Cárdenas and his ministers anticipated the firestorm of protest that would greet the announcement of Trotsky’s asylum. The Communists loudly complained, and vicious anti-Trotsky posters were put up all over the capital. Alongside them appeared Trotskyist counter-proclamations, which featured a pencil-drawn portrait of the exile, although many of these were soon defaced with the Nazi swastika. The Communists, meanwhile, declared open season on the renegade Diego Rivera, himself a former party member. The Trotskyist group in Mexico was insignificant, and unlike in the United States, there was no independent liberal class to take the side of the president.
On New Year’s Eve, as political tensions mounted, President Cárdenas summoned Rivera to his residence for a private conference. He assured the beleaguered painter that there was absolutely no reason to fear for Trotsky’s safety. Cárdenas was adamant that Trotsky must not land secretly, which would reflect poorly on Mexico and on him as president. A military escort would deliver the distinguished guest safely to his new residence, where he would be provided with full protection. And Trotsky should consider himself a guest and not a prisoner, Cárdenas told Rivera. He would enjoy complete freedom of movement.
The change in the political atmosphere during the next few days provided unmistakable evidence that the president meant business. Communist propaganda backed away from incitement to assassinate Trotsky, instead protesting that his presence in Mexico would divide the labor movement. Rivera assumed that Cárdenas or one of his men had called the secretary of Mexico’s Communist Party, Hernán Laborde, and told him to behave himself. The Communists were explicitly warned not to deface the Trotskyist posters or they would be prosecuted for violating the right of free speech.
The attitude of the president left no doubt that he intended to carry out his promises. Yet Mexico’s political environment was such that Trotsky’s status could be secure only so long as the tough, clever, incorruptible Cárdenas remained in office. And he was now two years into his single, constitutionally permitted six-year term as president. With this in mind, Rivera told Shachtman that Mexico could at best serve Trotsky as a bridge between Europe and the United States. Shachtman, after three weeks of sampling the political culture of the capital, believed that Rivera was “absolutely correct.” The American committee must be persuaded to bring its influence to bear on securing Trotsky a U.S. visa. Perhaps the courage shown by President Cárdenas would embolden President Roosevelt to emulate his example.
Shachtman was not optimistic, placing the odds at “one chance in a hundred.” But an all-out effort had to be made, because the Old Man’s life might depend on it. In briefing Trotsky about what awaited him in Mexico City, Shachtman and Novack thought it wise to leave out some unsettling details, at least for the time being. These included the fact that recently Rivera had narrowly avoided an attempt on his life, that Rivera’s caretaker had subsequently been kidnapped and beaten up, and that Shachtman had just put down $100 for a Thompson submachine gun—an outlay to be charged to the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky.
In the mid-morning on Sunday, January 10, the armored train came to a halt in the town of Cárdenas—no relation to the president—near the foot of the plateau dominating the topography of northern and central Mexico. Trotsky took advantage of the opportunity to get off the train and stretch his legs.
The imposing presence of El Hidalgo alerted the local citizens that an important person had arrived. Novack says that as many as four hundred “natives,” almost the entire population of the town, crowded around Trotsky and Natalia, the children pushing their way to the front of the crowd. To Trotsky, these brown-skinned, barely dressed little ones were a stark contrast to the children with “china-blue eyes” and “corn-colored hair” he had left behind in Norway. For Novack, the remarkable contrast was right there in front of him: “this striking goateed gentleman with a stick and plus fours thus surrounded by serapeed Indians and barefooted brown-faced gamins.”
From the town of Cárdenas, an additional locomotive would be required to haul the heavy train up the plateau. One train, two engines: It was, Trotsky could assure his traveling companions, an arrangement quite familiar to him from his glory days in revolutionary Russia. His own armored train was so formidable that it required two locomotives just to pull it over level ground. That was in the days of the Russian civil war, when Trotsky was the war commissar of the new Soviet regime. For nearly two and a half years, he saw very little of his headquarters, living in a railway carriage that once belonged to the czarist minister of transportation. Trotsky’s exploits in his armored train catapulted him to great fame and made “Lenin and Trotsky” synonymous with Russian Bolshevism.
