After the congress the ranks of the opposition thinned even more. Some, like Zinoviev and Kamenev, degradingly begged for forgiveness, others simply gave up political activity, while still others were arrested and sent into exile. Either Sermuks or Poznansky would visit Trotsky every day to bring him up to date: Rakovsky had been exiled to Astrakhan, Smirnov to Armenia, Radek was still in Tobolsk, Serebryakov, Smilga and Preobrazhensky were about to be exiled to Semipalatinsk, Narym and Uralsk, respectively. Trotsky’s assistants read more and more new names, but the places of exile were all too familiar from another age: Irkutsk, Abakan, Kansk, Achinsk, Minusinsk, Barnaul, Tomsk. He felt he would be sent into exile himself any day now, although at the same time he harboured a faint hope that Stalin would not bring himself to treat Lenin’s closest comrade-in-arms that way.
At the end of December Poznansky was called in by the OGPU and ordered to take Trotsky an offer to move to Astrakhan. Trotsky wrote to the Politburo the same day to say that he was prepared to work anywhere in the country, as long as it did not affect his health adversely. He would not agree to move to Astrakhan, as its humidity was not good for his malaria. A week later a minor OGPU official summoned him and announced that his request had been granted and that he could go to a dry place instead. The official then read the order in a flat, impersonal voice: ‘In accordance with the law punishing anyone for counter-revolutionary activity, Citizen Lev Davydovich Trotsky is to be exiled to the town of Alma-Ata. The period of residence there is not specified. Date of departure for exile, 16 January 1928.’ Trotsky gazed absently around the shabby little room and left. He felt no twinge of hesitation or repentance. He had long made up his mind. He would stick to his chosen path.
Natalya tried not to show her feelings at the miserable news he brought home. Their host, Beloborodov, had also received notice that he was to be deported to some unpronounceable place in the Komi republic. The packing-up process began. Constantly visited by oppositionist leaders who were still at large, Trotsky excitedly issued instructions, dictated telegrams, wrote out protests, enquiries and statements, in an effort to show his supporters that all was not yet lost. The Party must wake up. The cause of the revolution must not be ruined.
As Natalya Sedova later recalled, the packing was completed by 16 January. Trotsky had been particularly concerned that all his papers, books and archives be packed. Sermuks, Poznansky and his elder son, Lev, put them into more than twenty boxes. In the morning, his two wives, the sons, Ioffe’s widow and two or three other relatives waited for the OGPU to come for Trotsky. He tried to make a joke, but the atmosphere in the small apartment was tense and unusually quiet. Then Rakovsky arrived and announced that a vast crowd had gathered at Kazan Station to see Trotsky off. The militia couldn’t disperse them. There were portraits of Trotsky and some of the young people were lying on the line in front of the train.
Finally, the OGPU called to say the departure was delayed for two days, giving no reason. Next day, however, a large group of OGPU officers turned up. At first Trotsky refused to open the door, accusing ‘the present leadership’ of a breach of faith, and when he had to let them in he refused to submit to their order to quit the apartment, calling it illegal. Several OGPU men then picked him up bodily and carried him downstairs to a waiting car. His elder son ran ahead, knocking on all the doors and shouting, ‘Look, Comrades! They’re taking Trotsky away by force!’ A few doors opened a crack to reveal a frightened or puzzled face, which quickly disappeared. Finally they were on their way, driving through the frozen streets of Moscow, empty-handed and unprepared for the journey, and were delivered not to Kazan Station but Yaroslav Station, where there was no one to see them off. The agents picked Trotsky up again and deposited him in a railcar. Escorts stood at the windows and doors of the compartment, and the neighbouring compartment was also occupied by OGPU agents. ‘Where were we going?’ Sedova later wrote. ‘We didn’t know. Our baggage had not been brought in when the locomotive started off with our solitary car. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. We found that we were going by a circuitous route to a small station where our car was to be attached to the mail-train that had left Moscow from Kazan Station for Tashkent. At five o’clock, we said goodbye to Seryozha and [Beloborodov’s wife], who had to return to Moscow. We continued on our way. I had a fever. L.D. was brisk and almost gay. The situation had taken definite shape.’125
