For the Stalin biography, a scholar of Russian literature was hired to translate Trotsky’s chapters in New York as each was completed. Unlike in the past, Trotsky himself would not be able to consult books borrowed from a major library. Instead, a comrade in New York would serve as his researcher, while queries could be sent to the Paris comrades, who had better access to old Russian newspapers and other obscure sources. The research and translation phases of the work were thus in good hands, but Trotsky had yet to find a replacement for his Russian typist. After fifteen years of dictation, he had lost the habit of writing by hand, except for short texts. Without the services of a Russian collaborator, he would not be able to meet his deadline.
While the search was under way, a comrade from New York with serviceable Russian was asked to fill in, but Trotsky chafed at the slow pace and the constant interruptions. She was replaced in the first week of May by Sara Weber, who had worked for Trotsky in Turkey and during the previous summer in Coyoacán. She arrived from New York in the first week of May, intending to stay for six months, through the completion of the Stalin book, but a family illness forced her to scale back this commitment. So, while the work proceeded, Trotsky continued to be preoccupied by the search for a permanent typist.
Security concerns complicated the search. In May, Frankel sent word about a candidate in his native Czechoslovakia, a young woman of eighteen who reportedly was an expert typist in Russian. The hitch was that the woman in question, whose parents had emigrated from the Soviet Union, was thought to be a Communist. Van entered Trotsky’s study and gave him the news. With a theatrical sweeping motion of his left arm, Trotsky exclaimed: “Let her come! We shall win her over!”
Van and Frankel advised against it, but Trotsky was undaunted. “She is a quite young girl of eighteen,” he wrote to Frankel. “I do not believe that she can be a terrible agent of the G.P.U. Even if she comes with some sympathies for the Stalinists and with some wicked intentions against us (which I consider impossible, for nobody would entrust diabolical schemes to a little girl without experience), even in that case we feel strong enough to watch her, to control her, and to re-educate her.” Trotsky, who tended to see the hand of the GPU in unlikely places, here detected nothing but an expert typist with perfect Russian. A month later, he was still importuning Frankel: “A girl of eighteen cannot make conspiracies in our home: we are stronger. In two or three months she would be totally assimilated.”
In August, just as Sara Weber was preparing to leave Coyoacán, Trotsky discovered the Dictaphone. He had resisted the idea a year earlier, but when it turned out that Diego owned one—an Ediphone in need of minor repairs—he felt he ought to give it a try. Like most people of a certain age, Trotsky was initially skeptical of the new technology. Hansen says he behaved “like a peasant shying away from an optician—grandpa never wore no glasses.” Whenever he got stuck, he would run into the patio calling, “You see? You see? Your American machine…it don’t work.” After Hansen showed the Old Man what he had done wrong, “he would make a little hissing sound in his teeth and then settle down again to more dictating.”
Once Trotsky got the hang of it, his enthusiasm for his recording machine was unbounded. He began to bring it into his bedroom so he could dictate at night. A Russian émigré living in Mexico was hired to replace Sara, but she was a novice typist, and soon Trotsky had created a backlog of recorded text. New York was asked to send down a fresh supply of wax cylinders, as well as a shaving machine so they could be erased and reused.
The work moved ahead over the summer and into the autumn, despite the frequent intrusion of more pressing matters: the French police investigation into Lyova’s death, the battles with Lyova’s widow over custody of grandson Seva and Trotsky’s papers, the Klement murder in Paris, travels with Breton and Diego, and preparations for the founding congress of the Fourth International in Paris that September. There was the usual stack of mail to answer, but Trotsky had sworn off “guerrilla polemics” until further notice. For considerable stretches, the long workdays were devoted exclusively to the Stalin book, with breaks for a meal, a siesta, and sometimes an evening discussion.
