Trotsky spent his time writing, apart from occasional fishing trips for which he developed a great liking. In a letter to Yelena Krylenko-Eastman he wrote: ‘I have a big favour to ask you in the fishing area. Could you possibly buy me some line for underwater rods used for catching big fish? 200 metres would be good.’ Six weeks later he wrote to thank her for the line.6 But he needed money, as ‘Stalin’s gift’ had lasted only a short time. Several donations came from the Rosmers and others, but they were not enough. He needed an income to support himself, his family and the two or three secretaries without whom he could not function, especially as he had now decided to publish a small journal of the ‘left’ opposition. He needed money, and only his writing could provide it.
Trotsky was well enough known for a host of publishers to want his work. He received $10,000 for his first articles for the Daily Express, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times and other newspapers. Soon he would receive an advance of $7000 from an American publisher for his autobiography, and for a series of articles entitled ‘The History of the Russian Revolution’ the Saturday Evening Post paid him $45,000.7 While these were substantial sums for the time, they were all advances against books still to be written, and the writing of books is hard labour indeed. Fortunately, Trotsky enjoyed this particular form of punishment.
This was his third stint of exile. He still believed that either he would be called back to Moscow or that things there would change and he would be able to return, if not in triumph, at least with honour. Until 1934 he harboured the admittedly fading belief that the Party would not tolerate Stalin for much longer. The dictator must surely hang himself on the rope of collectivization and his struggle with the right. Meanwhile, Trotsky intended to do all in his power to debunk Stalin, to expose his limitations and the damage caused by his policies.
To increase the volume of information at his disposal, he sent his son with a fisherman he knew to Constantinople to buy a radio receiver so he could listen in to the crackly broadcasts from the USSR. In early March 1930 he heard Radio Moscow broadcasting a speech of Stalin’s, published in Pravda as ‘Dizzy With Success’, in which the General Secretary stated: ‘Up to 20 February this year already 50 per cent of peasant households in the USSR were collectivized. That means we have overfulfilled the five-year plan to 20 February 1930 more than twice over.’ Instead of commenting on this success, however, the presenter started talking about ‘bungled work’, ‘racing ahead’, attempts to collectivize all and everything, and saying that ‘such a policy can only be useful and good for our sworn enemies’.8 Trotsky interpreted the article as a serious failure for Stalin and described the situation in a letter to his American friends: ‘Stalin’s new retreat, predicted so accurately by the opposition, will have major political consequences … This retreat represents a savage blow to the revolution in general. The Stalinist faction will be severely shaken and there will be a new influx to the left opposition.’9 Trotsky’s conclusion was contradictory: on the one hand, he was claiming that a retreat from a left-wing policy would be unpopular in the Party, but more significantly, he seemed to forget that the power of the Stalinist organization, which had been the chief cause of his conflict with the leadership, could and would override ideological differences and rule by force. In other words, what he failed to consider was that, whether Stalin adopted a right-wing or a left-wing approach, he would carry the Party with him by means of organizational control.
After two or three months on Prinkipo, Trotsky and his wife could see how lonely their son was with nothing to do, and how much he missed the rest of the family. Letters from Moscow were few and far between, because they were being intercepted and retained by the OGPU. Lev was his father’s pride. There was complete harmony in their political views, he had his father’s combative character and the ability to grasp the intricacies of Party and international politics. After a long discussion, it was agreed that Lev should go to Moscow to see how things stood, and whether the rest of the family should remain in Moscow or try to join their parents. It was also necessary to clarify Sergei’s position: he had become interested in science and was unlikely to agree to become a political nomad, like his elder brother.
