Once the show trials were over, Trotsky had outlived his usefulness. Sudoplatov records Stalin’s complaint, at their March 1939 meeting, about the “treacherous infiltrations” of the Trotskyists in the international Communist movement; once the looming European war broke out, such machinations would endanger the Soviet state by hindering its subversion operations behind enemy lines. Stalin may have portrayed Trotsky as a threat to national security for the benefit of the young intelligence officer sitting before him, but in fact he was under no illusion about the dangers posed by the tiny Trotskyist movement, either to Soviet security or to his own grip on power. Paranoia, in other words, did not influence Stalin’s calculations.
Envy, hatred, revenge—these provided motivation enough for Stalin to want Trotsky dead. A few years after the Revolution he was heard to say: “The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and then go to sleep.” For Stalin there was no greater object of loathing than Trotsky, that “operetta commander” who had dared to ridicule him as the “outstanding mediocrity” of the Party and denounce him as the “gravedigger” of the Revolution.
When Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin and joined Trotsky in opposition in 1926, they carried dire warnings about their erstwhile ally. As Trotsky launched into a critique of Stalin’s policies toward China, Great Britain, and other countries, Kamenev interrupted him: “Do you think that Stalin is now considering how to reply to your arguments? You are mistaken. He is thinking of how to destroy you.” Zinoviev and Kamenev drew up a joint testament, kept safely hidden, which warned that in the event of their “accidental” deaths, Stalin should be held responsible. They advised Trotsky to do the same.
For years Stalin had to remain content with Trotsky’s mere political destruction—although in the purge that followed the Kirov murder in December 1934, he was able to strike at the exile’s family members living in the USSR. After learning of his son Seryozha’s arrest in Moscow, Trotsky wrote about Stalin in a diary entry: “His craving for revenge on me is completely unsatisfied: there have been, so to speak, physical blows, but morally nothing has been achieved…. At the same time he is clever enough to realize that even today I would not change places with him: hence the psychology of a man stung.”
The idea that the dictator might choose to administer the ultimate “physical blow” still seemed improbable. “Naturally, Stalin would not hesitate a moment to organize an attempt on my life, but he is afraid of the political consequences: the accusation will undoubtedly fall on him.” That was before the Terror and the trials and the cascading charges against Trotsky of treason, espionage, sabotage, and assassination. By 1939, after the bloody annihilation of the Old Bolsheviks and of the Red Army command, and with Hitler’s troops capturing headlines with their occupations of Austria and then Czechoslovakia, Stalin had no inhibitions about hunting down the outlaw Trotsky in distant Mexico. The fugitive fully comprehended the danger.
When Beria was done speaking, Sudoplatov heard Stalin say that the only significant political figure in the Trotskyist movement was Trotsky himself. “If Trotsky is finished the threat will be eliminated.” Previous attempts to organize Trotsky’s liquidation had come to naught. Now the assignment was to be handed to Sudoplatov, an experienced killer. The year before, he had carried out the assassination of the émigré Ukrainian nationalist Yevkhen Konovalets in Rotterdam. Konovalets had a sweet tooth, and Sudoplatov, having gained his confidence, contrived to present him with a booby-trapped box of chocolates. Sitting across a restaurant table from his target, Sudoplatov removed the box from his coat pocket and laid it flat on the table. Shifting the device to the horizontal position activated the timer. The two men shook hands and Sudoplatov left the restaurant. He walked into a nearby haberdasher’s shop, where he purchased a raincoat and a hat. Thirty minutes later, exiting onto the street, he heard a bang that sounded like the blowout of a tire. People began running toward the restaurant. Konovalets was dead.
Stalin instructed Sudoplatov to assemble a team of shock troops to carry out what he called the “action” against Trotsky. If the operation were successful, he pledged, the Party would always remember the service rendered by the participants, would see to their welfare and that of their families. Then Stalin stiffened and issued an order: “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year.”
