He had not been able to bring himself to write to Stalin, although he knew that of course only the General Secretary would decide the outcome. Instead he wrote to the Politburo, putting ‘Secret’ at the head of the paper:
I regard it as my duty to make one more attempt to appeal to the sense of responsibility in those who are presently ruling the Soviet state. You are better able than I to judge the situation in the country and the Party. If internal development continues along its present path, a catastrophe is unavoidable. It is utterly hopeless and fatal to think that the present situation can be overcome by repression alone. What must be done? First, the party must be reborn. It is a painful process, but it must be done. I have not the slightest doubt that the ‘left’ opposition is willing to give the Central Committee its full cooperation to put the Party back on the rails of a normal life without shocks or with as few as possible … The fate of the workers’ state and the international revolution for many years to come are at stake.
Sensing what today would be called historic failure, Trotsky nonetheless saw the means to avoid it in one-sided, metaphysical terms. He attacked the bureaucracy and totalitarianism, but still believed in the revolutionary methods of the single party. It did not occur to him to doubt the axioms of Bolshevism. He believed that agreement between the ‘left’ opposition and the leadership was possible: ‘However strained the atmosphere, it could be relaxed in a few successive stages, given goodwill on both sides … The purpose of this letter is to declare the existence of goodwill in the “left” opposition.’ The Politburo, he concluded, could choose the ways and means, if it ‘thought it necessary to enter into preliminary negotiations without any publicity’.101
Naturally, there was no reply, nor could there be. Stalin was waiting for news of a quite different kind. Having read the letter, he cursed ominously and snapped that Menzhinsky ‘can’t catch mice any more’ and that it was time he had Trotsky silenced. Menzhinsky was ill, and had he not died soon after there can be little doubt that he would not have survived much longer in this world, let alone at his post. This episode demonstrates that, even when he and his family had been placed in the position of permanent nomads, Trotsky had made one last naive effort at reconciliation, one last attempt to restore the Party to the democratic ideals of the revolution. The gesture was rejected and the persecution intensified.
In May 1938 a warning was published in the Bulletin, in which the editor claimed to know the NKVD’s intentions towards Trotsky: ‘As long as L.D. Trotsky is alive, Stalin’s role as destroyer of the Bolshevik old guard is unfinished. It is not enough to pass the death sentence on Comrade Trotsky, along with Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and the other victims of the terror. The sentence has to be carried out.’ The journal published a list of suspicious individuals who had followed Trotsky from country to country.102 Among the warnings of the growing danger was a letter which carried great weight. It spoke with apparent inside knowledge of the NKVD’s plans to murder Trotsky. In due course it was revealed that the letter was sent by Alexander Orlov, a senior intelligence officer who had defected while abroad. He would later write a sensational book, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes. Orlov warned that Trotsky was in danger from someone known as ‘Mark’—he couldn’t recall ‘Mark’s’ surname—and he advised against trusting anyone who turned up with an introduction from ‘Mark’. He suggested that ‘the Old Man’ put a notice in a local paper to say he had received the letter.103 Trotsky duly posted the announcemement ‘Your letter received and noted. Please come for personal conversations.’104 Orlov, however, did not show up, and Trotsky assumed the letter to have been an NKVD provocation. His confidence in ‘Mack’ remained undiminished.
The Moscow Trials
The four years on Prinkipo had been extremely productive in terms of Trotsky’s writing. Apart from his History of the Russian Revolution and My Life, he had given dozens of interviews in which he never tired of repeating that Leninism was not dead, that the idea of world revolution was not utopian, and that Stalinism was no more than a tragic hiccup in Russian history. In the years that followed he would write little, apart from a small book called The Revolution Betrayed, of which even Victor Serge, who edited it for publication, declared: ‘It is cumbersome, hastily written and of small literary value.’105 He had sacrificed even his literary talent, along with everything else, to the political issues of the day. The French, Norwegian and Mexican stages of his wanderings would pass as time committed to his new brainchild, the creation of the Fourth International. He would quickly discover how ill-assorted and unpromising that body would turn out to be, even if many other people have continued for decades to believe in its viability.
