Trotsky’s letter was a blow to Zinoviev and Kamenev. Their position was shaky enough already, and now Stalin’s chief enemy, in trying to strengthen his own security, was adding fuel to the fire. It was hardly ethical of Trotsky to refer to their past conversations, especially as his erstwhile temporary allies were bound to try to earn Stalin’s indulgence by renewing their condemnation of Trotskyism. In any event, when they were accused three years later of involvement in Kirov’s murder, Trotsky’s letter would figure as incriminating evidence.
While he was adapting to the life of an exile, Trotsky did not cease his efforts to acquire the right of residence in a Western country, but nowhere could he find a government willing to accommodate the demon of October. Finally, in the autumn of 1932, Denmark allowed him and Natalya to come to Copenhagen for a week at the invitation of a student organization to give several lectures on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the Russian revolution. He hoped he would be allowed to stay in Denmark for a long time, but the trip was not a happy one. He and Natalya were not permitted to leave their ship when it docked at Athens. In Italy they were allowed to disembark, but only under police escort. They travelled through France on a transit visa and were permitted to spend only one hour at the station in Paris. Obstacles were also placed in their path in Denmark, where Trotsky was under constant police surveillance, and where local Communists staged a demonstration against his visit. The monarchists also protested that he had been involved in the murder of the Romanovs, and the bourgeois press rehearsed his ‘revolutionary sins’. The Soviet Consul demanded his immediate expulsion. Trotsky still managed to hold meetings with supporters from Germany, Denmark, France and Norway, and to give a number of interviews, but his hopes of remaining in Copenhagen were dashed. The Danish authorities told their ‘guests’ that they would have to leave when their seven-day visa expired, and so they did, retracing the journey to become outcasts again on Prinkipo.
Max Eastman’s wife undertook to try to obtain a visa for Trotsky to visit the USA to lecture on the Russian revolution and the situation in the Soviet Union, but even before the formal refusal came, Trotsky knew it would not be issued. ‘It was a mistake even to raise the question, given my present position,’ he wrote to Yelena Eastman.26 An attempt to go to Prague met a similar response. Forced to remain where he was, he set about putting his papers in order, the papers Stalin had allowed to slip through his fingers. Starting on Prinkipo and continuing in France, Norway and finally Mexico, he slowly worked through his speeches, orders, directives, letters and a broad array of documents, filing and annotating them in preparation for the literary work he saw ahead of him.
Already in March 1924 his assistant Butov had written a note to Glazman and Poznansky, asking them to begin sorting Lenin’s letters and telegrams to Trotsky, which their boss needed for a book he planned to write on the late leader: ‘I think the most difficult thing will be to find documents written by Lenin but located in secretarial files, i.e. non-confidential files, as there are so many of them. Lev Davydovich wants us to start collecting them without haste, carefully, but right away.’27 Trotsky now leafed through all this material, feeling himself travelling back in time. One copy of almost all of the communications with Lenin was kept in the official archives in Moscow, and another in his personal archives. Among them was a note from Lenin in a file dated 1922: ‘We’re hiding my present location from everyone (including even [Dr] Guetier). I’m saying I’m in Gorki. Have you or Natalya Ivanovna said the opposite to Dr Guetier? If so, write to him so as not to offend him. If not, say nothing. If he comes to you, drop me a line.’28
Among the many notes from Lenin to Trotsky were also those dictated to his secretary Lydia Fotieva, or written by her. For instance: ‘Vladimir Ilyich has told me to write to say he welcomes your idea of taking a gift from him to the children at the sanatorium at Podsolnechnoe. He asks you also to tell the kids that he thanks them very much for their cordial letter and the flowers, and is sorry he cannot accept their invitation; he has no doubt he would certainly get better being among them …’29 Looking through his papers, Trotsky would also have come across a summary from a military tribunal reporting that 4337 men had been executed in the Red Army in 1921.30 Or a note from Unshlikht offering him a place to recuperate: ‘It is a two-storey house with ten rooms, Dutch heating system, good if variable furniture of Karelian birch, hand-made as well as simple. There are beds for seventeen bodyguards downstairs and seven upstairs, and five rooms for the Trotsky family. What is extremely inconvenient is that 1) the guards being downstairs will make a noise and disturb L.D., 2) the kitchen is about seventy yards away, 3) the telephone is downstairs in the room occupied by the manager, Shibanov, 4) there are no bells. If one needs something, one has to shout.’31