Russia’s time of troubles began as a result of the First World War, in which it fought on the side of France, Great Britain, and later the United States, against Germany and Austria. The Imperial Army’s catastrophic defeats at the front, together with the economic hardship at home caused by the prolonged war effort, provoked strikes, mutinies, and riots that led to the fall of the Russian monarchy in the February Revolution of 1917. The Provisional Government that succeeded the autocracy could not halt the country’s slide into anarchy. The Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution promising to withdraw Russia from the war, a promise they fulfilled in March 1918, when they agreed to the crushingly punitive terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the separate peace with Germany that shut down the eastern front. In defending the controversial treaty within the Party’s Central Committee, Lenin argued that what revolutionary Russia needed above all was a “breathing spell.”
Peace was fleeting, though. A military threat to Soviet power began to materialize within Russia in the spring of 1918. Serious hostilities broke out in the summer, the first shots coming from an unlikely quarter: a legion of 35,000 Czechoslovak soldiers, former Habsburg prisoners of war, who had become trapped inside Russia. The heavily armed Czechoslovaks were attempting to get out of Russia by way of Siberia, strung out along a vast stretch of the Trans-Siberian railroad, when they clashed with Red units and began to topple local Soviet governments. Joining forces with White Guard troops, they seized Samara on the shores of the Volga River, then Simbirsk to the north, then Kazan farther upriver, where the Volga bends west toward Moscow.
Trotsky learned of the fall of Kazan while en route in his hastily organized train, which left Moscow on the night of August 7. The closest his train could get to the ancient Tatar capital was the small town of Svyazhsk, on the opposite bank of the Volga. These Red defeats took place against a backdrop of ominous developments on the periphery. To the west, the Germans had acquired in the peace treaty an enormous swath of territory from the Baltic to the Black Sea; in the north, French and British troops occupied the port cities of Murmansk and Archangel; in the Ural Mountains to the east, and on the Don River to the south, White Russian armies were coalescing. “The civil war front,” as Trotsky described it, “was taking more and more the shape of a noose closing ever tighter about Moscow.”
Trotsky spent that critical month of August 1918 coordinating operations for the recapture of Kazan from his train, which he called a “flying administrative apparatus.” In those early days, the train consisted of twelve cars, all armored, and carried a heavily armed crew of about 250 men, including a squad of Latvian Riflemen and a unit of machine gunners.
The recapture of Kazan was the immediate goal, but the larger challenge Trotsky still faced was to forge a genuine army out of the remnants of the peasant czarist army and the proletarian Red Guard units from Moscow and Petrograd. Desertion from the battlefield remained endemic. Any units retreating without orders, Trotsky now warned, would face the firing squad, starting with the commanding officer. “Cowards, scoundrels, and traitors will not escape the bullet—for this I vouch before the whole Red Army.” Such credible death threats produced the desired effect. And after the Reds recaptured Kazan on September 10 and Simbirsk two days later, Trotsky claimed that the significance of the victory far
outweighed the liberation of two Russian cities: “A vacillating, unreliable and crumbling mass was transformed into a real army.”
This was the first of many turning points in the civil war, as Trotsky coordinated the efforts on innumerable fronts, with more than fifteen armies in the field. They were commanded by former officers of the Russian Imperial Army who were drafted into the ranks of the Red Army because it desperately needed their expertise and experience. In order to ensure the loyal behavior of these often unwilling recruits, Trotsky attached to the ranking officers trustworthy Bolsheviks designated as political commissars. It was an arrangement fraught with tension and controversy.
