For Trotsky, Frida was a storm that had passed. He and Natalia were reconciled. It was time to get back to work. But the Little Lion would make one last attempt at escape. The opportunity arose later in the year, when the Mexican Communists launched another of their noisy campaigns of abuse and threats against Trotsky, giving rise to concerns about his safety. Trotsky believed that under the cover of a protest demonstration, the Stalinists might try to storm the Blue House and assassinate him. This was a scenario that Van deemed entirely plausible, and he found Trotsky’s plan of escape in such an event to be a clever one. A ladder would be kept in a corner of the second, smaller patio, along the quiet, dimly lit Avenida Berlin. “In case of an attack, Trotsky would put the ladder against the wall, cross over alone and unseen, and quickly walk to the house of a young Mexican woman whom we knew, to take refuge there.”
The young woman in question was Frida’s sister, Cristina. Before a rehearsal could be arranged, however, she approached Van and explained that during the previous several months Trotsky had on four or five occasions directly and insistently propositioned her. She had managed to deflect these unwanted advances without raising a fuss. She also told Van that Trotsky had divulged to her the escape plan and the anticipated rehearsal. Van was angry that Trotsky would risk compromising his security for a sexual liaison, but he said nothing. There turned out to be no need, because Trotsky stopped pushing for a rehearsal, possibly sensing that its true purpose had been discovered. Yet how many times must the Old Man have raised the ladder and rehearsed the escape plan in his mind.
CHAPTER 4
Day of the Dead
Trotsky turned fifty-eight on November 7, 1937. His birthday coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd—known as the Great October Socialist Revolution because of where the date fell on the old-style calendar used in Russia in 1917. This was Trotsky’s first November 7 in Mexico, and thanks to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the Blue House was the scene of a fiesta.
Diego, Frida, her sister Cristina, Antonio Hidalgo, who was Trotsky’s go-between with the Mexican government, and other friends arrived at the house long before dawn. In fact it was near midnight, according to Trotsky’s American secretary, Joe Hansen, “in the inimitable style of Mexico.” Diego and Frida brought along an enormous collection of red carnations and they immediately set to work snipping off the flowers and arraying them on the white cloth that covered the long, broad dining room table. Diego, the master of the large canvas, took the lead in arranging and rearranging the flowers, before settling on a decorative salute to Trotsky and the Fourth International: “ARRIBA LA CUARTA INTERNACIONAL/VIVA TROTSKY.” As a centerpiece Diego had ordered an enormous cake covered in red icing and ringed with candles encircling a hammer and sickle.
Toward 7:30 a.m., two orchestras hired by Diego crowded into the patio and began serenading outside the French doors to Trotsky and Natalia’s bedroom: sonorous voices accompanied by marimba, accordion, bass viol, and guitars. An hour later, in the bright and warming winter sunshine, comrades began arriving, most bearing red flowers of one or another variety. The celebrants, about sixty in all, were mostly workers and schoolteachers, the two groups that made up the large majority of Trotsky’s Mexican followers. Most were dressed simply, the men in white cotton pants and shirts, the women in the ample dark skirts fashionable at the time. Huarache sandals clustered beside primitive idols, squat rock sculptures engraved with the faces of the gods, each deity surrounded by ferns and cacti. An assortment of foods appeared, Hansen reports, “including a few live chickens, their feet tied. Several five-gallon cans, converted into household utensils, were brought in filled with atole, a thin chocolate-flavored gruel which we sipped out of cups.”
Atole, a traditional hot beverage with a cornstarch base, is a particular favorite during Mexico’s most important fiesta, Day of the Dead, a combination of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, November 1 and 2. Despite its name, Día de los Muertos is a joyous occasion, a celebration of the lives of the deceased, whose graves become the settings for lively family gatherings. Hansen described it for his wife back in Salt Lake City as a cross between Halloween and Decoration Day, the original name for Memorial Day. On November 2, the cemeteries were crowded with the friends and relatives of the dead, along with vendors selling tacos, candied plums, and cakes, as well as balloons and tinsel propellers. Among the most popular decorations and presents were full-length skeletons, skeleton masks, candy coffins, and sugar skulls with the name of the deceased spelled out across the forehead. Back in those less regimented times, the Day of the Dead usually lasted for an entire week.
