Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  In the 1840s, the Ottomans had begun regular ferry service to the habitable islands, and Büyükada in particular became the major summer residence for the city’s wealthy merchants, especially Greeks. Wood-frame houses with whitewashed verandas and louvered doors provided relief from the stifling summer heat. Private automobiles were (and still are) prohibited, so horse-drawn phaetons carted locals and visitors around the island’s few roads, cushioned by a deep layer of pine needles. At the height of the summer season, white and purple oleander and bougainvillea framed the roadsides and spilled over garden walls. Along the leafy Çankaya Avenue, which wound down to the ferry landing, massive villas and their dependent guesthouses looked out on the turquoise sea and the low hills of the Anatolian coast.

  Like Karl Marx in the previous century, Trotsky relied for his well-being on the kindness of capitalists he one day hoped to crush. One after another prominent Turkish businessman came forward to help him begin a new life in exile, perhaps attracted by the thrill of being close to a political celebrity or eager to court an enemy of Stalin. A former Ottoman official offered to rent the guesthouse of his villa. The expansive grounds lay on the downhill side of Çankaya Avenue and ended in a small cliff facing the sea. “The waves of the Sea of Marmara lapped the shore a few steps from our new home,” Natalya recalled. “It was a beautiful place, spacious, peaceful, set in the blue sea and bathed in golden sunlight most of the time.”

  A fire, probably caused by a faulty water heater, raced through the house in March 1931. Trotsky reportedly sued both his landlord and his housekeeper for negligence, but that did not solve the immediate problem of finding new accommodation. The family was once again on the move—first to a hotel on the island, then to a walled house in the Moda neighborhood on the Asian mainland, then back to a red-brick house on Büyükada owned by a Turkish shipping magnate and located a short walk from the original residence. There they settled into life amid plum and fig trees inside what islanders called a rakı kökü—a small house built for sipping anise-flavored liqueur and enjoying the view north toward Istanbul proper. It was now the unlikely home of the prophet of world revolution.

  Throughout his stay on the island, Trotsky grew increasingly fearful for his own safety. With both White Russians and Bolshevik agents present in the city, he had reason to be afraid. He routinely carried a small pistol and never appeared outside without a guard. Like a crotchety old man yelling at children to get off his property, he might yank at the beard of a Greek Orthodox priest to make sure he was not an assassin in disguise or pull a gun on a local fisherman who had suspiciously trawled the same spot for too many days in a row.

  Islanders were less than enthusiastic about their most famous resident. Trotsky hired local guards, gardeners, and servants, but stories circulated about his peculiar requirements: for deaf cooks, so they would not be able to report on his conversations, or for illiterate cleaning people who would not be able to read his correspondence. His conversation was normally laced with sarcasm. When he happened to find someone in the household taking a rest or reading a book, he would exclaim, “Here is the Russian emigration!” He also had the habit common to people too comfortable with their own power: He would christen those around him with odd nicknames that then became, in his mind, their new identity.

  The only friendship he seems to have struck up was with a local Greek fisherman, Haralambos. The two could be seen in a small boat, usually with guards or houseguests, bobbing in the water and drag-netting or line-fishing for red mullet and bonito in season. The fishing party would load up the boat with stones and cast them into the sea to drive the great schools of fish toward the nets. Trotsky and Haralambos would call out to each other in their own private language braided from Turkish, Greek, Russian, and French. In these moments, Trotsky seemed most playful and at ease. “Ah, Comrade Gérard!” he once teased his lawyer, Gérard Rosenthal, “if you strike the bourgeoisie like you attack the fish, they’ll have a pretty long life!”

  Even then, Trotsky rarely felt truly safe. Once, a small girl—later the distinguished Turkish writer Mîna Urgan—swam toward the boat and grabbed onto the gunwales. An agitated Trotsky yelled at his guard to shoo her away and whack her fingers with his rifle butt. When the fishing was good, though, he would return to the house in excellent spirits and spin off new writings, dictated to a secretary with feverish speed.

