Trotsky (24 page)

Trotsky idolized Lenin, and yet here his elevation of the Bolshevik leader was in part an act of self-aggrandizement. Trotsky’s name was inseparably linked to Lenin’s in the context of the Revolution. Trotsky was Red October’s chief of staff, Lenin’s second-in-command. Thus, in exalting Lenin, he was by implication also lifting himself onto the pedestal. This was intended as a slap at Stalin’s historians, who had begun to portray the dictator as Lenin’s right-hand man from the moment the Party’s leader arrived in Petrograd. Stalin had been famously described as a “gray blur” in 1917. Trotsky’s account leaves him in obscurity.

On the strength of the clamorous reception and respectable sales of
The History of the Russian Revolution,
the American publisher Doubleday, Doran & Company signed Trotsky to a contract for a biography
of Lenin. When he began the new project, he was living in Barbizon, France, some thirty miles south of Paris, where he conducted his research using books brought to him by Lyova. During a sedate autumn and winter of 1933–34, he wrote the initial chapters covering Lenin’s youth. Further progress was stalled when his asylum came under hostile scrutiny and he was forced to move, first within France and then to Norway. In retrospect, the villa on the island of Prinkipo seemed like a writer’s paradise.

When Trotsky arrived in Mexico in January 1937,
Time
magazine gave its readers the impression that the exile was eager to return to work on his biography of Lenin. But Trotsky’s life was in a state of upheaval and his financial situation was extremely precarious. He owed the Norwegian government hundreds of dollars in taxes and he had left behind unpaid medical and legal bills totaling hundreds more. It was only thanks to the generosity of Diego Rivera that he was comfortably situated in Coyoacán.

Trotsky had been counting on income from the sale in the United States of a small book about Stalinism he completed in Norway just before the first trial in August 1936, a work that had already appeared in France as
The Revolution Betrayed.
Instead, he learned that his literary agent in New York, Max Lieber, had failed to sell the manuscript. Nor, it appeared, had he even tried. Moreover, Lieber’s elusiveness had jeopardized potentially lucrative deals for interviews and articles. Trotsky was flummoxed: his agent, he said, was behaving like a “counter-agent.”

“What is the matter with Lieber?” he inquired impatiently of a comrade in New York. “Has he perhaps become connected with the Stalinists?” Indeed, he had. Lieber’s literary agency served as a front for Soviet espionage activity, including that of Whittaker Chambers, shortly to become the most important American defector from Communism.

Once Lieber was dropped, an agreement was quickly reached with Doubleday to publish
The Revolution Betrayed,
which came out in March 1937. But Doubleday was insisting that Trotsky complete his biography of Lenin, for which he had been paid his full advance of $5,000 three years earlier. Yet Trotsky needed income. He figured that a book on the Moscow trials could be the best-seller that would rescue him financially. He began to cobble together from his recent short articles and
other odds and ends a counterindictment he called “Stalin’s Crimes.” Harper & Brothers agreed in principle to bring out such a book, but when plans were made to publish the transcripts of the Dewey Commission hearings, Trotsky felt compelled to abandon his project.

In the summer of 1937, the need for money inspired Trotsky to try his hand at writing magazine articles, but he was quick to realize that his style was “not sufficiently adapted to the average man on the New York street.” He floated the idea of updating
My Life
to include the years since 1929, but he himself was reluctant to take it up. He decided instead to move forward on the Lenin biography, but that effort was cut short early in September by the departure of his Russian typist, who suddenly decided to get married. In December, still adrift and without a typist, Trotsky warned the New York office that his financial position was “extremely acute.”

On February 16, 1938, the day Lyova died, a breakthrough occurred in New York, where Trotsky’s new agent, Alan Collins, of the well-regarded Curtis Brown literary agency, worked out an arrangement whereby Harper & Brothers would buy out Trotsky’s contract with Doubleday. The new deal would require him to write two biographies: first a popular life of Stalin, followed by the monumental study of Lenin. Trotsky would receive $5,000 for the two books.

