Trotsky was not entirely honest in dealing with this issue. With Lenin’s knowledge, he had indeed been one of the organizers of the bloody suppression of the revolt. The criticism coming from his former friends had found a raw nerve and he felt constrained to respond in a further long polemical article, entitled ‘The Fuss About Kronstadt’, written at the end of 1937 and beginning of 1938. It quickly found its way via Zborowski to Stalin’s desk.166 This was one occasion when the General Secretary could not have found fault with his former rival, for the line Trotsky took on Kronstadt coincided precisely with the official Soviet line at the time. Indeed, Stalin could have put his own signature to it. Among other things, Trotsky wrote: ‘The Kronstadt revolt was nothing more than the armed reaction of the petty bourgeoisie against the difficulties of the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat … The [rebels] wanted a revolution that would not lead to a dictatorship, and a dictatorship that did not use coercion.’167 This was pure Stalinist, or rather Bolshevik, cant. Trotsky and Stalin may have been diametrically opposed in personal terms, but they both remained typical Bolsheviks, obsessed with violence, dictatorship and coercion.
Simultaneously, Trotsky was having to repudiate the Stalinist slander, the criticism of his former supporters and the attacks of the Mexican Communist and labour organizations that were demanding his deportation from the country. Feelings of loneliness and isolation grew in him and at times led to depression. He did not give in, however, and tried to keep up the front of the committed revolutionary, reminding the world community that he was alive and had not yet spoken his last word. Only his wife knew how low he really felt.
The two years they lived in Diego Rivera’s house seemed idyllic, in terms of their physical well-being. Then, suddenly, a rift occurred. The bone of contention was President Cardenas, whom Trotsky regarded with the greatest respect for having provided a refuge. Then, unexpectedly, Rivera published a blistering attack on the president as ‘an accomplice of the regime in Moscow’. Trotsky and Rivera attempted to solve their differences, but they only grew deeper, until Trotsky announced he no longer found it possible to accept the painter’s hospitality.
At almost the same time other events were taking place in the Trotsky family which complicated matters further. When Trotsky first arrived in Mexico he had met Rivera’s wife, the painter and actress Frida Kahlo. She was a woman of great beauty and delicacy, and living in the same house, she and Trotsky saw each other constantly. Suddenly, at the age of fifty-seven, Trotsky felt an overwhelming attraction to this intelligent and enchanting woman. By nature a puritan, he had strict views on family relations and still loved his wife sincerely, yet he almost lost his head, even becoming oblivious to the social good conduct he normally observed by openly displaying obvious signs of attention to Frida. In July 1937, at Rivera’s suggestion, he went on his own to stay for three weeks at the village of Gomez Landero, where he relaxed, rode, did some fishing and wrote. A few days after his arrival there, Frida joined him. The true nature of the relationship between the worn-out revolutionary of a certain age and the twenty-eight-year-old beauty is not known. But it is plain he was infatuated with her. This much is revealed by the few notes he sent her that have recently been discovered among the papers of Frida’s friend Teresa Proentso, by the Mexican journalist Xavier Guzman Urbiola.167
The notes show the depth of feeling Trotsky was experiencing. His relations with Frida became known to Natalya and Diego, and difficult moments ensued. Trotsky had the good sense not to take things so far as to break with Natalya. He managed to shake himself free of Frida’s charms and to tell Natalya everything. His secretary, van Heijenoort, wrote in his book With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan that after a brief moment of ‘torment’, Trotsky’s common sense had triumphed over his feelings.
Relations with Diego, however, could not be so easily repaired. In his last note to Frida, Trotsky wrote: ‘I still hope it will be possible to restore my friendship with him, both political and personal, and I sincerely hope you will share this opinion. Natalya and I wish you the best of health and real artistic success and I embrace you as our good and sincere friend. As ever, Yours, L. Trotsky.’169
With the help of American friends, in the spring of 1939 Trotsky acquired a large but uncomfortable house on Vienna Street in Coyoacan, and at once assumed a financial burden beyond his means. He published whatever he could, received advances for his unfinished book on Stalin and tried to reissue his old books. He still needed to pay two or three secretaries, a bodyguard, a housekeeper and a typist. Under these circumstances, he felt compelled to sell his archives to the Houghton Library at Harvard University for the astonishingly small sum of $15,000. As before, he was helped in the crisis by friends, notably Albert Goldman, and was thus able more or less to maintain his way of life.
