Young’s cameras recorded scenes from several of Trotsky’s cactus-hunting picnics in the winter of 1939–40. Trotsky, wearing heavy work gloves and wielding a pickax, is seen digging out one and then another cactus, assisted by Sergeant Casas and a bodyguard. The prize specimens, one of them chest-high, are wrapped in thick coats of newspaper so as to protect their needles. Extra soil is collected in sacks for the replanting back home. The visual record makes plain why the guards were leery of these physically exhausting expeditions. Any hint of flagging energy might provoke another round of badgering from the Old Man, who at one point turns and accuses the cameraman of loafing.
The job was not done until the hunting party returned home and the last cactus had been replanted in the patio at Avenida Viena 19, Trotsky’s residence since May 1939. Trotsky’s home was only three blocks from the Blue House, yet it was relatively isolated, at the end of a dirt road lined with adobe hovels. Only one wall was attached to a neighboring property. Running parallel to Avenida Viena, on the opposite side of the house, was the Churubusco River, more like a creek and mainly dry.
The house was a run-down villa that had been built as a summer residence at the end of the previous century. Although the grounds were originally enclosed inside brick-and-stone walls, in the weeks leading up to Trotsky’s occupation of the house they were raised to a minimum height of nearly fourteen feet. The iron gate that had once served as the central entrance on Avenida Viena was bricked in.
The house itself was shaped like a letter T. The top of the T, running perpendicular to Avenida Viena, constituted the east wall of the roughly rectangular enclosure. It contained the library, the dining room, the kitchen, a water closet, and a bedroom, all with interconnecting doors. Three tall windows, protected by iron grillwork, looked out onto a barbed wire fence, a strip of no-man’s-land, and a corn field beyond. The stem of the T, which jutted into the patio, housed three interconnected rooms: Trotsky’s study, Trotsky and Natalia’s bedroom, and, at the base of the T, Seva’s bedroom.
The entire structure was built on one story, except in the northeast corner, where a two-storied tower overlooked the river. This tower, built as an observation post during the revolutionary decade that began in 1910, was dwarfed by an enormous eucalyptus tree standing inside the north wall. Beneath it and abutting the wall was a row of adjoined brick outbuildings constructed to house the guards. While the size of the property was about the same as that of the Blue House, the guards were less comfortably billeted, and they had to be quieter because there was only one patio.
Outside on Avenida Viena, at the southeast corner of the property, the police built a brick casita with a loophole. In all, ten policemen, working in two shifts of five men, were assigned by the Mexican government to guard Trotsky. Visitors entered the property through the southwest corner, where heavy doors, bolted and guarded from the inside, led into the garage, from which another door gave into the patio, where grass plots abounding with cacti and agaves were crisscrossed with stone walkways.
There, over by the west wall, Young’s camera found Trotsky feeding his rabbits and chickens, part of his daily routine and his principal form of exercise. This zoological hobby began at the Blue House, but the new residence—which Trotsky at first rented and later arranged to purchase, thanks to gifts totaling $2,000 from American sympathizers—gave him the freedom to take it to obsessive lengths. The stock of chickens was augmented with additional Leghorns, Plymouths, and Rhode Island Reds, among other varieties, while the rabbits proliferated on their own, so that by the autumn of 1939 there were fifty in all.
In January 1940, the burgeoning bunny population was transferred to new three-decker cages that Trotsky had designed. He was so eager to use them that he decided he could not wait until they were fully painted. Young’s Bell & Howell captured the moment, as Trotsky, with the help of the young Mexican handyman, Melquiades, gently delivered the docile creatures to their new quarters. They all seem to know the Old Man, who likes to let the chief buck take a hard bite on his glove. When Eastman visited the house the following month, it seemed to him “so amusingly strange to be introduced to a flock of rabbits by the War Commissar and Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army.”
