The NKVD’s resources for penetrating Trotsky’s manifold circles were of course numerous and varied. For example, according to recently published documents from the archives of the KGB, Sylvia Franklin and Ruby Weil, two secret American Communists, were introduced to the NKVD in 1937 and 1938 by the American Communist Louis Budenz. In due course Sylvia Franklin became secretary to James Cannon, the American Trotskyist leader, and was thus made privy to a large part of Trotsky’s own plans, since Trotsky relied very much on Cannon. Meanwhile, under instruction by the NKVD, Ruby Weil, who posed as a Trotskyist, cultivated Sylvia Agelof, a social worker from Brooklyn who devoted her vacations to working for the Trotskyists. Agelof was known to Zborowski through their work together in the secretariat, and she acted as interpreter at the meeting in Paris. The NKVD arranged for Weil to introduce Agelof to a young Spaniard calling himself Jacques Mornard.188 The couple soon became lovers. Mornard was also an agent of the NKVD’s Foreign Section.
Awaiting news of the congress in Coyoacan, Trotsky imagined that the new body would announce the formation of the World Party of Social Revolution, a political force to be reckoned with. Not for the first time, however, he had miscalculated politically. The International was destined forever to remain a sect which, especially once its founder had departed the scene, would fade rapidly and within a decade be barely noticeable. The European press greeted the founding congress with deafening silence. The radio was reporting the agony of the Spanish Republic. There was economic news and music. The telephone failed to ring, until finally on 5 September Trotsky received a telegram announcing that ‘the new-born promises to be a hero’. He, his wife and his secretaries rejoiced, thinking that at last their efforts had borne fruit.
Two weeks later 200 pages of the documents approved by the congress arrived in Coyoacan. Trotsky was especially moved by a letter which had been adopted in the last few minutes of the meeting and which expressed the delegates’ feelings towards their absent leader:
The Fourth International sends you warm greetings. The barbaric repressions directed against our movement, and against you especially, prevented you from being among us and contributing your important viewpoint as an organizer of the October uprising, as the theorist of permanent revolution and direct heir of Lenin’s teaching. As enemies of Stalinism, Fascism and imperialism, great trials have befallen us … You are yourself the object of constant murder attempts … However harsh it may be, this persecution can only strengthen further our conviction in the correctness of the Marxist programme, whose chief interpreter since Lenin’s death you have become for us. That is why our greetings contain something more than recognition of a great contemporary theorist of revolutionary Marxism … We express the hope that for a long time to come you will share the spoils of victory, just as for so long you have shared the vicissitudes of the struggle …189
Two weeks after the congress Trotsky met its chairman Max Shachtman, and quickly realized that the ‘World Party’ was a great illusion. At the most, the congress had united some eight to ten thousand members of disparate small groupings which too often were calling themselves ‘parties’. As honorary president of the new International and a member of its executive committee, Trotsky felt that, against a background of the rise of the totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy and the USSR, the growing threat of war and the decline of the labour movement, success was unlikely. The founding of the Fourth International went virtually unnoticed by the main political forces in the unfolding drama. Trotsky had hoped to use the slogans of the First World War: ‘For Marxists the struggle against war means the struggle against imperialism. The means to accomplish this is not “disarmament”, but the arming of the proletariat for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the creation of a workers’ state. Not a League of Nations, but the United States of Europe and of the entire world … Whoever wishes to struggle against the war must rally to the banner of the Fourth International.’190
This notion was also illusory, yet as long as Trotsky was the head of the new International, it might have something to say. His major miscalculation was to imagine that the Fourth International would replace Comintern, which was in decline and which had become, as everyone knew, an auxiliary arm of Soviet policy and totally subservient to the ruler in the Kremlin. Trotsky nevertheless set out to compromise Comintern by publishing a number of articles, one of which, ‘Comintern and the GPU’, was published posthumously. In it, he showed that Comintern, and the leaders and officials of many Communist Parties, were financially dependent on the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Comintern’s entire budget came from the Central Committee’s, and often also from that of the GPU.191 He completed the article three days before his death. He knew that Stalin was capable of using Comintern as a cover for terror against disobedient and difficult or suspicious individuals, as is evidenced by documents in the archives dating from as early as May 1931.192
In fact, Comintern had been in the hands of the Soviet Party from the moment of its inception. Lenin’s unpublished papers contain a great deal of evidence that the leadership funded foreign parties in order to stimulate the revolutionary process, and Trotsky himself had been closely associated with this practice. In 1921 he had written to Raskolnikov, the Soviet envoy to Afghanistan, asking for his views on further action to be taken in Persia: ‘Would I be right in thinking our hands are free to penetrate deep into Persia, if a revolt occurs in Persia and a new government calls on our help?’193 In other words, by engineering a revolt, the Soviets would have an open door through which the Red Army could pass in order to ensure the creation of a Soviet-friendly regime. Similarly, in August 1919 the chairman of the Kalmyk Bolshevik Central Executive Committee, A. Chapaev, wrote to Lenin: ‘1) We must equip an armed detachment and send it through Mongolia and Tibet to India; 2) The detachment should take arms and ammunition for distribution among the population; 3) We have to introduce the Buddhist peoples of the East to the world revolution …’ Lenin marked the letter to be ‘forwarded to Chicherin for action’.194 Thus, Comintern activity, through the introduction of arms, propaganda and agitation, was seen as an integral part of the policy being implemented by the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Such requests for Soviet financial and other aid for revolutionary causes, routed through the Soviet Foreign Commissariat, were commonplace.
