by Patrick Iber
Lobbied by Diego Rivera, President Cárdenas granted asylum to Trotsky in December 1936. Trotsky arrived with his wife and grandson in January 1937, taking up residence with Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. Although he had crossed an ocean, Trotsky remained at the center of a campaign by the Comintern against his life and reputation. In 1936 he had been tried in absentia in the Soviet Union for espionage, sabotage, and counterrevolutionary crimes that supposedly dated back to the early days of the Russian Revolution. Those who were put on trial as his coconspirators confessed to elaborate plots and were executed, marking the beginning of a three-year period in which nearly all the old Bolshevik elite was eliminated and hundreds of thousands were killed.
From left to right: Antonio Hidalgo, a liaison between Trotsky and the government of Cárdenas; Trotsky himself; Trotsky’s wife, Natalia Sedova; and Diego Rivera. Photo courtesy Archivo General de la Nación, Collection Enrique Díaz, envelope 61/21.
Many in the Western Left did not believe that such confessions could be forced from people, nor that the Soviet government would invent such an apparently elaborate rationale for mass execution. However, some anti-Stalinists in the United States, mostly members of liberal and social democratic groups, came to Trotsky’s defense. Combative philosopher Sidney Hook had been one of the first to introduce Marxist thought to the United States but came to hate Stalin’s version of it. He might have been a Trotskyist, but he was a poor follower and quarreled with Trotsky in correspondence. Still, he saw Trotsky’s show trial as an opportunity to expose the nature of Soviet totalitarianism and organized a countertrial, with the tacit support of President Cárdenas, that would give Trotsky a chance to address the charges made against him in Moscow. Hook persuaded his mentor, the liberal philosopher John Dewey, to head the Committee in Defense of Leon Trotsky, which met in Mexico City to hear Trotsky’s testimony and examine the documents he presented. The proceedings produced the expected result: a verdict of not guilty.35
During his countertrial Trotsky described himself as a defender of democracy, but what he meant by that term and the way in which his largely liberal judges would have understood it were quite different. Trotsky became an advocate of intraparty democracy after losing an undemocratic struggle for power, not before, and considered a government democratic if it implemented policies on behalf of the proletariat, not because it arrived at its laws with the input of the public. At the end of the presentation of evidence at Trotsky’s trial, Dewey had told him, “If all Marxists were like you, Mr. Trotsky, I would be a Marxist,” and Trotsky had replied, “If all liberals were like you, Dr. Dewey, I would be a liberal.” Subsequent disagreements made it clear that these words were mostly pleasantries, but they did prefigure the kind of “liberal Trotskyism” that some of Trotsky’s former followers would advocate during the Cold War.36
So it was also with Trotsky’s theories of art. Trotsky argued that his Left opposition stood for greater democracy within the revolution, and in the realm of art that implied less power for cultural officials to dictate the acceptable limits for artistic production. This made Trotskyism seem an appealing avocation for those who wanted to maintain revolutionary commitments but found their ideas unacceptable to socialist realist orthodoxy. In New York the group of Trotskyists and near-Trotskyists clustered around the magazine Partisan Review considered themselves culturally avant-garde, and official Communist taste in art vulgar. When the surrealist leader André Breton visited Mexico in 1938 on commission from the French government, he and Trotsky coauthored an artistic manifesto calling for art’s complete freedom from political or business control, and for the free choice of themes and forms of expression: an independent revolutionary art.37
Trotsky and Breton were quick to clarify that their manifesto did not endorse political indifference in art, and that they objected to any attempt to revive any “pure” art that, they argued, “generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction.” The purpose of the artist, they wrote, was to bear witness to the revolution in a time of the death of both capitalism and fascism while rejecting the Stalinist “reactionary police-patrol” spirit. Breton was taken with what he considered the native surrealism of Frida Kahlo, and Rivera, still in his Trotskyist phase, made a few efforts at surrealistic easel paintings and woodcuts. But the most important consequence of Breton’s visit was his collaboration with Trotsky, in which the contours of a Cold War politics that linked anti-Stalinism with the right to “cultural freedom” began to take shape.
