On the afternoon of June 27, 1941, a team of FBI agents and U.S. marshals raided the branch headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party in Minneapolis and St. Paul. They seized a large amount of radical literature, two red flags, and an autographed photo of Trotsky.
On the basis of this and other evidence, the federal authorities charged twenty-nine Trotskyist militants with conspiracy against the U.S. government. Four of the accused were national leaders of the Socialist Workers Party: James Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, Al Goldman, and Felix Morrow. Fourteen others were connected to the Teamsters, including Ray Rainbolt, head of the union’s Defense Guard, and Dorothy Schultz, Hank’s wife and Twin Cities secretary of the Workers Defense League, as well as former Coyoacán guards Jake Cooper and Emil Hansen, the better half of the disgruntled duo of Bill and Emil.
The indictment contained two counts, the first of which charged the defendants with conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States through armed revolution. The prosecution sought to demonstrate that the accused took their inspiration from the Russian Revolution and their ideas from Lenin and Trotsky: “and accordingly, certain of the defendants would, and they did, go…to Mexico City, Mexico, there to advise with and to receive the advice, counsel, guidance, and directions of the said Leon Trotsky.” The second count invoked the Smith Act of 1940, which made it a criminal offense to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government. Among the evidence presented in court was Trotsky’s photograph and his writings, along with the published works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
All the defendants were cleared of the conspiracy charge, but eighteen of them were found guilty of violating the Smith Act, including Cannon, Dobbs, Goldman, Cooper, and Hansen. Their prison sentences ranged from a year and a day to sixteen months, which they began serving on January 1, 1944.
The Communist Party aided the Justice Department in prosecuting these Trotskyists by providing incriminating documents, some of which had been collected by Sylvia Caldwell, Cannon’s secretary, who was an informant for the NKVD. After she was exposed by a Communist defector in 1954, she was brought before a grand jury but refused to testify, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. She finally confessed to her NKVD past before a second grand jury in 1958.
That was the year that the law also caught up with Mark Zborowski, aka Étienne and “Tulip,” who was Lyova’s shadow and his successor as Trotsky’s right-hand man in Paris. Zborowski came to the United States in December 1941. In New York, where he moved in Russian émigré and Trotskyist circles, he reported on the activities of Al Goldman and Jean van Heijenoort, among others. He was also put on the trail of Victor Kravchenko, a trade official whose defection to the United States in 1944 greatly embarrassed the Moscow government.
In New York, Zborowski continued his research in cultural anthropology, at first in association with the American Jewish Committee, then as a consultant to a Columbia University research project on contemporary cultures, sponsored by the U.S. Navy. This work led to his co-authorship in 1952 of Life Is with People, a groundbreaking study of the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe before World War II, with an introduction by Margaret Mead. In 1954 he began research at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in the Bronx on the rehabilitation of disabled people. It was at that time that he came under scrutiny from the FBI.
The noose tightened around Zborowski when Alexander Orlov, the Soviet defector who had gone underground in 1938, surfaced in New York. Orlov and his wife had been living on the NKVD funds he absconded with at the time of his defection and flight to the United States. As these funds ran low, he decided he would support himself by publishing his memoirs—although a carefully crafted version that would honor his pledge of secrecy to Moscow and at the same time not make him look like a man with blood on his hands. By a stroke of good luck, he completed his book manuscript on the eve of Stalin’s death, in March 1953, which generated enormous interest in what was published later that year as The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes.
Orlov made his first big splash a month after Stalin’s death with a series of articles in Life magazine. According to Orlov, during his time as NKVD station chief in Spain, he functioned more or less as a political attaché, and played no role in the murder of Andrés Nin and others on the non-Communist left during the Spanish civil war. Orlov had known for years that he would have some explaining to do about his actions in Spain. Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, in a 1939 memoir, had identified Orlov as the NKVD’s chief terrorist there. The FBI assumed that Orlov was keeping secrets, although the agency’s interrogators failed to break him. Orlov dismissed Krivitsky’s claims about him as a “Trotskyist invention.” Krivitsky was not there to back up his assertions: in February 1941 he was found dead in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, a victim of suicide.