The last time Trotsky and Stalin saw each other was in October 1927, at the Central Committee meeting that voted to expel Trotsky from that body. On the drive back to their Kremlin apartment, Natalia did her best to calm her husband, who was highly agitated. “But they cannot tear me away from history!” he declared, a statement that was equal parts defiance and self-consolation. The fact is, however, they had already begun to alter Trotsky’s role in accounts of the Revolution. The Man of October was being remade into the Judas Iscariot of the Party.
Fiercely jealous of his place in history, Trotsky was determined to put up a fight. He would be well equipped to do so, thanks in part to a misunderstanding among Stalin’s policemen. The order for Trotsky’s expulsion from the country said nothing about his personal archives: crates and trunks stuffed full of Soviet-era documents, including copies of his correspondence with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders and the records of the Opposition since 1923. He was allowed to take these incriminating documents with him into exile, together with his personal library. When Stalin found out, he was incredulous. In the aftermath, several people were arrested, including three GPU agents.
The passport Trotsky was handed as he boarded the steamer Ilich, leaving Odessa for Istanbul in February 1929, listed him as a writer. This must have pleased him. As a youth he had dreamed of becoming a writer, but he chose instead to subordinate his literary work, like everything else, to the revolution. During the Soviet years, his extended writing projects on literature and culture offered him an escape from the stresses and strains of political life. In exile he would have the opportunity to devote himself to serious writing. He would in fact be compelled to do so in order to support himself, to pay for his protection, and to fund the Bulletin of the Opposition. It was these considerations, rather than vanity, that persuaded Trotsky, not long after he had settled in Turkey, to accept an offer from Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York to publish his autobiography. One year later, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography was selling briskly in English, Russian, German, and French editions.
Trotsky took obvious pleasure in composing the book’s early chapters, which contain vivid recollections of growing up on his father’s prosperous farm in the southern Ukraine, his schooling in Odessa, his turn to radicalism, and his first prisons and Siberian exile. The writing of the later sections, however, which recount his battles with Stalin and the other “epigones,” took a toll on his nerves and his health. Here Trotsky was forced to answer the favorite question of journalists, comrades, and perfect strangers, one he had come to dread: “How could you lose power?” The question was naive, he thought, as if losing power was like losing a watch or a wallet. Once more he had to explain that his defeat came at the hands not of a man but of a machine. It was not Stalin who had triumphed over him, but the ascendant bureaucracy Stalin personified.
The success of My Life led to a publishing contract from Simon & Schuster for a book on the Russian Revolution. Trotsky spent the better part of two years on the project, drawing on his memory and imagination, his books and archives, as well as library books that were shuttled back and forth to him in Turkey by comrades in Paris and Berlin. The result was Trotsky’s masterpiece, The History of the Russian Revolution, a hugely detailed narrative account of Russia’s upheaval, from the fall of the Romanovs to the Bolshevik coup d’état. Written in Russian, it was published in English translation in three volumes in 1932 and 1933.
The History is best appreciated as a work of literature. The narrative pulses with drama and coruscates throughout, as Trotsky switches effortlessly back and forth between the movements of armies and of crowds and the ac
tions of individuals. There are powerful set pieces. An encounter on a Petrograd street during the February days between a demonstration of 2,500 Petrograd workers and a detachment of Cossacks, the czar’s enforcers, is especially memorable, as is the Red Guards’ assault on the Winter Palace during the October insurrection. The portraits of individual actors are sharply drawn. Trotsky subjects the opponents of the Bolsheviks—be they monarchists, liberals, or socialists—to his corrosive blend of irony, sarcasm, and mockery. Not only are they invariably found guilty of being on the wrong side of history; they are typically both wicked and stupid. George Bernard Shaw once remarked that “When Trotsky cuts off his opponent’s head, he holds it up to show that there are no brains in it.”
