Trotsky (19 page)

In his urgent New Year’s Day letter to Frankel, Trotsky proposed the formation of a commission of French comrades to investigate the allegations about Étienne-Zborowski. If they proved to be true, he advised,
the provocateur should be denounced to the French police for his role in the theft of the archives, and in a way that would cut off all possible avenues of escape. At that moment Trotsky sounded convinced, but he could not help suspecting that he was being played. Three weeks later he speculated that the mysterious correspondent was Krivitsky, who had recently arrived in the U.S. Perhaps the defector actually remained in the service of the GPU and hoped to demoralize Trotsky’s camp.

In the hands of the French Trotskyists, Orlov’s warning would likely have led to Zborowski’s exposure and perhaps his arrest. In the event, Trotsky’s instructions never reached Paris. To blame this on the GPU would sound clichéd if not for the fact that Trotsky had singled out Cannon to take the matter up with the French comrades, and Cannon’s secretary was an informant for the GPU. Or perhaps a letter from New York to Paris simply went astray, in which case the real mystery is why no one bothered to follow up on a question of such vital importance. For now, Trotsky assumed that the investigation was moving forward, and he waited to learn the results.

It was Orlov who years later told the story of how Blumkin, the GPU man ensnared in Turkey, had endured his interrogation in a Lubyanka prison cell with remarkable dignity and had faced death with extraordinary courage. “When the fatal shot was about to be fired, he shouted, ‘Long live Trotsky!’” Perhaps Orlov’s telling this story indicates where his sympathies lay, which might account for his effort to warn Trotsky. In any case, Orlov was now powerless to prevent what he had set in motion, and as a result, Trotsky’s time was running out. As GPU station chief in Spain, Orlov had been responsible for the recruitment of a twenty-three-year-old native of Barcelona by the name of Ramón Mercader.

I
n the autumn of 1938, Trotsky began to confront a different sort of threat to his security when his friendship with Diego Rivera began to unravel. On November 2, Diego arrived unexpectedly at the Blue House. It was the Day of the Dead, and the painter was infected with the holiday spirit. “Looking as mischievous as an art student who has played some prank,” as Van describes the scene, Diego walked into Trotsky’s study and placed on his desk a large purple sugar skull on whose forehead was spelled out in white sugar the name of Stalin. Trotsky decided to ignore this holiday offering, which may have disappointed Diego but could not have surprised him. Their conversation was brief, and as soon as the mischief-maker had gone, Trotsky asked Van to remove the offending object and destroy it.

A year earlier, Trotsky would have found a way to accommodate this exhibition of the painter’s irrepressible sense of black humor. Generally speaking, the two men remained on friendly terms. Diego was still the only person allowed to show up unannounced at Trotsky’s door. But their friendship was under increasing strain. That these two disparate personalities would eventually clash was almost predictable. The sequence of events that opened the rift between them can be traced to the summer of 1938, when the French Surrealist poet André Breton paid an extended visit to Mexico.

Breton was the leader of Surrealism, whose theoretical principles he set down in two manifestos in the decade following his break with Dadaism in 1922. He had long been an admirer of Trotsky’s In 1925 in
the journal
La Révolution surréaliste
he published a laudatory review of Trotsky’s eulogistic volume
On Lenin.
Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927, yet he and his Surrealist gang in Paris ultimately refused to knuckle under to the Communists. In 1934 they published a tract called
Planet without a Visa
in support of Trotsky’s efforts to resist expulsion from France. Two years later, Breton joined a French commission of inquiry into the Moscow trials, which ended up serving as a European branch of the Dewey Commission.

Trotsky was pleased to have a major literary figure like Breton in the anti-Stalinist camp, though he was wary of the Surrealist project, which gave off a strong whiff of mysticism. He had not given much attention to Breton’s books, however, and as the celebrated poet and essayist was about to visit Mexico, it was time to bone up. Van arranged to have the essential Breton
oeuvres
sent down from New York, courtesy of art historian Meyer Schapiro.

W
HEN IT CAME
to painting, Trotsky confessed he was never more than a dilettante. In the field of literature, however, he could claim to be an authority. He wrote extensively about literary fiction, beginning during his first exile to Siberia at the turn of the century, when he was a regular contributor to the Irkutsk paper
Eastern Review.
The young radical stood up for literary tradition. In an appreciative essay devoted to Nikolai Gogol in 1902, on the fiftieth anniversary of the writer’s death, Trotsky defended the author of
Dead Souls
—his greatest novel, published in 1842—from those who found his social criticism too timid. When all was said and done, Gogol was the “father of Russian comedy and the Russian novel,” the first “truly national writer,” a forerunner of Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.