In July 1933, with Natalya and two secretaries, Trotsky boarded an old Italian steamer, the Bulgaria, and left Constantinople for Marseilles, hoping that his appearance in the West would activate his supporters. Natalya later recalled that Trotsky had felt unwell on the trip. ‘It was very hot. The ship was draughty and it ended with him getting lumbago. We called the ship’s doctor. The pain was excruciating. The patient couldn’t get out of bed. On 24 July the ship stopped off Marseilles. A motor-launch came alongside with our son, Lev Sedov, and R. Molinier.’106 After travelling around the south of France and living in a host of small towns on the way, in July 1933 they settled in Grenoble for eleven months. In mid-December 1933, Trotsky managed to spend just one day in Paris.
As soon as Mark Zborowski joined Trotsky’s organization, it became clear to the family that Trotsky was being followed. He said as much to his secretaries, Rudolf Klement and Sara Weber, as well as to Raymond Molinier, and security measures were stepped up. Zborowski would extract as much information as possible from Lev Sedov about Trotsky’s movements in France, although Lev was at first suspicious and even wondered if Zborowski was not an agent of the NKVD. Trotsky soon realized that France was bristling with Soviet agents. Despite all the measures he took to remain anonymous, he was several times recognized by reporters, as well as officials of various political parties and Russian émigrés. The Communist newspaper L’Humanité several times published protests against lifting the ban on Trotsky’s entry into France. Despite this, Trotsky received his supporters from many countries in Europe, the USA and even China, although he took careful precautions. He told them all that a new wave of revolution was coming, that they must prepare for it and intensify their work among the masses; he took soundings on the possibility of unifying the multitude of Trotskyist groups into a single major international organization. To his distress, however, many of his supporters were not convinced that a new revolutionary wave was approaching.
At a meeting in Paris in August 1933 at which fourteen parties and groups were represented, only three of them could agree on the proposal to create the Fourth International at once. Trotsky, who had not taken part in the meeting as a matter of security, was disappointed. He had devoted considerable effort to preparing the documents and resolutions for this conference, and had expected a better result. But at least it revealed to him just how little support he had. The world situation was different from what it had been on the eve of the October revolution.
Trotsky, too, felt that there would be no more meteoric rises, either revolutionary or for him personally. His letters of September 1933 from St Palais near Royan on the French Atlantic coast to Natalya in Paris, where she was undergoing medical treatment, were sad and disconsolate: ‘Dearest, dearest mine, it was quieter on Prinkipo. Already the recent past seems better than it was. Yet we looked forward with so much hope to our stay in France. Is this definitely old age already? Or is it only a temporary, though all too sharp decline, from which I shall still rally? We shall see.’107
The pressure on him was building up. In the spring of 1934 he was asked to leave Barbizon, an hour’s journey from Paris, because the police could no longer guarantee his safety. Following a hasty withdrawal from Barbizon, he spent just over another year in France, but without finding peace and security anywhere. At tim
es his escapes were conducted in humiliating conditions, as for example when he had to shave off his beard and disguise himself. Once he had to hide for several days in the attic of one of his son’s friends. He was threatened by local Nazis and Communists alike, and the OGPU was hunting for him. He was supported throughout all this, and indeed until the end of his life, by his Dutch assistant van Heijenoort, whose dedication reminded Trotsky of Sermuks and Poznansky. Often Trotsky changed his abode without Natalya, usually accompanied by Molinier and van Heijenoort with one or two French bodyguards. At times he was changing hotel rooms five or six times a month, but always he was followed by silent, mysterious-looking policemen.
He became anxious, and seriously regretted leaving Prinkipo. Only in a small village near Grenoble was he able to settle quietly for a few months, and there he tried to complete the book on Lenin for which he had already signed contracts with a number of publishers. But his inspiration had been driven out by the anxiety. Instead, he waited every day for his secretary to bring him the newspapers: after the murder of Kirov, the situation in the USSR was becoming ominous. The Western press—he saw few Moscow newspapers—were daily reporting new arrests, the search for plotters everywhere, even within the Politburo, and incomprehensible events throughout the country. In the evenings he tuned in to Radio Moscow and occasionally managed to catch its distant chimes, reminding him of his days in the Kremlin. Radio Moscow was constantly talking about the criminal activity of Zinoviev and Kamenev, as responsible for the murder of Kirov, and stating that all these ‘unfinished enemies’ were inspired and guided by ‘the Fascist hireling Trotsky’.