The first task to which his friends and his guards turned their attention was to see to the security of the house. They raised a high fence and strengthened the doors and gates to the property. A high tower with a searchlight was erected and an alarm system installed inside the house, which now took on the appearance of a small fortress. The doors to Trotsky’s study and his bedroom were lined with sheet-iron. The outside of the house was patrolled day and night by the police and the inside by his secretaries and bodyguard. Monitoring arrangements were organized for visitors. People Trotsky did not know were admitted into his presence only if they were carrying nothing and were accompanied by the bodyguard. Journalists continued to call and supporters still came from different countries, as well as publishers and Trotskyist activists. From one of the secretaries, Zborowski learnt that Trotsky ‘has a weakness for visitors from the [Soviet] Union and Spain’, and passed this intelligence on to his masters in Moscow.170 It was valuable information.
Trotsky planned his days in strict order. Rising early, he would work at his desk for two hours before lunch, after which he carried on with his literary labours until dinner. Life in the little fortress was tense and nervous. Its inhabitants noticed that the number of unfamiliar faces around the place seemed to be growing. For a time, an observation point was established in a neighbouring property. It appeared at first as if there was some digging going on, but then it became clear that each shift of three or four men was spending more time observing Trotsky’s house than working in the trench. NKVD officials who had had to flee Spain in the aftermath of the civil war seemed to have found an alternative base next door to Trotsky. He redoubled the security of his walls and doors. Taking exercise, usually in the evenings, he would pace thirty steps in the yard in one direction, then thirty back. He was immersed in his book on Stalin, and he confided to Natalya that now his mind was ranging over the gamut of his experience, from the turn of the century to October 1917, to the mistake he and Lenin had made in not having seen through the ‘wonderful Georgian’, as Lenin had described Stalin so many years ago.
In a letter to the editor of the Bulletin in March 1938, Trotsky wrote:
I am committed to write a book on Stalin and to finish my book on Lenin in the next eighteen months. All of my time, at least over the next few months, will be devoted to this work … I will need your help with the book on Stalin. Tomorrow I’ll send you the list of books I have on Stalin. I can tell you now that I don’t have Barbusse’s book. I don’t know if there are any special files on Stalin in Lev’s archive.171
It is not hard to imagine the effect of this letter on Stalin when it landed on his desk. In eighteen months a book on him, written by his best-informed enemy, would be published. It must not happen. It was precisely at this time, late 1938 and early 1939, that Stalin’s verbal instructions to liquidate Trotsky became frantic. Trotsky meanwhile was writing to his friends for more material on Stalin. In May 1938 he asked Kogan ‘to look through the journal Krasnaya Nov’ from the point of view of Stalin’s political evolution, or rather his zigzags, and the methods he used to fight the opposition. I will be much obliged to you for any information of this sort, as
I have very few books here, and I have to finish the book on Stalin within five months.’172
Occasionally, early in the morning, accompanied by two or three men, Trotsky would disguise himself and, tucking into a corner of the car, escape from the fortress for a brief outing. They would drive twenty or thirty kilometres into the mountains and fields, wander around looking for original kinds of cactus, find a village and have lunch and return home quickly under cover of darkness. Every such ‘expedition’, as he called these trips, was fraught with risk. On several occasions when an open attack was expected, Trotsky would go to a remote village for two or three weeks and stay in a secretly hired peasant hut, in disguise and under an assumed name. Quite a few letters from him to Natalya during these periods have survived, and they reveal his intimate and tender feelings for her. Almost never did he discuss political or ideological topics in them, and they testify to his growing sense of isolation and his awareness that she was the last remaining person in the world who was close to him.