Two days before Trotsky’s deportation, Stalin had left for Siberia to deal with problems of grain deliveries, having first made the necessary dispositions regarding Trotsky. Central Committee Secretary S.V. Kosior sent him a coded cable to report that his orders had been carried out: ‘It proved necessary to use force and carry him out, as he refused to go, and he locked himself in his room and they had to break down the door. We’re arresting Muralov and the others this evening.’ Stalin replied: ‘I received your cable about the antics of Trotsky and the Trotskyists.’126
In my book on Stalin I outlined this episode somewhat differently, but now that additional information has become available, the picture can be more fully described. The Politburo discussed the question of Trotsky’s exile several times. Bukharin and Rykov were against it. Stalin was for it, with Voroshilov’s zealous support. The rest were hesitant. The discussions were not minuted, but clearly Stalin got his way: his constant rival would be sent to the Chinese border, although evidently the idea of putting him outside the borders of Soviet territory was still a possibility.127
Beyond the detailed account of the journey to Alma-Ata given in Trotsky’s autobiography, it is worth adding that the OGPU had set up a large special section, with branches in the localities, to deal with the mass deportation of oppositionists to the eastern regions. Any former Party member who had ever uttered a sympathetic word about Trotsky was now arrested, and the number of suspects being watched grew apace. The first category to be arrested were those who had worked under Trotsky in the Revolutionary Military Council, the War Commissariat and his secretariat.
Sermuks and Poznansky were arrested in Alma-Ata. Theirs was a sad fate, as I learned from Nadezhda Alexandrovna Marennikova, who had worked in Trotsky’s secretariat in the 1920s. Sermuks and Poznansky, she recalled, were highly intelligent, thoroughly dedicated to their work and utterly convinced that Trotsky was right. Butov served more or less as chief of the secretariat. ‘We typists got 40 roubles a month, a small sum even then. Butov once mentioned this to Trotsky who arranged to pay us an extra 23 roubles a month out of his earnings from publishing.’ Marennikova’s memory was patchy, as she was the first to admit: ‘I can remember which row in the theatre I sat in with Sermuks, but I cannot remember Butov’s first name.’ Her memories of Sermuks were especially warm. ‘He was arrested in 1928. He wrote to me from camp. His letters were stamped Medzhvezhegorsk, Cherepovets. He was moved somewhere else in 1929. He must have destroyed my letters, otherwise I’d have been arrested too. Everyone I knew in Trotsky’s secretariat was arrested. They got long prison sentences and concentration camp, and in 1937-38 they were shot. Someone was very anxious that no one should remember Trotsky. They hunted down everyone who had worked with him in the People’s Commissariat, or who had known him. And an awful lot of people had known him, so an awful lot had to be exterminated.’128
At the end of January 1928, Trotsky, his wife and son Lev were taken to Alma-Ata, then a minor provincial town in the borderlands. They would stay there a year. At first they were put up in the Hotel Dzhetysa, then soon found a small house. Sermuks and Poznansky were with them for a while, but, much to Trotsky’s chagrin, were soon arrested.129 The family organized a simple life for themselves, and Trotsky threw himself into his work. Whatever the circumstances, his sharp pen was never idle, and letters and telegrams were soon flying from Alma-Ata to Moscow and elsewhere. He was trying to establish as soon as possible where the other opposition leaders had been exiled, so that together they could work out their future strategy. Soon Trotsky’s modest dwelling was inundated with correspondence.