A note from Butov, dated 2 February 1922, reported that the Politburo administrative secretary, Comrade Buranova, was asking if he’d be coming to meetings and whether they should send him the questions the Politburo would be voting on outside its sessions. The note included a list of materials attached: a letter from Lenin, another from Chicherin, material from Suvarin about the Communist movement in France, material from Profintern, his exercise book containing quotations from Shakespeare; it ended with a short list of papers that would be sent if Trotsky so chose, including a protest against the deportation of the Menshevik Sukhanov and an explanation of the arrest of one Comrade Borodulin.32
Butov had even sent him a copy of his own cardiogram, with the physician’s notes: ‘A heart attack occurred between 4 and 5 a.m. on 24 January [no year indicated], causing two brief blackouts. Arriving soon after the attack, I established that the heart was working quite normally. The same thing occurred the next day. L.D. felt some weakness for the next three to four days, but still went out, as usual, with his rifle. The weakness disappeared in due course and L.D. was back to his usual robust self.’33
Also among the papers was a note to GPU assistant chief Rudolf Gerson, requesting the chemical analysis of a packet of cooking salt, ‘because the person who used it has had stomach pain for the last few days’. Gerson was able to report that the cooking salt contained ‘a mixture of 3.71 per cent plaster of Paris and 17.25 per cent Glauber’s salts [a popular laxative], and is harmful to the health and not to be used in cooking’.34 A special commission was set up to investigate, but nothing came of it.
There was a letter in almost schoolboy handwriting from Raskolnikov, then the Soviet envoy to Kabul in Afghanistan:
I have translated my latest conversation with Rabindranath Tagore and have started writing my reminiscences of the recent stormy years which you and I came out of alive by a miracle. Do you remember our night assault on the destroyer at Kazan when the boat died and we tied up to some barge or other in the light of the treacherous moon? The only reason we weren’t shot at was that every last one of the White artillery officers was enjoying himself at the theatre. I’m now writing ‘On the Eve of the October Revolution’ and ‘How the Black Sea Fleet was Sunk’ … The Foreign Commissar doesn’t seem able to fix a firm line … Either he empowers me to offer Afghanistan mountains of gold, or he orders me to give them the finger … I’ve established good relations with the Emir. He’s a powerful politician and a decisive man, both in politics and in crime.35
As a member of the Politburo, Trotsky had received papers on every imaginable subject. He had kept his copy of the ‘Manifesto of the Rightful Heir to the Russian Throne Cyril’, signed in Paris on 31 August 1924. In it, Cyril listed the members of the royal family who had been murdered in Yekaterinburg in July 1918. In a phone call to Trotsky, Sverdlov had mentioned in passing that the Politburo had supported a proposal from the local Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg to liquidate the Romanovs. Lenin had not objected, and neither had Trotsky, especially as the fate of the royal family had been a topic of discussion in the leadership on several occasions. They had wanted to take a decision, but it had never seemed the proper time. Neither then nor later did Trotsky ever express d
oubt that the decision had been the right one. What he thought of the murder of the empress and her children he never disclosed.
He could hardly believe it had all happened only ten years ago—the clatter of the wheels of his famous armoured train across the endless Russian plain, the Comintern congresses on which he had pinned such hopes, the death of Lenin who in his last months had seemed to want to tell him something very important. It was all gone. The only sounds he heard now were the lapping of a strange sea outside a strange window.
Deprived on 20 February 1932 of his Soviet citizenship, he was genuinely stranded on his lonely island and could do nothing but think about how to fight back. He and his wife still saw their present residence, the villa for which they paid around $4000 a year, as a temporary halt which they would leave any day now. All approaches seemed closed, until Maurice Parizhanin approached the former French premier, Edouard Herriot.36 Permission for Trotsky and his wife to enter France was finally granted after many delays and disappointments.