The Fourth International was to be, Trotsky had hoped, a proletarian force free of Stalinism, but he also knew that unless the situation in the USSR changed, any plans and programmes drafted in Coyoacan would remain nothing but pieces of paper. It was impossible to channel any influence from the Fourth International to the workers in the Soviet Union. It is even unlikely that anyone there, apart from the leadership and NKVD officials, knew that such a body had come into existence. Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ had come down well before the start, let alone the end, of the Second World War. Trotsky’s influence on Soviet political and social life was minimal, if not totally nonexistent. Occasionally and indirectly, for example by producing a reaction in a foreign Communist Party, might the muffled echoes of Trotsky’s attacks on ‘bureaucratic absolutism’ find their way to the USSR. Apart from the financial and logistical restraints, there was no state in the world that would permit Trotsky to broadcast to the USSR from its territory.
After much thought, he decided in April 1940 to write an open letter to the Soviet workers, hoping, not very enthusiastically, that it would get through and be copied and passed from hand to hand. After crafting several variants, he finally settled on what sounded like a combined personal manifesto and an appeal from the Fourth International. In three dense pages, he managed to compress history, politics, ethics, philosophy and psychology. The letter included assessments of the situation in Russia, the causes of degeneration of the Soviet system, and a pointer to the way the country could get out of the deep crisis into which Stalin had taken it. Headed ‘You are being deceived!’, the letter opened with:
Greetings to the workers, kolkhozn
iks, Red Army men and Red sailors of the USSR from distant Mexico, where I ended up after being expelled to Turkey by Stalin’s clique and chased by the bourgeoisie from country to country … Whoever raises his voice against the hated bureaucracy is called a Trotskyist’, an agent of a foreign power, a spy—yesterday a spy for Germany, today a spy for England and France—and subject to execution by shooting. Tens of thousands of revolutionary fighters have perished.
This was a serious underestimate. From my own study of reports in the Stalin archive, the NKVD’s own statistics and the archives of the former Central Committee, by the time Trotsky wrote his letter, between 1937 and 1939 from five to five and a half million people had been arrested. Not less than a third of them had been shot, and many of the rest died in the camps.
Trotsky went on:
Stalin has destroyed the entire Bolshevik old guard, all of Lenin’s collaborators and assistants, all the fighters of the October revolution, all the heroes of the civil war. He will go down in history under the despised name of Cain.
He then came to the main point of the letter:
Honest leading revolutionaries have organized the Fourth International abroad and already it has its sections in most countries of the world … In taking part in this work, I remain under the same banner I stood under with you or your fathers and older brothers in 1917 and the years of the civil war; the same banner as that under which together with Lenin we built the Soviet state and the Red Army. The aim of the Fourth International is to spread the October revolution throughout the world and at the same time to give rebirth to the USSR by cleansing it of the parasitic bureaucracy. This can only be done by way of an uprising of the workers, peasants, Red Army men and Red sailors against the new caste of oppressors and parasites. A new party is needed to prepare this uprising … Learn how to create closely tied and reliable revolutionary circles in the Stalinist underground … The present war … will bring the whole world to new revolutionary explosions.195
Dated 25 April 1940 and published on 11 May, the letter ends with an appeal to strengthen the USSR as a ‘fortress of toilers’, and to prepare for the ‘world socialist revolution’ by getting rid of ‘Cain-Stalin and his camarilla’.
The call for creating an illegal underground organization and staging an uprising suggests that Trotsky was prepared to go to the limit, but it also shows the degree of his desperation. It was also totally unrealistic. Every vestige of opposition inside the Soviet Union had been destroyed, and any attempt to move against the regime would have been crushed, not merely because of the monstrously efficient security and penal system, but also because the population was too stupefied by propaganda even to recognize the status of slave it had come to occupy.
The creation of the Fourth International was the last expression of Trotsky’s vast egoism, of his inability to accept that the time of his meteoric rise had passed and that his brainchild was stillborn. It was the most unrealistic venture of this Gulliver among a mass of Lilliputians, the squabbling Trotskyists. Whatever trace the Fourth International might have left is due only to the name of its founder. In attempting to infuse new blood into the anaemic new body, Trotsky reverted to the Marxist dogmas that had already been shown in Stalinist practice to be limited and historically vulnerable. This was true above all of the theory of class war and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the monopoly of the single party and the exclusion of the social democrats. Trotsky envisaged fighting on two fronts: against the imperialistic bourgeoisie and Stalin’s ‘bureaucratic absolutism’. And to do so without the help of allies, for he had dismissed the social democrats as servants of the bourgeoisie. But neither Trotsky and the ‘World Party of Social Revolution’, nor any other political force of the time, was capable of shouldering this task. Trotsky’s new venture only exposed still more sharply the hopelessness of his position, this Don Quixote of the twentieth century.