In May 1939, for example, Sidney Hook formed the Committee for Cultural Freedom in the United States to press the case against government control of artistic and scientific activity in totalitarian states. Although it opposed both fascism and Communism, it was the latter stance that defined the group, since practically anyone who cared about manifestos was already an antifascist. Countermanifestos proliferated. A group sympathetic to the Soviet Union argued in an open letter that there was a sound basis for cooperation between the United States and the USSR for world peace and freedom, and that “fascists and their allies” were determined to sow suspicion between the Soviet Union and other countries. More orthodox Trotskyists responded to Hook by forming the competing League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism, arguing in the spirit of the Trotsky-Breton manifesto that “the liberation of culture is inseparable from the liberation of the working classes and all of humanity.” Both organizations were relatively short-lived, but the ideas that undergirded Hook’s work would be resurrected during the Cold War. By then, there would be less distance between the liberal and Trotskyist versions of anti-Stalinism.38
Meanwhile, the Comintern’s position was about to change again, perhaps as dramatically as it ever would. In August 1939 the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a pact of nonaggression. For the Soviet Union, this was justified as self-defense, but it put the world’s Communist parties in a bizarre position. Communists whirled to defend the action after years of positioning themselves as fascism’s greatest enemies, now arguing that what would become World War II was a conflict between rival Western imperialisms. Vicente Lombardo Toledano, for example, decided that his newspaper El Popular would begin printing submissions from the German state news agency to provide a more “balanced” view of international affairs.39
With the threat of war, the United States was greatly concerned about the presence of fascist influence and propaganda in Latin America. The U.S. government had formalized the use of peacetime cultural propaganda in Latin America beginning in the late 1930s, when it tried to counter Axis-aligned messages. The great fear was of a fifth column: a group committed to internal subversion that could act at any moment, potentially toppling the governments of Latin America and creating a fascist bridgehead in the Americas. President Roosevelt needed the governments of the Americas to support the United States in case of war and preached, through his Good Neighbor Policy, nonintervention and respect for national sovereignty. Those policies were welcomed by democrats and dictators alike; aiding the U.S. war effort against Nazism was the quickest way for an autocrat to burnish “democratic” credentials on the global stage. But the desire for inter-American peace did create some opportunities to duck the heavy-handed U.S. intervention that the region had experienced in prior decades. When President Cárdenas carried out a key aspect of his program and nationalized foreign oil companies in 1938, U.S. companies protested, but Roosevelt’s government sought a face-saving solution that compensated the companies but accepted the nationalization.40
In an unexpected way, the oil nationalization intersected with the ongoing campaign against Trotsky. Because foreign oil companies had momentarily become the great popular enemies in Mexico, Communists accused him of collaborating with North American oil barons. But there was a stickier charge against him that was partially true: Trotsky, it was said, was collaborating with fascism because of his attempt to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the United States (known as the Dies Committee after it
s chairman, Martin Dies of Texas). The Dies Committee used its investigations of Communist subversion to target the workers in the unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the programs of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, and members of Roosevelt’s administration. A forerunner to his more famous postwar fellow traveler in anti-Communist demagoguery, Joseph McCarthy, Dies used the power of subpoena and citations of contempt to punish those who refused to cooperate with his investigations. The committee was a vehicle for Dies—a racist, a nativist, and a Red-baiter—to persecute the program of the U.S. Left, although it claimed some success in uncovering Soviet spies, including ones within the Roosevelt administration.41
Thinking of the Dies Committee’s potential to disrupt networks of Soviet agents, Trotsky agreed to travel to Texas to testify before it. He planned to deliver a speech that exposed the Soviet secret police’s use of murder as a political weapon while simultaneously calling on workers to rise up in revolution. Trotsky was dissuaded from his plan by some of his American followers. Informed of his intention to call for revolution in his testimony, the Dies Committee reconsidered its decision to invite him, and he was denied a visa to travel to the United States. Still, on May Day of 1940, thousands of Communists marched through the streets of Mexico City and accused Trotsky of “intriguing with Dies and the oil companies against the Mexican people.” On 24 May, Siqueiros, by this time a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, led a sloppy attack in which a gang armed with machine guns and pistols stormed Trotsky’s compound. Siqueiros described the attack—quite wrongly—as revenge for Trotsky masterminding the May Day conflicts in Barcelona during the war in Spain. The attackers got past the gate and fired several shots into Trotsky’s bedroom but failed to check that he had been hit—and he had not, for he and his wife had huddled under the bed. The Mexican government stepped up its protection of Trotsky’s home, and Siqueiros, once located, was jailed for his role in the attack. Siqueiros jumped bail to leave for Chile under an arrangement made by Pablo Neruda, who had recently arrived in Mexico City to serve as Chilean consul.42
If even an abortive effort to use the Dies Committee seemed an ugly bargain for a man of the Left to have made, Trotsky was not alone in judging that the congressional investigation provided him with a reasonable weapon to use against his Communist enemies. Although Diego Rivera had personally broken with Trotsky in 1938, he also sought to use the Dies Committee to disrupt Mexican Communism at the time of the pact between Hitler and Stalin. Similarly denied entry to the United States because of his Communist past, Rivera became an informant for the U.S. State Department in 1940, passing his contact there mostly derivative information about the ongoing work of Mexican Communists whom he considered a danger to Mexico. In 1941 Julián Gorkin too sought to testify before the Dies Committee and was denied entry to the United States for the same reason. These seemingly curious relationships prefigure the alliances that members of the Left, including Gorkin, would make with sections of the U.S. government during the Cold War, each believing that the other could be used to further an anti-Communist agenda.43