All of which means that the revelers who gathered at the Blue House on that November 7 morning were in good practice. At a certain point in the festivities, calls were heard for the guest of honor to make a speech. This was inevitable, of course, yet Hansen noticed that Trotsky seemed hesitant, attributing his reluctance to his limited Spanish, though he could have added that by 1937 the Old Man was seriously out of practice. “He appeared to brace himself, as if he were taking a deep breath.” Twenty years earlier, he lit the world on fire as the great orator of the Russian Revolution, racing from one audience to the next, stoking the passions of Petrograd’s workers, soldiers, and sailors.
“LIFE WAS A whirl of mass meetings,” Trotsky wrote in his autobiography about his return from exile to the Russian capital in May 1917, ten weeks after the fall of the Romanovs. “Meetings were held in factories, schools, and colleges, in theaters, circuses, streets, and squares.” Expand this list to include the Baltic shipyards and various army barracks, and one begins to understand why even anti-Bolshevik accounts of 1917 give the impression of Trotsky as a man in perpetual motion. An eyewitness who belonged to one of the political parties vanquished by the Bolsheviks testified that Trotsky “seemed to be speaking simultaneously in all places. Every Petrograd worker and soldier knew him and heard him personally. His influence, both on the masses and at headquarters, was overwhelming.”
One electrifying performance led directly to another and then another. “Each time it would seem to me as if I could never get through this new meeting,” Trotsky recalled, “but some hidden reserve of nervous energy would come to the surface, and I would speak for an hour, sometimes two, while delegations from other plants or districts, surrounding me in a close ring, would tell me that thousands of workers in three or perhaps five different places had been waiting for me for hours on end. How patiently that awakening mass was waiting for the new word in those days!”
Trotsky’s favorite venue was the Cirque Moderne, across the Neva River from the Winter Palace, a dingy hall that became known to his allies and enemies alike as his “fortress.” In Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed recounts how every night this “bare, gloomy amphitheatre, lit by five tiny lights hanging from a thin wire, was packed from the ring up the steep sweep of grimy benches to the very roof—soldiers, sailors, workmen, women, all listening as if their lives depended upon it.” Trotsky appeared there in the evening, sometimes when the hour was late. On each occasion, he remembered, the place was a human tinderbox: “Every square inch was filled, every human body compressed to its limit. Young boys sat on their fathers’ shoulders; infants were at their mothers’ breasts. No one smoked. The balconies threatened to fall under the excessive weight of human bodies. I made my way to the platform through a narrow human trench, sometimes I was borne overhead. The air, intense with breathing and waiting, fairly exploded with shouts and with passionate yells peculiar to the Cirque Moderne.”
Landing in the ring, he somehow manages to subdue his audience. The clamor subsiding, he begins to cast his spell. “Above and around me was a press of elbows, chests, and heads. I spoke from out of a warm cavern of human bodies; whenever I stretched out my hands I would touch someone, and a grateful movement in response would give me to understand that I was not to worry about it, not to break off my speech, but keep on.” In Trotsky’s recollect
ion, faces in the audience theatricalize their emotions, like overwrought actors in a Sergei Eisenstein film montage. Nursing mothers are no less animated, while their passive sucklings serve as conspicuous symbolism. “The infants were peacefully sucking the breasts from which approving or threatening shouts were coming. The whole crowd was like that, like infants clinging with their dry lips to the nipples of the revolution.”
