After Lev’s death the Bulletin started appearing on the American continent, as NKVD 5th Section security agent Gusakov reported, adding that its publisher in New York was Sara Weber, who had visited Trotsky on Prinkipo.67 The deputy chief of the 5th Section, P.A. Sudoplatov, reported that the journal of the Fourth International, currently being printed in Paris by the French section of the Popular Revolutionary Party (a Trotskyist grouping), would be coming out in Brussels from July, edited by individuals identified as S. Lesual and Don.68 The Soviet secret service knew practically everything about the Trotskyists, their organizations and their publications. In March 1937 the chief of the 7th Section of the NKVD security service sent Yezhov a highly detailed list of all the Trotskyist publications in all countries and continents, and outlined their main contents.69
After Lev’s death Trotsky maintained contact with his circle, especially Estrin and Zborowski. ‘Dear Comrades,’ he wrote, ‘I enclose material for the Bulletin. If there’s too much, you don’t have to print all these articles and commentaries, just a part. You can delete the signatures under the articles, but the dates must definitely be left in. We are not replying yet to your letter about Lev; we still have to find the strength. N[atalya] Iv[anovna Sedova] is very weak and cannot write at all. What are the material possibilities and outlook for the Bulletin?’70 One way or the other, the journal had to survive the death of its manager and chief administrator.
Family Tragedy
It was dangerous to be a relative of Trotsky’s. This became clear as early as the civil war. In February 1920 a coded message was sent by the Odessa revolutionary committee to his armoured train: ‘In December 1919 on Denikin’s orders Comrade Trotsky’s family was arrested, including his uncle and aunt Gersh and Rakhiel Bronstein, who were arrested in Bobrinets, and his cousin Lev, a Communist. They have been transported to Novorossiisk as hostages. According to some reports, they are being exchanged for Kolchak’s nephew. Relatives of those arrested are asking for urgent measures to be taken to effect their release by means of exchanging hostages.’71 Trotsky did not see the telegram as he was at the front, but Butov took the necessary measures.
Trotsky’s closest relatives watched his meteoric rise with joy. Until the emergence of the left opposition in 1923, the slightest connection with the Bronshtein-Trotsky clan or acquaintanceship with his relatives gave the revolutionary young a reverential thrill and a feeling of being close to something great. The number of his relatives grew, most of them completely new to him. On 2 August 1921, for example, he received a letter: ‘I am M.L. Ginzburg of Yekaterinoslav (husband of your cousin Olga Lvovna, née Zhivotovskaya), and I need to see you on a matter of great urgency to me, so I beg you not to refuse to give me a few minutes of your time.’72 It transpired that the Ginzburgs were being persecuted and living in poverty.
Trotsky’s daughters, Nina and Zina, did their best to defend their father when the press starting attacking him. They rarely asked him for material help, although they always lacked money. His two families—the two daughters from his first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, and two sons from his second wife, Natalya Sedova—were Trotsky’s personal drama. The two wives felt a strong mutual hostility, and he had to exercise considerable tact to avoid arousing an outburst of female emotion. He occasionally remembered to send a birthday card to his daughters, but took virtually no part in their upbringing. They nevertheless grew up with a strong sense of pride in their famous father, even though they also harboured resentment against both of their parents for their ambiguous position and the feeling of inferiority it engendered.
The younger daughter, Nina, died in June 1928, when Trotsky was in exile in Alma Ata. She was twenty-six. Her husband, Nevelson, had already been arrested and would eventually be shot. Apart from her sister, Nina received help from no one. The stigma of having a rebellious father worsened her situation and hastened her death, although her tuberculosis no doubt saved her from prison and the Gulag. Her daughter Volina, born in 1925, may have been with her grandmother, Sokolovskaya, but when she in turn was arrested and exiled the child disappeared without trace and her fate is unknown. She may still be alive, having survived the orphanages without knowing either her real name or origin. As we have seen, Trotsky learnt of Nina’s death only several weeks after the event, and it hurt him to know that its main cause was his defeat in the political struggle. His elder daughter Zina had sent him a telegram: ‘Nina is calling for you all the time, hoping that if she sees you she will get better.’ It arrived seventy-three days after it was sent, when Trotsky was under guard. Nina’s death heralded the start of a long series of deaths in Trotsky’s family.
