Light can be thrown on the question of plots to kill Stalin from another angle. In the first half of February 1937, Fedor Dan read a report to a group of fellow-Mensheviks in Paris which essentially recapitulated the contents of two of his articles in Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, entitled ‘The Death Sentence on the Bolsheviks’ and ‘The Political Crisis in the Soviet Union’. Dan noted that ‘among the Mensheviks were some who recognized the positive side of terrorism’. Solomon Schwartz argued that he was ‘against terror in general, but under certain circumstances it can play a positive role. The murder of Stalin would arouse the widest masses which would be beyond the control of Voroshilov or Kaganovich or anyone else who took Stalin’s place.’ The content of this meeting was reported to Moscow by the NKVD agent present.132 However incapable this small group of Mensheviks might be of influencing events in the USSR, it is easy to see how such ‘theoretical’ views could be used by the suspicious Stalin to support his arguments at the February-March plenum.
There is, however, another source of evidence concerning the idea of getting rid of Stalin, this time connected directly with Trotsky. Among the numerous reports sent from Paris by Zborowski are two curious documents. The first, in Zborowski’s hand, was dated 8 February 1937:
On 22 January at [Zborowski’s] apartment, speaking of the second Moscow trial and the role of the various defendants (Radek, Pyatakov and others), L. Sedov declared: ‘There’s no point in hesitating any longer. Stalin has to be killed.’ I was so surprised by this, that I had no time to react. L. Sedov at once changed the subject. On 23 January in my presence and that of L. Estrine, L. Sedov uttered something of the same sort as on the twenty-second. Estrine snapped ‘Bite your tongue.’ They did not return to this topic.133
Possibly the report was a fabrication designed to add fuel to the prosecution’s arguments at the forthcoming trial. Yet it was not used by Vyshinsky or Ulrikh: no doubt they did not want to expose their secret agent in Paris. In any event, the document remained in Zborowski’s dossier. Perhaps Sedov uttered the phrase in an outburst of hatred for Stalin, perhaps he was revealing a genuine intention. It should, however, be noted that several months before this event, the Chief of the Foreign Section of NKVD Main Directorate of State Security, Commissar Second Class Slutsky, reported to Yezhov:
On 21 June [1936] Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, proposed to our source (‘Mack’) that he should go to the USSR to do illegal work. L. Sedov said to the source literally the following: ‘We will give you missions, money and a passport. You will go for two or three months and go to several places at the addresses which we’ll give you. It won’t be easy. There is unfortunately no centre you can go to. The people are isolated and you’ll have to look for them…’ Sedov gave no indication when this trip might take place.134
A month later a note was written in blue pencil on the report: ‘Nothing happened.’ Whether Zborowski declined the proposal or, more likely, Trotsky and his son changed their minds, is unknown.
The second document from the Zborowski collection, dated February 1938, is more lengthy and included the following:
Since 1936 ‘Sonny’ has not talked to me any more about terror. He used to start conversations about it indirectly: ‘Terrorism does not contradict Marxism. There are situations when terrorism is necessary.’ While reading the newspapers, he said: ‘The whole regime in the USSR depends on Stalin and if he were killed the whole lot would collapse.’ He repeatedly returned [to this theme] and stressed that the murder of Comrade Stalin was necessary. During this conversation ‘Sonny’ asked me if I was afraid of death in general and was I capable of carrying out a terroristic act? In reply to my answer that it would depend on the need and the practicality, ‘Sonny’ said the whole thing depended on someone being ready to die. Like the members of the People’s Will [a terrorist organization in nineteenth-century Russia]. He then said I was too soft for such a job. The conversation was abruptly terminated by the appearance of ‘Neighbour’ [Estrine] and the theme was not raised again.135
There are several possible explanations of this document. It may have been fabricated by the NKVD to be used should it be decided to recall Zborowski to Moscow for trial and liquidation. Nor can the possibility be ruled out that Zborowski was simply fantasizing. Or perhaps Lev, who was of a nervous and unstable disposition, had become obsessed by the idea of murdering Stalin. It is not inconceivable, either, that Trotsky himself was testing the ground to see if someone was capable of performing this act of terror in his name in order to rid the USSR of the Stalinist pollution. Trotsky’s own attitude to terror and violence had been amply demonstrated by his strong-arm tactics during the civil war. Whatever the explanation, there is not a single shred of evidence that the Trotskyists carried out or prepared for any high-profile act of terrorism.
