Some of the most damning evidence comes from comrades who fought by his side, not least Natalia. She later recalled that when he was leader of the Left Opposition in the 1920s, his comrades repeatedly urged him to loosen up a bit, “lest he be thought haughty and arrogant”—which of course was already the case. He dreaded their social gatherings, which required him to engage in that unproductive exercise, small talk. “Nor did he care for the double entendres, touched with vulgarity, which were so freely bandied about.” The chief perpetrator in those days was the puckish Bolshevik journalist and jester Karl Radek, who had a special talent for telling bawdy jokes but had to clam up whenever Trotsky approached. Natalia explains that “although Trotsky, too, had a sense of humor, it was of a different kind.”
As she proceeds with her defense, Natalia begins to protest too much. “The fact was that he used the familiar form of address to hardly anyone, that we neither made nor received visits—in the first place we had no time—and that he went to the theater only very occasionally.” Trotsky’s circle of friends was restricted to comrades dedicated entirely to the political struggle, she proudly asserts. “But he established the warmest relationships in spite of that.” The examples she puts forward, however, describe not genuine friendships but the loyalties of younger comrades.
Natalia’s apologetics only serve to reinforce the devastating portrait of her husband drawn by the American writer Max Eastman, who was Trotsky’s biographer and the translator of his books into English. Eastman’s judgment was that Trotsky lacked “the gift of personal friendship” and that this doomed him as a politician. “Aside from his quiet, thoughtful wife, toward whom his attitude was a model of sustained gallantry and inexhaustible consideration, he had, in my opinion, no real friends,” Eastman observed. “He had followers and subalterns who adored him as a god, and to whom his coldness and unreasonable impatience and irascibility were a part of the picture…. But in a close and equal relation he managed to get almost everybody ‘sore.’ One after another, strong men would be drawn to him by his deeds and brilliant conscientious thinking. One after another they would drop away.”
Eastman’s Trotsky gives the impression of someone who has studied the handbook on how to conduct a friendship. “The part he played was that which a high idea of personal relations demanded of him, but since the whole feeling was not there he fell often and too easily out of the part.” Farrell, whose acquaintance with Trotsky was comparatively brief and who, unlike Eastman, remained on good terms with him to the end, found this profile convincing. The man who could move the masses, Farrell agreed, had a proclivity for “seeing individuals as servants to an aim and an idea rather than as personalities in their own right.”
Eastman describes the scene at an “anniversary smoker” in the Kremlin in the early twenties, where he discovered Trotsky, who was offended by tobacco smoke and rarely drank alcohol, wandering about “like a lost angel, faultlessly clad as always, with a brand-new shiny manuscript case under his arm, a benign sort of Y.M.C.A. secretary’s smile put on for the festivities, but not an offhand word to say to anybody. It seems a funny epithet to use about a commander in chief, but he reminded me of Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
Try as she might, Natalia cannot rescue Trotsky here. She recalls his attendance at a New Year’s Eve party in 1926 given by his brother-in-law, Lev Kamenev, at his Kremlin apartment, directly above their own. Trotsky’s purpose was not entirely pleasure, as he intended to use the occasion to gauge the mood of an oppositionist group from Leningrad. To Natalia’s surprise, he returned almost immediately and in a foul mood. “I can’t stand it,” he fumed. “Liqueurs, long dresses and gossip! It was like a salon.”
Trotsky’s favorite distractions were hunting and fishing, the essential activities of his exercise regimen up until his departure from Turkey in 1933, after which—in France, Norway, and then Mexico—security concerns restricted his opportunities. Hunting and fishing were not Diego’s pastimes, but like Trotsky, he enjoyed escaping Mexico City by automobile. Hansen’s letters and notes record the excursions undertaken by Diego and the Old Man—usually identified as “the OM,” or as “LD,” for Lev Davidovich, his first name and patronymic, which is how the staff addressed him. On November 3, 1937, Hansen reports that, “Last Sunday we drove in the Dodge to the base of Iztaccihuatl, the volcano north of Popocatepetl, and ate some ham sandwiches and tacos with Diego and Frida and Hidalgo. It was a very pleasant drive and a relief for L.D.” Later that month the destination is the Huasteca region, 150 miles to the southeast, where the OM spends “a few days relaxing and drinking mineral waters in the company of Diego.”