Like all historical research, Trotsky’s job was one of excavation. In this case, however, progress was slowed by multiple layers of falsification about the youth and early career of Joseph Djugashvili. The man who became Stalin was born a year before Trotsky, in 1878, to a violent, drunken cobbler in Gori, a small town in Georgia, in the Caucasus, the mountainous southern reaches of the Russian Empire. In 1894 he entered the seminary in Tblisi, the Georgian capital, where he was exposed to nationalist and other subversive influences. He was expelled from the seminary in 1899, the year he became a professional revolutionary and adopted the pseudonym Koba, taken from the hero of a Georgian novel, an intrepid, avenging Caucasian outlaw. In 1902 he was arrested and exiled to Siberia, the first of seven such banishments, from which he made six escapes. The collapse of the Russian autocracy freed him for the final time.
Unlike the better-educated bourgeois revolutionaries living in European emigration, like Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin operated in the underworld of revolutionary politics inside Russia. As his biographer, Trotsky faced the challenge of establishing even the basic facts about Stalin’s movements and activities before 1917. This required a careful sifting through the differing versions put forward in a succession of official histories and in memoirs both friendly and hostile. When did Stalin become a Marxist? Which of the Party congresses abroad did he attend? When did he first meet Lenin? What was his involvement in the bank robberies carried out in the Caucasus to raise funds for the Party? Was Stalin in fact an agent of the czarist secret police, as nagging rumor had it?
In piecing this story together, Trotsky had to accommodate the awkward truth of Lenin’s promotion of Stalin to the top ranks of the Party. In 1913, a year after Stalin was brought onto the Central Committee and the year he adopted the pseudonym Stalin, meaning Man of Steel, Lenin enthused about his “wonderful Georgian” in a letter to writer Maxim Gorky. Stalin had just visited Lenin in Cracow, where the two men worked on the protégé’s article about Marxism and the nationalities question in Russia. This now became his area of expertise, and after the Revolution he was named People’s Commissar of Nationalities. He may have been a gray blur on the revolutionary stage in 1917, but when the Party’s new elite decision-making body, the Politburo, was created the following year, Stalin took his place on it, alongside Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Nikolai Krestinsky.
These were Trotsky’s preoccupations in the middle of 1938, as he hustled to meet his publisher’s deadline. On July 1, he sent off the first chapter of a projected dozen. A second chapter was finished in mid-August and a third in mid-September, at which time he wrote to his agent: “I must inform you that the whole book will be far more than 80,000 words, I believe 120,000.” The reason, he explained, was the need for completeness. In truth, however, Trotsky was finding it impossible to write a popular biography of Stalin. Too often, the author felt compelled to pause the narrative in order to discredit Stalin’s flatterers. As a result, the writing was tedious and repetitive, as though written for the Society of Old Bolsheviks instead of the Book of the Month Club.
Alan Collins, his agent, voiced concern that Trotsky had changed the conception of the book and that at his current pace he would not be able to meet his November 1 deadline, in which case Harper would withhold further payments. Collins was not placated by Trotsky’s announcement, made at the end of September when he delivered a fourth chapter, that he hoped to finish the book by February 1.
After several comrades in New York echoed Collins’s apprehension, Trotsky responded with a vigorous defense. Stalin was not a figure from the Middle Ages, after all, but a present-day tyrant. He was, moreover, a man whose life and career had been systematically falsified and distorted. “I knew the situation well enough before I went into this work, but at every page I am two or three times surprised, astonished, bewildered by this intern
ational conveyor of historical, theoretical, and literary frame-ups.” Because of this deplorable state of affairs, said Trotsky, his handling of historical sources had to be fully transparent, even at the cost of disrupting the narrative. Otherwise, Stalin’s liberal sympathizers would accuse him of being partial and subjective. “My book on Stalin must be unattackable, or better not to be written at all.”
Despite his agent’s unease, in mid-October Trotsky received his third payment from Harper, together with the third installment from his British publisher. A month later he sent off a fifth chapter, informing his agent that he was now working simultaneously on the sixth and seventh, which took the coverage of Stalin’s life through the Russian Revolution. The writing would proceed more quickly now, Trotsky assured Collins, because as the story entered the Soviet period, he would be able to draw on his own experiences and memories of his subject.