By then the rabbits numbered well over a hundred. Trotsky liked to quiz the guards about this at the dinner table, where rabbit and chicken were occasional items on the menu. The guards were enlisted in the care and feeding of the animals, while Trotsky took great pride in the careful preparation of their diet. Young’s films show Seva grinding corn for the chickens, as Trotsky and Farrell Dobbs, who arrived in mid-January on his first visit from the United States, look on. Trotsky is seen giving water to the chickens, then feeding the chickens and then the rabbits. At last, he turns to the cameraman and says, silently: “Well, that’s all there is. I can’t act for you anymore. Is it OK?”
Trotsky feeding one of his rabbits, winter 1939–40.
Alexander H. Buchman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives
Young had intended to stay only long enough to show Trotsky his China films, but after inspecting the alarm system at the house, he offered to draw on his engineering expertise to improve it. This system had been rigged up by Van, who had departed for the United States in October 1939 after marrying a visiting comrade from New York. His intention was to return in six months, at most a year, though by the time he left Mexico, he was ready to get out from under Trotsky’s shadow, and the feeling was mutual. Easily the longest-serving secretary-guard, Van was the only member of the household with the authority to insist that he always be present when Trotsky met with visitors, no matter who they were. “You treat me as though I were an object,” Trotsky liked to complain, dissimulating his impatience with a jab of sarcastic humor.
Young found Van’s “quasi-electronic security system” to be “messy and complicated,” such that its repair was beyond the technical ability of anyone in the household. The guards joked that it looked like a Hollywood version of Sing Sing. Tripwires running along both sides of the walls were connected to a set of electric light bulbs mounted on a board inside the guardhouse, a narrow wooden structure standing inside the patio against the garage. Each bulb designated a particular area of intrusion. Young rewired the control panel and provided simple diagrams to facilitate troubleshooting.
Still, there was only so much that Young could do on a severely limited budget. Julius Klyman, a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who visited the house in March, intentionally exaggerated the security regime at Trotsky’s “Mexican stronghold,” out of sympathy for the exile’s vulnerable position. Klyman, the rare American journalist to win Trotsky’s trust, came upon him in the patio watering the grass. “See,” Trotsky said upon greeting him, “they will not let me into your country. So I have become a farmer. Like your President. “Where is he a farmer?” President Roosevelt’s “farm” was in Hyde Park, Klyman deadpanned, pleased to find Trotsky in a relaxed mood. “He is a calmer, more composed man than when the writer first met him in January, 1937, three days after his arrival from Norway,” Klyman reported. “Then, while completely assured, he seemed tense, a tightly wound spring waiting for its release. Now, after three years in Mexico, he seems at ease—perhaps as much at ease as a man of his dynamic intellectuality ever can be. He is continuously in mental motion.”
Klyman took his readers inside Trotsky’s study, a room about fifteen feet square in the stem of the T. Trotsky’s “great work table,” made of several planks joined and placed on heavy legs, ran away from the tall French windows, which let in ample light. The walls were lined with books, and a side desk was piled high with newspapers and magazines from many nations. There were several rush-bottom chairs bought in the marketplace in Coyoacán and a cot for his afternoon nap. On the wall behind the desk was a large map of Mexico; a smaller map of Europe had been put up after the war broke out. “The room is pleasant, informal but serious.”
Klyman performed a service for Trotsky by describing his home as impenetra
ble, but an attentive reader would have noticed a chink in the armor. It is revealed in a passage where Klyman draws a twin contrast between the circumstances of his two visits. In January 1937, he recalled, Trotsky’s English was rather weak. “A man of extreme conversational preciseness, he at that time frequently found it necessary to turn to an ever present secretary to find the exact word he wanted.” Now, in March 1940, not only was Trotsky’s spoken English vastly improved, but Klyman had Trotsky all to himself. “This time we held our conversations alone.”
AFTER AL YOUNG had revamped the alarm system, he was asked to move into the house and take up guard duty. The idea appealed to him because he wanted more time to take photographs and films of Trotsky. Young happened to be a good driver and had an instinct for diplomacy, so he was assigned to chauffeur Natalia on her food-shopping trips.