Lev went to the Soviet Consul and requested permission to return to Moscow. He was promised an early reply, but weeks went by without news. With his father’s help, Lev wrote to the OGPU, with a copy to the TsIK:
On 13 July this year I made an enquiry at the Consulate General of the USSR in Constantinople as to whether or not, as a Soviet citizen, I require a visa to return to the USSR. The Consulate asked for my passport (which I surrendered) and promised to reply within a few days. A month has now passed. I applied to the Consulate a second time (on 8 August this year), also with no result. I earnestly request that you expedite this matter, as there can be no formal or substantive reason for a refusal. I have come here only temporarily, the family in Moscow is expecting me, and so on.10
The Consulate could, of course, decide nothing for itself. The bureaucratic machine turned slowly before Yenukidze finally informed Stalin of the request that had been made by Trotsky’s son. Stalin merely smirked and said: ‘For him it’s all over. And the same for his family. Reject it.’ The same day, 24 August 1929, Yenukidze told the OGPU to reject Sedov’s application.11 Now that he knew the way back home was closed to him, Lev committed himself wholeheartedly to serving his father, taking over the publishing operations, the contacts with the host of support groups throughout Europe and, finally, his father’s personal security. Sermuks and Poznansky would, of course, have been of immense help, had they been allowed to join Trotsky. Instead they were moved from camp to camp and finally left to rot. Glazman was driven to suicide, Butov died in prison.
Two months or so after his first articles had appeared in Turkey, Trotsky read the Kremlin’s reaction in the Moscow newspapers. Pravda published a statement signed by thirty-eight of his former supporters who now denounced him.12 The heavy guns, however, were reserved for Bolshevik, the main theoretical journal of the Party, in which Yaroslavsky came out with two devastating articles. Trotsky had never liked Yaroslavsky. Even as early as the 1905 revolution he had thought him lacking in principles and prepared to serve whoever held power. Later, as the editor of Derevenskaya Pravda (Village Pravda), a member of the Party centre directing the uprising in Moscow, and First Commissar of the Kremlin, Yaroslavsky had displayed efficiency and imagination. When he began handling the history of the Party, however, he quickly revealed himself to be an obedient and nimble interpreter of Stalin’s views. But he also supported Stalin’s actions. Speaking in January 1938 at a Central Committee plenum, for instance, he ‘reassured’ his comrades that ‘as well as our unmasked enemies, we are in a position to withdraw tens and hundreds of thousands of worthy people.’13 For Yaroslavsky—Chairman of the Society of Old Political Prisoners, and of the Union of Militant Atheists, and of the Old Bolsheviks—the Stalinist terror was a natural extension of the revolutionary process. In 1936 a letter from Natalya Sedova, concerning Sergei and distributed to the leadership, ended up in Yaroslavsky’s hands. He knew both of Trotsky’s sons well, but he would do nothing for Sergei. His own death in 1943 would spare him the news of his son’s suicide on 9 January 1947.14 In 1929, he had no time for family sentiment.
With some disgust, Trotsky read Yaroslavsky’s first article, ‘Mr Trotsky at the Service of the Bourgeoisie, or L. Trotsky’s First Steps Abroad’, and then the second one, ‘How Trotsky “Replies”, and How the Workers Reply to Trotsky’. The terminology in both articles was typical Soviet usage of the period: ‘Trotsky’s calls for counter-revolution’, ‘a record of stupidity’, ‘the return to the Mensheviks’, ‘spitting in the face of the Soviet Union’, ‘the mischievous, renegade Trotskyist truth’, ‘Trotsky’s utter intellectual bankruptcy and degeneracy’. It had become the norm to substitute abuse for argument. Claiming that Trotsky had exposed himself fully by accepting ‘a large sum of dollars’, Yaroslavsky added, ‘the living political
dead, the living renegade is negotiating the price of his slander’, and concluded that, according to some sources, Trotsky had received $10,000 for his articles, while others put the figure at $25,000.15 The second article condemned Trotsky simply for publishing his pieces in the bourgeois press at all. Yaroslavsky’s sensibilities as a good Stalinist ideologist would not permit even the possibility of ‘approaching the proletariat’s class enemies and of using their services to publish such insinuations’.16
More important for Trotsky than replying to such hack criticism was the task of securing the regular publication of his Bulletin of the Opposition and its distribution in as many countries as possible, including the Soviet Union. He also wanted to establish a centre to focus the efforts of Marxists opposed to bureaucratic socialism, and to try to make contact with his supporters in the USSR. Rising from his desk after a long day of writing, and gazing over the calm sea burnished by the setting sun, he steadily lost hope that he would be recalled to Moscow and gradually adapted to the idea of himself as a man, as he put it, ‘without a passport or visa’. For him, after falling from power, it was not enough to retire peacefully and write his memoirs, however. He had an aim, and it was to fight against his adversary in the Kremlin. He wrote to the Politburo that the opposition would not lay down its political weapons, but would fight Stalin to the end: ‘Stalin’s fate, as the perverter of the Party, the gravedigger of the Chinese revolution, the destroyer of Comintern and candidate for gravedigger of the German revolution, is sealed. His political bankruptcy will be among the most awful in history.’17 Trotsky had chosen his weapons: political and ideological criticism, exposure of the Stalinist regime, establishing alternative structures to Comintern and struggling for influence among the workers of different countries.