Speaking at the February-March plenum of the scale of the ‘Trotskyist wrecking’, Molotov quoted Stalin’s words: ‘How is it possible for the wrecking to have assumed such proportions? Who is to blame for it? We are to blame.’136 He then regurgitated the argument that the NKVD had delayed liquidating the Trotskyists for four years. That delay would now be made up for with interest. Anyone who had ever had the slightest contact with Trotsky was placed under surveillance, arrested, exiled or executed. And, perhaps uniquely in history, the archives became a dangerous place. NKVD officials descended on the archives of the Red Army, the Central Committee and October Revolution, and systematically checked Trotsky’s orders, directives and correspondence, collecting all the names found there for further ‘processing’.137 Practically all of the people discovered in this way would be executed in due course, whether they had served in the Revolutionary Military Council, the People’s Commissariat, the armoured train, or were no more than acquaintances in Trotsky’s Party or literary work. Hundreds of thousands of people were sucked into the vortex of the political trials, all of them, in Stalin’s twisted logic, ‘directed’ by Trotsky. It should have been asked how such a vast army of conspirators could have come into being, considering that at the end of 1920s the ‘left’ opposition had numbered no more than three to five thousand people. As Trotsky himself wrote mockingly in an article entitled ‘The Results of the Trial’:
Judging by the results of the last series of trials, Vyshinsky must conclude that the Soviet state emerges as a centralized organization of state treason. The head of government and most of the People’s Commissars …; the most important Soviet diplomats …; all the leaders of the Comintern …; all the economic chiefs …; the best leaders of the Red Army …; the most prominent worker-revolutionaries produced by Bolshevism over the last thirty-five years …; the head and members of the government of the Russian Republic …; the heads of all three dozen Soviet republics without exception …; the GPU chiefs of the last ten years … and finally and most important, members of the all-mighty Politburo, the supreme power in the country—all these people were involved in a conspiracy against the Soviet regime, even when it was in their hands. All of them, as agents of foreign powers, strove to tear the Soviet Federation that they had built into shreds and to enslave in Fascism the peoples they had struggled for decades to liberate.
In their criminal activity, premiers, ministers, marshals and ambassadors were invariably subordinate to one man. Not an official leader, but an outcast. Trotsky had only to lift his finger and veterans of the revolution became agents of Hider and the Mikado. On Trotsky’s instructions’ leaders of industry, transport and agriculture destroyed the country’s productive forces and its culture. On an instruction sent from Norway or Mexico by an ‘enemy of the people’ the railway workers of the Far East organized the derailment of military trains and venerable Kremlin physicians poisoned their patients … There is a problem, however. If all the key points of the system were occupied by Trotskyists under my orders, how is it that Stalin is in the Kremlin and I am in exile?138
The Moscow trials were not only a general purge, they were staged so as to destroy Trotsky morally, politically and psych
ologically; the order to annihilate him physically had been given long before. The people, fed on disinformation and deception, blindly supported the regime’s actions. Meetings were held with such slogans as, ‘Death to the Fascist hirelings!’, ‘Crush the Trotskyist vermin!’, ‘Trotskyism is another form of Fascism!’. On 6 March 1937 Pravda asserted that ‘the Trotskyists are a find for international Fascism … The insignificant number of this gang should not reassure us, we have to increase our vigilance tenfold.’ On 15 March 1938 Vechernyaya Moskva (Moscow Evening News) wrote: ‘History knows no evil deeds equal to the crimes of the gang from the anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyist Bloc. The espionage, sabotage and wrecking done by the ober-bandit Trotsky and his accomplices Bukharin, Rykov and the others, arouses feelings of anger, hatred and contempt not only in the Soviet people, but all progressive mankind.’
Tens of millions of people were seized by one of the greatest confidence tricks in history. The vast, unhappy country condemned its fake enemies. The security and intelligence services also underwent a fearful purge. In 1937-38 23,000 NKVD officials were arrested. Most of those interrogated informed on others in order to survive. Suspicion turned people into scoundrels. The Chief of the First Section of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army A.I. Starunin sent a report ‘upwards’, and as a result of its ‘hostile leadership’, the Red Army was left virtually without any intelligence organization. On the eve of the Second World War, the army had no ‘eyes and ears’. Between 1938 and 1940 three heads of Red Army intelligence were liquidated: Ya.K. Berzin, S.P. Uritsky and I.I. Proskurin, along with almost all deputy heads of directorate and most department chiefs. Before his own arrest, Proskurin reported, as if it were a great achievement: ‘More than half of the intelligence personnel have been arrested.’139
As Alexander Orlov, a senior intelligence official who, as we have seen, defected from the USSR in the 1930s, wrote: ‘Although Trotsky was thousands of kilometres from the courtroom, everyone knew that it was precisely he who was the chief defendant, here as in the previous trials. It was precisely because of him that the gigantic machine of Stalinist falsifications was set in motion again, and each of the defendants could clearly feel Stalin’s hatred pulsating here, and Stalin’s thirst for revenge, aimed at the distant Trotsky.’140 It is plain now that the trials, which were fabricated from start to finish, occasionally touched on facts which did have a degree of relevance to Trotsky.