Trotsky’s History, while free of jargon, is unmistakably the work of a Marxist historian. The author claimed to be objective in his presentation of facts, but he did not pretend to be impartial. Despite the mounting suspense he is able to sustain throughout his narrative, the outcome is never in doubt. Russia must overcome its backwardness by leaping over the bourgeois stage of history directly into socialism. The Provisional Government, personified at the pivotal stage by the charismatic socialist lawyer and politician Alexander Kerensky, is doomed to defeat, as are the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the other rival parties of the Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet.
The masses are the collective heroes of the drama, yet ultimately only the Bolshevik Party can lead the way and seize power in the name of the workers and peasants. It was Trotsky himself who directed the October putsch, but here he goes out of his way to remove himself from the narrative. Instead, as he did in My Life, he deliberately places himself in Lenin’s shadow. Without Lenin, Trotsky states explicitly, the Bolsheviks would not have taken power in October, and probably not at all—a remarkable statement from someone who believed that impersonal social forces determined the course of events.
Trotsky idolized Lenin, and yet here his elevation of the Bolshevik leader was in part an act of self-aggrandizement. Trotsky’s name was inseparably linked to Lenin’s in the context of the Revolution. Trotsky was Red October’s chief of staff, Lenin’s second-in-command. Thus, in exalting Lenin, he was by implication also lifting himself onto the pedestal. This was intended as a slap at Stalin’s historians, who had begun to portray the dictator as Lenin’s right-hand man from the moment the Party’s leader arrived in Petrograd. Stalin had been famously described as a “gray blur” in 1917. Trotsky’s account leaves him in obscurity.
On the strength of the clamorous reception and respectable sales of The History of the Russian Revolution, the American publisher Doubleday, Doran & Company signed Trotsky to a contract for a biography of Lenin. When he began the new project, he was living in Barbizon, France, some thirty miles south of Paris, where he conducted his research using books brought to him by Lyova. During a sedate autumn and winter of 1933–34, he wrote the initial chapters covering Lenin’s youth. Further progress was stalled when his asylum came under hostile scrutiny and he was forced to move, first within France and then to Norway. In retrospect, the villa on the island of Prinkipo seemed like a writer’s paradise.
When Trotsky arrived in Mexico in January 1937, Time magazine gave its readers the impression that the exile was eager to return to work on his biography of Lenin. But Trotsky’s life was in a state of upheaval and his financial situation was extremely precarious. He owed the Norwegian government hundreds of dollars in taxes and he had left behind unpaid medical and legal bills totaling hundreds more. It was only thanks to the generosity of Diego Rivera that he was comfortably situated in Coyoacán.
Trotsky had been counting on income from the sale in the United States of a small book about Stalinism he completed in Norway just before the first trial in August 1936, a work that had already appeared in France as The Revolution Betrayed. Instead, he learned that his literary agent in New York, Max Lieber, had failed to sell the manuscript. Nor, it appeared, had he even tried. Moreover, Lieber’s elusiveness had jeopardized potentially lucrative deals for interviews and articles. Trotsky was flummoxed: his agent, he said, was behaving like a “counter-agent.”
“What is the matter with Lieber?” he inquired impatiently of a comrade in New York. “Has he perhaps become connected with the Stalinists?” Indeed, he had. Lieber’s literary agency served as a front for Soviet espionage activity, including that of Whittaker Chambers, shortly to become the most important American defector from Communism.
Once Lieber was dropped, an agreement was quickly reached with Doubleday to publish The Revolution Betrayed, which came out in March 1937. But Doubleday was insisting that Trotsky complete his biography of Lenin, for which he had been paid his full advance of $5,000 three years earlier. Yet Trotsky needed income. He figured that a book on the Moscow trials could be the best-seller that would rescue him financially. He began to cobble together from his recent short articles and other odds and ends a counterindictment he called “Stalin’s Crimes.” Harper & Brothers agreed in principle to bring out such a book, but when plans were made to publish the transcripts of the Dewey Commission hearings, Trotsky felt compelled to abandon his project.