As it turned out, however, crossing the threshold of 1917 had the opposite effect on Trotsky. For when he began to narrate the story of his contest with Stalin, his health gave out—just as it had fifteen years earlier, at the crucial juncture.
“Health is revolutionary capital and must not be wasted,” Trotsky was always admonishing his staff. The need for vigilance about one’s health was a Bolshevik principle that originated with Lenin. His obsession with matters of health and fitness—both his own and that of his comrades—inspired the convention whereby the physical well-being of Party officials was the business of the Politburo.
Like Lenin, Trotsky believed in a strict regimen and physical exercise. He was passionate about hunting and fishing, although life as an endangered exile restricted his opportunities. In Turkey, he occasionally shot quail, but fishing became his regular form of exercise. He liked to set out well before dawn, dragging along guards and secretaries, to cast lines or nets into the Sea of Marmara, which teemed with fish. Fishing for Trotsky was strenuous work. He threw his entire being into it. Returning with his catch from these exhausting labors, he began the workday refreshed and energized.
After Trotsky left Turkey in 1933, he had fewer occasions to hunt and to fish. This was especially the case in Mexico, where his movements were restricted by concerns about his safety. During his first year at the Blue House, he often paced the patio. Then came the security renovations in the spring of 1938, which led to the landscaping of the back patio. Trotsky decided to lend a hand, and he quickly realized that this was the kind of demanding physical exercise that he had been missing. He became a gardening addict, the master of the hoe, the trowel, and the shovel. He planted several species of fern, and it was not long before nasturtiums grew luxuriantly throughout the back patio.
In late summer, the cactus was Trotsky’s new obsession. Cactus expeditions became a routine activity, with the entire staff pressed into service. When the Dodge and the Ford came to rest at the designated location, Trotsky and his helpers emerged with picks and buckets and got to work. Trotsky was especially fond of a species called the viejo—Old Man Cactus—a phallus-shaped plant covered with long snowy white strands of hair. Some of the species singled out for removal were fiercely armed with heavy spines. The largest weighed nearly two hundred pounds, and the workers’ sweat poured freely under the blazing sun as the cacti were uprooted and then loaded into the automobiles. Looking on, Natalia made jokes about this punishing form of “penal labor.” Trotsky said it was the next best thing to hunting.
During these and similar outings, Trotsky liked to regale his young friends with hunting stories from his Soviet days. Many were simply humorous episodes, like the time Lenin had to drag an unwilling Zinoviev out of a haystack by his boots. It did not take much to get LD reminiscing, as Hansen could testify. Over New Year’s 1938, he and Trotsky were hiking through a field near Taxco. “We flushed a covey of mourning doves and that started the Old Man telling me about hunting trips in the Caucasus mountains.” In the telling, Trotsky made it sound like “the best hunting ground in the world for variety and size of birds such as quail, sage hens, and pheasants.”
Inspired by these recollections, the following day they bought a supply of 12-gauge shells and drove to a lake twenty miles outside of town. Game was scarce, yet Trotsky, who had lost none of his quickness and accuracy with a shotgun, shot four mourning doves. The next evening Hansen escorted him to the same spot. “We tried to get some ducks but they were wary and flew out into the lake. A couple of snipe he shot fell into the water near shore where it was swampy.” Hansen waded out to retrieve these trophies and was promptly relieved of his shoes. As it was getting dark, they had to return to the car. Hansen would have to drive back to Taxco in his bare feet.
Trotsky on a cactus hunt, winter 1939–40.
Alexander H. Buchman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives
This gave Trotsky an opening to poke fun at his vulnerable secretary. It was the first time in his life, he said, that he had a chauffeur without shoes. How did Hansen expect to get past the Taxco authorities barefooted? How could he prove that he was the owner of the automobile when he did not even own a pair of shoes? The Old Man was making the most it, and yet the sight of Hansen’s bare feet triggered inescapable memories of a different kind of hunting story, one that changed the course of Soviet history.