Overwhelmed by grief at the death of his son, Trotsky could hardly imagine undertaking a biography of the man he assumed had just had him killed. Yet the monetary reward was tempting. By this point, the household was on the edge of insolvency. Natalia was borrowing funds from the Mexican comrades and becoming extremely worried, and there was only so much of this that she was able to hide from her husband. From New York, Jan Frankel wrote an anxious letter to Van saying that unless Trotsky accepted the Harper proposition, they would be unable to implement the plan to increase the guard at the Blue House.

Ten days after Lyova’s death, Trotsky finally relented, signaling to Harper that he found their proposal “totally acceptable.” The truth is, he was not in a position to refuse. As Van advised Frankel:
“Le vieux semble disposé (à contre-coeur).”

Having been warned by the Doubleday editors about Trotsky’s inability to meet a deadline, Harper decided on a hardheaded arrangement
for paying its new author. The $5,000 advance for the two books would be spread out in ten payments of $500 each, delivered at two-month intervals. The British publisher, Nicholson and Watson, would divide its payment of $2,500 for the Stalin book into four installments. The Stalin biography was to be 80,000 words in length and be completed within six months; the Lenin book would be 150,000 words, written during the subsequent eighteen months. The details of the contract were still being negotiated when the first advance check arrived in Coyoacán at the end of April, just as the work was getting under way.

At the time, it was commonly assumed that Trotsky set out to write a life of Stalin as a way to settle scores with his old foe. But in fact, in signing his book contract he raised not the proverbial sword, but the shield. To defend himself from Stalin’s assassins, Trotsky would have to write his biography.

“Beginning in 1897, I have waged the fight chiefly with a pen in my hand,” Trotsky wrote in his autobiography. In 1902, during his first escape from Siberia, he was nicknamed Pero, Russian for the Pen, a tribute to his journalistic achievements in exile. Over the years, he was always obsessing about his pen. And yet most of his literary output since the early 1920s, from his correspondence to his books, he produced by dictation, a practice that enabled him to draw on his skills and experience as an orator.

Listening to Trotsky’s resonant voice as he gave dictation, one could imagine its power when he harangued his troops without the aid of a microphone. Dictating in Russian, he would pace the floor of his study, speaking without interruption for an hour or two, sometimes longer. His secretaries marveled at his ability to conjure up lengthy passages of beautifully crafted prose from a few pages of notes in his hand. The clicking keys of the typewriter signaled their concurrence and urged him forward. Punctuation was left entirely to the discretion of the typist, who understood that Trotsky hated to be interrupted. If asked to
stop or repeat something, he would easily lose his train of thought and his patience.

Trotsky was known as a literary stylist and he worked hard at it. As he wrote to Cass Canfield, the president of Harper & Brothers, after he began work on the Stalin biography: “At least one-third of my working time is devoted to the literary form of the book. I must have a perfect translation.” But a perfect translation is always elusive, and Trotsky’s Russian presented special challenges. He took full advantage of the freedom afforded by Russian syntax to manipulate the word order within a sentence in order to express emphasis or nuance or for dramatic effect. He refused to concede a trade-off between precision and style, and was always trying to bend the rules of English, French, and German grammar. He complained that Max Eastman’s translation of his
History of the Russian Revolution
was full of errors, despite its magnificent style.

For the Stalin biography, a scholar of Russian literature was hired to translate Trotsky’s chapters in New York as each was completed. Unlike in the past, Trotsky himself would not be able to consult books borrowed from a major library. Instead, a comrade in New York would serve as his researcher, while queries could be sent to the Paris comrades, who had better access to old Russian newspapers and other obscure sources. The research and translation phases of the work were thus in good hands, but Trotsky had yet to find a replacement for his Russian typist. After fifteen years of dictation, he had lost the habit of writing by hand, except for short texts. Without the services of a Russian collaborator, he would not be able to meet his deadline.

While the search was under way, a comrade from New York with serviceable Russian was asked to fill in, but Trotsky chafed at the slow pace and the constant interruptions. She was replaced in the first week of May by Sara Weber, who had worked for Trotsky in Turkey and during the previous summer in Coyoacán. She arrived from New York in the first week of May, intending to stay for six months, through the completion of the Stalin book, but a family illness forced her to scale back this commitment. So, while the work proceeded, Trotsky continued to be preoccupied by the search for a permanent typist.