Comintern, now virtually an arm of the Communist government in Moscow, was mobilized to use all its resources to discredit Trotsky as a politician, to compromise the numerous groups that were supporting him, and to conduct ideological war against Trotskyism on a broad front. Stalin also resorted to using White émigré dupes. Trotsky had always been known for his outright hostility towards the Whites. In September 1923, when he was at the peak of his power, he replied to a proposal by the Commander-in-Chief of Naval Forces, Ye. A. Berens, that Guchkov’s group in Paris might be sounded out with a view to reconciliation: ‘The talks must cease. Tell the negotiators that you regard continuing talks that will commit no one to anything as impossible.’18 He wanted no truck with the Whites, and never changed his attitude. In November 1938, for instance, he advised his supporters: ‘Assassins are being recruited from among the Whites … so you should under no circumstances enter into any kind of agreement with them …’19
The West responded to Trotsky’s deportation cautiously, suspecting a trick. Russian émigrés saw it as a sign of a split in the Soviet leadership, a deep crisis and consequently, they hoped, the possibility of better times ahead. Two months after Trotsky’s arrival in Turkey, Yagoda, Deribas and Artuzov, the high priests of the Soviet Inquisition, could report to Stalin, on the basis of reports from the Foreign Department of the OGPU: ‘On 8 April P.N. Milyukov [former leader of the Russian liberals] gave a confidential speech in Prague in which he claimed that the Bolsheviks would fall this September and that it was now most timely to establish a Russian republican democratic party abroad … Kuskova, however, believes that there are no grounds for expecting a ‘big” revolution, but that the deportation of Trotsky may usher in a new and broader NEP which will give the country freedom of trade, labour and so on …’20 Russia’s former politicians had not taken long to become totally detached from the realities of Soviet political life.
Through its network of disinformation in the mass media, the OGPU let it be known that Trotsky had been deported from the USSR not as punishment for his opposition to the leadership, but in order to infiltrate him into the revolutionary movement in the West to revive it. This rumour was intended above all to inflame White officers against him still further.
As soon as Trotsky had settled on Prinkipo, he was put under Soviet surveillance, and strangers, who were neither journalists nor supporters, started appearing in the little village a few hundred metres from his house. On one occasion a certain Valentin Olberg urged Trotsky to take him on as his secretary, but was turned away after warnings came from friends in Paris. Olberg later gave evidence in the Moscow trials against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev.21 Others offered their services as bodyguards, but Trotsky politely turned them all away. One night in March 1931, the house burned down. Trotsky wrote to Max Eastman’s wife, Yelena, in Paris: ‘Along with the house, everything we had with us and on us also burned. The fire happened in the dead of night … Everything, from our hats to our boots went up in smoke, including my entire library, although by chance my archive was saved, or at least the most important part of it.’22 Later on, when he was in Mexico, he concluded that the fire had been started deliberately.