At the time Young came on board, in January 1940, the overlapping guard and secretariat were overstretched, and remained so even after the number of guards was increased from four to five the following month. Van had been replaced as European secretary by Otto Schüssler, who had served as Trotsky’s German secretary in Turkey and now lived at the house with his wife Trude, both refugees from Hitler. The English-language secretary was now Charley Cornell, a young schoolteacher from Fresno, California, who also served as Trotsky’s chauffeur. The chief of the guard was Harold Robins, although Robins had just barely escaped being fired by Trotsky.
Robins was born Harold Rappaport in New York City in 1908, the son of Russian immigrants. Except for a two-year hiatus, he had been with the American Trotskyists since 1928. He was that rare breed, a worker-intellectual who had read the Marxist classics. He was arrested for his involvement in a riot sparked by the 1934 Waldorf-Astoria Hotel workers’ strike and served nine months in Sing Sing. In 1937 he helped organize the wave of sitdown strikes that paralyzed the automobile plants in Detroit and Flint, Michigan.
Robins was tall and lanky, with dark brown hair combed back from a widow’s peak and a perpetual stubble on his long sunken cheeks that gave him the look of a desperado. Joe Hansen, from the headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party in New York, recommended him as “quiet, very calm, one of the coolest militants in a difficult situation the party has.” Yet all this was merely secondary. “The main consideration,” Hansen made clear, “is that he is the best available driver.” Robins had driven a cab in New York City from 1929 to 1934, then a truck in upstate New York. Behind the wheel he was “cool, skillful, careful but quite capable of emergency driving at top speeds.”
Robins would have been an ideal candidate, except that he had a wife and child, and Hansen indicated that Mrs. Robins would follow her husband to Mexico in six months. This raised a red flag for Trotsky, who agreed that driving expertise was “the most important condition,” but did not want to run the risk of having yet another wife join the household, even at some indefinite future time. Nonetheless, Trotsky was prevailed upon, and Robins was sent down in September 1939. Three months into the job, he disclosed that his wife was making arrangements to move to Coyoacán and that their child might soon be joining them.
This was too much for Trotsky. On January 2 he unburdened himself in a letter to his former secretary Sara Weber, instructing her to communicate its contents to Cannon and his associates. He wrote it by hand, in Russian, in order to bypass his secretarial staff and make himself clearly and forcefully understood. The comrades had to realize, Trotsky wrote bitterly, that the female companions of the guards had made life miserable for him and especially for Natalia Ivanovna. “The wives quarrel and sulk. NI has to think about sheets, personal tastes, warm compresses etc. It’s worse than hard labor. We have had four or five ‘wives’ at a time.” All of them start out saying they will live apart, but instead they eat, sleep, and take sunbaths at the house and then move in after a couple of days, “so that the result is a never-ending vacation. We have decided to prevent a repeat of this no matter what!” There were already two couples living in the house: the Rosmers and the Schüsslers. “That’s enough!”
Trotsky demanded that the party immediately recall Robins, as well as his wife, who was already on her way to Mexico. “Comrades who come here must know they are coming to a prison, not to a resort,” Trotsky admonished. “Work also becomes difficult for me on account of the talk, noise, running about. We want now to reduce the population and the expenses to a minimum and rest up a little in our home. We are not getting any younger.” Whatever Trotsky’s blast had to do with it, Mrs. Robins visited only briefly, and the storm passed.
In the first days of March, Young announced that he intended to return to the United States, and New York was asked to send down a new man. Funds for the guard remained extremely tight, and replacing a guard meant additional expenses. The increase to five guards put a further strain on the finances, as did the purchase of more and better-quality guns and ammunition, as recommended by Farrell Dobbs during his visit that winter. At remote locations in the countryside, Dobbs gave the guards training in small-arms fire and with the lone Thompson submachine gun, which had a tendency to jam and had to be sent out for repair.