ON A SUNDAY in October 1923, Trotsky was in the marsh country north of Moscow, in a region called Zabolotye—literally Beyond the Swamps. Here the Dubna River would spill its banks and flood the surrounding countryside for miles, creating lakes, swamps, and marshes densely bordered by tall reeds. “In the spring,” Trotsky remembered, “the place is visited by geese, storks, ducks of all kinds, curlew, snipe, and all the rest of the swamp brotherhood.” Trotsky’s boatman, Ivan Vasilevich Zaitsev, was the duck lord of this territory, like his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him. “He has no interest in moorcocks, woodcocks, or curlews. ‘Not my guild,’ he will say cursorily. But he knows the duck through and through, its feathers, its voice, its soul.”
On that frosty Sunday morning, at the conclusion of the hunt, Zaitsev was delivering Trotsky to his automobile, which was waiting for him on a rise of land. “From the canoe to the automobile I had to walk about a hundred steps, not more. But the moment I stepped onto the bog in my felt boots my feet were in cold water. By the time I leaped up to the automobile, my feet were quite cold.” Once inside the car, Trotsky took off his boots and tried to warm his feet by the heat of the engine. He came down with the flu and a high fever, later diagnosed as a paratyphoid infection.
In Moscow, the doctors ordered Trotsky to bed, and that is where he spent much of the rest of the autumn and winter of 1923–24. Lenin was mortally ill, and the succession struggle had broken out into the open, with Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin closing ranks against Trotsky. Owing to Trotsky’s confinement, Politburo meetings took place at his Kremlin apartment. From an adjacent room, Natalia could hear her husband’s heated arguments and the impassive responses of his rivals. “After each of these meetings, L.D.’s temperature mounted; he came out of his study soaked through, and undressed and went to bed. His linen and clothes had to be dried as if he had been drenched in a rainstorm.”
Trotsky’s illness continued to plague him for years. He would experience low-grade fevers, sometimes exceeding 100 degrees, that lasted for days, even weeks, at a time. They were accompanied by fatigue, headaches, numbness, and pains in his limbs, but it was the fevers that debilitated him. As he recalled in his autobiography, “my high temperature paralyzed me at the most critical moments and acted as my opponents’ most steadfast ally.” The decisive moment occurred in January 1924, in the days following the death of Lenin.
Feverish and exhausted and needing to escape Moscow, on January 18 Trotsky headed south for the Black Sea resort of Sukhumi. The rail journey was slowed by drifting snows, but Trotsky’s load seemed to lighten the farther he traveled from the capital. On Tuesday, January 22, as his train stood in the station of Tblisi, Georgia, a grim-faced aide walked into the working
end of Trotsky’s railroad car and handed him a telegram. The message, signed by Stalin, informed him that Lenin had died the previous evening. Trotsky immediately cabled back: “I deem it necessary to return to Moscow. When is the funeral?” The reply came about an hour later: “The funeral will take place on Saturday. You will not be able to return on time. The Politburo thinks that because of the state of your health you must proceed to Sukhumi. Stalin.”
Lenin had been seriously ill for the better part of two years, and a stroke he suffered the previous March had left him severely disabled. Still, his doctors had held out hope for his recovery, and Trotsky, already deeply depressed, took the news hard. A delegation of local officials came to his car and urged him to write a tribute to their fallen comrade. “But I had only one urgent desire,” he recalled in My Life, “and that was to be alone. I could not stretch my hand to lift the pen.” Nonetheless, while the train was held up for a half-hour, Trotsky wrote his eulogy. The text was sent by wire to Moscow and published two days later in Pravda and Izvestiia under the title “Lenin is no more.” Having performed his duty, Trotsky resumed his journey toward the Black Sea.
In Moscow, Lenin’s body lay in state for four days not far from the Kremlin inside the ornate Hall of Columns, in an eighteenth-century neoclassical building that was once the Club of the Nobility and would later serve as the venue for the Moscow trials. More than half a million people entered the vast hall, which was draped in black and red banners and ribbons, and filed past Lenin’s bier. Outside, bonfires burned day and night to warm the unbroken stream of mourners, who stood in line for hours in the extraordinary cold in order to pay their last respects to their beloved “Ilich,” Lenin’s patronymic and affectionate nickname.
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