Zinaida, in whose arms Nina had died, was broken by the dramatic change in the family’s circumstances, her father’s exile, the arrest of her husband Platon Volkov, the death of her sister, her son’s illness and the dire need and rejection which had become her lot. As if all this were not enough, she too suffered from tuberculosis. She began to make efforts to go to Trotsky in Turkey and, after a long ordeal and humiliation, she finally succeeded in obtaining permission and in early 1931 arrived with her son on Prinkipo. By this time, however, she was plainly showing signs of psychological instability, having, like her sister, lived for the last few years in a state of mortal terror. In addition to her tuberculosis, she became deeply depressed and suffered anxiety attacks. She missed the daughter she had left behind in Moscow and she did not know what was happening to her husband. She felt her presence was a burden to her father. She stayed with him on Prinkipo for ten months, but during that time no deep feeling developed between them. She was eager to help him in his political work, but he, aware that she must one day return to her daughter in Russia, kept her, for her own sake, at a distance in that sphere. Furthermore, despite his best efforts, the ill-concealed hostility between his second wife and his daughter remained as a barrier.
Although Trotsky was troubled by his lack of fatherly affection for his elder daughter, it seemed he could do nothing about it. She, feeling unwanted and unloved, competed for his affection with her stepmother, and the atmosphere in the home became unbearably strained. Finally, Zinaida took her father’s advice to seek treatment in Berlin, and, after considerable efforts on his part, she left her six-year-old son Seva temporarily with him and went to the German capital, with return to the USSR ultimately in view. Requesting a re-entry visa for her from the Turkish foreign minister, Trotsky wrote: ‘In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I think I ought to point out that the journey my seriously sick daughter is making is not connected directly or indirectly with any political purpose and is purely in her therapeutic interests.’73
Soon after Zinaida began her treatment in Berlin Trotsky received a letter from his friend Alexandra Ramm, who had undertaken to look after his daughter. She wrote that ‘Zina’s condition is complicated not only by the lung disease, but above all by her psychological state … It undoubtedly started in Constantinople. She went there full of the greatest expectations of her famous father and so on, but soon suffered deep disappointment. This expressed itself as, they don’t love me. Who’s to blame? Apart from that, she feels she is alone and sick. Her sister died. Constant illness …’74 Alexandra Ramm was right. The chief cause of Zinaida’s illness was that she was alone. Her father was cold to her, her husband had been arrested, her daughter was in Moscow. Ramm went on: ‘Dear Lev Davydovich, I don’t want to hide my personal thoughts from you. In a sense she has been disappointed here, too. She thought she would enter Lev and Jeanne’s life here. That hasn’t happened, nor could it. She said to me once, don’t you know a man or woman with nothing to do who could visit me, it’s so hard for me to be alone.’75
In about a dozen letters, Lev wrote in a similar vein to his father:
Zina remembers a lot and talks about Nina’s death … She was counting very much on your writing to her yourself … She is more depressed than she has ever been. She doesn’t attack Mama [Natalya], but she says you cannot write to her and that you
won’t and she understands that. Zina is terribly oppressed, depressed, she looks utterly destroyed, I pity her, Daddy, very, very much. It’s painful to look at her. I talked to Dr Mai in detail. He thinks she could return to the [Soviet] Union in eight to ten weeks. He says she needs more tenderness. In other words he gave me to understand that he thinks it very important for you to write to her and to exert a direct influence. Maybe her last postcard to you will give you the opportunity? The line I am taking with her (one has to take her condition into account) is that she herself, by her own behaviour, with facts, the nature of her letters and so on, must create the preconditions for establishing normal relations with you. She responds with utter pessimism: ‘No, you know what I’ve done to Papa, he’ll never write to me.’76