Meanwhile, Trotsky’s son Lev had moved from Berlin to Paris, where he had soon become an object of interest to the Soviet secret service. Through one Alexander Sevastyanovich Adler, an émigré from Leningrad, they had recruited an agent, ‘B-187’, whose name was Mark Zborowski.37 Zborowski completed a number of questionnaires for the agency, outlining his autobiography and revealing that he had relatives in the USSR: two brothers, a sister and her husband, and giving their addresses. When his new bosses in Moscow, G. Molchanov and M. Rutkovsky, were informed that he had been recruited, they launched an in-depth check on his parents and his background in general.38 Steps were now taken, in the summer of 1934, to infiltrate Zborowski into the company of Trotsky’s closest and most trusted aide: his son Lev. Henceforth, many of the decisions, intentions, actions and documents emanating from Trotsky would become known to Moscow and to Stalin himself. Alexander Orlov (real name Leib Feldbin, aliases Lev Nikolsky and Igor Berg), a senior security official who had defected while serving in Spain, tried anonymously to warn Trotsky of the danger he was now in, but Trotsky never knew the truth about his son’s new ‘helper’, who was in a position to feed Trotsky’s mail and his writings straight to Stalin’s desk in the Kremlin.
Who was this Mark Zborowski, thanks to whom Stalin was informed of practically every step Trotsky took from 1933 to 1939 even to the point of receiving books and articles before they had been published? Three days before he was assassinated in August 1940, Trotsky completed a long article, entitled ‘The Comintern and the GPU’, which was published posthumously. In it he correctly asserted that these two bodies were dissimilar yet indistinguishable: ‘They are mutually coordinative, although the Comintern does not give orders to the GPU, rather the opposite, the GPU totally dominates the Comintern. Many Communists from different countries, being financially and politically dependent, carry out the shameful and criminal orders of the GPU.’39 Mark Zborowski had carried out numerous missions already, as a member of the Polish Communist Party, both at home and abroad. He had been born in February 1908 in Uman in the province of Kiev and had emigrated to Poland with his parents in 1921, leaving behind in the Soviet Union a sister and two brothers. He had been imprisoned in Poland for organizing strikes, and with his wife, Regina Levi, had moved to Berlin and then Paris. Short of money, Zborowski was an easy plum for the OGPU agent to pick.40 He was given the codenames ‘Max’, ‘Mack’, ‘Tulip’ and ‘Kant’.
The Paris controller was soon able to cable Moscow:
As reported, the source ‘Max’ has begun working in the Trotskyists’ ‘International secretariat’, where the wife of Trotsky’s son also works. [Lev’s wife, Jeanne Martin, had left her previous husband, Raymond Molinier, for Lev.] In the course of his work, the source has befriended the son’s wife and as a result has been transferred to the Russian section as a sort of personal assistant to the son. At the moment, the source is meeting the son almost every day. We think this alone is evidence that your orders to infiltrate the source into Trotsky’s entourage has been carried out.41
Moscow was delighted with this rapid success and signalled their agent ‘Peter’ in Paris: ‘It is essential that the source “Max” strengthen his position in the organization. Give the source clear instructions on how to behave. Warn him not to undertake anything in the organization without your approval. We urge that he not go too far and thus ruin all our plans in this project.’42
‘Max’ soon earned Lev’s trust so fully that he was granted almost complete access to Trotsky’s papers. He was reporting regularly to Moscow about everything Trotsky and his wife were doing, as well as their intentions. Some of his reports were regarded as of special value. For example, after Trotsky’s move to Norway, in the summer of 1935, the security services could not discover his address. The problem was solved when ‘Max’ sent Moscow an original letter from Trotsky to Lev which included Trotsky’s address, as he was asking his son to send him the journal Bolshevik and other literature.43 ‘Max’ eventually became entirely trusted by Trotsky and his son, as a letter from Lev to his father, dated 6 August 1937—and of course copied at once to Moscow—shows: ‘In my absence my place will be taken by Étienne [the name by which ‘Max’ was known to Lev], who is on the closest terms with me here, so the address stays the same and your missions can be carried out as if I were in Paris myself. Étienne can be trusted absolutely in every respect.’44 Had Trotsky been aware of the web Stalin was weaving around him, he might have had a better notion of the police system he himself had been so zealous to create.
