Trotsky (17 page)

The residents of the Blue House anticipated a frontal attack. Every contingency had to be considered. Van made inquiries about procuring gas masks and a machine gun. As it turned out, however, the next assault assumed a familiar form. In Moscow, another show trial had begun.

The “Trial of the 21,” the third and most grotesque of the Moscow show trials, opened on March 2, 1938. The most high-profile defendant was Nikolai Bukharin, at one time a popular figure and a favorite of Lenin. A leading Bolshevik theorist, Bukharin was for years editor of
Pravda,
and in the 1920s the leader of the Party’s right wing. Among his co-defendants in the dock were some fellow Old Bolsheviks and, a strange sight, Genrikh Yagoda, the former head of the GPU. The fact that the man who had exposed the Trotskyist conspiracy in the first trial had now been unmasked as Trotsky’s agent was one of the more bizarre features of this extraordinary spectacle.

The indictment had a familiar ring. The defendants were accused of forming a “Right-Trotskyist Bloc” for the purpose of overthrowing the Soviet regime and restoring capitalism. Toward this end and acting in conjunction with the intelligence services of Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and Poland, they had conspired to carry out a variety of criminal acts, including sabotage, murder, and mass poisonings of workers. Bukharin, among his many other crimes, was charged with plotting to assassinate Lenin in 1918. All the defendants eventually confessed their guilt, and all but three were executed immediately, including Bukharin, the rest within a few years.

Once again, Trotsky was placed at the center of the conspiracy, as was Lyova, now conveniently unavailable to defend himself. Trotsky’s study at the Blue House was transformed into a war room. Newspaper reports about the trial testimony were carefully scrutinized for contradictions and outright absurdities, which were then made the subject
of daily press releases. For Trotsky, this was the third time around, and yet he could hardly believe his eyes as he read the fantastic confessions of the accused. “It all seems like a delirious dream,” he said. This time, however, he was not nearly so isolated. The Dewey Commission had recently delivered its verdict condemning the first two trials, and Dewey himself now denounced the third proceeding from New York, where for many beleaguered sympathizers of the Soviet Union the execution of Bukharin was the last straw.

Lyova’s death and Bukharin’s trial gave a boost to the New York Trotskyists as they sought to raise the funds necessary to improve security at the Blue House. Trotsky personally took part in the effort, declaring, “I will not be accused that I offered a too easy victory to the G.P.U.” Two days after the trial ended, on March 15, Hank Stone, the first chief of the guard, arrived in Coyoacán.

Stone, whose real name was Henry Malter, was a thirty-year-old military engineer and officer in the New York National Guard. He had been a Trotskyist since 1930, when he joined the Spartacus Youth League. In 1937 he volunteered to go to Spain with the Eugene Debs Column, which was conceived as a non-Communist alternative to the Abraham Lincoln Battalion but never went to Spain. Instead, Stone had to settle for an earful of his friend Harry Milton’s hair-raising tales of the civil war.

Stone’s initial inspection of the Blue House revealed several problems that needed immediate attention, including an appalling shortage of the most basic supplies. There were no tools whatsoever, not even a hammer and nails, nor any tools or spare parts for the Dodge. There were no extra bulbs or fuses and only one flashlight, with dead batteries. A household that was bracing for a machine gun raid or a bomb attack lacked a decent first aid kit.

Firearms were also in short supply. Two of the five handguns were found to be
hors de combat.
These did not include the guns of Trotsky and Natalia, which were in working order, though there was precious little ammunition for any of these weapons, none of which had been cleaned since Hansen arrived the previous autumn. “Some actually looked as though they had cobwebs inside the barrel,” Hank complained.

So much for the existing arsenal. The local comrades promised a
supply of new guns, but Stone became impatient and decided to go shopping. Purchasing guns in Mexico, he was happy to discover, was as easy as “buying bananas.” He bought three .38 Colt revolvers to supplement the new one he had carried down with him, and a hundred shells to add to his own total of fifty. A final acquisition was a .22 Colt to use for target practice, along with a thousand shells.

The budget to support the guard was set at $100 per month, but soon Stone was reporting that he would need at least $150. In fact, during the next two years the guard fund was often low on cash or completely broke, and it became routine for the chief of the guard to harass New York about a long-promised sum of money. In a pinch, he could request a loan from Natalia, who managed the separate household fund supported by Trotsky’s publishing income.