In none of the archives where Trotsky’s papers are held has it proved possible to trace a single letter from him to his tormented elder daughter. Perhaps, had he written to her, her life might not have ended as tragically as it did, but his hardness towards her proved too much. Father and daughter were separated by a barrier of incompatibility which he, as the father, ought to have sought to overcome. Perhaps his heart had been hardened by the revolution, or, having left his daughters with their mother so early in their lives, he could not find in himself any fatherly feelings towards them. Be that as it may, soon after Zinaida arrived in Berlin she suffered another blow, and a blow that could not be remedied: on 20 February 1932 the Soviet government deprived not only Trotsky of his Soviet citizenship, but also his wife and all the members of his family who were abroad on that day. On 26 February Trotsky wrote to Yelena Eastman-Krylenko, suggesting that perhaps her brother, Nikolai Krylenko, might take an interest in the case.77 Krylenko was People’s Commissar for Justice of the RSFSR, i.e. of the Russian Republic rather than the Soviet Union, though he would have only two more years in the job, as he was shot in 1938.
Zina had been bursting to go home to the Soviet Union, to her daughter Alexandra, and to be reunited with her husband who was then in exile. Despite the fact that Trotsky had managed to organize the return of her son Seva (his full name was Vsevolod) to her in Berlin—he too had been deprived of his Soviet passport—she became still more depressed. She could not take the last blow: at the insistence of the Soviet embassy, only one week after Seva arrived, the German police ordered Zina and her son to leave Berlin. She had no passport and no money. Where was she to go? On 5 January 1933, she left Seva with some neighbours and turned on the gas in her apartment. She was just over thirty. Seva was adopted by Lev and now calls himself Esteban.
A week later Lev wrote to his parents with the details:
The morning before, Zina phoned me to say she wanted to see me, she asked me to come straight away (our slight estrangement disappeared once Seva arrived). There was simply no way I could go that morning. I urged her to come over that evening or during the day or any other morning: I insisted and she replied with some reluctance but promised to come. I never saw her again. Platon [her husband] must be written to, he loved Zina very much. If it’s too much for Papa to do, I’ll write, but at least give me some advice … [The] world’s press has already reported the death of Trotsky’s second daughter.78
Trotsky was shaken by what had happened in Berlin. He had lost both his daughters in less than eight years. Their health and their mental states had been too unstable to withstand their father’s defeat, and he knew it. His immediate reaction to the news was to write in anger to the Communist Party leadership in the USSR:
The persecution … of my daughter was completely senseless politically. Depriving her of her citizenship, taking away her last remaining hope; allowing her to live normally and recuperate and then to expel her from Berlin (obviously the German police were doing Stalin a favour) were politically pointless acts of naked revenge and nothing more. My daughter knew what was happening to her. She knew that, in the hands of European police who were tormenting her to gratify Stalin, she had no hope … I will restrict myself to this communication without further comment. The time for comment will come.79
Lev succeeded against the odds in getting through to his younger brother Seryozha in Moscow by telephone, and Seryozha duly reported the tragic news to Zina’s mother in Leningrad. Alexandra Sokolovskaya was not yet sixty, but when she heard about Zina’s death she turned into an old woman overnight. She now took on the care of her grandchildren. In one of Zina’s last letters, Alexandra Sokolovskaya had been bitterly reproached for not having been able to keep the family together and for making them all miserable. Trotsky had heard the same thing from his elder daughter. The wife of Trotsky’s younger son, Olga Eduardovna Grebner, was right when she told me: ‘Regardless of what he would have wanted, Trotsky brought grief to all his family and relatives.’ His grandchildren were not spared. Nina’s daughter Volina, as we have suggested, disappeared into the Soviet orphanage system, while Zina’s daughter Alexandra was sent into the Gulag when she reached maturity. She died in 1989. Seva-Esteban now lives in Mexico, where he is the curator of the museum devoted to his grandfather.
