Zborowski worked assiduously to create the impression in Coyoacán that he was Trotsky’s most devoted comrade. The two men never met, and the obsequious manner that sometimes irritated Lyova did not come across in Zborowski’s letters to Trotsky. The Bulletin now began to appear more regularly than it had for a long time. “You are doing a great service in publishing the Bulletin so punctually and with such care,” Trotsky commended Étienne. “This is to your credit.”
Zborowski’s facility in Russian made him irreplaceable in Paris, which is why his superiors were wrong to suppose that Lyova’s death opened up the possibility “to get to the OLD MAN” by transplanting “Tulip” to Mexico. Zborowski was instructed to offer his services in Coyoacán, but although he claimed that his letter to Van broaching this idea had gone unanswered, no such letter exists and it is unlikely that one was ever sent. Zborowski and his family lived in a comfortable apartment building in Paris, courtesy of the GPU, and in his spare time he was able to pursue his studies in ethnology. It is hard to imagine him going to much trouble to exchange all this for an uncertain future in Mexico alongside the ultimate outlaw.
Then came the Klement murder in July 1938. About two weeks later Trotsky received a letter purporting to be from the victim, writing as a disillusioned follower. An obvious provocation, the text accused Trotsky of collaborating with the Gestapo and of behaving in a Bonapartist manner, and it declared the bankruptcy of the nascent Fourth International. Somehow, Klement’s death helped confirm Sneevliet in his suspicion that Zborowski was a GPU informant, a charge that he began to make openly that autumn. So did Victor Serge, like Sneevliet once a close confederate of Trotsky’s who had lately become an irritant. Krivitsky and Reiss’s widow, meanwhile, voiced suspicions about Serge, detecting the hand of the GPU in his release from Soviet exile two years earlier.
Thousands of miles away in his Mexican redoubt, Trotsky tried to weigh the significance of these conflicting indictments. When Zborowski appealed to him for advice on how to clear his name, Trotsky proposed that he challenge Sneevliet and Serge to bring their charges before an authoritative commission. “The sooner, the more decisively, the firmer, the better,” he wrote without any pretense of neutrality, advocating an “energetic initiative…to press the accusers to the wall.”
Here matters stood in the final days of 1938, when a letter arrived at the Blue House that demolished Trotsky’s presumptions. The three-page letter, dated December 27 and sent from New York, was typed in Russian on a Latin-script typewriter and signed “Your Friend.” The writer, who claimed to be a Russian émigré to the United States by the name of Stein, said he was a relative of Genrikh Liushkov, a GPU commissar who had defected to Japan. Stein declared that he had recently returned from visiting Liushkov, who wished to warn Trotsky that a “dangerous provocateur” lurked among his followers in Paris. Liushkov, said Stein, could remember only the spy’s first name, Mark. This Mark had been close to Lyova and now published the Bulletin of the Opposition. He was further identified as a Jew from Poland, between thirty-two and thirty-five years old, who wrote well in Russian, wore glasses, and had a wife and young child. Trotsky understood that the person in question was Mark Zborowski.
According to Liushkov, Zborowski had kept Moscow informed about Lyova’s every move, read Trotsky’s letters, and was responsible for the theft of his archives in Paris. Mark presented himself as a Polish Communist, but Liushkov expressed skepticism about this and claimed that a background check would reveal that Mark had once belonged to the Union for Repatriation of Russians Abroad, a Paris-based organization run by former czarist officers, in which he had operated as a GPU provocateur. Mark met regularly with personnel from the Soviet embassy in Paris, according to Liushkov, who indicated that this could easily be verified by having him followed. “What surprises me more than anything,” Stein injected reproachfully, “is the credulity of your comrades.”
Nor was this all. Liushkov believed that Trotsky himself was to be Mark’s next target. The GPU, he said, planned to send an assassin to Mexico, either through Mark or from Spain through Spanish agents posing as Trotskyists. Stein advised Trotsky to be extremely cautious. “The main thing, Lev Davidovich, is to protect yourself. Don’t trust a single individual sent to you by this provocateur, neither man or woman.”
