After the deaths of Nina and Zina there was real fear for the safety of Trotsky’s sons, especially Sergei. He had not wanted to leave the country with his father, preferring to devote himself to his scientific interests. Uninterested in politics, Sergei had first wanted to be a circus performer, but then became interested in technology, completed polytechnic and became a teacher there. He was a professor before he reached the age of thirty. He married twice and his daughter from his second marriage, Julia, is still alive in the USA. His first wife, Olga Grebner, a lively and intelligent elderly woman when I spoke to her in 1989, naturally endured Stalinist camp and exile. She recalled Sergei only fragmentarily: he had been a mischievous boy, and an amusing and talented man. Plainly, in the family it was the elder boy, Lev, who was the favourite. Olga and Sergei had married when he was twenty and she was nineteen.
‘When the family was kicked out of the Kremlin to Granovsky Street,’ she recalled, ‘we had nowhere to live. We took shelter in any corner we could find. Lev Davydovich was always welcoming. I was especially impressed by his lively, clever blue eyes. Outwardly, Natalya Ivanovna was not an interesting woman. She was short, fat and unattractive. But it was obvious how much they meant to each other. As I said, Sergei was talented, whatever he turned his hand to, he succeeded. When Trotsky was deported, Natalya Ivanovna said to me: “Look after Seryozha.” He was arrested on 4 March 1935. It seemed like a tragic play. Five of them arrived. The search took several hours. They took Sergei’s books and a portrait of his father. My husband was taken to the Lubyanka. He was there two or three months. They told him the charges: espionage, aiding and abetting his father, wrecking. Anyway, they sent him to Siberia. He was doomed.’
In January 1937, Pravda published an article under the heading ‘Trotsky’s Son, Sergei Sedov, Tries to Poison Workers With Exhaust Gas’. At a meeting at the Krasnoyarsk Engineering Works, a foreman called Lebedev declared: ‘We have working here as an engineer the son of Trotsky, Sergei Sedov. This worthy offspring of a father who has sold himself to Fascism attempted to poison a large number of workers at this factory with gas.’ The meeting also discussed Zinoviev’s nephew Zaks and the factory manager Subbotin, who was alleged to be protecting him and Sergei. All three were doomed. ‘Sergei was soon sentenced,’ Olga Grebner recalled. ‘Some time that summer I received a postcard which he had somehow managed to send. It said: “They’re taking me to the North. For a long time. Goodbye. I embrace you.”’ There were rumours that he was shot in 1941 somewhere in Kolyma, but Olga Grebner was not sure. In fact, he had been executed on 29 October 1937.
For a long time Sergei’s parents remained unaware of what had happened to him. In his last letter to his mother, on 9 December 1934, he had written that the ‘general situation is proving extremely difficult, much more difficult than you can imagine’.85 On 1 June 1935 Trotsky wrote in his diary: ‘Seryozha has been arrested; he is in prison; now it is no longer guesswork, something almost certain but not quite; we have a direct communication from Moscow … He was arrested, evidently, about the time our correspondence stopped, i.e. at the end of December or beginning of January … Poor boy … And my poor Natasha …’86
Natalya, with Trotsky’s help, addressed an appeal to public opinion and leading cultural figures in which she called for ‘an international commission of authoritative men of goodwill, naturally friends of the USSR. This commission should check all the repressions connected with the murder of Kirov; in the process, it should also throw light on the case of our son Sergei.’ She added: ‘Surely Romain Rolland, André Gide and Bernard Shaw and other friends of the Soviet Union could undertake this initiative?’ She wrote that ‘Seryozha remained as far from politics in recent years as he always had … And the regime, from Stalin down, knows this very well; Seryozha, after all, grew up in the Kremlin, Stalin’s son was a frequent visitor to our boys’ room; the GPU and the university authorities have kept a double watch on him, first as a student and then as a young professor.’87 But it was all in vain. Sergei had vanished from sight. Right up until his death, Trotsky tried to convince himself that Seryozha was still alive in some remote concentration camp ‘without the right of correspondence’. He would say to Natalya, ‘Maybe my death will save his life?’88
In November 1935, without waiting for a response to his wife’s appeal, Trotsky, now in Norway, wrote to a friend enclosing three copies of Natalya’s letter about Sergei. ‘Apart from the usual agencies and newspapers, it should be sent to Romain Rolland, André Gide, Malraux and other famous “friends of the USSR” by registered post, reply paid.’89 Natalya again appealed to public opinion through the Bulletin and the press: ‘For the last three months I have been sending a very modest amount of money by bank transfer to my son’s wife in order to assist her, as far as possible, in helping Sergei … But the reply I got was that the addressee could not be found … Thus my son’s wife has also been arrested … One cannot dismiss the thought that in these new circumstances the rumour, started by the Soviet authorities to the effect that my son “is not in prison”, has acquired a particularly ominous and irremediable meaning. If Seryozha is not in prison, where is he? And where is his wife?’90 Her appeal was met by the terrible silence of the Gulag.
