Trotsky (23 page)

While the search for a new house was under way, Trotsky proposed to pay rent for as long as he remained in the Blue House. Rivera rejected this offer, insisting that the house belonged to Frida and thus that the proposal to pay him rent was intended as an insult. Trotsky called this assertion ridiculous—“He wishes to impose his generosity on me”—and offered two hundred pesos as a modest monthly payment. Rivera accepted the money then refused it, so it was donated to the local comrades.

In early March, Trotsky’s staff found a new house, located only a few blocks away, on Avenida Viena. It would need extensive cleaning and renovation before it could be occupied. In the intervening weeks, for the sake of security, the impending move was to be kept quiet. Secrecy was maintained until the second week of April, when Diego made public his break with Trotsky in an interview with the local daily
Excelsior,
a story that was picked up by
The New York Times.
Rivera’s tone was restrained and regretful. Off the record, however, he was heard to say that Trotsky’s interception of his letter to Breton was typical of the methods of the GPU. Diego’s promiscuous application of the GPU label had been troubling Trotsky for some time. In recent months he had similarly unmasked Hidalgo, Múgica, and O’Gorman, among other friends and enemies.

“A tremendous impulsiveness, a lack of self-control, an inflammable imagination, and an extreme capriciousness—such are the features of Rivera’s character,” Trotsky wrote to the Pan-American committee in explanation of Rivera’s repudiation of the Fourth International.
To Frankel in New York he wrote contritely: “You warned us many times about his fantastic political ideas.” Trotsky rehearsed for Frankel how Diego’s “fantastic mind” had concocted his “fantastic slander” and his “fantastic letter” to Breton. “We were very patient, my dear friend. We hoped that in spite of everything, we would be able to retain the fantastic man for our movement…. Now we must show this fantastic personality a firm hand.”

Trotsky, who preferred to attribute his setbacks to the workings of larger historical forces, was not content to cite the dark side of Rivera’s artistic temperament. “In spite of the individual peculiarities,” he explained to Breton,
“the painter’s case is a part of the retreat of the intellectuals”
—by which he meant a retreat from communism. “Our painter is only more gifted, more generous and more fantastic than the others, but he is, nevertheless, one of them.”

Had he lived a few years longer, Trotsky would have been forced to revise this analysis, as Rivera executed his fantastic political U-turn back toward the Mexican Communist Party and toward Stalin. After all of his Trotskyist sins, it would take Rivera several attempts before he was allowed back into the Communist fold. In other words, he had to perform more than the usual amount of groveling and self-criticism required on such occasions. In one application round, he told the tale of how he had secured Trotsky’s asylum in Mexico for the purpose of having him assassinated.

On May 1, 1939, Trotsky’s household made the move to the new residence on Avenida Viena. Trotsky himself was transferred on May 5. At the moment of his departure, he approached his empty desk and placed on it two or three small items, gifts from Diego and Frida. One of these, a favorite pen, had been a present from Frida, who had contrived to get a sample of his signature and have it engraved along the pen’s barrel. He then turned and walked out of his study, under the gaze of Frida, who stood between two curtains holding a bouquet of flowers, in the self-portrait she had dedicated with all her love to Leon Trotsky.

I
t was March 1939, and Pavel Sudoplatov was being driven to an important meeting in the Kremlin in the company of NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, who sat beside him. Sudoplatov was head of the Administration for Special Tasks, an elite unit that specialized in sabotage, abduction, and assassination of enemies of the people on foreign soil. Sudoplatov’s predecessor had been arrested the previous November, and he feared his own arrest after being denounced by a colleague as a “typical Trotskyist double-dealer.” When Beria summoned him, he suspected the worst. The car entered the Kremlin through the Spassky Gate on Red Square, and drove down a dead end alongside the old Senate building. Only then did Sudoplatov realize that Beria was taking him to meet with Stalin.