Here was a warning that demanded to be taken seriously. On New Year’s Day, Trotsky sent an “extremely confidential, extremely important, and extremely urgent” communication to Jan Frankel in New York, summarizing the contents of the letter and suggesting two possible sources: either a legitimate warning from a timid friend or a GPU provocation. In fact, the Stein letter was the cunning contrivance of an improbable well-wisher. He was Alexander Orlov, until recently one of Moscow’s top spymasters.
At one time the illegal GPU resident in London, Orlov helped recruit and supervise Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess, the three original members of the infamous Cambridge spy ring, which passed top secret information to Moscow into the early years of the Cold War. At the outbreak of the Spanish civil war he was sent to Madrid to be the GPU’s station chief. Officially a mere political attaché, Orlov was the top Soviet official in Spain. It was Orlov who carried out the purge of the POUM and the anarchists in the name of liquidating Trotskyism. When Andrés Nin disappeared from a prison near Madrid in June 1937, he was said to have escaped, but in fact he was abducted, tortured, and murdered by a mobile squad supervised personally by Orlov.
Orlov and his staff in Spain warily monitored Moscow’s ongoing purge of the secret police and understood that fellow agents abroad were being ordered home and executed. The fatal summons for Orlov arrived in Madrid on July 9, 1938. Feigning compliance, he slipped across the border to France, collected his wife and daughter in Paris, and sailed to Canada.
Orlov determined that his best hope for survival was to blackmail Stalin. From Canada he arranged to have a letter addressed to GPU chief Yezhov delivered to the Soviet embassy in Paris. In it he listed all the secrets he could reveal if his life were endangered or in the event of his death. The damage would include the exposure of numerous undercover agents such as the Cambridge spies, the truth about the fate of Nin, and the full story of “Tulip,” in which connection he named Sneevliet and Reiss. A separate item on the list read: “All about the OLD MAN and SON.”
Orlov figured that Moscow would see the wisdom of leaving him alone. Shortly afterward, he moved to New York, where he made an arrangement with the U.S. immigration authorities that allowed him to reside in the country in obscurity under an assumed name. Of course, Orlov could never be certain that Moscow would allow him to live at all, which necessitated a life of caution and deception. Above all, Moscow must not be given the impression that he had failed to uphold his end of their tacit bargain.
Orlov should simply have disappeared, but he must have had a troubled conscience or some other kind of itch because he decided to take a risk and warn Trotsky. As Orlov was aware, the first GPU man to do this—Yakov Blumkin, in his face-to-face meeting with Trotsky in Turkey in 1929—was exposed and executed. Orlov had to assume that his letter to Trotsky would end up in the hands of the GPU, and so he had to concoct it in a way that concealed his identity. By posing as a relative of the defector Liushkov, he was able to convey highly secret information while eluding detection.
Orlov’s “Stein” letter was intended to reveal just enough about Zborowski to have him unmasked. He asked Trotsky to acknowledge receipt of the letter by placing an ad in the Socialist Appeal, the Trotskyist weekly printed in New York. Trotsky published the ad, which requested that Stein appear at the office of the Socialist Workers Party and ask to speak to “Martin,” the pseudonym for James Cannon. Trotsky needed confirmation that the letter was legitimate, but Orlov was no fool and it would have been foolhardy for him to accept such an invitation.
In his urgent New Year’s Day letter to Frankel, Trotsky proposed the formation of a commission of French comrades to investigate the allegatio
ns about Étienne-Zborowski. If they proved to be true, he advised, the provocateur should be denounced to the French police for his role in the theft of the archives, and in a way that would cut off all possible avenues of escape. At that moment Trotsky sounded convinced, but he could not help suspecting that he was being played. Three weeks later he speculated that the mysterious correspondent was Krivitsky, who had recently arrived in the U.S. Perhaps the defector actually remained in the service of the GPU and hoped to demoralize Trotsky’s camp.