In the summer of 1937, the need for money inspired Trotsky to try his hand at writing magazine articles, but he was quick to realize that his style was “not sufficiently adapted to the average man on the New York street.” He floated the idea of updating My Life to include the years since 1929, but he himself was reluctant to take it up. He decided instead to move forward on the Lenin biography, but that effort was cut short early in September by the departure of his Russian typist, who suddenly decided to get married. In December, still adrift and without a typist, Trotsky warned the New York office that his financial position was “extremely acute.”
On February 16, 1938, the day Lyova died, a breakthrough occurred in New York, where Trotsky’s new agent, Alan Collins, of the well-regarded Curtis Brown literary agency, worked out an arrangement whereby Harper & Brothers would buy out Trotsky’s contract with Doubleday. The new deal would require him to write two biographies: first a popular life of Stalin, followed by the monumental study of Lenin. Trotsky would receive $5,000 for the two books.
Overwhelmed by grief at the death of his son, Trotsky could hardly imagine undertaking a biography of the man he assumed had just had him killed. Yet the monetary reward was tempting. By this point, the household was on the edge of insolvency. Natalia was borrowing funds from the Mexican comrades and becoming extremely worried, and there was only so much of this that she was able to hide from her husband. From New York, Jan Frankel wrote an anxious letter to Van saying that unless Trotsky accepted the Harper proposition, they would be unable to implement the plan to increase the guard at the Blue House.
Ten days after Lyova’s death, Trotsky finally relented, signaling to Harper that he found their proposal “totally acceptable.” The truth is, he was not in a position to refuse. As Van advised Frankel: “Le vieux semble disposé (à contre-coeur).”
Having been warned by the Doubleday editors about Trotsky’s inability to meet a deadline, Harper decided on a hardheaded arrangement for paying its new author. The $5,000 advance for the two books would be spread out in ten payments of $500 each, delivered at two-month intervals. The British publisher, Nicholson and Watson, would divide its payment of $2,500 for the Stalin book into four installments. The Stalin biography was to be 80,000 words in length and be completed within six months; the Lenin book would be 150,000 words, written during the subsequent eighteen months. The details of the contract were still being negotiated when the first advance check arrived in Coyoacán at the end of April, just as the work was getting under way.
At the time, it was commonly assumed that Trotsky set out to write a life of Stalin as a way to settle scores with his old foe. But in fact, in signing his book contract he raised not the proverbial sword, but the shield. To defend himself from Stalin’s assassins, Trotsky would have to write his biography.
“Beginning
in 1897, I have waged the fight chiefly with a pen in my hand,” Trotsky wrote in his autobiography. In 1902, during his first escape from Siberia, he was nicknamed Pero, Russian for the Pen, a tribute to his journalistic achievements in exile. Over the years, he was always obsessing about his pen. And yet most of his literary output since the early 1920s, from his correspondence to his books, he produced by dictation, a practice that enabled him to draw on his skills and experience as an orator.
Listening to Trotsky’s resonant voice as he gave dictation, one could imagine its power when he harangued his troops without the aid of a microphone. Dictating in Russian, he would pace the floor of his study, speaking without interruption for an hour or two, sometimes longer. His secretaries marveled at his ability to conjure up lengthy passages of beautifully crafted prose from a few pages of notes in his hand. The clicking keys of the typewriter signaled their concurrence and urged him forward. Punctuation was left entirely to the discretion of the typist, who understood that Trotsky hated to be interrupted. If asked to stop or repeat something, he would easily lose his train of thought and his patience.
Trotsky was known as a literary stylist and he worked hard at it. As he wrote to Cass Canfield, the president of Harper & Brothers, after he began work on the Stalin biography: “At least one-third of my working time is devoted to the literary form of the book. I must have a perfect translation.” But a perfect translation is always elusive, and Trotsky’s Russian presented special challenges. He took full advantage of the freedom afforded by Russian syntax to manipulate the word order within a sentence in order to express emphasis or nuance or for dramatic effect. He refused to concede a trade-off between precision and style, and was always trying to bend the rules of English, French, and German grammar. He complained that Max Eastman’s translation of his History of the Russian Revolution was full of errors, despite its magnificent style.
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