As the performance continues, the speaker becomes one with his audience and begins to channel its emotions. Planned remarks give way, as “other words, other arguments, utterly unexpected by the orator but needed by these people, would emerge in full array from my subconsciousness.” Trotsky is reliving an out-of-body experience. “On such occasions I felt as if I were listening to the speaker from the outside, trying to keep pace with his ideas, afraid, like a sleepwalker, he might fall off the edge of the roof at the sound of my conscious reasoning.”
Having worked his audience into a frenzy, it was now time to seize the moment and administer a revolutionary oath. “If you support our policy to bring the revolution to victory,” he exhorted an audience three days before the Bolshevik coup, “if you give the cause all your strength, if you support the Petrograd Soviet in this great cause without hesitation, then let us all swear our allegiance to the revolution. If you support this sacred oath which we are making, raise your hands.” Thousands of hands shot up in response.
British intelligence agent Bruce Lockhart, who witnessed Trotsky’s heroics in these revolutionary days, wrote in his diary: “He strikes me as a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it.”
The oath having been administered, it was time for Trotsky to depart the Cirque Moderne. Leaving on foot was out of the question: no passageway could be sliced through that human mass, united in its fervor and in no mood to disperse and go home. There was only one way out: “In a semiconsciousness of exhaustion, I had to float on countless arms above the heads of the people in order to reach the exit.” Bobbing along a sea of heads, he would sometimes catch sight of his two teenage daughters from his first marriage, Zina and Nina. “I would barely manage to beckon to them, in answer to their excited glances, or to press their warm hands on the way out, before the crowd would separate us again. When I found myself outside the gate, the Cirque followed me. The street became alive with shouts and the tramping of feet. Then some gate would open, suck me in, and close after me.”
NOW, TWENTY YEARS later, in the bright morning sunshine of Mexico City, the spellbinder of the Russian Revolution was wide awake. As Hansen looked on with anticipation, Trotsky managed to find his voice: “He stepped forward to the balustrade; and he was transformed. He took complete possession and spoke out as if this were completely natural and something he did every day. He pitched his voice so that it soared somewhat and could be heard with complete ease.”
For Hansen, the twenty-seven-year-old native of Utah and the truest of the true believers at Trotsky’s side in his Mexico years, the moment inspired an epiphany: “It was impossible to think of the great past, the tradition beginning with Marx, continued by Engels, then Lenin, now Trotsky…his exile and the genuine appreciation for all this expressed by these comrades without feeling sharp emotion…that despite the vicissitudes which revolutionaries as individuals experience, that despite the ingratitude of progress to those who have furthered it, we are part of a great and swelling stream and that we shall inevitably conquer.”
One week earlier, on October 29, 1937, Trotsky and Natalia’s younger son, Seryozha, was executed in a Soviet prison cell, dispatched with a bullet to the base of the skull. His parents never learned his fate, though they imagined it many times. Seryozha joined the swelling stream of victims that by now included almost all of Trotsky’s Bolshevik comrades. They had been shot or were in exile or in the camps, caught up in the blood and fury of the purge and the terror. Both of Trotsky’s daughters were dead, victimized by their association with their outcast father; their mother had disappeared into the gulag. Of Trotsky’s children, the only one left was Lyova, his favorite and his right-hand man—and next to his father, the chief target of Stalin’s secret police.
Just as Trotsky is recognized as the great orator of the Bolshevik Revolution, Diego Rivera was at one time regarded as its outstanding painter. Trotsky once called him October’s “greatest interpreter”—though nowadays few would think to bestow this honor on him. Rivera “remained Mexican in the most profound fibers of his genius,” Trotsky recognized. “But that which inspired him in these magnificent frescoes, which lifted him above the artistic tradition, above contemporary art, in a certain sense above himself, is the mighty blast of the proletarian revolution. Without October, his power of creative penetration into the epic of work, oppression and insurrection would never have attained such breadth and profundity.”
