Having fed the animals, Trotsky would sit down to write. That day, he intended to reply to the Mexican newspaper El Popular and to continue working on the biography of Stalin. Natalya recalled:
At about five o’clock we had tea. Twenty minutes later, I saw Leon Davidovich at the bottom of the garden near the rabbit hutches. He had a visitor with him, but I did not recognize him until he came up to me and took off his hat. It was Jacson-Mornard … ‘I am terribly thirsty,’ he said. ‘Could I have a glass of water?’ ‘Wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?’ ‘No, I had a late lunch …’ His face looked green and he seemed singularly nervous. ‘Why are you wearing your hat and raincoat,’ I asked, ‘in such fine weather?’ ‘Because it might rain,’ he replied absurdly … He drank a glass of water and told me that he had brought an article, typed this time, for Leon Davidovich to see.147
After the rehearsal of 17 August, when Ramon had visited with his raincoat on his arm, he had now come to do the terrible deed itself. Eitingon had worked long and hard to prepare him for the final act, but Mercader was not a robot. Fifty years after the event, his brother Luis declared: ‘My brother was not simply a murderer, he was a man who believed in the Communist cause.’ For this agent of the NKVD Trotsky was an agent of world imperialism and a mortal enemy of Communism.
There were, I believe, other motives which prompted Mercader. He was acting under compulsion. His mother was in Mexico—indeed, she was waiting for him in the car with Eitingon not a hundred metres from the house. One can well imagine the tension they were feeling. If Ramon’s nerve failed, none of them would survive. They were his hostages. As was his young brother Luis, who at Eitingon’s insistence had been sent from Paris to Moscow. The greenish colour of Mercader’s visage showed his mental struggle as he faced the thin line between life and death, the line beyond which he must now despatch another human being.
The account continues with the evidence Mercader gave at his trial:
I laid my raincoat on the table in such a way as to be able to remove the ice-pick which was in the pocket. I decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment Trotsky began reading the article gave me the chance, I took out the ice-pick from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head. Trotsky gave a cry that I shall never forget. It was a long ‘aaaa’, endlessly long, and I think it still echoes in my brain. Trotsky jumped up jerkily, rushed at me and bit my hand. Look, you can still see the marks of his teeth. I pushed him away and he fell to the floor. Then he rose and stumbled out of the room.148
Natalya describes what happened next: ‘Three or four minutes went by. I was in the room next door. There was a terrible piercing cry … Leon Davidovich appeared, leaning against the door-frame. His face was covered with blood, his blue eyes glittered with his spectacles, and his arms hung limply by his side.’149 Sudoplatov commented: ‘In any affair there are unavoidable accidents. And one occurred here. How could Trotsky find the strength both to struggle and to utter that inhuman cry after Mercader, who was very strong physically, had delivered such a crushing blow with the ice-pick? If Trotsky had died instantly Mercader might have escaped.’
A great din was raised in the house. Mercader was seized and beaten by the guards. Natalya recalled that he cried out, ‘They made me do it … They’ve got my mother … They have put my mother in prison …’ ‘What shall we do with him?’ Natalya asked. ‘They’ll kill him.’ Trotsky replied slowly, ‘No, he must not be killed, he must talk,’ dragging out each word. Charlie Cornell, Joe Hansen and Harold Robins had fallen on the assassin, who yelled, ‘Kill me now or stop beating me!’150 It was his one display of weakness, and in the long months of the investigation and the trial he would not repeat those words. He would stick to the line that it was he who had planned and carried out the whole operation. He knew of no GPU, nor had he any accomplices. It was his decision and his alone.
According to Sudoplatov, during the first six months of his twenty-year sentence, Mercader was often beaten in prison in an effort to find out just who he was. For a full five years he was kept in solitary confinement, with no window, but Eitingon’s special agent kept control of himself and would not recant his first testimony, even though at the trial documentary proof had been produced to show that he was not who he claimed to be. As Luis stated: ‘After the first shock he came to himself and always believed he had done a necessary deed.’ Twenty years later, after his release, when he was in the USSR, Ramon, commenting on events in Colombia, declared: ‘Terrorism is necessary in the struggle for Communism.’151 In fact, he was quoting Trotsky’s own words from Terrorism and Communism, where his victim had written: ‘Terror can be very effective against a reactionary class that does not want to leave the scene.’152 In these utterances we find an unexpected resonance between the victim and the murderer. The ideas of Bolshevik Jacobinism, so firmly implanted by Trotsky in the Russian revolution, had come back to strike at him with the force of a boomerang.