All this refers chiefly to the correspondence with the region of exile, but letters from exile filtered out into the country as well. Of the correspondence sent us, we received, in the best months, not more than half. In addition, we received about eight or nine secret mails from Moscow, that is, secret material and letters forwarded by special courier. About the same number were sent by us in similar fashion to Moscow. The secret mail kept us informed of everything that was going on there and enabled us, though only after much delay, to respond with our comments on the most important events.130
And the events that were taking place were important indeed. A grain crisis was mounting, as the peasants were refusing to give up their produce at low prices. Even though the Trotskyists had been hounded out of the Party, the Politburo was split. Stalin espoused the leftist course that Trotsky had been advocating, while Bukharin and his supporters warned of the danger of trying to force the issue. When Trotsky read Bukharin’s ‘Notes of an Economist’ in Pravda in September, he exclaimed: ‘The capitulationists could win! The revolution is in danger!’ Bukharin was claiming that it was possible for industry and agriculture to develop without creating a crisis. Grain prices should be raised and the one-sided and excessive transfer of goods from the countryside to the cities for the needs of industry should be stopped. Everything should be done to widen the peasant market and not to force the transformation of the village. ‘The maximum number of economic factors that work for socialism must be set in motion and made flexible,’ he wrote. ‘This means a complex combination of personal, group, mass, social and state initiative. We have over-centralized too much.’
Trotsky sensed that Stalin was inclined to repudiate Bukharin and take the route the opposition had proposed: restrict the kulaks, accelerate industrialization at the cost of the countryside, and take extreme measures to get out of the crisis. Like other opposition leaders, he was amazed that Stalin was coming over to their side. Many believed, as they wrote in their letters, that this change of course and the clash between Stalin and Bukharin would end with their being brought back from exile. Something similar is detectable in some of Trotsky’s letters to his supporters.131 In conversation with the few emissaries who managed, semi-legally, to reach him from Moscow and Leningrad, Trotsky expressed the view that Stalin’s ‘leftward’ shift of policy meant that the opposition’s strategy had been correct. And he declared that Bukharin’s policies and ideas were more dangerous than Stalin’s peasant policy.132 It seemed to him that Stalin’s attack, against his own will, on the kulaks would bring the General Secretary and his faction onto the left wing of the Party. The Party still needs us, he declared, optimistically.
Trotsky’s hopes seemed to have been justified when one evening he was visited by a young man, calling himself an engineer, who shared his views. He enquired about the life of the exiles in Alma Ata, and then asked outright: ‘Don’t you think it is possible to take some steps towards reconciliation?’ Trotsky replied: ‘Reconciliation is impossible, not because I don’t want it, but because Stalin cannot make peace.’133 The visitor left and did not return, but Trotsky realized he had been sent to sound him out. He also understood that Stalin could hardly be expected to make peace with the ‘left’ opposition, as it would be seen by the rest of the Party as an admission of error on his part. Gradually, however, he came to the conclusion that Stalin had accumulated his enormous power in order to get rid of first the left and then the right. While formally remaining a centrist, Stalin was able nonetheless to appropriate much of Trotsky’s platform.
Stalin would never again think of collaborating with Trotsky, as there was too much mutual hatred between them. But Stalin’s pragmatic acquisition of some of the opposition’s ideas led to their reshuffling. The old Bolsheviks, for whom membership of the Party virtually bore a mystical character, were prepared to ask for forgiveness from Stalin’s organization. Among them, Radek and Preobrazhensky were especially vocal, while Rakovsky was absolutely opposed. Trotsky had already noticed a shift in Radek’s position. Only a minority of Trotskyists, predominantly younger people, did not trust Stalin, believing that having taken over the ideas of the opposition, he was realizing them by shady methods. The opposition continued to melt away. In the six months following the Fifteenth Congress, more than three thousand of his supporters officially broke with Trotsky.134 There remained only a few small groups, mostly in the large towns, which continued their illegal activities, and the colonies of exiles who went on belatedly arguing about the fate of their platforms and themselves.