In the hands of the French Trotskyists, Orlov’s warning would likely have led to Zborowski’s exposure and perhaps his arrest. In the event, Trotsky’s instructions never reached Paris. To blame this on the GPU would sound clichéd if not for the fact that Trotsky had singled out Cannon to take the matter up with the French comrades, and Cannon’s secretary was an informant for the GPU. Or perhaps a letter from New York to Paris simply went astray, in which case the real mystery is why no one bothered to follow up on a question of such vital importance. For now, Trotsky assumed that the investigation was moving forward, and he waited to learn the results.
It was Orlov who years later told the story of how Blumkin, the GPU man ensnared in Turkey, had endured his interrogation in a Lubyanka prison cell with remarkable dignity and had faced death with extraordinary courage. “When the fatal shot was about to be fired, he shouted, ‘Long live Trotsky!’” Perhaps Orlov’s telling this story indicates where his sympathies lay, which might account for his effort to warn Trotsky. In any case, Orlov was now powerless to prevent what he had set in motion, and as a result, Trotsky’s time was running out. As GPU station chief in Spain, Orlov had been responsible for the recruitment of a twenty-three-year-old native of Barcelona by the name of Ramón Mercader.
CHAPTER 7
Fellow Travelers
In the autumn of 1938, Trotsky began to confront a different sort of threat to his security when his friendship with Diego Rivera began to unravel. On November 2, Diego arrived unexpectedly at the Blue House. It was the Day of the Dead, and the painter was infected with the holiday spirit. “Looking as mischievous as an art student who has played some prank,” as Van describes the scene, Diego walked into Trotsky’s study and placed on his desk a large purple sugar skull on whose forehead was spelled out in white sugar the name of Stalin. Trotsky decided to ignore this holiday offering, which may have disappointed Diego but could not have surprised him. Their conversation was brief, and as soon as the mischief-maker had gone, Trotsky asked Van to remove the offending object and destroy it.
A year earlier, Trotsky would have found a way to accommodate this exhibition of the painter’s irrepressible sense of black humor. Generally speaking, the two men remained on friendly terms. Diego was still the only person allowed to show up unannounced at Trotsky’s door. But their friendship was under increasing strain. That these two disparate personalities would eventually clash was almost predictable. The sequence of events that opened the rift between them can be traced to the summer of 1938, when the French Surrealist poet André Breton paid an extended visit to Mexico.
Breton was the leader of Surrealism, whose theoretical principles he set down in two manifestos in the decade following his break with Dadaism in 1922. He had long been an admirer of Trotsky’s In 1925 in the journal La Révolution surréaliste he published a laudatory review of Trotsky’s eulogistic volume On Lenin. Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927, yet he and his Surrealist gang in Paris ultimately refused to knuckle under to the Communists. In 1934 they published a tract called Planet without a Visa in support of Trotsky’s efforts to resist expulsion from France. Two years later, Breton joined a French commission of inquiry into the Moscow trials, which ended up serving as a European branch of the Dewey Commission.
Trotsky was pleased to have a major literary figure like Breton in the anti-Stalinist camp, though he was wary of the Surrealist project, which gave off a strong whiff of mysticism. He had not given much attention to Breton’s books, however, and as the celebrated poet and essayist was about to visit Mexico, it was time to bone up. Van arranged to have the essential Breton oeuvres sent down from New York, courtesy of art historian Meyer Schapiro.
WHEN IT CAME to painting, Trotsky confessed he was never more than a dilettante. In the field of literature, however, he could claim to be an authority. He wrote extensively about literary fiction, beginning during his first exile to Siberia at the turn of the century, when he was a regular contributor to the Irkutsk paper Eastern Review. The young radical stood up for literary tradition. In an appreciative essay devoted to Nikolai Gogol in 1902, on the fiftieth anniversary of the writer’s death, Trotsky defended the author of Dead Souls—his greatest novel, published in 1842—from those who found his social criticism too timid. When all was said and done, Gogol was the “father of Russian comedy and the Russian novel,” the first “truly national writer,” a forerunner of Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.
“The novel is our daily bread,” Trotsky once remarked. He was especially devoted to the French novelists; Balzac and Zola were among his favorites. He had a strong preference for realist works, a predilection reinforced by his Marxist philosophy. Only literature that was socially conscious truly satisfied him. In two early essays about Tolstoy, he praised the novelist’s prodigious talent for invoking character and atmosphere—his “miracle of reincarnation”—but scorned his narrow focus on the familiar world of aristocrats and peasants and his flights from reality into nature and religion.
