Following Stalin’s decision ‘to bump Trotsky on the head’, Menzhinsky and Yagoda attempted to carry out their master’s wish on Prinkipo, covering their tracks by launching rumours in the Communist-friendly press about an impending attempt on Trotsky’s life by White émigrés. Efforts were indeed made to provoke Whites into carrying out the murder, but Trotsky left Prinkipo for France at the crucial moment. Thus ended the first, rather slack, attempt to fulfil Stalin’s wishes.
France, with its much larger Russian community and far larger contingent of OGPU agents than there had been in Turkey, presented a greater threat to Trotsky. His location was soon discovered and he was forced to move often, living like a wanted criminal in hiding. It was impossible for him to disappear from view, however, because among his son’s assistants was the OGPU agent Zborowski.
Early in 1935, Soviet intelligence agent Mikhail Shpigelglas received verbal instructions from Yagoda, who had received them in turn from Stalin, to ‘speed up the liquidation of Trotsky’. An experienced operator, Shpigelglas mobilized the entire agency in France, including Ignaz Reiss, a Polish Communist who worked for the OGPU from 1925 to 1937 in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland, successively.
Trotsky was very careful. He had received warning via Reiss that he was a marked man.89 Reiss himself defected in 1937 over the bloodletting of the Moscow trials, proclaiming himself a Trotskyist and supporter of the Fourth International. He wrote to the Central Committee: ‘I have come thus far with you, but I will not go one step further … Whoever remains silent now becomes an accomplice of Stalin and a traitor to the cause of the working class and socialism.’ He enclosed with his letter the Order of the Red Banner that he had received as ‘a heroic fighter for Communism’, adding: ‘To wear it while the executioners of the best representatives of the working class are also wearing it is beneath my dignity.’90 Six weeks after writing this letter, on 4 September 1937, Reiss was murdered in Zurich. He had probably warned Trotsky to get out of France as early as the spring or summer of 1935, which Trotsky duly did. It was at this period that Trotsky virtually went under cover. Shpigelglas and his men located him several times, only to find that their prey had slipped the noose at the crucial moment.
Deep frustration was felt in Moscow, and when Trotsky escaped to Norway in June 1935, Shpigelglas was summoned home, only to find a witch-hunt in progress, with himself under suspicion. Eighteen months later, at the February-March 1937 Central Committee Plenum, Stalin declared: ‘The one thing we lack is the willingness to liquidate our own carelessness, our own placidity, our own short-sightedness.’91 He accused the special services of spinelessness and indecisiveness. Not surprisngly, the resolution on Yezhov’s report—Yezhov having replaced Yagoda—confirmed that the NKVD Security Directorate had had the chance in 1932-33 to expose ‘the Trotskyist conspiracy’ and liquidate it. This was an implicit and sinister reproach that the chief enemy had been allowed to remain alive. The resolution spoke of the surviving links between Soviet officials and Sedov in Berlin, of the ‘criminal’ relations betwen the chief of the NKVD’s Secret Political Section, Molchanov, with the Trotskyist Fourier, and so on. This confirmed that senior Soviet officials abroad were under surveillance themselves, as reports from the Paris agency also showed.92
The plenum resolution also called for the process of ‘exposing and smashing the Trotskyists’ to be carried out to the end, a formula which, issuing from Stalin, could only mean physical annihilation. The NKVD special services were to be reinforced. Having failed to carry out Stalin’s order, Yagoda was soon arrested as a member of the ‘Right Trotskyist Bloc’, and in 1938 was shot, although the charges specified at his trial did not, of course, include that of failing to organize the murder of Trotsky.93 Yagoda stated at the trial: ‘I already know my sentence, I’ve been expecting it for a whole year.’94 In his prosecution speech, Vyshinsky declared significantly that ‘Yagoda and his vile treacherous activity’ had not been exposed by the ‘treacherous security organ that he organized and that he directed against the interests of the Soviet state and our revolution, but by the real, the genuine Bolshevik intelligence service that is headed by one of the most remarkable Stalinist comrades-in-arms, Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov’.95 The fact is that, when Trotsky sailed away from Turkey in July 1933, both Menzhinsky and his deputy, Yagoda, had known that Stalin would never forget it. Menzhinsky died a natural death in his bed, but Yagoda was fair game as a defendant in the ‘right-Trotskyist’ trial. The resolution unambiguously decreed that steps be taken ‘to strengthen a reliable agency in the country and abroad’.96
The implication was that not only had Yagoda and his subordinates ‘penetrated the NKVD agencies as Trotsky’s accomplices’,97 but that such agents and Shpigelglas and his group had done so too. He had been sent abroad, knowing that his operation had been sanctioned by the highest authority, and he had failed. Although he was allowed to continue analyzing the reports that Zborowski was sending back to Moscow from Paris, he was no longer trusted,98 and was soon arrested, condemned and eventually shot. Sudoplatov’s comment on Shpigelglas was laconic: ‘He didn’t carry out the job of killing Trotsky. So he couldn’t be forgiven.’