During a casual conversation with a Russian émigré, Orlov discovered that Zborowski was living in New York. He seems to have been surprised that his warning letter to Trotsky in Mexico had failed to expose the agent provocateur he identified as “Mark.” Orlov took his story about Zborowski to the FBI, and then publicly unmasked him in his testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee in September 1955.
Zborowski was then summoned to appear before the same committee in February 1956. The senators questioned the witness about his spying activities in France, from his alleged role in the theft of Trotsky’s archives in November 1936, to the circumstances surrounding the death of Lyova in a Paris clinic in February 1938. Zborowski skillfully ducked and weaved, often pleading a faulty memory. In any case, he was not legally culpable for espionage work carried out in France, and he told the Senate panel the same thing he had told the FBI: that he had emphatically refused to work for Soviet intelligence in the United States, despite being pressured to do so.
On February 20, 1957, Zborowski appeared in court to testify at the trial of an American accused of spying for the Soviets. Under oath, Zborowski told the grand jury that he did not know the defendant, although in fact the man in question was his former Soviet handler in New York—and the FBI soon had the evidence to prove it. In April 1958, Zborowski was arrested for perjury. At the time, he was a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, working on the same campus that housed Trotsky’s archives.
Zborowski was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. The conviction was then overturned on a technicality, but he was retried in 1962 and again convicted, and he served a sentence of three years and eleven months.
VAN HAD AGREED to appear at Zborowski’s trial in 1958, but it turned out that his testimony was not needed. By then Van had been out of the Trotskyist movement for over a decade. The Socialist Workers Party expelled him in 1947 for asserting that Marx’s predictions about the revolutionary capacity of the working class had been mistaken. In an article devoted to the 100th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto which appeared in the March 1948 issue of Partisan Review, Van called for a rethinking of the fundamental assumptions of Marxism. Partisan Review, the literary haven of Trotskysant intellectuals in the late 1930s, was becoming a voice of Cold War liberalism. Among those leading the anti-Communist charge were Trotsky’s old ideological antagonists Max Eastman and Sidney Hook. Max Shachtman joined this chorus somewhat later, from his position on the social democratic left.
James Burnham, once Trotsky’s most formidable adversary and bête noire inside the Socialist Workers Party, turned his thesis about a brave new world of “bureaucratic collectivism” into a hugely successful book, The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. The book stirred enormous controversy, not least because of the author’s apparent coldblood-edness about the dawning age of authoritarianism pioneered by the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and New Deal America. George Orwell accused Burnham of looking forward to a German victory in the war and to a totalitarian future, a charge Burnham denied. Orwell later drew upon Burnham’s dark vision to create his dystopian masterpiece, 1984.
After the war, the fiercely anti
-communist Burnham fell out with Cold War liberals over their objections to the red-baiting crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and he moved toward the political right. In 1955, the year after McCarthy’s downfall, Burnham helped William F. Buckley Jr. launch the conservative weekly National Review, contributing as a columnist and a senior editor. Burnham and his fellow editors were early and unwavering champions of Ronald Reagan, whom they helped get elected to the White House in 1980. In 1982, in a speech he gave to the British House of Commons, President Reagan famously declared, “The march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” Few were aware at the time that Reagan’s words were an ironic echo of Trotsky’s banishment of the Mensheviks to the dustbin of history back in 1917. In 1983, the year Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” he awarded Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Even then, Trotskyist sects endured throughout the non-Communist world. In the United States alone, there were numerous splinter groups, factions, and tendencies—remnants of the party that Cannon and Shachtman built. Joe Hansen, Trotsky’s favorite American secretary-guard-driver, remained in the thick of these obscure Trotskyist politics until his death in 1979.