A trip to Guadalajara in July 1938 offered varied diversions, including car trouble: two tires blew out, one when the car was traveling at a speed of 60 miles per hour. “The Old Man enjoyed especially pushing the car out of the mud holes. It made him feel twenty years younger, he declared, as it reminded him of the civil war days. He had not pushed a car out of a mud hole since that time.” July falls within the rainy season in Mexico, which explains the ubiquitous presence of mud. “On occasion it was really funny, Diego half up to his knees in mud and so stuck he couldn’t move himself without help, and the Old Man one time taking a header into the mud when the car gave a sudden lurch backward.”
It begins to sound like the kind of material Hollywood turns into a buddy movie, yet tourism in the company of Diego required a certain amount of patience and stamina. He was never without a tiny scratch pad tucked in the palm of his hand, in which he was constantly sketching whatever came into view: faces, flora, churches, everything, turning over page after page. A typical distraction appeared during the expedition to the volcano in October 1937. “We came through a village where a funeral was in process—black coffin, hexagonal—fitted to the body—ordinary boards—so we had to stop while he sketched that.”
These unscheduled stops could get on Trotsky’s nerves, as revealed by Hansen’s remark about a less enjoyable trip to Guadalajara: “Visiting churches (time LD lost patience over Diego & and his churches & buying in mkt place & we return alone).”
Trotsky understood that he could not afford to lose all patience with Diego, his sponsor and benefactor, the man who had secured him entry into Mexico and set him up in the Blue House rent-free. The painter also acted as guardian to the vulnerable exile. The first night of Trotsky’s stay in Mexico, when security arrangements had to be improvised, Diego went home to retrieve a Thompson submachine gun from his arsenal. He had his own reasons for maintaining vigilance. Several weeks earlier, at the Restaurant Acapulco in Mexico City, four gunmen approached his table and started an argument that was intended to culminate in his assassination. Frida leaped up in front of her husband and made a scene, denouncing the pistoleros as cowards, and they retreated in confusion. Afterward she was sick to her stomach, but her quick action had saved her husband’s life.
Diego would end up spending a considerable sum of money on Trotsky’s security, despite the fact that his own financial house was in perpetual disorder, another manifestation of his anarchic nature. Contrary to the allegations of his critics, Diego’s government-commissioned murals had not made him rich. In fact, the private commissions he accepted and which also brought him derision—oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings sold mostly to Americans—helped to offset the deficits he incurred on his fresco projects and to cover Frida’s substantial medical bills. He was able to raise money quickly in an emergency, however, which proved vitally important to Trotsky in February 1938, when the GPU came calling at the Blue House.
It was late in the afternoon on Wednesday, February 2, when a man arrived at the door with several large packages that he claimed had been sent by the minister of communications, Francisco Múgica, Trotsky’s most powerful patron inside the Cárdenas government. The packages were said to contain fertilizer for the garden. Why the communications minister would want to donate fertilizer for the Blue House garden is not explained. Neither Trotsky, nor Van, nor Jesús Cas
as, the chief of the Mexican police garrison assigned to the house, was home when the attempted delivery took place, which might account for its particular timing.
The packages were refused and the deliveryman promised to return the next day with the proper credentials. Later a phone call to the minister revealed that the deliveryman was a fake. Under the circumstances, the only conclusion to be drawn was that the ploy constituted a probe in advance of an assassination attempt. Trotsky was irate that the impostor had been allowed to drive off and that no one could adequately describe his vehicle or had thought to write down its license plate number. Perhaps this is what Van had in mind, in a letter he wrote to Jan Frankel in New York, by the “clumsiness” of those who were present at the house. He added that Natalia “behaved with a criminal lightmindedness” and that Trotsky had not spared her feelings.