The two men entered the building and walked up the staircase to the second floor, then down a long, wide, carpeted corridor past offices behind tall doors, like rooms in a museum, Sudoplatov thought. “I was apprehensive and tense with enthusiastic excitement.” He could feel his heart beating as Beria opened the door and they entered an enormous reception room, from where they were led into Stalin’s office.

Stalin, dressed in his trademark gray Party tunic and old baggy trousers, invited his guests to sit at a long table covered with a green baize cloth. Nearby stood his desk, its papers arranged in perfect order. On the wall behind the desk was a photograph of Lenin; on an adjacent wall were images of Marx and Engels. Stalin appeared focused, poised, calm. Sudoplatov was impressed by his self-confidence and ease. The
steady gaze of the dictator’s honey-colored eyes gave the impression that he was listening to every word. Beria, dressed in a modest suit with an open collar, adjusted his pince-nez and came right to the point, recommending that Sudoplatov be appointed deputy director of the NKVD’s foreign department.

Stalin frowned, a reaction that might have completely unnerved an uninitiated visitor, but Sudoplatov had seen this expression before. The pipe in Stalin’s hand, though stuffed with tobacco, was not lit. “Then he struck a wooden match with a gesture known to all who watched newsreels, and moved an ashtray close to him.” Stalin ignored Sudoplatov’s nomination and told Beria to summarize his foreign intelligence agenda. This was Sudoplatov’s third meeting with the Soviet leader, and once again he took note of Stalin’s gruffness, which he assumed was “an inseparable component of his personality, just like the stern look that came from the smallpox marks on his face.”

As Beria spoke, Stalin rose from his chair and began to pace slowly back and forth in his soft Georgian boots. Sudoplatov’s promotion, Beria proceeded to explain, would enable him to mobilize all resources necessary for the liquidation of that most treacherous enemy of the people, the renegade Trotsky. Stalin must have been thinking it was high time.

Ten years earlier, he had chosen to banish Trotsky from the Soviet Union. At the time, he was not yet powerful enough to have his vanquished enemy executed—not openly anyway, and he could not risk an assassination. Deportation, Stalin assumed, would cut off all potential avenues for Trotsky’s political comeback in the USSR. He probably figured that the exile would remain isolated, without friends or funds, and that he would become tainted by his foreign associations. Within a few years, however, as Trotsky denounced him relentlessly in interviews, articles, pamphlets, and books, Stalin came to regret having let the “chatterbox” out of his grasp.

Trotsky knew this instinctively. “Stalin would now give a great deal to be able to retract the decision to deport me,” he wrote privately in 1935. “How tempting it would be to stage a ‘show’ trial! But the danger of exposure is too great.” Once again Trotsky underestimated his adversary, who then cast him in the role of mastermind of the elaborate
conspiracies exposed in three spectacular show trials. Stalin’s bitterness about having allowed Trotsky to get away was assuaged by the exile’s usefulness as a satanic symbol of treason and heresy. Stalin could not have invented another scapegoat like Trotsky. And alarms about one and another “Trotskyist center” in the USSR would not have served Stalin nearly so well had the traitor not been alive and living abroad.

Once the show trials were over, Trotsky had outlived his usefulness. Sudoplatov records Stalin’s complaint, at their March 1939 meeting, about the “treacherous infiltrations” of the Trotskyists in the international Communist movement; once the looming European war broke out, such machinations would endanger the Soviet state by hindering its subversion operations behind enemy lines. Stalin may have portrayed Trotsky as a threat to national security for the benefit of the young intelligence officer sitting before him, but in fact he was under no illusion about the dangers posed by the tiny Trotskyist movement, either to Soviet security or to his own grip on power. Paranoia, in other words, did not influence Stalin’s calculations.

Envy, hatred, revenge—these provided motivation enough for Stalin to want Trotsky dead. A few years after the Revolution he was heard to say: “The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and then go to sleep.” For Stalin there was no greater object of loathing than Trotsky, that “operetta commander” who had dared to ridicule him as the “outstanding mediocrity” of the Party and denounce him as the “gravedigger” of the Revolution.

When Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin and joined Trotsky in opposition in 1926, they carried dire warnings about their erstwhile ally. As Trotsky launched into a critique of Stalin’s policies toward China, Great Britain, and other countries, Kamenev interrupted him: “Do you think that Stalin is now considering how to reply to your arguments? You are mistaken. He is thinking of how to destroy you.” Zinoviev and Kamenev drew up a joint testament, kept safely hidden, which warned that in the event of their “accidental” deaths, Stalin should be held responsible. They advised Trotsky to do the same.

For years Stalin had to remain content with Trotsky’s mere political destruction—although in the purge that followed the Kirov murder in December 1934, he was able to strike at the exile’s family members liv
ing in the USSR. After learning of his son Seryozha’s arrest in Moscow, Trotsky wrote about Stalin in a diary entry: “His craving for revenge on me is completely unsatisfied: there have been, so to speak, physical blows, but morally nothing has been achieved…. At the same time he is clever enough to realize that even today I would not change places with him: hence the psychology of a man stung.”

The idea that the dictator might choose to administer the ultimate “physical blow” still seemed improbable. “Naturally, Stalin would not hesitate a moment to organize an attempt on my life, but he is afraid of the political consequences: the accusation will undoubtedly fall on him.” That was before the Terror and the trials and the cascading charges against Trotsky of treason, espionage, sabotage, and assassination. By 1939, after the bloody annihilation of the Old Bolsheviks and of the Red Army command, and with Hitler’s troops capturing headlines with their occupations of Austria and then Czechoslovakia, Stalin had no inhibitions about hunting down the outlaw Trotsky in distant Mexico. The fugitive fully comprehended the danger.

When Beria was done speaking, Sudoplatov heard Stalin say that the only significant political figure in the Trotskyist movement was Trotsky himself. “If Trotsky is finished the threat will be eliminated.” Previous attempts to organize Trotsky’s liquidation had come to naught. Now the assignment was to be handed to Sudoplatov, an experienced killer. The year before, he had carried out the assassination of the émigré Ukrainian nationalist Yevkhen Konovalets in Rotterdam. Konovalets had a sweet tooth, and Sudoplatov, having gained his confidence, contrived to present him with a booby-trapped box of chocolates. Sitting across a restaurant table from his target, Sudoplatov removed the box from his coat pocket and laid it flat on the table. Shifting the device to the horizontal position activated the timer. The two men shook hands and Sudoplatov left the restaurant. He walked into a nearby haberdasher’s shop, where he purchased a raincoat and a hat. Thirty minutes later, exiting onto the street, he heard a bang that sounded like the blowout of a tire. People began running toward the restaurant. Konovalets was dead.

Stalin instructed Sudoplatov to assemble a team of shock troops to carry out what he called the “action” against Trotsky. If the operation were successful, he pledged, the Party would always remember the ser
vice rendered by the participants, would see to their welfare and that of their families. Then Stalin stiffened and issued an order: “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year.”

The last time Trotsky and Stalin saw each other was in October 1927, at the Central Committee meeting that voted to expel Trotsky from that body. On the drive back to their Kremlin apartment, Natalia did her best to calm her husband, who was highly agitated. “But they cannot tear me away from history!” he declared, a statement that was equal parts defiance and self-consolation. The fact is, however, they had already begun to alter Trotsky’s role in accounts of the Revolution. The Man of October was being remade into the Judas Iscariot of the Party.

Fiercely jealous of his place in history, Trotsky was determined to put up a fight. He would be well equipped to do so, thanks in part to a misunderstanding among Stalin’s policemen. The order for Trotsky’s expulsion from the country said nothing about his personal archives: crates and trunks stuffed full of Soviet-era documents, including copies of his correspondence with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders and the records of the Opposition since 1923. He was allowed to take these incriminating documents with him into exile, together with his personal library. When Stalin found out, he was incredulous. In the aftermath, several people were arrested, including three GPU agents.