  Unfettered by the restrictions imposed on his work in the Soviet Union, he could fully speak his mind and communicate with the international socialist community. He began editing—and almost singlehandedly writing—a new bulletin that reported on the work of the anti-Stalinist opposition. He started writing his autobiography, My Life, based on notes he had already made while in Kazakhstan; he finished a draft within a few months of his arrival in Istanbul. He also made initial notes for a history of the Russian revolution. Book contracts and publishing deals came from Germany and the United States. Editorials and political essays streamed in the opposite direction to major Western newspapers eager to publish Trotsky’s thoughts on the world situation—his “ululations from the Bosphorus,” as Winston Churchill, one of Trotsky’s targets, called them. The revolution was surely over, Churchill said, when “the Communist instead of bombs produces effusions for the capitalist Press, when the refugee War Lord fights his battles over again, and the discharged executioner becomes chatty and garrulous at his fireside.”

  Lyova was marshaled in to serve as his father’s secretary, managing the tide of correspondence and assisting Trotsky with the growing numbers of guests making the pilgrimage from the mainland to see someone who had become Istanbul’s—and perhaps the world’s—most sought-after has-been. Letters arrived from graphologists requesting handwriting samples. Methodists wrote to explain the advantages of Christianity. Astrologists offered readings of his star chart. Autograph collectors kindly asked to add his signature “to those of two American presidents, three heavyweight champions, Albert Einstein, Colonel Lindbergh, and of course Charlie Chaplin,” Trotsky recalled. He later employed a small staff—or chancellery, as he termed it—to deal with the workload of manuscript preparation, letter writing, and monitoring of international affairs.

  Trotsky’s break with Stalin had been a spectacular development, but it was one part of the larger differentiation among the world's socialists: those who still looked to the Soviet Union as the leader of global revolution, those who were forging their own paths to communism, and those who believed that the Russian experiment was destined to burn itself out, soon to be succeeded by new movements arising in Europe’s overseas colonies. Trotsky now came to assume a role he had never held: a pole around which disaffected radicals around the world—especially those most committed to permanent revolution and the spread of revolutionary ideas—could coalesce. Like many famous exiles, he was becoming chiefly a totem, essentially powerless except for the force of his personality and words. “Here on this island of quiet and oblivion echoes from the great world reached us delayed and muffled,” he jotted in his diary.

  It was one thing to imagine Trotsky as the sage of Büyükada. It was another actually to meet him. Visitors to the island almost always found themselves on a kind of anti-pilgrimage. “He seems too small for the struggle,” wrote Max Eastman, the American poet and political radical, who visited in 1932. Eastman expected to engage in deep discussions about the inevitable triumph of the socialist cause, but he found Trotsky obsessing about more mundane concerns, especially his finances.

  His writing generated substantial sums of money. A string of newspaper articles brought in fees of ten thousand dollars. The American edition of My Life garnered an advance of seven thousand. The Saturday Evening Post paid forty-five thousand to serialize his History of the Russian Revolution. But Trotsky was spending more than a thousand dollars a month on bodyguards, housing, food, and especially books, since his library and extensive collection of photographs from the revolution had been destroyed in the fire at the first house. To economize, he kept litt
le in the way of furniture, wandering about worriedly in mainly empty rooms. He let the garden go to seed. His dog, Tosca, chased birds through the tall grass and saplings. “We seemed to camp rather than live there,” recalled one of his secretaries.

  Eastman had signed on as Trotsky’s literary agent and was largely responsible for the income flowing into his bank account. But in their conversations, Trotsky tended to talk down to Eastman, complaining about the stinginess of Western capitalists and the tightfistedness of American publishers, even though Eastman was an old friend and one of the leading voices of the American Left. Trotsky squirmed out of contracts and groveled for extensions. He promised to deliver commissioned manuscripts but then insisted he had never done so. During Eastman’s visit, Trotsky spent most of their time together trying to convince Eastman to collaborate on a stage play about the American Civil War. Trotsky believed it would be a hit on Broadway, a work that would combine Eastman’s knowledge of American history with his own expertise on troop movements and tactics. Eastman considered the idea ridiculous.