In the wake of the February events, New York arranged for the party’s Minneapolis organization to underwrite the guard at the Blue House. Minneapolis became a Trotskyist stronghold in 1934, during the city’s great truckers’ strike, a protracted and violent conflict that ended with the unionizing of the teamsters. That same year witnessed similar strikes at the Toledo car plants and the San Francisco docks, but only in Minneapolis, home of General Drivers Local 574, led by the notorious Dunne brothers, did the Trotskyists make inroads into American labor.

Minneapolis agreed to contribute financially and also in kind, offering the services of two members of the local union defense guard. Their names were Bill and Emil, and although they were identified at the Blue House simply as the Minneapolis boys, in fact both were experienced picket-line fighters in their mid-thirties. Emil was a gentle giant. Hansen describes him as “a big meaty fellow with a dagger stabbed through a bleeding heart tattooed on his forearm, weighs about 230 or 240 pounds and carries a great paunch full of guts.” Bill was also built to defend his position, an impression reinforced when he smiled, disclosing the absence of six teeth in his left upper jaw.

Hank signed on for six months, Bill and Emil for three, though at the outset it seemed doubtful that the Minneapolis contingent would last more than a few days. The first indication of trouble was their stunned reaction when Hank broached the subject of nightly guard duty. Evidently their job description said nothing about a night shift.
Soon it became obvious to Hank that while he had been warned to expect a prison regime in Coyoacán, Bill and Emil had been promised a Mexican vacation. They were quite willing to assist Hank in strengthening the front door and installing the new lighting and alarm systems. What they found objectionable were Natalia’s many requests for help cleaning the kitchen and maintaining the patio, as well as other chores, such as driving into town with the mail and doing the food shopping. This gave rise to bitter complaints about having to perform “women’s work.”

Most troubling to Hank was Bill’s delinquency as a guard. The problem first came to light one evening shortly after Bill’s arrival, when Trotsky accompanied a guest to the front door at about 10:30 p.m. and found no guard on duty. When Hank questioned Bill about this, “he in polite terms told me to go jump in a lake.” The next night, when Hank came on duty to relieve Bill at 4:00 a.m., a Mexican comrade reported that the recalcitrant gringo had retired at 2:00 a.m. Confronted about this dereliction, Bill threatened to return to Minneapolis. “He has a very independent spirit,” Hank informed New York, “very good on a picket line—but of no value here. Here one demands discipline.”

Food proved to be a major source of discontent. Bill and Emil were incredulous when they realized that their Mexican vacation meant bread without butter and coffee with milk instead of cream. Hank also grumbled about the food placed in front of him, but the teamsters threatened to strike. Since Lyova’s death, Trotsky and Natalia took their meals in their room, but Natalia continued to set the menu and resisted making adjustments for the sake of Bill and Emil. Hansen was amused by their plight: “They cannot endure any food except potatoes and gravy with whatever goes with potatoes and gravy.” Hank remained grim-faced: “Lack of butter on the table should not create a political crisis.”

A new complication materialized in the third week of April in the person of Bill’s wife, Edith, who showed up unannounced and moved in with Bill. After listening to her husband’s tale of woe, Edith offered to cook. Hank relented and agreed to the operation of a separate kitchen for the guards in their spartan dwelling. The new arrangement lasted
all of ten days. Edith, standing over the stove with a spoon in one hand and a
Ladies’ Home Journal
in the other, served meals up to two hours late. When Hank complained, Edith refused to cook anymore. Bill and Edith then began to eat all their meals in the city, which is where Bill spent most of the day.

It was at this very time, toward the end of April, that George Mink was rumored to be in the vicinity. “I believe that a group of Stalin agents headed by ‘The Mink’ has arrived in Mexico, plotting to kill me,” Trotsky told
Time
magazine. A Philadelphia cabby who used to work with Mink begged to differ: “He hasn’t got the brains of a flea! He won’t kill nobody!” This was not the perception in Trotsky’s circle, where Mink was credited with having served as the GPU’s station chief in Spain. He was said to have murdered Andrés Nin, kidnapped Erwin Wolf, and arrested Harry Milton. A ten-year-old photograph of the jackal was located and sent down to Coyoacán, where it was used by the guards for target practice. To judge from Hank’s tales of woe, it is doubtful that the alert about Mink could have had much effect on security at the Blue House. For Bill and Emil, mention of the Butcher of Barcelona must have conjured up visions of a choice cut of beef to go with their potatoes and gravy.