The defamation of Trotsky, meanwhile, went on undiminished. When Moscow Party Secretary Uglanov announced that Trotsky was continuing his oppositionist activity under the cover of ‘an imagined illness’, Natalya lost patience and wrote a sharp letter, protesting that ‘the imagined illness’ continued the lies which had been used to raise a curtain around Trotsky. Signing herself Sedova-Trotskaya, she demanded an end to the harassment.135
By the autumn of 1928, the flow of letters addressed to Trotsky had been sharply reduced. Many vanished without trace, one of them in particular of special value to him. He had learned during the spring, in a letter from his elder daughter Zina, that Nina, the younger girl, was seriously ill. They were both living in very harsh conditions, finding corners to squeeze into and suffering constant persecution. Both were fanatical supporters of their father, and both felt acutely the knocks he had taken. Nina’s husband had been arrested and she had lost her job for her ‘Trotskyist convictions’. She became seriously ill, but there was no one to help, except her sister. For any doctor to attend the daughter of Trotsky would be tantamount to signing his own sentence. Nina died on 9 June 1928, aged twenty-six. It was seventy-three days later that Trotsky was informed. His elder daughter was also ill, but he could not make contact with her. The mail from Alma-Ata took an age: each letter was read, analysed and copied by the authorities. A special OGPU group summarized the correspondence and reported to Stalin through Menzhinsky. As he read the monthly secret police reports, Stalin became increasingly convinced that he must put an end to any kind of political activity by the Trotskyists on Soviet territory.
Trotsky, meanwhile, continued to send telegrams of protest, knowing that nothing would be done. On 3 December 1928 he addressed one to Menzhinsky, with copies to the Central Committee and Kalinin, the nominal head of state: ‘A total postal blockade has been going on for more than a month. Even letters and telegrams about my daughter’s health and the medicines she needs and so on are being seized.’136 His courier, a driver with a local organization, suddenly disappeared. They had been meeting at the public baths, where they had furtively exchanged packets of papers. The driver had obviously been followed and arrested, and Trotsky’s supplies of information were now being strictly rationed.
During breaks from the work he was doing on translations, Trotsky planned a large autobiography. He tried out several titles: ‘Half A Century (1879-1929): An Experiment in Autobiography’; ‘Flood Tides and Ebb Tides: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary’; ‘In the Service of the Revolution: An Experiment in Autobiography’; ‘A Life of Struggle: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary’; ‘To Live is to Struggle: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary’.137 Eventually he settled on My Life.
When he was not writing, Trotsky engaged in his favourite pastime, duck-shooting on the tributaries of the Ili River, some seventy kilometres away. Eventually the local OGPU was instructed to restrict his radius of travel to twenty-five kilometres. He sent a protest to Menzhinsky: ‘A month ago the GPU banned me from hunting. Two weeks ago they said permission had been granted. Now they’ve limited me to 25 [kilometres], where there’s nothing to hunt. I think there has been a mi
sunderstanding and I am letting you know that I am going hunting on the Ili, beyond seventy [kilometres]. I request instructions to avoid unnecessary collisions.’138 Nothing came back from the centre and Trotsky ignored the ban. Hunting almost alone in the great unspoiled territory of Central Asia, he would for a while at least gain some perspective on the events he had lived through: the excitement of 1917 and the triumphs of the civil war, but also the pettiness and squalor of the fights with Stalin and his camarilla.
After a spell of hunting, he would return to working on several books. He kept going back to the book he had begun on Lenin, and he wrote a long article called ‘The Permanent Revolution and Lenin’s Line’, an attempt to reinterpret Lenin’s writings. But he was too late, as Stalin had already seized the monopoly on Lenin. Without fresh information from the capital, furthermore, he found it increasingly difficult to continue this work. The postal blockade had been intensified.
Bukharin, feeling Stalin’s iron grip closing around his throat, had decided he should make common cause with Zinoviev and Kamenev and, perhaps, also with Trotsky. Throwing caution to the wind, on the evening of 11 July 1928 he called on Kamenev at his apartment with the intention of establishing illegal relations with the half-destroyed opposition. Bitterly he told Kamenev how much he now regretted helping Stalin to destroy the opposition. As Trotskyists later reported in a leaflet dated February 1929, Bukharin had appeared crushed, and was constantly repeating, ‘Stalin is Ghengis Khan, an intriguer of the very worst stripe,’ and ‘the revolution has been ruined.’ But he had no clear plan of campaign. He visited Kamenev on several further occasions, but no practical steps were taken.
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