  Trotsky had “followers and subalterns,” Eastman concluded, but he was incapable of having real friends. Trotsky would not have disagreed. “I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one’s personal fate,” he wrote. “On the contrary, I appraise my fate objectively and live it subjectively, only as it is inextricably bound up with the course of social development.” Enemies, he would say routinely, should be shot. He saw this philosophy as a virtue, but most of the people who knew him during his exile seemed to see it as his signature flaw, both as a person and as a politician. He preferred the safety of the podium and the blinding anonymity of the limelight to intimate conversation and real engagement. He was unsuited to exile not because he lost power—his political influence had been waning throughout the period when Stalin’s was rising—but because it robbed him of the two things that made it possible for him to live in the world of reality: a platform to inhabit and a program to implement.

  Like the Whites, Trotsky believed that both of these things might one day return if he could only move out of Istanbul and find his feet again. When he was not writing essays or corresponding with adherents, he was filling out visa applications. Germany declined to admit him, as did the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, and Spain. Denmark allowed only a short trip to Copenhagen. The British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the London School of Economics and Political Science, visited Büyükada two months after Trotsky’s arrival, but even they could not convince the British government, then under sympathetic Labour Party control, to grant him admission. Trotsky ended My Life with a wry chapter he called “The Planet Without a Visa.”

  Finally, through the intercession of French socialists, he managed to secure asylum in southern France, with the proviso that he never visit Paris and remain under continuous police surveillance. The years in Istanbul had been among the calmest, most creative, and “least unhappy” of his entire exile, according to his preeminent biographer, Isaac Deutscher. Trotsky recorded the final Büyükada days in his diary: “Our house is already almost empty; wooden boxes stand below, and young hands are busy hammering nails. In our old and neglected villa, the floors this spring were decorated with paint of a composition so mysterious that tables, chairs, and even feet stick lightly to the floor even now, four months later.” He couldn’t pass up the obvious metaphor. He felt that his feet somehow had become stuck to the island. He had aged there. His hair had gone white, and his brow had furrowed. Heart trouble and gout had set in. In July 1933, he and Natalya—Lyova had already managed to move to Berlin—made their way down Çankaya Avenue for the last time and boarded a small ship bound for Marseille.

  Trotsky had been delivered from his Turkish exile and was on his way to a new life, first in France, then in Norway, then finally in Coyoacán, a borough of Mexico City. He and Natalya carried newly issued Turkish passports that made their status clear. “The bearer of this passport,” declared the first page, “is not under the protection of the Turkish state.” But as he sailed along the coast of the island, past the charred upper floor of his first Turkish house and into the open sea, he was now in more danger than ever before. Istanbul, in a way, was going to follow him.

  At the beginning of the 1920s, John Dos Passos had come downstairs to find the lobby of the Pera Palace in chaos. In the lounge, Hellenic, Italian, and French gendarmes were trying to converse, each in his own language. A British member of parliament was downing a cocktail while attempting to explain something to a soldier. Bellhops and doormen were carrying out a man in an astrakhan hat and frock coat, leaving behind a pool of blood on the mosaic floor and a stained, plush-red armchair. The hotel manager was walking back and forth with sweat beading up on his brow, trying to learn what had happened. The envoy from Azerbaijan had been assassinated, someone said, and the gunman was a bearded Armenian. Or perhaps it was a clean-shaven Bolshevik, someone else said, who came right up to the doorway and shot him dead. Meanwhile, a waiter implored guests to settle their bills.

  It was not an unusual scene, both during and after the Allied occupation. Intrigue of some sort seemed to be the city’s common currency. With so many Russians living in Istanbul and its outskirts, the city became both a battleground for intra-Russian disputes and a potential target for Bolshevik agents. In October 1921, the Wrangels’ residential yacht, the Lucullus, was rammed and sunk by a steamer while at anchor in the Bosphorus, a probable assassination plot that the general and his wife escaped only because they happened not to be on board at the time. A certain Kuznetsov, lodged at the Pera Palace, was known to be the centerpiece of Bolshevik propaganda efforts, with a particular interest in turning Cossacks and other White Russians to the communist cause.