Stalin was impenetrable. He, like his organization, replied tersely to such appeals for mercy. When the wife of his closest aide since 1928, A.N. Poskrebyshev, was arrested, to the pleas of his faithful arms-bearer he replied: ‘Don’t panic. The NKVD will sort it out.’ Just how this was done was already clear to many, and Stalin, moreover, assisted the NKVD in their efforts. In August 1938 Yezhov sent a series of notes to Stalin, the first saying ‘Here is a list of those arrested subject to trial in the first degree by the military collegium.’ The return order, signed by Stalin and Molotov, was laconic in the extreme: ‘All 138 to be shot.’ The second note enclosed four lists of accused, numbering 313, 208, fifteen ‘female enemies of the people and 200 army employees. I request your approval to shoot them all.’ Stalin and Molotov responded with the single syllable ‘For.’91 It was into this bloody maw that Sergei was flung, the innocent object of Stalin’s insatiable revenge.
With Sergei’s arrest, Trotsky and his wife had to think even more seriously about the life of their elder son Lev, his father’s genuine emissary. Apart from publishing the Bulletin, Lev was also involved in two international bodies created by Trotskyists: the International Secretariat and the International Bureau. These two centres of ‘Bolshevik-Leninists’ were intended to rally the scattered groups of Trotsky’s supporters into the monolithic World Party of Social Revolution. Trotsky gave Lev as a party alias the name of one of his friends from the far-off revolution, the sailor Markin, who had arrested senior officials of the foreign ministry in November 1917.
Lev was the family favourite. He entered the Party early, idolized his father and was a fanatical believer in his ideas. When Trotsky came under attack in the mid-1920s, Lev dropped out of the technical school where he was studying and became in effect his father’s closest assistant. Although formally he was not himself exiled, he joined his parents in exile without hesitation and accompanied them when they were deported to Turkey as a sign of solidarity. He was, however, no mere executive: he had a flexible and strong political mind of his own and he wrote well. Among his brilliantly written pamphlets and articles is one, entitled ‘The Red Book on the Moscow Trials’, which is noteworthy for its solid argument and penetrating analysis.92
While his parents were on Prinkipo and Lev was travelling around Europe on his father’s business, he reported that he realized on several occasions that he was being followed. He knew Yagoda’s agents had him in their sights. The Moscow trials began in 1936 and thousands of people whom Stalin had decided might be dangerous to him were sent to their deaths. Progressive opinion in Europe was aghast. Even some Soviet intelligence agents were embarrassed and were ready to break with the criminal policy. The first to do so was the prominent agent Ignaz Reiss, to whom we shall return.