Security concerns complicated the search. In May, Frankel sent word about a candidate in his native Czechoslovakia, a young woman
of eighteen who reportedly was an expert typist in Russian. The hitch was that the woman in question, whose parents had emigrated from the Soviet Union, was thought to be a Communist. Van entered Trotsky’s study and gave him the news. With a theatrical sweeping motion of his left arm, Trotsky exclaimed: “Let her come! We shall win her over!”

Van and Frankel advised against it, but Trotsky was undaunted. “She is a quite young girl of eighteen,” he wrote to Frankel. “I do not believe that she can be a terrible agent of the G.P.U. Even if she comes with some sympathies for the Stalinists and with some wicked intentions against us (which I consider impossible, for nobody would entrust diabolical schemes to a little girl without experience), even in that case we feel strong enough to watch her, to control her, and to re-educate her.” Trotsky, who tended to see the hand of the GPU in unlikely places, here detected nothing but an expert typist with perfect Russian. A month later, he was still importuning Frankel: “A girl of eighteen cannot make conspiracies in our home: we are stronger. In two or three months she would be totally assimilated.”

In August, just as Sara Weber was preparing to leave Coyoacán, Trotsky discovered the Dictaphone. He had resisted the idea a year earlier, but when it turned out that Diego owned one—an Ediphone in need of minor repairs—he felt he ought to give it a try. Like most people of a certain age, Trotsky was initially skeptical of the new technology. Hansen says he behaved “like a peasant shying away from an optician—grandpa never wore no glasses.” Whenever he got stuck, he would run into the patio calling, “You see? You see? Your American machine…it don’t work.” After Hansen showed the Old Man what he had done wrong, “he would make a little hissing sound in his teeth and then settle down again to more dictating.”

Once Trotsky got the hang of it, his enthusiasm for his recording machine was unbounded. He began to bring it into his bedroom so he could dictate at night. A Russian émigré living in Mexico was hired to replace Sara, but she was a novice typist, and soon Trotsky had created a backlog of recorded text. New York was asked to send down a fresh supply of wax cylinders, as well as a shaving machine so they could be erased and reused.

The work moved ahead over the summer and into the autumn,
despite the frequent intrusion of more pressing matters: the French police investigation into Lyova’s death, the battles with Lyova’s widow over custody of grandson Seva and Trotsky’s papers, the Klement murder in Paris, travels with Breton and Diego, and preparations for the founding congress of the Fourth International in Paris that September. There was the usual stack of mail to answer, but Trotsky had sworn off “guerrilla polemics” until further notice. For considerable stretches, the long workdays were devoted exclusively to the Stalin book, with breaks for a meal, a siesta, and sometimes an evening discussion.

Like all historical research, Trotsky’s job was one of excavation. In this case, however, progress was slowed by multiple layers of falsification about the youth and early career of Joseph Djugashvili. The man who became Stalin was born a year before Trotsky, in 1878, to a violent, drunken cobbler in Gori, a small town in Georgia, in the Caucasus, the mountainous southern reaches of the Russian Empire. In 1894 he entered the seminary in Tblisi, the Georgian capital, where he was exposed to nationalist and other subversive influences. He was expelled from the seminary in 1899, the year he became a professional revolutionary and adopted the pseudonym Koba, taken from the hero of a Georgian novel, an intrepid, avenging Caucasian outlaw. In 1902 he was arrested and exiled to Siberia, the first of seven such banishments, from which he made six escapes. The collapse of the Russian autocracy freed him for the final time.

Unlike the better-educated bourgeois revolutionaries living in European emigration, like Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin operated in the underworld of revolutionary politics inside Russia. As his biographer, Trotsky faced the challenge of establishing even the basic facts about Stalin’s movements and activities before 1917. This required a careful sifting through the differing versions put forward in a succession of official histories and in memoirs both friendly and hostile. When did Stalin become a Marxist? Which of the Party congresses abroad did he attend? When did he first meet Lenin? What was his involvement in the bank robberies carried out in the Caucasus to raise funds for the Party? Was Stalin in fact an agent of the czarist secret police, as nagging rumor had it?