Trotsky responded to Stalin with equally burning hatred, though rather more justification: nearly all his family and loved ones had been destroyed directly or indirectly by Stalin’s actions. He did not, however, want to be thought of as vengeful or full of hatred. He had never expected the struggle of the ‘left’ opposition to end in a personal battle. Things were far more complex. Therefore, when he continued with his biography of Stalin, he wrote in the preface:
Certain circles speak and write of my hatred for Stalin which inspires me with gloomy judgements and predictions. I can only shrug my shoulders at this. Our paths have diverged so far and so long ago, and he is for me a tool of such inimical and hostile historical forces, that my personal feelings towards him hardly differ from my feelings for Hider or the Japanese Mikado. Whatever personal feeling there was has long been burnt out. The observation point that I have occupied has not permitted me to identify the real human person with the gigantic shadow he throws on the screen of the bureaucracy. I therefore think I have the right to say that I have never raised Stalin in my mind to a feeling of hatred for him.141
Did Trotsky not remember, however, that as the ‘second man’ in the country he had himself laid the foundations of lawlessness? In November 1922 the Bolshevik leaders in Baku reported to the Politburo on a trial of Socialist Revolutionaries, indicating that of the thirty-eight defendants, eight had been sentenced to death and the Baku people wanted the Politburo’s approval of the sentences, which they themselves regarded as essential. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Molotov voted in favour without hesitation.142 Stalin had been well trained by Lenin and Trotsky.
Even after Trotsky had been murdered, Stalin feared his shadow. As late as December 1947 he ordered the Ministry of the Interior to build top security prisons and camps for especially dangerous state criminals, above all ‘for Trotskyists, terrorists, Mensheviks, SRs, nationalists’. Stalin’s personal archive contains Interior Minister S.N. Kruglov’s reply in early February 1948: ‘In accordance with your instructions I herewith present a draft decision of the Central Committee for organizing strict regime camps and prisons to contain especially dangerous state criminals. I request your decision.’143 Stalin gave his decision, which the Council of Ministers rubber-stamped on 21 February 1948 and the Ministry of the Interior carried out one week later.
The documents show that these prisons and camps for ‘Trotskyists and other enemies’ were to be built in Kolyma and Norilsk in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Republic, at Yelaburg, Karaganda and other sites which formed the ‘Gulag Archipelago’. The judicial foundation was provided by the appropriate section of the infamous and much amended Article 58, according to which even the family of the ‘criminal’ were subject to inhuman punishment.144 The Minister of the Interior, following Stalin’s orders, issued instructions that ‘Chekist work must be done in order to expose any Trotskyists and other enemies of the state still at large,’ and that there should no ‘reduction of the term of punishment for such people nor the granting of any other privileges’, instead, when their terms of imprisonment and exile came to an end, ‘freed prisoners must be held for further registration’.145
Until his dying day, Stalin regarded Trotskyists as dangerous enemies, the embodiment of a universal evil. His henchmen therefore continued to hunt for them as long as Stalin was alive. Kruglov was soon requesting Stalin’s personal permission ‘to increase the size of the special camps’ from the present 180,000 ‘by another 70,000 to bring them up to 250,000 prisoners’.146 Stalin of course agreed, and no doubt would have liked to turn the whole country into a camp. Indeed, in many respects it already resembled one. The peasants were denied internal passports and were therefore unable to move around the country, fixed like serfs in their settlements. In every work-group and army company, in every university department and workshop there were secret informers, but no one was prepared to say that the Soviet Union was moving towards a state of slavery. Anyone who might have done so was liquidated, while the rest thought things were as they were supposed to be. The system had turned the people into a tool for achieving utopia. The revolution to which Trotsky had dedicated himself had turned into the pathology of social development.
The Loneliness of Coyoacan
Trotsky had never led the life of a hermit. He was used to being surrounded by large numbers of people, and this remained true to the end of his life. Yet in Mexico he and his wife felt a deep inner loneliness. The gradual loss of the ideals to which he had dedicated his entire life, the deaths of all his children and so many friends, and the passing of the days inexorably gnawed at the core of his being. More than once he thought of suicide, but did not want to leave such a stain on his record as a fighter and revolutionary.
Against their expectations, the couple were welcomed in Mexico with something approaching genuine friendliness. When the empty tanker Ruth docked at Tampico on 9 January 1937, Trotsky refused to disembark before he could see they were being met by friends. He was not disappointed. More significantly, perhaps, he was warmly greeted by official representatives of President Lazaro Cardenas, who put his personal railcar at Trotsky’s disposal. In fact, Trotsky was the guest of the president and the painter Diego Rivera. A small group of American Trotskyists were also there to meet him. It had been arranged that Trotsky and Natalya would stay with Rivera in his house, Casa Azul, on London Street in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, designed and built by the artist himself as a refuge for art, inspiration and creativity.
Trotsky and Natalya were ecstatic over their new abode. In his first letter to his son Lev he wro
te: ‘The Mexican authorities have treated us with utterly exceptional courtesy … The President is carrying out a radical and bold policy. He is helping [Republican] Spain openly and has promised to do everything to make our stay here comfortable.’147 According to a report from NKVD agent ‘Oscar’ to Moscow, Diego Rivera was making speeches in which he called on ‘true Marxists to break with the police-reactionary spirit represented by Iosif Stalin’. As for Rivera’s own agenda, ‘Oscar’ reported, he dreamed of creating a worldwide ‘congress which would officially consecrate the founding of an international federation of arts workers. We want: independent art for the revolution; revolution for the ultimate liberation of art.’148 Trotsky was cheered by Rivera’s message, he admired his work as an artist, and all in all was much buoyed by his first impressions of Mexico.
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