In the first decade of Bolshevik power, Trotsky became Soviet Russia’s most influential literary critic and its most effective advocate of freedom in the arts. The idea of proletarian culture was then in great vogue among writers and radical theorists in Moscow and Petrograd. This movement, spearheaded by a group called Proletcult, argued that prerevolutionary art and literature ought to be tossed into history’s dustbin along with the former ruling classes. Lenin, whose personal taste in art was conservative and pedestrian, resisted Proletcult’s radical agenda, which had influential supporters within the Party. Trotsky joined the battle on Lenin’s side.
His major contribution to this debate was one of his finest works, Literature and Revolution, published in 1923. Trotsky’s book surveyed the lively contemporary Soviet literary scene, directing pointed criticism at the three modernist movements of the day: Symbolism, Formalism, and Futurism. His principal theme was the indispensability of tradition, even in the homeland of communism. “We Marxists have always lived in tradition,” he admonished, “and we have not ceased to be revolutionaries because of it.” The notion that the art and literature of past epochs merely reflected the economic interests of vanquished social classes he considered vulgar. Great art, he declared, was timeless and classless.
No less misguided was the belief that the dictatorship of the proletariat should extend its reach into the domain of culture. The proletariat’s rule would be brief and transitory, Trotsky advised, giving way to a classless socialist society and with it the first universal culture. In any event, the Russian worker was now a cultural pauper. His immediate challenge was not to break with literary tradition, but rather to absorb and assimilate it, starting with the classics. “What the worker will take from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, or Dostoevsky will be a more complex idea of human personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and of the role of the subconscious, etc. In the final analysis,” he said, “the worker will become richer.”
The central task of the Party, in the meantime, was to foster an atmosphere of tolerance in order to allow Soviet culture to flourish. The Party must be prepared to exercise what Trotsky called “watchful revolutionary censorship” against any artistic movement openly opposed to the Revolution, but otherwise it should assume no leadership role. “Art must make its own way and by its own means,” he insisted. “The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command.”
Literature and Revolution
is one of Trotsky’s most sparkling works. A tough-minded critic, he could be unsparing when dealing with artists hostile to the Revolution, as in his savage arraignment of the Symbolist poet Andrei Bely, author of the 1916 novel Petersburg, now widely regarded as a masterpiece. Trotsky’s book showcases his full virtuosity as a writer: it is replete with aphorisms, telling metaphors, and brilliant turns of phrase. It was here that he introduced the label “fellow travelers” to designate writers who, despite their vital contributions to early Soviet letters, would be able to progress only so far along the road to socialism. Fellow travelers, Trotsky explained, “do not grasp the Revolution as a whole and the communist ideal is foreign to them.”
Trotsky’s reputation for tolerance in the arts left him vulnerable to charges of encouraging bourgeois individualism and spreading defeatism on the cultural front, transgressions that were added to the list of his heresies as head of the Left Opposition. After he was banished from Moscow in 1928, the champions of proletarian culture had their day, surging forward to lead the cultural counterpart to the crash industrialization and collectivization campaigns of the first Five-Year Plan. This tidal wave swept away the independent literary schools and the fellow travelers. Inevitably, the tide then turned against the proletarian writers. In 1932 the Party liquidated all autonomous literary organizations and enforced membership in a Union of Soviet Writers under the direction of the Party.
Soviet writers under Stalin were employed as instruments of state education and propaganda. They were expected to present idealized depictions of Soviet life: the struggle against kulak saboteurs during collectivization, the building of a steel plant at Magnitogorsk in the Urals, the construction of a hydroelectric station in the Ukraine, the rehabilitation of an inmate in a labor camp, and so on. The new style, which was imposed on all the arts, went by the name of socialist realism. A decade after Trotsky had canvassed a richly diverse Soviet literary scene, Max Eastman titled his scathing indictment of Stalinist culture Artists in Uniform.
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