After the Eighteenth Party Congress of March 1939, the Foreign Section became the NKVD First Directorate, headed by Fitin with Sudoplatov as his deputy. A Special Group, under the former SR Serebryansky, continued to function within the First Directorate, and after June 1941 it was detached to form a strong, independent unit, reporting directly to the People’s Commissar for the Interior.99
As operations behind enemy lines during the war expanded, the unit became the Second Independent Section of the NKVD, and then in 1942 the Fourth Section.100 Sudoplatov was made its chief with the rank of Lieutenant-General, and his deputy, Naum Eitingon, was made a Major-General. Both of them were decorated with the Order of Suvorov. The NKVD’s Special Group and similar units produced no less than twenty-two Heroes of the Soviet Union. As Sudoplatov wrote to the Politburo, his agency—Section C—had run a special bureau to gather information on the research being conducted on atomic weapons abroad, material that was put to use by Soviet physicists and arms manufacturers.101 Yet when Beria was arrested in the summer of 1953, Sudoplatov, Eitingon, Serebryansky and others of their kind were also arrested for having been particularly trusted by their fallen leader. In practice, their work had been devised and supervised by a special section of the Central Committee, but as a unit under the formal authority of the Interior Commissariat, they became especially vulnerable when its sinister chief fell from grace.
Stalin’s determination to get rid of Trotsky stiffened when he learned late in 1936 that Trotsky was writing The Revolution Betrayed and continuing his biography of Stalin himself, books that would expose the worst of the regime and the criminal nature of its leader. After the death of Lev Sedov, the Special Section had to decide the future role of Lev Zborowski. Agent ‘West’ reported that ‘Tulip’s’ (Zborowski’s) position had become difficult. The greatest threat was posed by Estrin, who did not hide her distrust of him, although Zborowski dismissed this as unimportant. Noting that Zborowski was ‘very lazy by nature’, ‘West’ requested Moscow’s permission to tell him to concentrate on gathering information on the Trotskyists, continuing his work on the Bulletin and assisting the ‘Russian Section of the Fourth International’. But the chief task the Special Section proposed giving to its underemployed undercover agent was to ‘get to “the Old Man”’. First, he must join Trotsky’s security staff. But van Heijenoort had not replied to a letter from Zborowski suggesting that he (Zborowski) come to Mexico to join Trotsky’s staff.102 Another would be sent by the next ship to Mexico. ‘West’ then referred to the ‘Sofia method’ (an attempt made by the NKVD to blow up an apartment in Sofia), adding that if Zborowski failed to penetrate Trotsky’s personal security, ‘two or three German Trotskyists should be despatched via the International Secretariat. These people could be very valuable to us in the future, also in other ways.’1
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‘West’s’ proposals were accepted by Moscow, and new agents were despatched from Spain and the Soviet Union. Soon it was decided that Zborowski should be sent to Mexico: ‘Send a draft letter from “Tulip” to “the Old Man”, but only after you have received our sanction should the letter be sent.’104 Moscow was thus considering various paths by which to penetrate Trotsky’s defences. Early in 1939, Stalin convened a small meeting to discuss the sole question of how to liquidate Trotsky. The 1938 issues of the Bulletin had contained the most vitriolic and devastating condemnation yet of the purge of the Red Army. Under the title ‘Totalitarian Defeatists’, Trotsky had accused Stalin of rendering the country defenceless in the face of war: ‘Defeatism, sabotage and treason are lodged in Stalin’s oprichnina [special guards]. The ober-defeatist is the “father of the people”—he is also their executioner … The slogan of Soviet patriotism should be “Down with the totalitarian defeatists, out with Stalin and his oprichnina!”’105
In an article entitled ‘Behind the Kremlin Walls’, dated January 1939, Trotsky revealed that Abel Yenukidze had been shot for trying ‘to stay the hand that was raised above the heads of the old Bolsheviks’.106 The same issue of the Bulletin was meant to have included an article commemorating the first anniversary of Lev’s death, but Trotsky could not find the strengh to write it. Instead, he asked Zborowski to do it for him: ‘You are doing a great service in publishing the Bulletin so punctually and with such care. This is to your credit.’107