“The novel is our daily bread,” Trotsky once remarked. He was especially devoted to the French novelists; Balzac and Zola were among his favorites. He had a strong preference for realist works, a predilection reinforced by his Marxist philosophy. Only literature that was socially conscious truly satisfied him. In two early essays about Tolstoy, he praised the novelist’s prodigious talent for invoking character and atmosphere—his “miracle of reincarnation”—but scorned his narrow focus on the familiar world of aristocrats and peasants and his flights from reality into nature and religion.

In the first decade of Bolshevik power, Trotsky became Soviet Russia’s most influential literary critic and its most effective advocate of freedom in the arts. The idea of proletarian culture was then in great vogue among writers and radical theorists in Moscow and Petrograd. This movement, spearheaded by a group called Proletcult, argued that prerevolutionary art and literature ought to be tossed into history’s dustbin along with the former ruling classes. Lenin, whose personal taste in art was conservative and pedestrian, resisted Proletcult’s radical agenda, which had influential supporters within the Party. Trotsky joined the battle on Lenin’s side.

His major contribution to this debate was one of his finest works,
Literature and Revolution,
published in 1923. Trotsky’s book surveyed the lively contemporary Soviet literary scene, directing pointed criticism at the three modernist movements of the day: Symbolism, Formalism, and Futurism. His principal theme was the indispensability of tradition, even in the homeland of communism. “We Marxists have always lived in tradition,” he admonished, “and we have not ceased to be revolutionaries because of it.” The notion that the art and literature of past epochs merely reflected the economic interests of vanquished social classes he considered vulgar. Great art, he declared, was timeless and classless.

No less misguided was the belief that the dictatorship of the proletariat should extend its reach into the domain of culture. The proletariat’s rule would be brief and transitory, Trotsky advised, giving way to a classless socialist society and with it the first universal culture. In any event, the Russian worker was now a cultural pauper. His immediate challenge was not to break with literary tradition, but rather to absorb and assimilate it, starting with the classics. “What the worker will take from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, or Dostoevsky will be a more complex idea of human personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and of the role of the subconscious, etc. In the final analysis,” he said, “the worker will become richer.”

The central task of the Party, in the meantime, was to foster an atmosphere of tolerance in order to allow Soviet culture to flourish. The Party must be prepared to exercise what Trotsky called “watchful revolutionary censorship” against any artistic movement openly opposed to the Revolution, but otherwise it should assume no leadership role. “Art
must make its own way and by its own means,” he insisted. “The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command.”

Literature and Revolution
is one of Trotsky’s most sparkling works. A tough-minded critic, he could be unsparing when dealing with artists hostile to the Revolution, as in his savage arraignment of the Symbolist poet Andrei Bely, author of the 1916 novel
Petersburg,
now widely regarded as a masterpiece. Trotsky’s book showcases his full virtuosity as a writer: it is replete with aphorisms, telling metaphors, and brilliant turns of phrase. It was here that he introduced the label “fellow travelers” to designate writers who, despite their vital contributions to early Soviet letters, would be able to progress only so far along the road to socialism. Fellow travelers, Trotsky explained, “do not grasp the Revolution as a whole and the communist ideal is foreign to them.”

Trotsky’s reputation for tolerance in the arts left him vulnerable to charges of encouraging bourgeois individualism and spreading defeatism on the cultural front, transgressions that were added to the list of his heresies as head of the Left Opposition. After he was banished from Moscow in 1928, the champions of proletarian culture had their day, surging forward to lead the cultural counterpart to the crash industrialization and collectivization campaigns of the first Five-Year Plan. This tidal wave swept away the independent literary schools and the fellow travelers. Inevitably, the tide then turned against the proletarian writers. In 1932 the Party liquidated all autonomous literary organizations and enforced membership in a Union of Soviet Writers under the direction of the Party.

Soviet writers under Stalin were employed as instruments of state education and propaganda. They were expected to present idealized depictions of Soviet life: the struggle against kulak saboteurs during collectivization, the building of a steel plant at Magnitogorsk in the Urals, the construction of a hydroelectric station in the Ukraine, the rehabilitation of an inmate in a labor camp, and so on. The new style, which was imposed on all the arts, went by the name of socialist realism. A decade after Trotsky had canvassed a richly diverse Soviet literary scene, Max Eastman titled his scathing indictment of Stalinist culture
Artists in Uniform.