On the recommendation of Rosmer and Maring Sneevliet, a Dutch socialist, Trotsky hired two more secretaries, making five in all, and several bodyguards from among his most reliable supporters. One of them, a Dutchman called Jean van Heijenoort, remained with him until the last minute of his life and subsequently wrote a book entitled With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan. The Turkish government deputed half a dozen policemen to provide round-the-clock security, but it did not prevent the OGPU from maintaining its own constant surveillance on Trotsky’s villa.
Thus, when Yakov Blyumkin—the assassin in 1918 of the German envoy to Moscow, Count Mirbach—visited Trotsky on Prinkipo en route back to the USSR from India, the OGPU knew about it at once. Blyumkin, a former Socialist Revolutionary and now a senior official in the OGPU, had reason to respect Trotsky, who had saved him from the death penalty over Mirbach’s murder. The two men spent a day together, and when Blyumkin left in the evening, he took with him several letters from Trotsky, which he handed over to Radek on reaching Moscow. Radek advised Blyumkin to tell the OGPU about his meeting with Trotsky. Blyumkin left in a state of alarm and confusion, and Radek himself at once telephoned Yagoda and told him about Blyumkin’s visit to Prinkipo, and also handed over Trotsky’s packet, still sealed, to the security organs. Yagoda of course already knew about Blyumkin’s movements.
Blyumkin was arrested immediately and shot a few days later, even though he was guilty of nothing more than having visited Trotsky, a fact he did not deny. When Trotsky heard what had happened, he wrote several angry articles, in one of which he declared: ‘Blyumkin told Radek about L.D.’s thoughts and plans in the sense of the need for further struggle for his views. In reply, Radek demanded, according to his own words, that Blyumkin go at once to the GPU and tell them everything. Some comrades are saying that Radek threatened Blyumkin that if he did not do this, he would inform on him at once. This is very likely, given the present mood of this ruined hysteric. We have no doubt that this is what happened.’23 Trotsky now realized that even contact with him was tantamount to a death sentence. He knew he was being followed and that he would be dealt with at the appropriate time. For the time being, he was saved by his convenient location and the security measures he had taken.
Soon, however, he read in a number of Western newspapers that a group of White officers, led by tsarist General Anton Turkul, had announced their intention of ‘taking revenge on the Christ-seller and destroyer of Russia, Trotsky’, and that they would put the blame on Moscow. There is no evidence that General Turkul had such a plan, but that was the rumour. Trotsky was convinced Moscow was establishing an alibi for itself and promptly, on 4 January 1932, sent the Politburo a ‘top secret’ letter (by ordinary post), in which he declared that he knew ‘about the work Stalin and General Turkul are sharing’ against him.
The question of a terroristic reprisal against the author of this letter was raised by Stalin long before Turkul: in 1924-25 at a small meeting Stalin weighed up the pros and cons. The main argument against was that there were too many y
oung and dedicated Trotskyists who might react with their own counter-terror. I got this information at a certain time from Zinoviev and Kamenev—Now Stalin has published the information which the GPU has collected about a terrorist act being prepared by General Turkul. Of course, I am not privy to the details of the scheme: whether Turkul will blame Stalin or Stalin will hide behind Turkul, I don’t know, but someone around Yagoda does know. This document will be kept in a limited but adequate number of copies and in reliable hands in several countries. So, you have been warned!24
Whether the Turkul ‘affair’ was a bluff or Stalin felt unable to ‘reach out’ to Prinkipo, Trotsky’s days passed peacefully enough. He learned that Kamenev and Zinoviev heard about his letter to the Politburo and that they had reacted, as expected, by struggling for survival. They wrote to the Central Committee:
Comrades Yaroslavsky and Shkiryatov have brought to our attention a letter from Trotsky of 4 January 1932 which appears to be a vile invention to the effect that in 1924-25 we and Comrade Stalin discussed the best time to carry out a terrorist act against Trotsky … This is nothing but a disgusting slander aimed at compromising our Party. Only the sick imagination of Trotsky, that is totally poisoned by the thirst for creating a sensation in front of the bourgeois audience and that is always ready to blacken our Party’s history with malicious words and hatred, is capable of dreaming up such a vile slander.25
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