The Whites would advance to their farthest point in mid-1919, when their armies drove toward Moscow from Siberia in the east and the Ukraine in the south, and threatened Petrograd from the northwest. That summer, Soviet Russia was reduced territorially to the size of ancient Muscovy. Yet its defenders had the advantage of internal lines of operation, enabling the Red Army to shift forces and supplies from one front to another as circumstances required. Trotsky, too, raced from front to front over Russia’s run-down railway lines, in disrepair after years of war and revolution. It is reliably estimated that his train traveled more than 125,000 miles during the civil war. “In those years,” he later recalled, “I accustomed myself, seemingly forever, to writing and thinking to the accompaniment of Pullman wheels and springs.”
One of the train’s carriages served as a garage, housing several automobiles and trucks and a large gasoline tank. Where the train could not take him, his car was put into service, transporting him to the front lines on countless excursions covering hundreds of miles. Trotsky and his convoy would set off accompanied by a team of twenty to thirty sharpshooters and machine gunners. “A war of movement is full of surprises,” he explained. “On the steppes, we always ran the risk of running into some Cossack band. Automobiles with machine-guns insure one against this.”
Trotsky’s visits to the front enabled him to ascertain the facts on the ground, but more important, they served to boost the morale of the Red soldiers. The train carried with it experienced fighters and dedicated Communists ready to step into the breach. Armed detachments dressed in black leather uniforms would descend from the train and go into action. “The appearance of a leather-coated detachment in a dangerous place invariably had an overwhelming effect,” Trotsky testified. Also effective were the assortment of supplies and gifts distributed from the train: food items, boots, underwear, cigarettes and matches, cigarette cases, medicines, field glasses, maps, watches, and machine guns.
The train was equipped with a telegraph station, so that urgent orders for supplies could be conveyed to Moscow without delay, and news from the outside world could be delivered to the otherwise isolated front-line soldiers. The train carried its own printing press and published its own newspaper, En Route. At each stop, the staff would distribute to soldiers and civilians stacks of these newspapers, along with copies of Trotsky’s writings. When it came to agitation, however, nothing could surpass Trotsky’s rousing whistle-stop speeches. The photographer and the motion picture man who accompanied him on the train captured him in his greatcoat and military cap, his hands in furious motion, his countenance stern, his bearing erect.
Trotsky may have looked the part of the Red warlord, yet he had no military background. In fact, as war commissar he rarely involved himself in questions of strategy or operations, leaving this to the experts. He reserved for himself the role of supreme agitator, and because he was as ruthless as he was ubiquitous, often resorting to bloodcurdling threats to achieve results, he acquired a reputation for brutality, most of all for his merciless treatment of deserters.
Justice was administered by field tribunals. During the battle to retake Kazan, one of these courts martial passed death sentences on every tenth deserter of a dishonored regiment, including the commander and the commissar, causing the executions of at least two dozen men. Trotsky had ordered the punishment, and he defended it without remorse: “to a gangrenous wound a red-hot iron was applied.” The Revolution must use all possible means to defend itself, Trotsky believed, although he tended to justify the severity of his regime in traditional terms. “An army cannot be built without reprisals,” he declared. “Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death penalty in its arsenal.”
Trotsky’s draconian ways and words made him a lightning rod for anti-Bolshevik propagandists. Especially notorious was his decision to use the wives and children of former czarist officers as hostages in order to inhibit any temptation these officers might have to sabotage the Soviet war effort or to defect to the enemy. White Guard posters and literature made the most of the fact that the Red demagogue was a Jew, thereby tapping into the deepest Russian fears of a mythical “Jewish Bolshevism.”
TROTSKY WAS BORN Lev Davidovich Bronstein, in 1879, in the southern Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. Like so many of Russia’s young Jews of his generation, he was drawn to revolutionary ideas and joined a clandestine circle devoted to propagating those ideas among the lower classes. Arrested at age eighteen, he adopted as his revolutionary pseudonym the family name of one of his jailers, thus becoming Lev, or Leon, Trotsky. In recent decades, Russia had become host to a virulent form of anti-Semitism—its most shocking manifestations were the waves of deadly pogroms in the western and southern borderlands, the former Jewish Pale of Settlement. Czarist Russia was the source of a notorious anti-Semitic forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. White propaganda exploited these festering prejudices by portraying Bronstein-Trotsky, his Semitic features cartoonishly enhanced, as the Jewish-Bolshevik Antichrist.