Trotsky was appalled by the degeneration of the Soviet system. Shortly before he and his wife left France, he would write an article in which he would recall that in March 1929 he had warned everyone that Stalin was bound to link the ‘opposition with assassination attempts and staging armed uprisings and so on’. Knowing full well that Stalin was the organizer of the Moscow trials that were just beginning, he declared openly that Stalin had given Zinoviev and Kamenev an ultimatum: they themselves must devise the formula for him that would justify his repression of them. It was all being done so as to be able to accuse Trotsky. Venomously, he mocked Stalin’s attempts to find more and more fabricated excuses to unleash mass arrests in the country.108
Within two months he learned that soon after Kirov’s murder Alexandra Sokolovskaya had been arrested and exiled to the north, forced to send his granddaughters to an aunt in Ukraine. For decades the woman who had introduced the young Bronshtein to Marxism bore the heavy cross of the lonely and abandoned woman, on whom ever more savage blows were rained. In numerous interrogations she was asked how she carried out her husband’s orders to assist the activities of Trotskyist groups, what instructions he had sent her from abroad and who brought them to her. Both Trotsky’s sons-in-law, Volkov and Nevelson, as they awaited the end of their sentences in exile, were rearrested and sent to camp, where they both soon disappeared without trace.
As for Trotsky, his prolonged petitioning at last bore fruit: the Norwegian government issued a permit for him to enter the country, and on 15 June 1935 he and Natalya arrived in Oslo. His friends found them a small hotel a two-hour journey from the capital. Life was hard there, as Trotsky and Natalya had left France with practically no money. Two years in France, not working but worrying about security, had eaten up Trotsky’s small savings. He now wanted to work: to write letters to the supporters who shared his dream of a new type of international organization, capable of raising the international banner that had been trampled in the mud; to earn a living, to publish the Bulletin, to support his elder son and his grandson, Seva. But he had to work in a country where he was regarded as a leper. The authorities had insisted he sign an undertaking not to engage in political activity. The opposition in parliament raised the question of his ‘temporary’ stay in the country. No one was willing to let him a house or apartment, and hotels were costly. The press was full of hostile articles. Soon agents of Yagoda appeared within his orbit: Zborowski, who monitored Trotsky’s correspondence with his son, was able to give Trotsky’s Norwegian address to his OGPU controller.109
In such difficult moments, Trotsky recalled, he had always been able to find moral strength and certainty in his wife. He wrote in his diary: ‘Natalya and I have been together for thirty-three years (a third of a century!), and always in tragic moments I am amazed by her reserves of character. I can say one thing: Natalya has never “reproached” me, not in the most difficult times; she doesn’t reproach me now, either, in the worst days of our life, when everyone has ganged up against us …’110
Eventually they found a suitable place to live just north of Oslo in the family of the Norwegian Social Democrat Konrad Knudsen. They were now without bodyguards and assistants. Since the Norwegian Minister of Justice, Trygve Lie—the future Secretary General of the United Nations—had forbidden Trotsky to engage in politics while he was in the country, he determined to concentrate on his writing, while keeping a keen eye on events in Europe and the Soviet Union. But his literary work was greatly hampered by the huge volume of correspondence he was compelled to maintain with his supporters. As before, he had to try by letter to reconcile hostile factions and groupings, especially in France, and to receive representatives of these groups. It seemed the ‘revolutionary army’ was good for nothing but endless petty squabbling, trivial intrigue and loud rhetoric. For a man who had stood on the very crest of the Russian revolution, none of this could increase his enthusiasm.