Shortly after Young arrived in Los Angeles from Mexico in late April 1940, he wrote to Dobbs in New York to brief him on the state of affairs he left behind at Avenida Viena. In his letter, Young felt duty-bound to report a strain in relations between the guards and the household over the quality of the food. None of the staff thought very highly of the meals served at the Trotsky ranch, but some of the guards were tactless in complaining about it at the dinner table in the Old Man’s presence. Most of this American slang sailed right over Trotsky’s head, though he caught its drift. Young called this “the height of folly.” If any ill will was intended, it must have been meant for Natalia, who set the menu and whose attitude toward the guards fluctuated wildly. Robins complained, “at one time we are the cream of the earth, at another the crumb.”
Whatever lay behind this uncouth behavior, its effect was poisonous. “I do know that the OM was really fed up,” Young told Dobbs. “A week previous and up to my departure he hardly spoke with anyone because of this.” Among the culprits was Young’s replacement, Bob Shields, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker and graduate of Duke University. Dobbs himself had recommended him as a dedicated comrade and a hard worker, notwithstanding the fact that he was the son of a wealthy businessman. Dobbs made no mention of the new man’s driving ability. In this case, the main consideration was his willingness to pay his own way to Mexico and to cover his board and personal expenses in Coyoacán.
Shields was his party name. His legal name was Robert Sheldon Harte, and his family called him Sheldon. To the NKVD, which recruited him in New York, he was known by the code name “Amur,” after the prodigious river in the Russian Far East. He traveled to Mexico City by airplane. When he took up his duties in Coyoacán on April 7, 1940, the NKVD had a mole inside Trotsky’s stronghold.
By the time Harte arrived in Coyoacán, the NKVD had two networks in place in Mexico City. The first group was called “Mother,” the code name of Caridad Mercader. Its chief asset was her son Ramón, now posing as a Canadian businessman named Frank Jacson. This change of identity, which took effect in Paris the year before, was an unforeseen development that complicated his mission. Sylvia Ageloff, his lover and the NKVD’s gull, had returned to New York from Paris in February 1939. Ramón was to follow her there, but a problem with his identity papers as the Belgian Jacques Mornard resulted in the United States rejecting his application for a visa. The NKVD then provided him with a passport in the name of the fictitious Frank Jacson, a Canadian citizen who was Yugoslav by birth.
Ramón received his U.S. visa and left France on September 1 as war broke out in Europe, arriving a week later in New York. There he explained his change of identity to Sylvia as a necessary step to avoid being drafted into the Belgian army. She apparently never questioned him about the unorthodox spelling of his new last name, which he pronounced in the French style, with th
e accent on the second syllable. It proved to be a felicitous choice: This would allow her, they agreed, to continue to call him Jacques—spelled simply “Jac”—without compromising his new identity. He explained to Sylvia that he was now a businessman, working for an international entrepreneur named Peter Lubeck, who traded in oil and sugar. This was all a fiction, of course. Ramón’s real boss was Leonid Eitingon, the operational commander of Operation Duck and the lover of Caridad Mercader.
On October 1, Ramón said goodbye to Sylvia and left for Mexico City on a business trip. Eitingon followed in mid-November, around the same time as Caridad. As the Christmas holidays approached, Sylvia contrived to get sick leave from her job as a New York City social worker on the strength of a doctor’s note saying she suffered from a sinus condition and required a warm climate in order to convalesce. She flew down to Mexico City on New Year’s Day 1940, and moved into Ramón’s apartment there. This unfolded in accordance with the NKVD’s optimal scenario, as did Sylvia’s next move, which was to contact Trotsky and, using the connection of her sister, receive an invitation to his house.
During her second visit to Avenida Viena, early in February, Sylvia encountered Alfred Rosmer in the patio as she was leaving. The two had met in Paris in the summer of 1938 at the founding congress of the Fourth International. Sylvia invited Rosmer and his wife, Marguerite, to visit the apartment, where they were introduced to Jacson.
Three weeks later, Sylvia and Jacson were invited on a picnic to Mount Toluca, about fifty miles west of Mexico City, joining the Rosmers, Otto and Trude Schüssler, and Seva, with AlYoung along as chauffeur. Jacson was considered good social company, although he was regarded as a superficial person and a political lightweight. The Rosmers asked him why, if he was a Canadian, he spoke Parisian French, even the current slang terms, and he explained that he had been educated in Paris.
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