In the end, neither Trotsky nor Rivera (nor Gorkin) testified before the Dies Committee, and on 20 August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated when a Spanish Soviet agent who had earned the family’s confidence pierced Trotsky’s skull with a blow of an ice ax. Fearing for his own life after the Siqueiros assault, Rivera had fled the country, gaining entry to the United States by leveraging his contacts in the State Department to obtain a visa. Eventually he reached San Francisco, where Frida Kahlo joined him; Rivera’s 1940 mural for San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exhibition, Pan American Unity, depicts the heroes of Mexican and U.S. independence together, while Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini are painted as ghostly and menacing leaders appearing to rise from a corpse. The words “Gestapo” and “G.P.U.” (referring to the Soviet secret police) intertwine below a blood-tipped ice ax held in Stalin’s hand, correctly identifying Stalin as the intellectual author of Trotsky’s murder.44
In June 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the United States, which feared possible German domination but not that of the Soviet Union, made an ally of a government that was broadly disliked in U.S. government circles. The world’s Communist parties entered a new period of extreme Popular Frontism, suddenly interpreting the United States and its businesses as progressive, for they were aiding the war effort against the fascist foe. Likewise, in the United States, although anti-Communism remained a powerful social and political force, the Soviet Union was the subject of little officially supported criticism: Stalin was often portrayed as the sympathetic “Uncle Joe.” In both the United States and Mexico, there was little good will for Trotskyists, who remained critical of the Soviet Union during wartime. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, the United States arrested members of the Trotskyist Fourth International in Minneapolis and charged them with seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government simply on the basis of their expressed beliefs. Even dedicated anti-Communists, while not changing their opinions, found relatively little traction for their views. Sidney Hook’s Committee for Cultural Freedom, for example, fell into inactivity when it found that it could no longer raise funds to sustain its anti-Soviet program.45
Latin America’s pro-Soviet Left threw itself into the war effort with enthusiasm. Vicente Lombardo Toledano immediately announced that there were now only two sides in the war: fascists and antifascists. Through the CTM in Mexico and the CTAL internationally, he urged Mexican support for the Allied cause and condemned any Axis presence in Latin America. Somewhat inaccurately, he attacked Mexico’s nationalist extreme Right as fascist and—extremely inaccurately—called anti-Stalinist refugees such as Victor Serge and Julián Gorkin a “Fifth Column.” Instead of a clash of European imperialisms in which Mexico had no part to play, he now presented World War II as a struggle for democracy and for the liberty of peoples, with the Soviet Union as the center of world democracy. Lombardo Toledano became one of the most ardent defenders of the war effort; when the sinking of Mexican ships by German submarines finally made possible a real declaration of war against the Axis in 1942, the CTAL called for it immediately. Lombardo Toledano became one of the most effective supporters of the Allied cause, undertaking extensive tours of Latin America under the auspices of the CTAL. He reached leftist labor audiences who might have been unsympathetic to having the United States as an ally, telling workers that it was necessary to draw distinctions between “Yankee imperialism” and the “great people of the United States.” The CTAL pledged to speed production of strategic materials and supported the drive for unconditional surrender by the fascist states, showing that labor did not pose a threat to the wartime interests of the Allies, who depended on the delivery of raw materials from Latin American countries.46
Other aspects of Lombardo Toledano’s behavior, however, illustrate the conditional nature of his support for the U.S. war effort. He used his visits to the United States to meet with members of the Communist Party to facilitate both legal and illegal political activity. He was formally recruited as an asset of Soviet intelligence, and as the war made Mexico City one of the most important world centers for Soviet espionage, Lombardo Toledano offered his help. He processed papers that other agents could use, assisted in regularizing the immigration status of Spanish Communist refugees whom Moscow wanted to use in other intelligence operations, and helped other agents travel between the United States and Mexico. As the Cold War settled in during the second half of the 1940s, Lombardo Toledano’s CTAL, the product of both Mexican and Soviet planning, was ready to transform its antifascism into anti-imperialism directed at the foreign policy of the United States.47
Under pressure from the United States at a time of emphasis on inter-American solidarity, Mexico declared war on Germany and Japan in 1942. Mexican politics too were changing. The war brought opportunities for rapprochement with the United States and industrial development: the beginning of a long rede
finition of “revolution” to mean material progress rather than redistribution. President Manuel Ávila Camacho, in office from 1940 to 1946, saw himself as a moderator between Left and Right factions within the official party and was less inclined to take risks to defend dissident sectors of the Left than Cárdenas had been at the beginning of his term. Mexico City, in spite of a substantial concentration of anti-Stalinist radicals, became a less and less hospitable place for them. But there continued to be no other place for many to go.48
Gorkin, who arrived in Mexico in 1940, lobbied successfully for his friend Victor Serge to be granted asylum. By the time they arrived, neither considered himself a Trotskyist any longer. Gorkin falsely claimed never to have been so. Serge, en route to Mexico, called himself a “Socialist Democrat” and said that Trotskyism had died with the man. (Serge shared a boat with the escaping André Breton and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; Lévi-Strauss wrote that Serge reminded him of a “maiden lady of high principles.”) But although they possessed quite different personalities—Serge’s writing is incomparably more compassionate than Gorkin’s—the two men were close friends and collaborators during their time in Mexico. With support from anti-Communist activists in the American Federation of Labor, they formed a small political group for “Socialism and Liberty,” which brought out some short-lived magazines under Gorkin’s direction.49