Stalin wanted to read or hear no more of Trotsky’s poisonous barbs. He was tired of waiting while a succession of henchmen failed to deal effectively with the issue, and decided to settle the matter by giving the orders himself. In March 1939 he summoned Sudoplatov and told him that ‘this Fascist hireling must be liquidated without further ado. Spare no expense. Bring in whoever you want.’ At a later meeting it was decided that Eitingon, with his greater experience and knowledge of Spanish, should head the expedition. Finally, Stalin reminded Sudoplatov that the order to liquidate Trotsky had come from the Central Committee: ‘I don’t have to tell you what that means,’ he added significantly. Eitingon (who spent twelve years in prison along with other secret service officials who were tainted by association with Beria, who was arrested after Stalin’s death in 1953), wrote to Khrushchev in September 1963 in the hope of rehabilitation, and stated plainly that from 1925 he had worked abroad on Central Committee missions, adding that his team had never carried out any personal commissions of the People’s Commissariat of the Interior.108
If Trotsky knew that the NKVD had been given orders to liquidate him, he also knew that such practices had been in use when he was still a leading political figure in the USSR. For instance, in May 1924 the head of the Foreign Section of OGPU, M. Trilisser, wrote to one of his agents in Germany: ‘Arthur Koch, Winkler, Kuhsfeld, Benimann, Spange, Elsa Stuerz, Maderkrebs and Senger have been adequately instructed in the use of hypodermic syringes and should have mastered them fully. San, Kaiser, Stuetter and Neumann must be eliminated in any event. Contact must be made with anyone arrested and instruction given as to how they should behave. Any reference to us is absolutely impermissible.’109
The practice of assassinating undesirables was even acknowledged by Vyshinsky at the trial of Yagoda, when he declared on 11 March 1938: ‘Yagoda stood at the peak of the technology of killing people in the most devious ways. He represented the last word in the “science” of bestiality.’110 Amid the welter of mendacity that characterized the show trials, this is one piece of testimony, at least, that can be accepted as true and accurate.
Of his part in the operation against Trotsky, Sudoplatov wrote to the Politburo: ‘At the end of 1938, thanks to the efforts of Dekanozov, the new chief of the Foreign Section, as well as of Beria, I was accused of having “criminal links with Shpigelglas”. I was threatened with arrest. And so was Eitingon. I remained in this state of limbo until March-April 1939. Then, just in time, Eitingon and I were given our new assignment by the Central Committee; everything around us calmed down and we began active preparations for the operation in Mexico. And we carried it out in August 1940.’111
Sudoplatov remained in Moscow ‘to supervise and cooordinate’ the operation, while Eitingon and a large group of agents, most of them from Spain, set off for Mexico. Among them were the Spanish military graduates Martinez, Alvarez, Ximenez, and the Chekists Rabinovich, Grigolevich and others who were well acquainted with Latin America. They were to have been joined by Zborowski, but by the time he arrived Trotsky was already dead, and his involvement was no longer required.112 He later made an effort to get out of the game and even managed to collaborate with the American anthropologist Margaret Mead on a study of the Jews of Eastern Europe, Life is for People (1952). He was suspected of espionage and arrested in the USA in 1956, but was soon released. Rearrested in 1962, he was given a four-year prison sentence. He managed to write another anthropological study, People in Suffering, but in none of his writings did he ever refer to his work as an agent of the NKVD.113 And there was much he could have said, especially as his indirect role in the operation against Trotsky in Coyoacan was significant, as we shall see.
The group settled in Mexico City as refugees from Spain. First, however, a noisy Comintern-inspired campaign was organized, calling for Trotsky’s expulson from the country. The Mexican Communist Party published an array of materials, sent by Moscow, purporting to expose Trotsky’s ‘treachery to the working class’, his links with German and English intelligence services, and his participation in terroristic attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders. Notices were posted in the streets to the effect that Trotsky was organizing a revolution in Mexico with the aim of establishing a Fascist dictatorship. In effect, these fabrications simply regurgitated the charges of the Moscow trials.
