Petrograd was saved, and Yudenich’s army was pushed back into Estonia. The following month, Trotsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. The citation praised the “indefatigability and indestructible energy” he displayed in fulfilling his commission to organize the Red Army and then by leading it so effectively. “In the days when Red Petrograd came under direct threat, Comrade Trotsky, in setting off for the Petrograd front, took the closest part in the organization of the brilliantly executed defense of Petrograd, inspiring with his personal bravery the Red Army units under fire at the front.”
By 1920, the civil war was won and the Red Army had five million men in uniform. But Trotsky had also acquired a considerable number of influential enemies. They tended to gravitate toward Stalin, the man who emerged from the war as Trotsky’s chief political rival. Stalin would employ the services of these like-minded Bolsheviks to eventually cut Trotsky down to size and to expel him from the Communist Party and then the country. The field was then clear for Stalin’s historians to portray their master as a great hero of the civil war, while distorting or omitting Trotsky’s revolutionary leadership of the Red Army. By the time the outcast arrived in Mexico, the Party’s official history had transformed the organizer of Red Victory into the “despised fascist hireling, Trotsky.”
As El Hidalgo ascended the Mexican plateau, the air became cooler and it began to rain, which brought relief to all the travelers, but especially to Trotsky and Natalia. Trotsky recorded in his journal: “we soon rid ourselves of the northerner’s fear of the tropics which had seized us in the steamy atmosphere of the Gulf of Mexico.”
In the evening of January 10, the train stopped briefly in the station at San Luis Potosí, more than 6,000 feet above sea level, then traveled southward, continuing its climb. It was late the following morning when the rail journey came to an end on the northern outskirts of Mexico City, at the tiny station at Lechería. This was how President Cárdenas himself typically arrived in his capital: secretly, and thus safely, in the suburbs.
Trotsky and Natalia arriving by train in Lechería, on the outskirts of Mexico City, on the morning of January 11, 1937.
Bernard Wolfe Slide Collection, Hoover Institution Archives
At Lechería, Trotsky was warmly greeted by Diego Rivera, temporarily released from the hospital and “fat and smoldering,” according to the Time magazine correspondent on the scene. Foreign and Mexican comrades were part of the reception committee, along with government officials, police officers, and more reporters and photographers. In the crush, Trotsky became separated from Natalia, who struggled not to lose sight of Frida, the only face she recognized in the crowd.
Then came what Novack called a “mad dash” by car around the city, southward toward the suburb of Coyoacán. The name Coyoacán meant roughly “place of the coyotes” in the Aztec language, although the only animals visible through the car window on the drive through the neighborhood were donkeys posted outside small adobe houses, cows enjoying an early lunch in the streets, and chickens and dogs patrolling the sidewalks—that is, where sidewalks were present. Coyoacán, the new arrivals discovered, was a village.
It was toward noon when the fleet of automobiles pulled up in front of a squat, one-story house of bright blue stucco arranged in a U-shape around a garden patio. The neighbors called it the casa azul, or the Blue House, and Diego and Frida later adopted the name. This was Frida’s home growing up, and Diego bought it from her parents after he married her. They had since moved to San Angel, a few miles away, and arrangements had been made for the Trotskys to occupy the Blue House temporarily. They entered a spacious patio filled with plants and flowers, pre-Columbian sculptures, and—what especially caught Trotsky’s eye—a fruit-bearing orange tree standing in the middle of the yard. The rooms were fresh and airy, each with its own collection of pre-Columbian artifacts and modern paintings, including works by Diego and Frida.
For the remainder of the day and all of the next, the Blue House was the scene of a celebration. Novack describes the atmosphere as “wild confusion, jubilation, and excitement,” with visitors of all kinds coming and going. Trotsky and Diego posed for photographers and gave interviews. Trotsky worked his charm on the Mexican reporters, leaving them with the impression that he intended to retreat into private life and return to work on his biography of Lenin, even though he knew that this was out of the question.
Meanwhile, all Mexico City was talking about the arrival of Trotsky. La Venida de Trotsky was the title of a ninety-minute skit featured at the Apollo, a popular burlesque house. The new slogan on the Communist posters was a belligerent “Out with Trotsky, the Assassin.” The day after his arrival, the Communists staged a massive demonstration in the city-center Plaza de Santo Domingo, where party secretary Laborde could be heard shouting, “Down with Trotsky who is living in the home of the capitalist painter Rivera!” He called for the exile’s expulsion from Mexico on the grounds that he had already violated the terms of his asylum by criticizing the Soviet government. The demonstration was broken up by the police after several speakers attacked the government for harboring an assassin.
Inside the Blue House, Trotsky professed to be indifferent to these fulminations. He had no intention, he said, of “entering into a polemic with flunkeys when ahead lay a struggle with their masters.” Moscow was preparing a new show trial. In Pravda and Izvestiia, Trotsky’s former comrades were calling for blood. Even Christian Rakovsky, once Trotsky’s best friend and close political ally, added his voice to the bloodthirsty chorus: “No pity for the Trotskyist Gestapo agents! Let them be shot!” American bodyguards would have to be found to supplement the seven Mexican policemen on duty outside the Blue House. And Shachtman urgently appealed to the New York comrades to come up with the money needed to hire a proper secretarial staff so that Trotsky could defend himself against the slanderous charges being prepared against him by Moscow’s prosecutors.