The alleged GPU probe now forced a decision to be made. For several weeks, suspicious activities had been observed at the adjacent house on Avenida Londres. A high wall separated the two properties, which made it difficult to monitor developments on the other side. The comings and goings next door were a considerable source of concern for Diego and Van, and now the situation had become intolerable. Diego decided that the surest solution to the problem was for him to purchase the house outright. Financially the timing was especially inconvenient for him. Frida was in the hospital. The previous month, in order to cut expenses he had moved out of his San Angel house-cum-studio and in with Cristina. Now, in order to respond to the emergency and cover the costs—upwards of $2,000—to purchase and renovate the new property and integrate it with the Blue House, Diego mortaged his home.
The purchase would take a few weeks, enough time perhaps for the Stalinists to execute their plan, so it was decided to have Trotsky go live at the home of Antonio Hidalgo in the fashionable Chapultepec neighborhood of Mexico City. On the assumption that the GPU might have an informant, even an unwitting one, among the Blue House staff, Trotsky’s absence had to be kept secret. So, on February 13, he quietly slid into the backseat of the Dodge, parked in the rear patio, and lay down on the floor. Van drove through the gate and out onto the street, waving to the guards as he passed. Once the car was safely out of sight, the passenger could sit up for the ride to his temporary sanctuary. Natalia, meanwhile, arranged pillows in Trotsky’s bed to make it appear that he was at home but unwell. The servants were told to stay clear of the bedroom, while Natalia pretended to take in tea to her ailing husband.
It would have been an especially unfortunate moment to be bedridden at the Blue House, which was being remodeled in advance of the acquisition of the neighboring property. As Hansen complained on February 14, “the house is in an uproar being changed around with doorways torn in walls, plaster and bricks over everything and everybody on each other’s nerves.” All the upheaval had put Trotsky on edge, leading to angry clashes with Natalia—reason enough to have him evacuated.
In the early afternoon of February 16, 1938, the third day of his exile from Coyoacán, a telephone call brought the news that transformed the date into what Trotsky later described as “the blackest day in our personal lives.” Lyova was dead in a Paris hospital, one week after an emergency appendectomy. Both the Associated Press and the United Press had the story on the wire. Van, who took the call, was thunderstruck. No one in the household was aware that Lyova was even ill. Measures were taken to ensure that Natalia was kept away from the phone and the afternoon newspapers, while Van and Diego tried to call Paris. The shocking news having been confirmed, they immediately drove to Trotsky in Chapultepec, arriving near dusk.
When they entered the room, Diego broke the news. Trotsky’s face hardened. “Does Natalia know?” he asked. When Diego replied in the negative, Trotsky said emphatically, “I shall tell her myself!” They left immediately for Coyoacán, Van behind the wheel, Diego beside him, and Trotsky sitting in back, silent and erect.
Natalia was surprised to see her husband enter the house and aghast at his appearance. He was all bent over and his face was ashen; suddenly he was an old man. “What is it?” she asked in alarm. “Are you ill?” “Lyova is ill,” “Trotsky replied in a low voice, “our little Lyova…”
CHAPTER 5
The Trouble with Father
Trotsky and Natalia were stunned by the sudden loss of their elder son, Trotsky’s favorite, who was named after his father. “Goodbye, Leon, goodbye, dear and incomparable friend,” Trotsky wrote in a moving tribute several days after Lyova’s death. “Your mother and I never thought, never expected that destiny would impose on us this terrible task of writing your obituary.” This was not the only passage in Trotsky’s eulogy where poignancy was allowed to obscure grim reality. The truth is, Trotsky and Natalia had substantial reason to fear that they would outlive Lyova—indeed all of Trotsky’s children and grandchildren. Such an outcome was foreshadowed by an incident that took place in Moscow twelve years earlier.