In one of his letters, he wrote: ‘… as I read your letter I wept … Everything you said to me about our past is right, and I have said the same thing to myself hundreds and hundreds of times. Isn’t it monstrous now to torment oneself over the way things were more than twenty years ago? Over details? But still some trivial question sticks in my mind, as if our entire life depended on answering it … So I run for a piece of paper and write the question down.’173 The death of his last son had filled his heart with desolation, pain and sadness. He recognized that his present efforts were ephemeral, but he still maintained one last goal, to preserve his reputation as a revolutionary, so that history would allocate a niche for him that would last forever.
The loneliness of the unhappy couple was relieved when their last true friends, the Rosmers, came to Coyoacan in October 1939, bringing with them Trotsky’s grandson Seva. They stayed in the gloomy house for eight months. Trotsky and Natalya were overjoyed by the boy’s arrival, although Seva, who had been transported from one country to another and constantly surrounded by new faces, did not understand much of what was happening. He had attended schools in German and French, and since his Uncle Lev’s death, no one had spoken to him in Russian, so that he spoke his native language like a foreigner. The tragedy of the family was as it were etched on the boy’s mind as a kaleidoscope of names, places, and rivalries between people who claimed a right to him. Now, at least, the boy could bring his grandfather joy in his last few months.
The Illusion of the International
While still on Prinkipo, and as the thought of being able to return to Moscow began to fade, Trotsky realized that what was needed was an organization inside the Communist movement to resist Stalin and Stalinism. He recognized that such an organization could succeed only if it had a clear programme, aims and means. As a political and ideological trend, from the outset Trotskyism was at a serious disadvantage: it set out to do battle not only with capitalism, the bourgeois political parties and governments, but also with everyone who in Trotsky’s opinion had betrayed Marxism and Leninism. Among these he included all the Communist and workers’ parties which had joined the Third International and recognized its programme.
By the early 1930s, in several European countries and North and South America, parties and groups had emerged which shared the ideas of the ‘Bolshevik-Leninists’—who were in step, that is, with the views of the crushed Left opposition of the Soviet Communist Party. Trotsky conducted a wide-ranging correspondence with these people and their representatives visited him for advice and inspiration, but he soon came to feel that there were far too few of them, numbering only a few hundred. In an interview in March 1937, he confessed: ‘It is hard to be sure of the exact number, especially as there are constant shifts within the working class: there are semi-supporters and demi-semi-supporters, and so on. I think today one could speak of several tens of thousands of them.’174 Plainly this was a considerable exaggeration.
It was a disappointment and a surprise to Trotsky that these parties and groups were constantly riven by discord, splits and mutual hostility. Many of them were sectarian, leftist formations whose members had been expelled from Communist and workers’ parties. Among them also were many provocateurs and OGPU agents whose purpose in joining was anything but revolutionary. Indeed, the NKVD was extremely well informed about most of the activities and conferences of the Trotskyists. Copies and the originals of many of their documents are to be found in the NKVD archives. For example, in March 1937 Yezhov sent Stalin ‘the continuation of Sedov’s letter to Trotsky of 3 March. The information from the USSR that he cites in this letter allegedly came via Menshevik circles from a French newspaper representative or the agent Havas who left Moscow recently. Measures have been taken to find out more about this individual. The letter contains some omissions and lack of clarity, which is explained by the fact that it was taken down while being dictated.’175
To be named in Trotsky’s correspondence as a supporter inside the USSR led, of course, to immediate arrest. In a note from Moscow to agent ‘Skif’ in June 1939, orders were given to ensure that Zborowski ‘should be directed above all to finding out about espionage, terrorist centres, counter-revolutionary contacts with the USSR, preparation of any transfers to the USSR and so on’.176 This largely explains the high number of arrests and murders, not only of Trotsky’s supporters, but of anyone who was even indirectly connected with them inside the USSR. Outside the country, especially in Spain during the civil war and under the guise of dealing with the Soviet Union’s enemies, NKVD operatives carried on the work of their comrades at home and arranged the assassinations of many Trotskyist sympathizers. Any Soviet citizen sent abroad on official business was liable to arrest as a Trotskyist spy immediately upon return to the Soviet Union.