Trotsky had been inspired by the prospect of being guarded by genuine American proletarians; instead, as a scandalized Van remarked about the Minneapolis boys,
“Ils se conduisent ici comme dans une maison de bourgeois.”
In Van’s estimation, Hank and Emil were satisfactory, while Bill was a disaster. His attitude demoralized the entire household, especially Hank, who at one point refused to communicate with Bill except through Van. Most distressing was Bill’s inclination to whistle, sing, and shout in the patio as he passed by the French doors to Trotsky’s study. A reprimand from Trotsky had no effect. When Bill said he would recognize no authority, this evidently included the former People’s Commissar of War.

By the middle of May, Van feared that Trotsky would erupt and fire everyone on the spot. Hank’s demoralization was now complete. “I no longer consider myself chief of guard or anything of the sort,” he wrote to Frankel, who must have squirmed to read this statement in Hank’s latest dispatch, which asked that Milton be sent to Coyoacán.

Bill and Emil were scheduled to be released on June 15, but conspired to skip out four days early. Their departure brought a collective sigh of relief; and yet, as these things happen, the goodbye was sad. The night before, the Fernández family threw a party for them and loaded them down with mementos. Trotsky presented each of them with an autographed photo. Natalia gave them presents, as did Rosita, whose cooking the boys found so uninspired, as well as Armando, the boy helper. Hansen describes an emotional send-off: “The cook cried, Armando cried, and the cook’s little boy, Alfonso, too—his great black eyes spilling tears on his cheeks like the overflow from a dark pool.”

Dry-eyed, Hank stayed on until mid-August, working with a new American guard, Chris Moustakis, recently of Boston, who had a master’s degree in history from Harvard. Having driven down to Mexico in a Plymouth Coupe in search of adventure, he became friends with Hansen, who admired his automobile and recruited him to the cause.

Thanks to Hank, the Blue House was now equipped with an elaborate alarm system, made conspicuous by the clutter of switches and alarms spread throughout the house. Visually more impressive was the effect of the floodlights positioned all along the top of the high blue wall. At night, in the inky darkness of Coyoacán, the house stood out like a fort—or a prison. As a security precaution, two cedars and a pine rising above the wall on the street side had been cut down; the great cedar in the main patio now stood alone. The police, meanwhile, had replaced their small wooden shelter outside the house with a more permanent structure made of bricks and covered with stucco, with slots for guns on all four sides.

Summer rains now drenched the patio, and Trotsky was relieved to have some peace and quiet. The deliberations about who should take Hank’s place only rankled him. From Coyoacán, Sara Weber, his Russian typist off and on since the Prinkipo days, warned New York that LD was “getting fed up with the entire matter. One of these days all the little irritations and annoyances will just get the better of him and he will flatly refuse to have anyone ‘guard’ him.”

Yet every time Trotsky may have been tempted to let down his
guard, along came a reminder of the perils of complacency. In July 1938 it arrived in the shape of a headless corpse floating in the Seine.

The victim was a twenty-eight-year-old German by the name of Rudolf Klement. As a young student from Hamburg, he arrived in Prinkipo in 1933 to serve as Trotsky’s secretary, then followed him to France. He was secretary designate of the inchoate Fourth International, whose founding congress was planned for later that summer. He vanished on July 13. When his beheaded remains were identified several days later, it strengthened Trotsky and Natalia’s belief that Lyova had died at the hands of the GPU.

Among the Trotskyists in Paris, a dark cloud of suspicion had thickened around Mark Zborowski, the man they called Étienne. He had first come under close scrutiny after the theft of Trotsky’s archives on the night of November 6 and 7, 1936. Zborowski was one of only a few comrades who knew the location of these files, and at a tense meeting to sort the matter out, only a strong endorsement from Lyova spared him from an investigation.