Yet Trotsky remained something of an outsider among the Bolsheviks. For a decade and a half up to 1917, the year he joined the Party, he had been a vehement critic of Lenin. But after the collapse of the Russian autocracy, he hooked his fortunes to the Bolshevik juggernaut, making history as the organizer of the October coup d’état. Now, as the Revolution’s second most important leader, he appeared too eager to demonstrate his intellectual superiority and to mug before the mirror of History. His behavior as war commissar fueled these animosities. Many Bolsheviks had assumed that the Revolution would put an end to a centralized regular army, which they considered a vestige of capitalism, and would rely instead on a volunteer militia to defend itself. Trotsky’s championing of conscription and old-fashioned military command and discipline ran counter to this spirit. What is more, he seemed to revel in traditional military culture, instituting awards for bravery and bringing a military band along on his train journeys. On top of all this, he was dogged by rumors that he had personally executed Communists.
The backlash against Trotsky was brought on, first and foremost, by his decision to fill the ranks of the Red Army with tens of thousands of former czarist military officers. This was the core issue at the start of his running feud with Stalin, who was far more suspicious than Trotsky of the kinds of treasonous plots these carryovers from the old regime might decide to hatch. Stalin himself exhibited an aptitude for scheming insubordination in his capacity as chief political commissar on the southern front. Sometimes he went over Trotsky’s head, directly to Lenin, in order to get his way. Lenin tried to mediate between his two headstrong lieutenants, but matters developed to the point where Trotsky ordered Stalin’s removal from the front. Stalin withdrew, but the problem did not go away.
Trotsky’s long absences from Moscow made it easier for his political enemies to outmaneuver him. His lowest point came in the summer of 1919, when he suffered a series of setbacks just as the White armies were closing in. He was overruled by the Communist Party’s Central Committee, its key decision-making body, on questions of strategy and command appointments at the same time that Stalin’s intrigues were undermining his authority in Moscow and an impatient Lenin was reproaching him for the Red Army’s reverses on the battlefield. He o
ffered his resignation as war commissar, which the Central Committee rejected.
Trotsky’s fortunes turned around in October, when he led a heroic defense of Petrograd. The former capital had come under siege from the Northwestern Army commanded by General Nikolai Yudenich, who was backed by British arms and funds. Lenin concluded that Petrograd ought to be abandoned in order to shorten the front line. Arriving in Moscow, Trotsky argued passionately that the cradle of the Revolution must be saved at any cost, even if it came down to house-to-house combat. If “Yudenich’s gang” were to penetrate the city’s walls, Trotsky swaggered, they would find themselves trapped in a “stone labyrinth.”
Having won the argument, Trotsky hastened to Petrograd, where he found officials demoralized and resigned to defeat. “Exceptional measures were necessary,” he decided, “the enemy was at the very gates. As usual in such straits, I turned to my train force—men who could be depended on under any circumstances. They checked up, put on pressure, established connections, removed those who were unfit, and filled in the gaps.”
It was in these critical days that Trotsky was presented with his one opportunity to assume the role of regimental commander. He was at division headquarters in Alexandrovka, just outside the city, when he looked up and saw retreating Red soldiers approaching. He reacted instinctively. “I mounted the first horse I could lay my hands on and turned the lines back,” he later recalled. It took a few minutes for the commissar of war to make his presence felt among his withdrawing troops. “But I chased one soldier after another, on horseback, and made them all turn back. Only then did I notice that my orderly, Kozlov, a Muscovite peasant and an old soldier himself, was racing at my heels. He was beside himself with excitement. Brandishing a revolver, he ran wildly along the line, repeating my appeals and yelling for all he was worth: ‘Courage, boys, Comrade Trotsky is leading you.’”
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