Still he continued to present the desirable as the real, never failing, for instance, to remind the world that the most powerful section of the Fourth International was that of the Soviet ‘Bolshevik-Leninists’, despite the fact that there was not a single delegate from the Soviet Union, unless one counts the NKVD agent Zborowski. Even before the new organization was proclaimed to exist, in 1936, for instance, Trotsky was claiming that the ideas of the Left opposition were penetrating the USSR ‘notably through our Bulletin’. After 1933 the Bulletin came into the hands of the OGPU-NKVD only, yet Trotsky declared in his 1936 article ‘The Soviet Section of the Fourth International’: ‘Already today the Fourth International has in the USSR the strongest, most numerous and most battle-hardened of its sections.’196 He dearly wished to believe his own myth.
It is important, however, to note that in striving to create his new party, Trotsky was also exposing the political forces that were preparing for war. In 1937 he predicted that a second world war would break out in two or three years, and before many politicians had realized it he had seen that the rise to power of Nazism in Germany would lead to war sooner or later. Such articles as ‘Germany, the Key to the International Situation’ (1931), ‘The Only Way’ (1932) and ‘What is National Socialism?’ (1933) were prophetic indicators of what Nazism would do.197 In 1933 he wrote that ‘Hitler stood out only because of his big temperament, a voice much louder than others, and an intellectual mediocrity much more self-assured … But his harangues resounded, now like commands and now like prayers … Sentimental formlessness, absence of discipline.’198 And in the summer of 1937 he predicted that Stalin would make an alliance with Hitler.199
While he may have seen clearly that a new world war was coming, Trotsky was woefully off target in seeking to avert it by starting a new revolution: ‘If [the revolution] does not come about before the war, then the war itself will bring about the revolution, as a result of which both the Stalinist regime and the Fascist regime will collapse.’200 Even when the Second World War was already raging, in February 1940, he wrote to an American sympathizer called Welch: ‘In this terrible time of rampant world chauvinism … the only way for humanity to survive is by way of socialist revolution.’201 The old revolutionary hymns were, however, drowned by the clanging of tank-tracks and the thunder of guns. And Trotsky, unheard, continued to live in his dream world of a bygone age.
* The soldiers and sailors of the island garrison had risen up against the Bolshevik government they had helped bring to power. The economic crisis of early 1921, combined with a sense of political betrayal, led to a rebellion which the Red Army, under Trotsky’s leadership, crushed with extreme violence. Trotsky had responded to the rebels’ attempts to negotiate with a demand for unconditional surrender, otherwise they would be ‘shot like partridges’. Fifty thousand Red Army troops made the final assault, killing hundreds in combat and later as prisoners.
* Peshkova was a leading figure in the Political Red Cross, which tried, mostly in vain, to intercede for writers and intellectuals who were in trouble with the authorities.
7
Outcast of the Era
In the last eighteen months or so of his life, Trotsky and Natalya would go out into the back garden of their small fortress and sit on a wooden bench, silent for the most part, occasionally exchanging a word or two, and watch the Mexican night descend. However doomed a man may be, he still has the great luxury of freedom of thought that can carry him soaring over the past and the future, the single attribute that can never be taken away by tyrant or circumstance. Thinking as always of the world revolution, Trotsky may have remembered receiving an inventory from Bazilevich, a special appointee of the Sovnarkom, in 1918:
This is to report that on 8 March in the [Kremlin] Armoury, upon opening chests containing the property of the former empress, State Repository representative Chinarev found contents to the value of 300 million gold roubles. The jewellers, Kodyar and Frants, base their valuation on the following: if a buyer were found who was able to buy these treasures as objects, then the value would be 458.7 million gold roubles … And the coro
nation treasures, which are contained in two separate chests, are valued at over 7 million roubles.1
Trotsky had forwarded the note to Lenin in the usual way, and Lenin for his part would have given routine instructions for the disposal of these riches for the good of the world revolution. A year later, A. Alsky, head of the State Repository, was reporting the distribution of an additional 2.2 million gold roubles to Comintern, mostly in the form of jewellery for sale.2
In his masterly biography of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher calls him a prophet. He undoubtedly was a prophet, but some of his prophecies sound more like Utopian dreams. In argument with Herter, the Dutch representative, at a session of the ECCI on 24 November 1920, Trotsky had called himself ‘one of Eastern Europe’s outcasts’.3 He was yet to discover that he was in fact an outcast of the era.
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