  “The Bosphorus was a dumping ground of all Europe’s war crooks and spies,” recalled Robert Dunn, an American naval official. The Pera Palace and Graveyard Street were natural points of attraction for foreigners and locals caught up in the game of intelligence gathering. The British Embassy stood at one end of the street, with a Turkish policeman permanently stationed outside to direct traffic to and from the Grande Rue. Farther along was the old Petits-Champs Park, with its theater and clubs. Next to the park was the Pera Palace itself and, next to that, the small grounds of the American Embassy. Then came the YMCA, followed by a British police station. During the Allied occupation, the headquarters of British naval intelligence and the officers’ mess of the British contingent were located in buildings just across the street. Bertha Proctor’s bar and sometime brothel anchored the southern end.

  Even by the late 1920s, when the foreign presence in the city was much diminished, it was still advisable to be careful with conversation and to check around corners in that section of Pera. Settling in Istanbul had involved “little deceptions and coercions,” Trotsky’s wife, Natalya, recalled. Trotsky may have seemed a conspiratorial eccentric to the islanders on Büyükada, but paranoia is a reasonable response if someone really is out to get you. The Soviet Embassy, today the consulate of the Russian Federation, was Trotsky’s first home in the city, but it was also the headquarters of the surveillance system that kept constant tabs on him. It lay at the center of a large and growing web of secret agents who hoped to make Istanbul the base for intelligence operations throughout southern Europe and the Near East.

  “The network of spies was well-organized at Constantinople,” recalled Georgy Agabekov, a senior official in the foreign intelligence branch of the OGPU. Agabekov claimed that virtually all the correspondence of major anti-Soviet émigré groups in Istanbul, such as Ukrainian nationalists and Caucasus highlanders, found its way into Soviet hands. The Soviets were careful to balance the desire to infiltrate enemy organizations with the need for keeping operations low-key enough to avoid offending the Turks. Agabekov claimed that the Soviets had managed to finagle informers inside the Japanese, Austrian, and other foreign embassies; to intercept mail destined for White associations and for Trotsky himself; to sign up an Ar
menian bishop as a paid agent; and even to place an informant inside Trotsky’s house on Büyükada. Much of this was little more than enthusiastic bumbling, however. Agents were proud of their roles as zealous defenders of Bolshevism—too proud, in many instances—and stood out like sore thumbs to counterintelligence operatives in Istanbul, Paris, London, and other cities—“prancing along in [a] blue serge suit made to order by some Russian émigré tailor,” noted one disillusioned Soviet official.

  Agabekov himself had the dubious honor of being the first defector from Stalin’s secret police, and it was his time in Istanbul that caused him to flip sides. In 1929 and 1930, he had been working in the city to set up a string of intelligence operations in Greece, Syria, and Palestine, while leaving Turkish affairs to his OGPU colleagues working out of the embassy. Agabekov always claimed that he had become disenchanted with the Soviet system, but the proximate cause was probably more prosaic. He seems to have fallen in love with a young English woman, Isabel Streater, whom he had hired as a language tutor. He at first offered himself to British diplomats as a defector, but they suspected a trap and treated him coolly. Finally, in January 1930, Agabekov and Streater fled separately to Paris, she via the Orient Express and he by sea, and eventually began a new life together as husband and wife.

  Agabekov’s defection was a blow to the Soviet effort, but the Istanbul operation was accustomed to the regular turnover of personnel. Less than a year before Agabekov’s departure, sometime near the middle of 1929, Yakov Minsky, the OGPU station chief who had originally helped Trotsky settle in the city, fell ill and returned to Moscow. His successor was a dark-haired, round-faced operative with a reputation as a personable comrade. His gray-green eyes and witty demeanor seemed to make him irresistible to a string of female coworkers. Even today it is difficult to establish with clarity to whom he was married and when; he may have been married to several women at the same time. His official cover was that of a diplomat at the Soviet Embassy. His travel documents identified him as someone named Naumov. His superiors gave him the code names “Tom” and “Pierre.” His real name was Leonid Eitingon.