In the middle of August 1936 Trotsky was on holiday with Knudsen when they heard on the radio that a major trial had opened in Moscow and that the chief defendants were Zinoviev, Kamenev and their ‘accomplices’, who were all being charged with organizing terrorism in the USSR. The main charge was that the murder of Kirov and a planned attempt on Stalin, Voroshilov and other leaders had been conducted ‘under the direction of Trotsky’. Hearing these revelations, the ‘organizer of Fascist terror’ hurried home and for the next few days was glued to his radio. He was shaken by what he heard. The whole thing was incomprehensible. Kamenev, Zinoviev, Mrachkovsky and Bakaev were saying monstrous things, there wasn’t a grain of truth in it, not a grain! Dispassionately, Zinoviev said he was the political inspirer of Kirov’s murder, in effect the organizer. Trotsky was named as the leader of an entire ‘terrorist’ bloc. ‘Trotskyism,’ Zinoviev averred, ‘is a variation of Fascism.’ Kamenev testified that ‘he himself served Fascism and with Trotsky and Zinoviev had prepared a counter-revolution in the USSR’. Trotsky could not believe what he heard. What had been done to make these people say such things? He was being called the chief plotter and organizer, a terrorist and murderer.
What he did not know was that just before the opening of the trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev had been brought from prison to Stalin’s study, where he had made them an offer: if they ‘confessed’ to everything at the trial and demonstrated that Trotsky was the chief organizer of hostile, terroristic activity against the Party and the country, he would do his best to save their lives. He would do his best. While there is no document to support this account of the meeting, indirect evidence suggests that the two old Bolsheviks were made to understand that they had no choice, and that death was the only alternative. Although they knew that Stalin had no equal in cunning and deceit, they could not but agree. Nor would they have the courage to deny everything in public.
The Moscow trials, more graphically than anything, confirmed Trotsky in his belief that Stalin had undermined everything the revolution had stood for. On 4 August 1936 he had finished his book The Revolution Betrayed. It had taken him a year to write and it was full of prediction, harsh judgement and categorical but often contradictory conclusions. The book’s chief target was the new bureaucratic caste in the USSR:
Why did Stalin win? It would be naive to suppose that he had emerged from behind the scenes, unknown to the masses, with a great strategic plan. No. Before he found his way, the bureauc
racy found him … The bureaucracy conquered not only the ‘left’ opposition. It also conquered the Bolshevik Party … It conquered all those enemies … not with ideas and argument, but by its own sheer weight. The leaden backside of the bureaucracy weighed more than the brains of the revolution … That is the secret of the Soviet Thermidore.111
Then, however, he suddenly came to the conclusion that the bureaucracy, as a new class, might bring about the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.
This kind of thinking was not untypical of Trotsky. Having conducted a deep and accurate analysis and made startling predictions, he was capable at times of drawing false conclusions—an effect, no doubt, of his being constantly primed for revolution. Since the bureaucracy had ‘consumed’ the revolution, he argued, it could end in bourgeois reaction. In fact, Trotsky’s position was closer to Stalin’s than that of more sober Marxists: ‘Giving the land to the collective farms for their eternal use is not a socialist measure and will only preserve the desire for private property.’ He believed that kulak psychology had not been eliminated, that personal private plots (a concession of 1932 designed to alleviate the worst effects of collectivization) were a seedbed of the old private-ownership outlook. In agrarian matters, he was completely bound by the old Marxist dogmatic and Utopian notions according to which it would be possible to bring about ‘truly socialist transformation’ only as a result of the total nationalization of the land and other property. He still believed that ‘the task of the European proletariat lies not in perpetuating frontiers, but on the contrary getting rid of them by revolutionary means. Not the status quo, but the United States of Europe!’
The chief argument of The Revolution Betrayed was that ‘the Soviet bureaucracy will not surrender its positions without a fight.’ Therefore, the working class, having carried out the first socialist revolution in history, now confronted the need for a new ‘supplementary’ revolution, not a social one, but a ‘political revolution against bureaucratic absolutism … There is no peaceful way out of the crisis. A clash between the people and the bureaucratic oligarchy … is inevitable. The political revolution will overthrow the Stalinist system of government, but will not alter the existing property relations.’112
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