The year 1979 was the 100th anniversary of Trotsky’s birth, an occasion marked by a ceremony held at Columbia University. In attendance that day was a middle-aged Russian Jewish émigré newly arrived from Moscow by the name of Yulia Akselrod. Yulia was the daughter of Seryozha, Trotsky and Natalia’s son—she was a granddaughter they never knew they had.
Seryozha was shot in October 1937, although all that his family in the Soviet Union knew was that he was last seen in prison in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. He had been exiled there after his 1935 arrest in Moscow. Yulia’s mother was allowed to join her husband in Krasnoyarsk, but when she was six months pregnant with Yulia, Seryozha was arrested again and disappeared. Yulia’s mother returned to Moscow, where she was arrested two years later and sent to Kolyma, in northeastern Siberia, the site of the most infamous of the gulag camps. Yulia remained in Moscow with her grandparents, until they were arrested in 1951 and all three of them were deported to Siberia.
Yulia eventually moved back to Moscow, where she kept her family background a carefully guarded secret. As a Jew, she was allowed to emigrate to the United States in 1979. A few months after her arrival in New York, she saw a poster advertising the Columbia University event in honor of her grandfather, and out of curiosity she decided to attend. It was an unforgettable experience. The Iran hostage crisis had just begun, yet the hall was decorated with a huge black-and-green banner bearing the slogan “Long live the revolution in Iran!” Yulia’s command of English was not good enough to enable her to understand the particular substance of the speeches, but she grasped their tenor.
When the meeting ended, she could not resist disclosing her identity to the organizers of the event. She had the feeling that they did not quite believe her story, but nonetheless they introduced her to another special member of the audience, a man who had lived with her grandfather in Mexico and had subdued his assassin. This was Harold Robins, a hardened veteran of the Trotskyist factional struggles in the years since Trotsky’s murder. “Yulia and Robins became good friends, even though, as she later said, “I sometimes had to suppress the urge to kill the dear fellow. He was a true believer—a man who had never lost faith in Trotsky’s ideas and his dream of a world revolution—and we never stopped arguing.”
Robins kept urging her to read the Marxist classics, and she could not make him understand that for years she and her college classmates in Moscow had been force-fed their Marxism, and that it had left a distinctly bad taste in their mouths. “Telling this to Harold was like talking to the wall. I had nothing but my experience to go on, after all, whereas he had a vision.”
Robins died a true believer in 1986, the same year that Van met a violent end. After abandoning Trotskyist politics, he received a doctorate in mathematics from New York University in 1949 then pursued a distinguished academic career in the fields of mathematics and formal logic. He also continued to serve informally as Trotsky’s archivist, first at Harvard, where he helped catalog Trotsky’s papers, and later at Stanford, after a section of Trotsky’s Paris archive long presumed lost or stolen by the NKVD came to light at the Hoover Archives in the early 1980s. This included a large cache of letters between Trotsky and Lyova.
On one of his trips to Mexico to negotiate the purchase of Natalia’s papers for Harvard, Van started up a romantic liaison with the daughter of Adolfo Zamora, one of Trotsky’s Mexican friends and sometime legal adviser. The romance led to marriage, and Van found himself in a tempestuous relationship with an increasingly unstable woman. The marriage kept Van connected to Mexico City, which is where he was, asleep in his study, when his wife fired three bullets from a Colt .38 into his head before turning the gun on herself.
Van died just as General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet system were gathering momentum and making household words of the terms perestroika and glasnost. Gorbachev hoped to salvage the original Bolshevik project, and he understood that this would require filling in the many “blank spots” of Soviet history.
Yet from Gorbachev’s point of view, there was no room for Trotsky in the pantheon of honorable Bolshevik victims of Stalin. In a speech he delivered in November 1987 to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Gorbachev stated that Trotsky “had, after Lenin’s death, displayed excessive pretensions to top leadership in the Party, thus fully confirming Lenin’s opinion of him as an excessively self-assured politician who always vacillated and cheated.” Trotsky’s ideas, said Gorbachev, were “essentially an attack on Leninism all down the line.”
Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and many other fallen Bolsheviks were soon legally rehabilitated, as were many non-Bolsheviks, including Trotsky’s son Seryozha—but not Trotsky himself. In the new atmosphere of openness, however, he was no longer taboo, and Soviet journalists and historians began to publish articles about his role as Lenin’s essential comrade in 1917 and as the organizer of the Red Army. In January 1989, a Soviet publication told its readers for the first time that the Kremlin had ordered Trotsky’s murder. Later, Trotsky’s articles began to appear in print, and in post-Soviet Russia his books became available, by which point they were completely harmless.
In 1988, the Soviet government granted Seva a visa so that he could be reunited with his half-sister Alexandra after a separation of sixty years. Their mother, Zina, had been forced to leave Alexandra behind when she went to live with Trotsky in Turkey. In the postwar Stalin years, during a wave of arrests of the children of “enemies of the people,” Alexandra was sentenced to ten years of exile in Kazakhstan, a deportation that was cut short by Khrushchev’s thaw in 1956. When they met again, Seva and Alexandra shared no common language and had to communicate through an interpreter and by sign language. After his visit, Seva said of the experience, “It was a little like people from a shipwreck who meet safe and sound on the beach.”
Gorbachev had unleashed forces he could not control, and by 1990 the glasnost indictment of Stalin began to move on to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution. The unintended effect was to undermine the legitimacy of Marxist-Leninist ideology and the Bolshevik Revolution, and therefore of the entire Soviet system, preparing the way for the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
One of those observing these historic developments with intense interest from the sidelines was Albert Glotzer. Glotzer, a Chicago native, had joined the American Trotskyist movement at its creation in 1928 and served as Trotsky’s bodyguard in Turkey, where he fished and hunted with the Old Man, listened to him dictate his History of the Russian Revolution, and gave a beleaguered young Seva an abortive lesson in boxing. At the Dewey hearings in Coyoacán in 1937, Glotzer served as court reporter. He sided with Shachtman and the Minority in the factional split inside the Socialist Workers Party in 1939–40. He drifted away from Trotskyism, but
he stayed in contact with Natalia and became friends with Seva, whom he visited over the years in Mexico City.
Looking back on Trotsky and Trotskyism from the perspective of August 1991, as history turned a corner, Glotzer could not overcome a profound sense of waste. “Many things we wrote and said in the Thirties were simply bullshit,” he wrote to novelist Saul Bellow. Bellow was a student Trotskyist in Chicago in the 1930s. He and a former classmate had an appointment to meet with Trotsky in August 1940. They were in Taxco when they heard about the attack and rushed to Mexico City and to Green Cross Hospital. Passing themselves off as reporters, the two young men were led into a room where, as Bellow described the scene, “Trotsky was lying dead with a bloody turban of bandages, and his face streaked with iridescent iodine.”
Bellow was never as ideologically invested as the party cadres like Glotzer, and his Trotskyism died at the same time Trotsky did. A half-century later, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, he learned for the first time by reading Glotzer’s own memoir of Trotsky how the man he once revered had been an outsider to Bolshevism until 1917, how his actions as a Bolshevik leader turned him into a prisoner of the myth of October as a workers’ revolution, and how in his last exile he made his disciples its prisoners as well.
“The Soviet Union will live and develop as the new social basis created by the October Revolution,” Trotsky had declared after arriving in Mexico in 1937, when he predicted that the birthplace of socialism “will produce a regime of true democracy and will become the greatest factor for peace and for the social emancipation of humanity.” Although doubts crept into his later writings, through the Kremlin’s purges and the Nazi-Soviet pact and its bloody aftermath he refused to surrender this utopian vision. The fact is, as Glotzer elucidated for Bellow, Trotsky could not disavow the USSR without also repudiating Red October, which would have meant renouncing his life’s work. Instead, as his prospects grew dim and as Stalin’s assassins closed in, he kept reaffirming his absolute faith in the dogma of Marxism and pointing toward a glorious Soviet future. “Optimism was all he really had.”
Trotsky Page 35