Stalin’s report to the Central Committee plenum of February-March 1937 constituted in effect an exposition of the methodology of terror, repression, the hardening of the ‘class approach’ in relation to internal and external enemies. Secret circulars went abroad after the plenum hammering home Stalin’s argument: ‘We shall smash enemies in the future as we are smashing them at present and as we smashed them in the past.’93
When Trotsky was installed in Mexico, he repeatedly warned Lev of the danger he was in. Some of Lev’s friends urged him to leave Europe, even temporarily, and rejoin his father. After prolonged hesitation, Lev expressed his misgivings to Trotsky and again said he was being followed. He suspected there was an ‘outsider’ in his circle, and asked his father for advice. Lev was living in somewhat straitened circumstances, and Trotsky could do little to help, burdened with debt as he was, living on advances for unwritten books and still publishing the Bulletin with its meagre circulation and no revenue. Lev’s relationship with Jeanne became difficult. Every day seemed to bring new cares. The Trotskyist organizations were more often at odds with each other than in harmony. Lev experienced some sort of mental crisis, especially after receiving Trotsky’s letter from Coyoacan dated 18 November 1937, in which his father advised against leaving Paris as it would ‘slow things down’. Zborowski reported this to Moscow. In a report from Paris, the agent ‘Peter’ wrote:
On the occasion of his son’s birth, ‘Mack’ invited ‘Sonny’ [the OGPU’s codename for Lev] to dinner. ‘Sonny’ spent the entire day over the bottle at ‘Mack’s’ and drank a lot … Having drunk a great deal, but without passing out, ‘Sonny’ felt terribly upset. He apologized to ‘Mack’ and almost in tears begged his forgiveness for having suspected him of being an agent of the GPU when they first met. At the end of all these ‘revelations’, ‘Sonny’ said that right from the start in the [Soviet] Union the opposition struggle had been hopeless and that no one had believed it could succeed, that as early as 1927 he had lost all faith in revolution and now believed in nothing at all, that he was a pessimist. The work and the struggle that was going on now was nothing but a continuation of the past. Women and wine were more important to him …94
Lev was unable to hide his pessimism when he wrote to his parents. On 14 November 1937 ‘Mack’ reported via the local agent to the Foreign Section of the NKVD that ‘Sonny’ was depressed and ‘has left a will in which he says where his archives are kept and so on’.95 It later transpired that the archives were being held in a bank safety-deposit to which Jeanne had the key. Trotsky tried to reassure his son, but also criticized him for the ‘unsatisfactory content of the Bulletin’. As for a trip to Mexico, even a temporary one, Trotsky was not enthusiastic, replying that his son would gain nothing by leaving France: the United States was not likely to admit him and Mexico would offer even less security than France. As Deutscher comments, Trotsky did not wish his son to shut himself up in the Coyoacan ‘semi-prison’.96 How he would punish himself for those words two months later. Why did he not see the mortal danger hanging over his son? Alas, even prophets who can discern the shape of things to come through the present gloom are sometimes unable to see what is standing right before them.
On 8 February 1938 Lev had a severe attack of appendicitis. While Zborowski telephoned around the private clinics, Lev wrote his last letter which he asked his wife to open only if something happened to him. Absurdly, as Deutscher rightly says, he avoided French hospitals because of the fear that the OGPU would find him, and opted for the most dangerous alternative, a small private clinic run by Russian émigré doctors, where he registered as Monsieur Martin and was supposed to speak French only. They operated on him the same evening and it seemed he was recovering well. He was already walking and getting ready to discharge himself when, four days later, he suffered a severe relapse with signs of poisoning. After a series of blood transfusions and an agony of pain, on 16 February 1938 Lev died, aged thirty-two.
Zborowski reported Lev’s illness to his Paris controller and Moscow was informed the same day. There is no direct evidence in the NKVD archives to indicate that the secret police had a hand in his death. Perhaps, as their chief source of information on the Trotskyist movement, Lev was more useful to them alive than dead. On the other hand, in 1938 the NKVD had been ordered by Stalin yet again to intensify their efforts to get rid of Trotsky, and since Lev was by then in a state of depression, it may well be that his value as a source had greatly diminished.