A stormy scene erupted in the Politburo on October 25, 1926, a moment that would prove to be a turning point in the fortunes of the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. For several months their faction had carefully upheld a fragile truce with the Party’s majority, led by Stalin and Bukharin, but events now conspired to shatter the accord. Lenin’s political testament, suppressed in the Soviet Union since his death in 1924, had just been published in The New York Times, including the explosive postscript that sounded the alarm about the danger to the Party posed by Stalin and called for his removal as general secretary. The Opposition leaders, who had heretofore helped suppress circulation of the document under the pressure of Party discipline, decided to endorse the Times version of the testament as authentic. This infuriated Stalin, who used the occasion of the Politburo meeting to launch a blistering attack on his rivals, demanding their complete submission.
When Stalin was finished, Trotsky rose to protest against this diatribe, warning that Stalin’s malevolence posed a threat to the very existence of the Party. In that moment, Trotsky appears to have been overwhelmed by a feeling of liberation, as though someone had untied his hands. Turning to Stalin, he pointed an accusing finger at him and declared: “The First Secretary poses his candidature to the post of gravedigger of the revolution!” Stalin turned pale and became flustered, then rushed out of the hall, slamming the door behind him. The meeting ended in an uproar. The next morning the Central Committee voted to remove Trotsky from the Politburo.
Trotsky’s outburst had dramatically escalated the crisis. His own allies were dismayed that he had needlessly insulted Stalin. Immediately after the Politburo session, several comrades convened at his Kremlin apartment, where Natalia awaited his return. Among them was Yuri Pyatakov, who was especially upset. “You know I have smelled gunpowder, but I have never seen anything like this!” he said, gulping down a glass of water. “This was worse than anything! And why, why did Lev Davidovich say this? Stalin will never forgive him unto the third and fourth generation!” When Trotsky entered, Pyatakov confronted him: “But why, why have you said this?” Exhausted but calm, with a wave of his hand Trotsky brushed the question aside. The damage had been done; the breach with Stalin was irreparable.
Trotsky would recall this episode several years later, as reports of the arrests and deportations of his family members in the USSR reached him in France. “At the time,” he wrote in his diary in 1935, “the words about my children and grandchildren seemed remote, rather a mere turn of phrase. But here we are—it has reached my children and my grandchildren…what will become of them?”
Now, in February 1938, in shock from their most tragic loss, Trotsky and Natalia once again had occasion to recall Pyatakov’s oracle and to contemplate Stalin’s vengefulness. Yet the enigmatic circumstances surrounding Lyova’s death cast doubt on the culpability of the gravedigger in the Kremlin. Whether Lyova died a natural death or was murdered is a mystery unlikely ever to be resolved.
Earlier that month, Lyova had published a special issue of the Bulle
tin of the Opposition devoted to the recently issued not-guilty verdict of the Dewey Commission. The publication of the Bulletin came as a relief both to Lyova and to his father, who had become impatient by its delayed appearance. In his February 4 letter to Trotsky accompanying a copy of the proofs, Lyova gave no hint of his failing health: the sharp abdominal pains, the loss of appetite, the lassitude.
On February 9 Lyova’s appendicitis became acute. In part out of mistrust toward the French Trotskyists, he decided to avoid the French hospitals and instead chose to enter a small private clinic owned and run by Russian émigré doctors and staff. The clinic employed both Red and White Russians, spanning the entire spectrum of political enmity toward Trotsky, with the inevitable Stalinist police informants among them. Lyova registered at the clinic under the false identity of a French engineer, using his companion Jeanne’s family name, Martin. Evidently he was unconcerned that his illness or the effects of the anesthesia might induce him to speak in his mother tongue.
Emergency surgery took place that same evening and the patient appeared to be recuperating well, until the night of February 13 and 14, when he was seen wandering the unattended corridors, half-naked and raving in Russian. He was discovered in the morning lying on a cot in a nearby office, critically ill. His bed and his room were soiled with excrement. A second operation was performed on the evening of February 15, but after enduring hours of agonizing pain, the patient died the following morning. Lyova was a week shy of turning thirty-two.
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