At the time of the first trial, Trotsky had been unable to speak out. Now he felt unbound and battle-ready. His emigration to Mexico, he wrote in his journal, had changed the balance of power to the disadvantage of the Kremlin. This may have been true in the short term. But it did not change the harder truth Time magazine printed in its blunt assessment of the situation: “Today Trotsky is in Mexico—the ideal country for an assassination.”
CHAPTER 2
Mastermind
I demand that the mad dogs be shot—every one of them!” This was the cry of a foaming Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet chief prosecutor, near the close of the first Moscow show trial, in August 1936. The object of his fury were the sixteen defendants sitting in the dock, accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders. The next day, a screaming headline in Pravda echoed his demand: “The Mad Dogs Must Be Shot!” And indeed they were, each of them dispatched with a bullet to the back of the head.
Vyshinsky also prosecuted the second Moscow trial, which opened on January 23, 1937. This time, seventeen defendants were accused of forming a conspiratorial “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center” aimed at the dismemberment of the USSR in collusion with Germany and Japan. Trotsky, although not formally a defendant, was once again portrayed as the mastermind of the conspiracy, with his son Lev, nicknamed Lyova, serving as his close accomplice from Paris.
The most prominent defendant in the second trial was Trotsky’s former comrade Yuri Pyatakov, whose recent tenure as deputy commissar of heavy industry was exploited by the prosecution to lend credibility to the ancillary charges of sabotage and wrecking. In this way, hundreds of industrial accidents, coal mine explosions, and railway disasters, many of which in fact resulted from the breakneck speed of the five-year plans, could be blamed on the unmasked enemies of the people now on trial for their lives.
This trial, like its predecessor, foreshadowed further purges to come, as the defendants obliged the prosecutor by engaging in a lethal form of name-dropping. Karl Radek, the Bolshevik journalist and Trotsky’s onetime ally, put on an inspired perfor
mance, which may have saved his life. In his closing statement he remarked that there remained at large “semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us.”
This was a strenuous time for Trotsky and his staff at the Blue House. Each day news reports described the latest falsifications out of Moscow, and each day Trotsky issued multiple press releases pointing out the contradictions, improbabilities, and absurdities of the accusations made against him. Trotsky’s staff was led by Jean van Heijenoort, a Frenchman who had served as his secretary and bodyguard in Turkey and France. Trotskyist headquarters in New York sent down an American secretary to handle the English-language translations and to deal with the American press; local comrades assisted with Spanish. Each of Trotsky’s statements had to be translated immediately from his original French into English and Spanish, then distributed to the international news services and the Mexican newspapers.
Speed was of the essence. As was the case with the first Moscow trial, the entire court proceeding, from the reading of the charges to the final verdicts, took place within a single week. The verdicts were read out to the defendants in the early hours of January 30. All but four were sentenced to death. Later that day, on a wintry Red Square, where the temperature hovered at minus 17 degrees Fahrenheit, Moscow Party secretary Nikita Khrushchev harangued a crowd of 200,000 demonstrators. Some carried banners that read, “The court’s verdict is the people’s verdict.” They heard Khrushchev condemn the defendants as tools of “Judas-Trotsky.” “Stalin is our banner,” he cried. “Stalin is our will, Stalin is our victory.” Across the Soviet Union that day, Soviet citizens gathered at “indignation meetings” to demand that the death sentences be carried out—although the outcome was never in doubt.
In the second trial, as in the first, the confessions of the accused were the only evidence presented in court. These confessions became the subject of endless fascination and speculation in the West. Why would the defendants engage in such acts of self-abasement unless they were in fact guilty as charged? Why did some of them seem to revel in their admissions of guilt? To Trotsky, this was no great mystery. The show trial confessions, he explained, were the result of the prolonged mental torture the victims had endured, which included threats to family members held as hostages. In the end, according to Trotsky, they agreed to confess to the most fantastic of crimes because they knew it was their only chance to save themselves and their families.
While many Western observers found it troubling to think that the confessions were legitimate, it was even harder to imagine that they had been concocted. The defendants were, after all, hardened Old Bolsheviks, veterans of czarist prisons and exile, onetime conspirators in the revolutionary underground willing to take great risks and suffer great hardships. They seemed not only fully capable of conspiring against Stalin, but highly unlikely to fabricate their own confessions of guilt. Besides, Western reporters and diplomats were present inside the courtroom, the October Hall, upstairs in the stately neoclassical House of Unions, not far from the Kremlin. Would Stalin really have risked everything, knowing that one of the doomed men might decide at the last moment to blindside inquisitor Vyshinsky and leave his mark on history by blurting out the truth?
Kingsley Martin, editor of the British magazine New Statesman, asked Trotsky why none of the accused chose to go down fighting when they could assume, based on the outcome of the first trial, that they were all going to die. Trotsky became very animated. Even after the first trial, he argued, these men had reason to believe they could escape death. “There is a world of difference between certainty of death and just that much hope of reprieve”—here Trotsky pinched a sliver of space in front of him to indicate the slimmest chance of escape. And in fact, some were spared the executioner’s bullet.
