed, the room in darkness. They are utterly agonized.” As a precaution, the staff decided to remove the small automatic pistol that served as a paperweight on Trotsky’s desk.