When Trotsky and Natalya heard that Lev had died they were profoundly shaken. They locked themselves in their room and received no visitors for several days. Once he came to himself, Trotsky began demanding an immediate investigation of the circumstances of his son’s death. Almost nobody doubted that he had been poisoned, but if this was so, the murder had been carried out so professionally that it left no clues. (The NKVD had a special section for developing poisons.97)
On 20 February, a week after Lev’s death, Trotsky wrote what Deutscher has eloquently described as ‘a threnody unique in world literature’, his obituary for his son:
The old generation with whom … we once embarked upon the road of revolution … has been swept off the stage. What Tsarist deportations, prisons, and katorga [hard labour], what the privations of life in exile, what civil war, and what illness had not done, Stalin, the worst scourge of the revolution, has accomplished in these last few years … The better part of the middle generation, those … whom the year 1917 awakened and who received their training in twenty-four armies on the revolutionary front, have also been exterminated. The best part of the young generation, Lyova’s contemporaries … has also been trampled down and crushed …
He spoke of the great help his son had given him in his writing, help that was possible ‘only because our intellectual solidarity had entered our blood and our nerves’. Blaming the OGPU and their master in Moscow for Lev’s death, Trotsky ended: ‘Farewell, dear and incomparable friend! Your mother and I never thought, never expected, that fate would lay this task on us … that we should have to write your obituary … But we have not been able to save you.’98
As Zborowski reported to Moscow, the Politburo of the French Trotskyists proposed he take over all the work of the Russian section, even before ‘Starik’ (i.e. ‘the Old Man’, as the NKVD codenamed Trotsky) sent his own instructions.
1) The French will recognize only ‘Mack’ as the representative of the Russian group. 2) With ‘Neighbour’ [L. Estrin] on 18 February [1938] ‘Mack’ will send a letter to ‘Starik’ in which they will give the details of ‘Sonny’s’ death. 3) ‘Neighbour’ has told ‘Mack’ that there are three archives: a) an old archive, which is in a bank safety deposit for which Jeanne has the key; b) an old archive which ‘Mack’ is looking after (and which is known to us); c) one (the Ajax archive) hidden by ‘Neighbour’. ‘Sonny’ did not know its location. 4) ‘Mack’ and ‘Neighbour’ have a good relationship. She regards herself as equivalent to ‘Sonny’s’ successor. It has been suggested to ‘Mack’ that he shouldn’t snub her, but rather to get everything she knows out of her. This is very important … 5) ‘Mack’ has been instructed by us to take over future links with the ‘International Secretariat’ himself.99
Having in all probability murdered Lev, the NKVD was determined not to lose the valuable links it had set up to the Soviet regime’s most wanted man.
Trotsky did not know what had happened to his granddaughters in the USSR after the arrest of his first wife, and the one remaining offspring of that generation abroad was Zina’s son Seva, who was barely ten years old when Lev, his adopted father, died. Trotsky felt a sense of deep guilt for the deaths of his children and wanted to take on the task of raising his remaining grandson himself. He knew that his political struggle had made both his families deeply unhappy and had been ultimately responsible for all their fates. He judged himself harshly, within the concrete stockade in Mexico, for having done so little to help his sick daughters, for failing to make real human contact w
ith Zina, for not having persuaded Sergei to come with him to Turkey, and for not responding to Lev’s wish to take a break from France. But he had always put the cause before his children, and for that he would bear the guilt until the end of his life.
The matter of his grandson was not simple, however. A struggle with Jeanne over his archives did much to spoil the atmosphere when he tried to persuade her to come and live with the boy in Coyoacan. Their relations deteriorated so badly that he finally resorted to the courts to obtain custody. The case dragged on for a year, but Jeanne would not yield. Trotsky then wrote to the French Minister of Justice to explain that the boy had no parents and no blood relatives, except himself: ‘Your authoritative intervention, Monsieur Ministre, would be sufficient to cut through the knot in twenty-four hours.’100 But it was not until October 1939, after Marguerite Rosmer had torn Seva from Jeanne’s clutches, that the child finally joined his grandfather in Mexico.
For more than a third of his life Trotsky had lived abroad. He had been rejected by his homeland and condemned to wander. It was only after the deaths of his sons that he felt deep in his heart that he would never see his country again. Several years earlier, shortly before leaving Prinkipo, he had given Moscow a signal that in the interests of the revolution he was prepared to compromise. He had agonized for a long time then, in March 1933, before writing the letter. He did not want it to look as if he was surrendering. That he would never do, but he did harbour a faint hope of at least reducing the hostility to the point where he might once again see his homeland.
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