As the documents in the ‘Sneevliet’ collection and in the archive obtained with Zborowski’s help make clear, ‘Tulip’, as Zborowski was also codenamed, was deputed to work on the members of the Fourth International Secretariat, and to provide information on French Trotskyists and Lev Sedov. ‘With his assistance,’ reads one report, ‘the archives of the International Secretariat and part of Trotsky’s archive were lifted.’177 Through the work of agents like Zborowski, Moscow aimed at blocking the ‘subversive actions’ of the Trotskyists.
In a letter of July 1935, Trotsky told leading ‘Bolshevik-Leninists’ in Poland that they must form opposition groups inside the Polish Social Democratic Party, ‘penetrating [it] surreptitiously, and also working illegally inside the Communist Party. You must also slip into the [Jewish] Bund. You must cease pointless discussion and become more actively linked with the left elements of Polish Social Democracy.’178 While Trotsky said nothing about terror of any kind, he certainly advocated illegal and other ways of strengthening his influence in socialist and Communist parties, and such ‘instructions’ found their way not only into the offices of the NKVD, but also the Party Central Committee.179
Although plans for the formation of the Fourth International were ready as early as 1933, Trotsky held back from putting them into effect, and when he finally committed himself, the moment had passed. In relative terms, the early 1930s were the most propitious time the Trotskyists may have had. By 1938, when the founding congress took place in Paris, the Trotskyist wave, itself barely noticeable, had virtually merged into the smooth surface of the post-revolutionary scene. In the USSR the last of Trotsky’s supporters were being mercilessly wiped out or dying in the camps. In Germany, Hitler was dealing with the Marxists in the same way. In Austria, Czechoslovakia and Italy the Nazis and Fascists were trampling everyone underfoot. The time of the popular fronts had passed. Trotskyism had never enjoyed a high profile, but with the defeat of the Republican cause in Spain, it became nothing more than a symbol of its leader. Without him, it is unlikely many people would have heard of this particular branch of Marxism.
Trotsky did everything possible to make the founding congress a success. He had already proposed that the n
ew international be called the ‘World Party of Social Revolution’.180 The new body, he declared, should ‘gather together everyone who is for the [new union], even if they have serious differences among themselves’.181 In practice, the founding congress comprised merely twenty-one delegates from eleven countries. It took place on 3 September 1938 in Alfred Rosmer’s villa outside Paris. Fearing that French right-wingers or the OGPU might stage a provocation, the delegates hastily approved the documents that had been prepared, with barely any discussion. There were, among others, resolutions on the war in the Far East, on victims of class warfare, on international solidarity, and on the current position in the USSR, where ‘all the conquests of the October revolution are threatened with destruction’ and ‘the basic task of the Russian section of the Fourth International is to call for a new social revolution’.182 The manifesto proclaimed the new International ‘proudly the successor and continuation of the cause of Marx’s First International, the Russian revolution and Lenin’s Communist International’.183 The congress lasted no longer than one day.
To conceal the whereabouts of the delegates, the press release announced that the congress had taken place in Lausanne, but of course such measures were futile since the sole member of the Soviet ‘delegation’ was none other than Mark Zborowski, who since Lev’s death had been representing Trotsky’s interests in Paris. Zborowski reported to the NKVD: ‘“The Old Man” has arranged for me to join the secretariat and to be invited to all sessions of the International Secretariat.’184 On 20 June 1938, even before the Paris meeting took place, Zborowski had informed Moscow that a special commission had been formed ‘to combat the police and the GPU’. In the same report he gave Moscow details of the forthcoming founding congress.185 Following the congress, he rapidly transmitted details of the participants, along with the resolutions passed, including, of course, the call to step up the task of infiltrating Trotskyists into various mass organizations, especially among the youth and the student population. Trotsky, indeed, had already indicated that ‘the Fourth International will be a Youth International’.186 Zborowski, in his zeal, also compiled a complete list of the documents he had managed to photograph in the International Secretariat and in Trotsky’s personal archive and sent it to Moscow.187
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