Trotsky knew that Stalin would not stop. Although he became accustomed to life on Prinkipo, it was difficult to keep in touch with his supporters, hard to publish the Bulletin and, in case of emergency, difficult to hide or escape. He felt Yagoda’s agents closing in on the villa and he longed to move to Western Europe. He had tried as early as 1929 to gain entry to a European country, but first Germany and then England, after some hesitation, declined his application. He had written for help to a number of luminaries of the British left, such as the Webbs, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, and Labour Cabinet Ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, reminding him that he had received him in the Soviet Union,80 but nothing worked. He then turned to the French who replied, after a lengthy silence, that the order expelling him from France to Spain in 1916 was still in effect. Enquiries were made in Prague which at first met with an encouraging response and then, suddenly, an outright refusal. Similar results came from Holland, Luxembourg, Austria and Norway.
Many people abroad believed that his deportation was a move in a game being played by Stalin and Trotsky: he had been sent abroad to export revolution. He realized he must sit tight and wait, as his wife urged him to do: ‘You must be patient. Everything in its own time. Your hour has not come yet.’ As usual, he thought, she was right. During the years of revolution and civil war, Natalya had worked in the Cultural Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment [Education],81 and there is plenty of archival testimony to her responsibility and competence. For instance, on 6 July 1920 she wrote to Foreign Commissar Chicherin: ‘The department for the protection of art and antiquities has no objection to the return to Finland of artistic and archaeological objects that have no special value for Russia.’82 At a time when much of the country’s cultural heritage was being pilfered and destroyed, she succeeded in saving a great deal by protecting it under revolutionary law.
The couple would often recall those days, as they sat on the veranda of their Turkish villa and watched the lights of the fishing boats. They might have reminisced about the time Trotsky had had to apply to the chief of supply just to get Natalya some new stockings.83 Perhaps he owed some of the firmness of his convictions to his stalwart wife. His letters to her show not only their tenderness towards each other, but also how much he valued her attitude to him and his cause.84 Stoically she bore all the hardships and misfortunes of their exile and remained a strong support for her husband. She had to endure the bitterest of suffering, that both her sons would die before her and that she would not be able to bury either of them, and then to survive her husband by more than fifteen years. During her long life, she did much to organize and safeguard Trotsky’s rich archive and to transfer it to Harvard University.
Trotsky had two sisters and a brother. One of his sisters, Yelizaveta Melman, died of natural causes in the Kremlin in 1924. The other, Olga Kameneva, the wife of Lev Kamenev, would suffer all the hardships that could b
e inflicted on a relative of Stalin’s chief enemy. First she was exiled, then in 1935 arrested and sentenced to prison and concentration camp, and finally shot in the autumn of 1941. In that year, following the German invasion, Stalin set about clearing the prisons of those judged by the NKVD to be a ‘dangerous political burden’, and many thousands were summarily executed.
Trotsky’s elder brother Alexander worked during the 1920s and 1930s as an agronomist in the Novokislyaevsk sugar mill in the province of Voronezh. As I was told by an inhabitant of the district, A.K. Mironov, Alexander was a learned expert who enjoyed the respect of the villagers. He apparently rode in a beautiful phaeton drawn by two fine horses. When Trotsky came under attack, Alexander was expelled from the Party, exiled, and made publicly to repudiate his brother. He underwent a marked change, shrinking into himself as if from the pangs of conscience. The recantation did not help him, however, and in the summer of 1936 he was suddenly arrested at night and the following year shot in Kursk prison as ‘an active, un-disarmed Trotskyist’. Stalin’s long arm had reached them all, except the main target himself, his wife and his two sons.
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