The passport Trotsky was handed as he boarded the steamer
Ilich,
leaving Odessa for Istanbul in February 1929, listed him as a writer. This must have pleased him. As a youth he had dreamed of becoming a writer, but he chose instead to subordinate his literary work, like everything else, to the revolution. During the Soviet years, his extended writing projects on literature and culture offered him an escape from the stresses and strains of political life. In exile he would have the opportunity to devote himself to serious writing. He would in fact be compelled to do so in order to support himself, to pay for his protection, and to fund the
Bulletin of the Opposition.
It was these considerations, rather than
vanity, that persuaded Trotsky, not long after he had settled in Turkey, to accept an offer from Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York to publish his autobiography. One year later,
My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography
was selling briskly in English, Russian, German, and French editions.

Trotsky took obvious pleasure in composing the book’s early chapters, which contain vivid recollections of growing up on his father’s prosperous farm in the southern Ukraine, his schooling in Odessa, his turn to radicalism, and his first prisons and Siberian exile. The writing of the later sections, however, which recount his battles with Stalin and the other “epigones,” took a toll on his nerves and his health. Here Trotsky was forced to answer the favorite question of journalists, comrades, and perfect strangers, one he had come to dread: “How could you lose power?” The question was naive, he thought, as if losing power was like losing a watch or a wallet. Once more he had to explain that his defeat came at the hands not of a man but of a machine. It was not Stalin who had triumphed over him, but the ascendant bureaucracy Stalin personified.

The success of
My Life
led to a publishing contract from Simon & Schuster for a book on the Russian Revolution. Trotsky spent the better part of two years on the project, drawing on his memory and imagination, his books and archives, as well as library books that were shuttled back and forth to him in Turkey by comrades in Paris and Berlin. The result was Trotsky’s masterpiece,
The History of the Russian Revolution
, a hugely detailed narrative account of Russia’s upheaval, from the fall of the Romanovs to the Bolshevik coup d’état. Written in Russian, it was published in English translation in three volumes in 1932 and 1933.

The
History
is best appreciated as a work of literature. The narrative pulses with drama and coruscates throughout, as Trotsky switches effortlessly back and forth between the movements of armies and of crowds and the actions of individuals. There are powerful set pieces. An encounter on a Petrograd street during the February days between a demonstration of 2,500 Petrograd workers and a detachment of Cossacks, the czar’s enforcers, is especially memorable, as is the Red Guards’ assault on the Winter Palace during the October insurrection. The portraits of individual actors are sharply drawn. Trotsky subjects the opponents of the Bolsheviks—be they monarchists, liberals, or socialists—to
his corrosive blend of irony, sarcasm, and mockery. Not only are they invariably found guilty of being on the wrong side of history; they are typically both wicked and stupid. George Bernard Shaw once remarked that “When Trotsky cuts off his opponent’s head, he holds it up to show that there are no brains in it.”

Trotsky’s
History,
while free of jargon, is unmistakably the work of a Marxist historian. The author claimed to be objective in his presentation of facts, but he did not pretend to be impartial. Despite the mounting suspense he is able to sustain throughout his narrative, the outcome is never in doubt. Russia must overcome its backwardness by leaping over the bourgeois stage of history directly into socialism. The Provisional Government, personified at the pivotal stage by the charismatic socialist lawyer and politician Alexander Kerensky, is doomed to defeat, as are the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the other rival parties of the Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet.

The masses are the collective heroes of the drama, yet ultimately only the Bolshevik Party can lead the way and seize power in the name of the workers and peasants. It was Trotsky himself who directed the October putsch, but here he goes out of his way to remove himself from the narrative. Instead, as he did in
My Life,
he deliberately places himself in Lenin’s shadow. Without Lenin, Trotsky states explicitly, the Bolsheviks would not have taken power in October, and probably not at all—a remarkable statement from someone who believed that impersonal social forces determined the course of events.