The One-Author Journal
Trotsky had hardly arrived on Prinkipo when he started to think of ways to bring out a small but regular journal. He was assisted in this venture by supporters, notably the Rosmers in Paris, but primarily by his son Lev. Trotsky established contact with the Spanish Communist Andrés Nin, the chairman of the Socialist Party of Holland, Maring Sneevliet, the Belgian Van Overstratten, his French supporters Pierre Monatte and Boris Souvarine, the American socialist Michael Gold, and others who felt close to the Russian left opposition. Gradually, a number of tiny groups of Zinovievites in Germany joined him and sympathizers appeared in dozens of different countries. There was even a group in China, led by graduates of the Sun-yat Sen University in Moscow who had heard Trotsky speak while they were there.
Within a couple of months on Prinkipo, he was receiving visitors. They included those calling themselves Trotskyists, journalists, and some who, it later transpired, had been sent to infiltrate his household. He was often irritated by so many visitors and wrote to his son, then in Berlin, that he should prevent ordinary pilgrims, as ‘these meetings exhaust me and take me away from my work’.45
Trotsky had arrived in Turkey in February 1929, and by July of that year the first issue of his journal appeared, called Bulletin of the Opposition, as unequivocal a name as it was possible to invent. He announced that the journal would be devoted to theoretical, political and factual articles about the Russian Communist Party, and to assisting the party of Lenin back onto the correct path. He promised his readers that he would examine problems of revolutionary internationalism and publish archival documents of the left opposition since its inception in 1923. A significant feature of the journal, which existed from July 1929 to August 1940, was that its chief, and often its only, contributor was Trotsky himself. It would be no exaggeration to say that he wrote something like 70 to 80 per cent of the entire contents of the sixty-five issues. (Some were double issues, which explains why the serial number reach 87.)
The journal was funded from Trotsky’s royalties and from donations by supporters. Since he had no printing facilities of his own, it could only be produced where political circumstances permitted and financial arrangements could be made with printers where the journal’s chief administrator, Lev, happened to be living. As the political situation in Europe was constantly changing, the Bulletin was printed in five different places. From July 1929 to March 1931 it was published in Paris. Lev then moved to
Berlin, where not only were the terms better, but Trotsky’s books were already being published, and there were contacts of sorts with the Soviet Union. When Hitler came to power in early 1933, however, Lev had to beat a hasty retreat back to Paris, where the next issue came out in March of that year. As the danger from Stalin’s secret agents was mounting, the Bulletin remained there only until February 1934. Lev then moved to Zurich, but returned again to Paris in April 1935, where the last ‘European’ issue of the journal was published in the middle of 1939.
By that time, it was no longer Lev who was preparing the journal for the printer. He had died on 16 February 1938 in mysterious circumstances which, however, left little doubt that his death had been the work of Yezhov’s agents. After the outbreak of the Second World War, the Bulletin came out in New York, which was chosen as being moderately close to its chief author, who was then living in Mexico. There was sufficient momentum in the operation for four issues to come out after Trotsky’s death, and it then ceased publication.
Lev, as the chief administrator of the journal, was assisted at first by his father’s strong supporter in Paris, Raymond Molinier, especially in financial and technical matters. Molinier engaged in commercial ventures of an unspecified kind and had wide contacts in the business world, a fact which for a time did much to alleviate Trotsky’s material position. At first Trotsky addressed Molinier as ‘my dear friend’ and signed his letters ‘With respect always’.46 Then, suddenly, it all changed. Raymond’s wife Jeanne left her husband for Lev. A scandal ensued and Molinier left the circle. Lev’s new affair of the heart, however, brought him little joy. He was still receiving letters from the wife who had remained behind in Moscow with their small daughter, and who was now in despair. Furthermore, Jeanne turned out to be rather egocentric, which only heightened Lev’s emotional distress. His only safety-valve was the work he did for his father, and here the hardest task was to find a channel by which to send a few dozen copies of the Bulletin into the Soviet Union.
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