In Moscow, efforts were being made to find supplementary ‘evidence’ of Trotsky’s crimes. At the end of 1938, Yezhov and Beria sent a top-secret memorandum to the Politburo—apparently the last thing Yezhov wrote—in which it was claimed that additional evidence had been found that showed Trotsky as having collaborated with German intelligence even before the October revolution.114 The blatant falsity of this material was too much even for the Politburo, and no more was made of it.
Meanwhile, Trotsky and Natalya felt the noose tightening around their last refuge. Their guards watched as strangers and vehicles circled the house slowly. A careful scrutiny was made of all visitors, and Trotsky asked the city authorities for police reinforcements. He had been warned of the looming danger by Alexander Orlov, who had worked with Eitingon in Spain. When a relative of Orlov’s in Kiev—one Katsenelson—had been arrested, Orlov saw the writing on the wall, seized $60,000 of the Agency’s funds, and absconded to America with his wife and daughter. Trotsky, however, had not taken Orlov’s warning seriously, especially in regard to Zborowski, who had taken over the Bulletin after Lev’s death.
Many of Trotsky’s supporters were similarly under siege, thanks to Zborowski. In August 1937 he had reported that Lev had left Paris, handing over the organization’s affairs to him, Zborowski, to manage, including all the current correspondence along with the despatch of documents to Trotsky. Lev had given him a small notebook containing all the addresses: ‘As you know,’ Zborowski wrote to his masters in Moscow, ‘we have dreamed about getting hold of it for a whole year, but we never managed it before, because “Sonny” would never let it out of his hands. I enclose herewith a photo of these addresses. We shall research them in detail shortly and send you [the results]. There are quite a few interesting addresses here …’115 They included those of Trotsky’s entourage in Mexico.
The NKVD knew too much about Trotsky for him to survive. Trotsky arranged for an article to appear in the press under the headline ‘L.D. Trotsky’s Life in Danger’, in which it was made plain that the threat came from Stalin: ‘As long as L.D. Trotsky is still alive, Stalin’s role as the destroyer of the Bolshevik old guard has not been accomplished. It
is not enough to condemn him to death with Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and the other victims of the terror. The sentence has to be carried out.’ The article mentioned that an attempt had already been made on his life in Coyoacan: ‘In the guise of an exile bringing a gift, a suspicious-looking man had attempted to get into the house. The attempt had failed because the man’s behaviour had aroused suspicion. He managed to get away, but left behind a package containing explosives.’116 The article also named Stalin’s agents who had come from Spain to Mexico, but the list does not include Eitingon, Mercader or Grigulevich, nor indeed any of the chief members of the group that had arrived to carry out the act. They were, of course, all operating under assumed names.
Trotsky wrote two letters to the Bulletin editors. In the first he informed them that they should not expect any major new articles for the next two or three months: ‘I am under an obligation to write my book on Stalin and to complete my book on Lenin over the next eighteen months.’ In his second letter, written two days later, he noted that articles by Alexander Barmin, the former Soviet envoy to Athens who had defected, had arrived ‘just when we were in a state of alarm (from an attempt of the sort made in Bulgaria …) I had to leave the apartment for a while without my manuscripts and documents …’117
Copies of Trotsky’s letters to the Bulletin were already on their way to Moscow when he went into hiding. Agent ‘West’ reported to the Foreign Section that the Bulletin would be coming out on 15 April: ‘You have already received by the latest post, or will be receiving, nearly all the “Old Man’s” articles.’118
It was known in Moscow that Trotsky was aware of the operation mounted against him. At the end of the 1930s Yakov Serebryansky, a major Soviet intelligence agent, had managed to steal part of the Trotskyists’ archives in Paris, with the help of Zborowski. In it were documents showing that an attempt on Trotsky’s life was known to be a possibility. For instance, in a document dated 19 November 1935, a meeting is mentioned at which a letter from Freda Zeller, who had visited Trotsky in Norway on returning from the Soviet Union, was discussed. The letter, which contained a proposal ‘to kill Stalin’, was seen by the Trotsykists as a blatant provocation.119 The myth of an attempt by the Trotskyists on Stalin’s life provided a satisfactory justification not only for the mass terror in Russia, but also for the activities of the Foreign Section of the NKVD abroad. The Sneevleit archive, which also ended up in NKVD hands, contains numerous examples of documents which testify to the general fear and awareness among Trotsky’s entourage. For example, a certain Kruks wrote to a fellow-Trotskyist, Keller: ‘A mortal danger from the GPU is hanging over Comrade “Ts” [Trotsky]; we have to take measures to save him.’120
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