Martin persisted, asking Trotsky if perhaps there was something in the Bolsheviks’ code of conduct that would “psychologically expose them to serve the Party at the expense of personal honor, by confessing anything that was not the truth.” Martin was unaware that Trotsky himself had once offered a striking display of this mentality. It was in 1924, in a moment of political adversity, when he stood before a Party congress and declared: “One can only be right with the Party and through the Party, because history has not created any other way for the realization of one’s rightness. The English have the saying, ‘My country, right or wrong.’ With much greater justification we can say: ‘My Party, right or wrong.’”
The idea that the purge trial confessions were a kind of last service to the Party, an act of self-immolation performed by legally innocent true believers, would gain popularity in the years to come, thanks in part to Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler’s 1941 novel dramatizing the trials. Trotsky maintained that the psychology behind the confessions had been best described a century earlier by Edgar Allan Poe, in his short story “The Pit and the Pendulum,” in which “the victim is terrorized and psychologically shattered by the slow and systematic descent of death.” As he explained to an American reporter, “Human nerves, even the strongest, have a limited capacity to endure moral torture.”
Trotsky’s explanation of the confessions, and his refutation of the trials generally, failed to sway liberal-to-left opinion in the United States. Part of the problem was that Trotsky’s voice could barely be heard above the murderous din orchestrated in Moscow. To remedy this, the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky arranged for him to deliver a speech about the Moscow trials, live by telephone to an audience in Manhattan. The venue chosen for the event, the Hippodrome, guaranteed Trotsky a large audience and maximum publicity.
The Hippodrome was a monumental Beaux Arts theater on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets. In its heyday, after the First World War, it was the scene of extravagant entertainment spectacles, including major circus performances and aquatic shows. Its enormous stage contained an 8,000-gallon glass water tank that could be raised by hydraulic pistons. It was at the Hippodrome in 1918 that escape artist Harry Houdini staged “The Submersible Iron-Bound Box Mystery” and made a 10,000-pound elephant disappear. Now, from this same stage, the incomparable Leon Trotsky would attempt to remove a very large monkey from his back. The New York Trotskyists could barely contain their excitement. “This is going to be one of the most dramatic events of all time in New York,” one of them wrote to Trotsky. “It will be an immense newspaper sensation.”
On the evening of February 9, Trotsky stood before a microphone in a small room on the premises of the telephone exchange in Mexico City. He was prepared to speak in English for forty-five minutes, and in Russian for fifteen more. Warned that overtime charges were astronomical, he had rehearsed repeatedly in order to get his timing down. In New York, inside the bright blue walls of the Hippodrome, a capacity crowd of more than six thousand people sat in red-colored seats with gold embroidered crests. Police detectives moved along the aisles, ready to quell any pro-Stalin manifestations, while outside the building 150 officers were on patrol.
Trotsky was scheduled to start speaking at 10:10 p.m., and as the historic moment approached and the audience fell silent, the atmosphere inside the Hippodrome was electric. At exactly ten minutes past the hour, a faint voice could be heard over the sound system speaking in Russian, but a moment later there was a loud click followed by a burst of static. Numerous attempts were made during the next hour to establish a connection, but without success. An act of sabotage, most likely at the Mexico City end, made sure that Trotsky’s voice would not be heard.
The audience waited and dozed until, at 11:20, Shachtman executed the backup plan by reading the text of Trotsky’s speech, which began with an apology for “my impossible English.” Trotsky called Stalin’s Russia a “madhouse,” and launched into a detailed rebuttal to the Moscow trials, the purpose of which, he believed, was to engineer his deliverance to the Soviet Union and the cellars of the GPU. The speech was laced with Trotsky’s usual slashing sarcasm and punctuated with dramatic pauses, as he frequently ask
ed his audience, “Do you hear me?” and “Have you all heard?” They could hear Shachtman perfectly, even as eyes wandered upward from the podium to the huge painting of a prizefighter that towered above the left side of the stage.
Playing to his New York audience, Trotsky took several jabs at some influential American friends of the Soviet regime, in particular Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of The New York Times. Duranty, whom Trotsky regarded as the Kremlin’s “political prostitute,” vouched for the integrity of Stalin and the legitimacy of the trials, explaining the masochistic tone of the defendants’ confessions by invoking eternal Russian culture. “No, the Messieurs Duranty tell us, it is not a madhouse, but the ‘Russian soul,’” Trotsky explained derisively. “You lie, gentlemen, about the Russian soul. You lie about the human soul in general.”
The most memorable moment of the speech—and the one that made headlines the next day—came when Trotsky reiterated his willingness to appear before a neutral commission of inquiry to answer the charges brought against him in Moscow. He capped this promise with a dramatic declaration: “If this commission decides that I am guilty in the slightest degree of the crimes which Stalin imputes to me, I pledge in advance to place myself voluntarily in the hands of the executioners of the G.P.U.”
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