All this upheaval took place while Trotsky was in exile. Still a voracious reader of novels, he no longer devoted himself to serious writing about literature, although he occasionally fired off a salvo in the direc
tion of Soviet culture. He was offended most of all by the enlistment of the arts in the cult of Stalin and his minions. “It is impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust, mixed with horror,” he complained, “or to look at reproductions of paintings and sculpture in which functionaries armed with pens, brushes, and scissors, under the supervision of functionaries armed with Mausers, glorify the ‘great’ and ‘brilliant’ leaders, actually devoid of the least spark of genius or greatness.” Stalinist hegemony over the arts, he asserted, would go down in history as an era of “mediocrities, laureates and toadies.”

Not all the laureates and toadies were mediocrities, however, a point Trotsky made using the example of Alexis Tolstoy, a gifted writer of science fiction and historical novels and a distant relative of the great novelist. In 1937, Tolstoy used his talents to promote the leader cult with a civil war novel called
Bread,
which portrayed Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov as heroic defenders of Tsaritsyn on the Volga in 1918. This especially embittered Trotsky, because as war commissar he had removed both men from the Tsaritsyn front for insubordination, even threatening Voroshilov with arrest. Now, as Trotsky looked on helplessly, the Soviet Tolstoy turned this history on its head, elevating the insubordinates and eliminating the true hero of the tale. “Thus, a talented writer who bears the name of the greatest and most truthful Russian realist, has become a manufacturer of ‘myths’ to order!”

Yet Tolstoy, like so many other artists under Stalin, was merely practicing a different form of realism. With the Great Terror filling the prisons and the labor camps,
Bread
was Tolstoy’s insurance against a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Besides, he had long understood on which side his bread was buttered. Voroshilov, recently promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union, had been made head of the Red Army back in 1925, the same year that the city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad.

Trotsky’s reputation as a Bolshevik with an enlightened attitude toward the arts won him a loyal following in literary circles outside Stalin’s
Russia. His arrival in Mexico helped to crystallize the disillusionment with Soviet Communism among a group of radical writers and critics who would later become known as the “New York intellectuals.” For a brief, intense moment, these apostates, among them some of the country’s literary luminaries, present and future, were drawn into Trotsky’s orbit.

This was the era of the Popular Front. In the United States, the Communist Party lined up behind President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, while New Deal liberals came out in support of the Soviet Union. As the gap between radicalism and liberalism narrowed, the Communists enjoyed a spike in membership and influence. Literature followed politics, as liberal writers gravitated toward the party and its front groups, magazines, and writers’ congresses.

These abrupt changes in the Party line inevitably produced disillusionment on the left. Among the disaffected were William Phillips and Philip Rahv, editors of the literary journal
Partisan Review,
founded in 1934 as the organ of the New York branch of the Communist-sponsored John Reed Club. In the autumn of 1936, Phillips and Rahv suspended publication of their magazine, before relaunching it the following year as an independent literary organ of the anti-Stalinist left. The
Partisan Review
editors were not the first leftists to renounce Soviet Communism, but their recast magazine became the most important rallying point of disillusioned radicals for whom Trotsky became a lodestar.

The initial source of their discontent was literary. Radical critics like Phillips and Rahv sought to create a Marxist literary aesthetic, but were repulsed by the “vulgarizers of Marxism” who put political before literary standards. Their chief antagonists were the hard-core radicals associated with the Communist paper
New Masses,
who insisted on a sharp break with the past in promoting a new generation of socially conscious “proletarian” writers. The
Partisan Review
editors argued the need to assimilate the literary achievements of the past, including 1920s Modernism, as exemplified by Proust, Joyce, and Eliot, which was anathema to the orthodox left. Modernism was bourgeois, they agreed, but must nonetheless be preserved as part of what Phillips called the “continuum of sensibility.” The Popular Front strategy’s sudden shift toward
rural, nativist, and patriotic themes intended to appeal to a middle-class audience was the final indignity. Thanks to the financial backing of the painter George L. K. Morris, Phillips and Rahv would be able to publish their magazine without reliance on the Communist Party.

By 1936 these literary discontents were overshadowed by the two great political controversies of the day: the Spanish civil war and the Moscow trials. Spain was supposed to be the great anti-fascist cause, yet France’s flagship Popular Front government failed to come to the defense of the Spanish Republic, while reports out of Spain told of Soviet persecution of the non-Communist left. The bizarre spectacle of the Moscow trials was the subject of endless debate among liberals and radicals. For the skeptics, Trotsky’s condemnation of Stalinism as a betrayal of the Revolution showed how one could reject Soviet Communism without abandoning fidelity to Marxist principles and Leninist ideals.