When the Russian autocracy collapsed in 1917, Mexico was in the midst of its tumultuous revolutionary decade, from 1910 to 1920. Its starting point was an uprising against dictator Porfirio Díaz, which ushered in a series of bloody, protracted, and overlapping civil wars led by flamboyant agrarian revolutionaries like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. The cataclysm left more than a million Mexicans dead. Rivera was absent during Mexico’s time of troubles, having left in 1907 at age twenty to go paint in Spain. He later settled in Paris, the art world’s metropolis, where under the influence of Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris he gained a reputation as a credible practitioner of Cubism, then modern art’s cutting edge. Yet Rivera knew that his Cubism was essentially imitative, and he felt increasingly constrained by the abstract form, which frustrated his growing desire to express the political and social ideas that had begun to preoccupy him. These he absorbed in the cafés of bohemian Montparnasse, on the left bank of the Seine, where émigrés from Mexico and Russia told firsthand accounts of the epoch-making events under way in their countries.
Mexico’s revolution drew to a close in 1920, when the constitutionalist army general Alvaro Obregón was elected president. The multiple civil wars had shattered Mexico’s sense of nationhood, and President Obregón and his minister of education, José Vasconcelos, both radical nationalists, sought to unite the country by tapping into the so-called Mexican Renaissance, the movement for cultural renewal that had begun before the revolution. The goal was to forge a fatherland by making Mexicans aware of their common cultural heritage, and public works of art were to play a vital role in this enterprise. Vasconcelos would invite the country’s premier painters to use the vast walls of Mexico’s government buildings as their canvases.
In Paris, Diego Rivera was eager to answer the call. Before his return to Mexico, and at the urging of Vasconcelos, he spent seventeen months in Italy studying Renaissance frescoes in search of the formula for a genuinely popular art. He arrived in Mexico in 1921 and the muralist movement got under way in earnest the following year. Three major figures would emerge: Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, each with his own distinct style, yet like all the muralists, each favoring indigenous over European artistic influences and tending to idealize Mexico’s preconquest heritage.
Rivera’s artistic breakthrough—the moment he discovered his own style—came in 1923, when he began to paint frescoes at the Ministry of Education building, a recently constructed stone and cement edifice two city blocks long and one block wide done in the style of Spanish convent architecture. In its great inner courtyard, lined with arches on all of its three floors, Rivera painted scenes of Mexico’s land and people, labor and festivals. The result was 235 individual fresco panels covering an area of 15,000 square feet. The project would take five years to complete, but already in 1923 the frescoes were a sensation and brought Rivera and the Mexican art movement international renown.
Diego Rivera, Mexico, 1920s.
Bertram D. Wolfe Papers, Hoover Institution Archives
Planted on the scaffold from dawn to dark, Rivera drew crowds of onlookers. One who had the
opportunity to join him up there was Bertram Wolfe, the Brooklyn-born American Communist who became Rivera’s comrade, friend, and biographer. Wolfe observed “a bulky, genial, slow-moving, frog-faced man, in weather-worn overalls, huge Stetson hat, cartridge belt, large pistol, vast paint-and-plaster-stained shoes.” The frog image recurs. “Frog-toad” was one of Frida’s affectionate nicknames for her husband. Wolfe says Diego’s eyes “bulged like those of a frog or a housefly, as if made to see a whole crowd, a vast panorama, or a wide mural.” In fact, though, they probably bulged as a result of a thyroid condition, which ailed him in later years.
Mexico’s painters took the lead among the radical intellectuals who wanted to continue the revolutionary struggle for economic justice, freedom, and democracy, including the liberation of art. In 1922 they formed a union: the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, as it came to be called. This short-lived and ineffectual body issued a combative founding manifesto, written by Siqueiros, declaring the sympathy of the unionized artists for the oppressed masses and repudiating “so-called easel art and all such art which springs from ultra-intellectual circles, for it is essentially aristocratic. We hail the monumental expression of art because such art is public property.” Rivera, Siqueiros, and Xavier Guerrero were elected to the syndicate’s executive committee and were coeditors of its newspaper, El Machete, whose name reflects the essentially agrarian outlook of Mexico’s revolutionaries.
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