A letter found in Jacson’s pocket stated that he had become disillusioned with Trotskyism and Trotsky. It gave as a trigger for his action Trotsky’s having told him of his intention to go to the USSR to liquidate Stalin. The letter had plainly been written by others. The court quickly established that Trotsky had been alone with Jacson only twice, on 17 August, for five to seven minutes, and on the day of the murder, for an even shorter time. It is inconceivable that in those brief moments Trotsky would have revealed such an intention to a virtually complete stranger, yet Jacson claimed that he had done precisely this. The court did not of course recognize the well-practised hand of the NKVD. Similar letters were found in 1938 on the bodies of Rudolf Klement, Trotsky’s murdered secretary, and several other defectors who were killed after allegedly accusing Trotsky of espionage and terrorism. Possibly the letter found on Mercader had been inspired by a report from Zborowski to Moscow in February 1938—if it was not a fabrication of the NKVD—in which he stated that Sedov had raised the question of finding a terrorist because, he had said, ‘It is enough to murder Stalin for everything else to collapse.’153 In this case, however, the falsity of the letter concocted by Eitingon’s group is not open to doubt. It seems that the organizers of the murder made no great effort to establish an alibi. The world still knew little about the event, yet the Party newspaper, Pravda, could state on 24 August 1940 that ‘Trotsky has died in hospital from a fractured skull, received in an attempt on his life by one of his closest circle.’154 The letter in Jacson’s pocket and the information for Pravda came from a single source. In fact the world’s press never doubted the identity of the murderer.
All those who planned the operation managed to escape, except Mercader. The car, its engine already running, took off the moment there was a stir at the gates and the alarms went off. Eitingon, Mercader’s mother and some others escaped from the capital by various means. Eitingon and Caridad waited in California for instructions to come from Moscow. Within a day they learnt from the radio and press that the operation had been a success. Stalin’s order to ‘decapitate the Fourth International’ had been carried out. Eitingon was afraid that the excitable Caridad, having lost her son, might fall apart and commit some indiscretion. Within a month Moscow reported, by special channels, that it was grateful the task had been accomplished, and ordered Eitingon to find out from his agency in Mexico the condition of the ‘patient’, i.e. Mercader, and to see what could be done to help him. After having done this, Eitingon would be permitted to return to Moscow. In May 1941, a month before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, Eitingon and Caridad returned to Moscow via China, a journey taking more than a month. Sylvia’s movements during the incident, and indeed after it was all over, have not been accounted for. Presumably, as an innocent tool in the conspiracy, she returned to her normal life in Brooklyn.
Trotsky survived the attack for twenty-six hours. Everything was done to save him, but it was clear that all the vital centres of his brain had been damaged
. Two hours after the attack, Natalya recalled, Trotsky fell into a coma. Shortly before this, ‘pointing to his heart, he said to Joe Hansen in English, “I feel … here … that this is the end … This time … they’ve … succeeded.”’ Before operating, the nurses began cutting his clothes off. Natalya recalled that he said to her, distinctly and very gravely: ‘I don’t want them to undress me … I want you to do it …” These were his last words to me. I undressed him and pressed my lips to his. He returned the kiss, once, twice and again. Then he lost consciousness.’ Concluding her sad reminiscence, Natalya wrote that in the evening of the following day, after trepanation, the doctors ‘lifted him up and his head slumped onto his shoulder, but his features retained their pride. I had seen him ride out crises … I still believed he could do it again. He would suddenly regain his strength, open his eyes, and take charge of his life again … Two doctors in white stood before me … Leon Davidovich had died peacefully a moment before, at 7.25 p.m. on 21 August 1940. He was sixty years old.’
Obelisk in a Foreign Country
A huge anti-Stalinist demonstration was occasioned by his funeral, on the day after his death, following Mexican custom. Trotsky was buried at the house on the quiet little street in Coyoacan. Natalya insisted on it. All she had left was her grandson Seva, and Trotsky’s grave, which provided a link to the memory of everything that mattered to her. She was above all his wife and the mother of his sons, and she had never played an active political part in his struggle.
Soon after the funeral a meeting of the leaders of the American Section of the Fourth International decided to erect an obelisk on the grave, and to look into the possibility of building a museum in Trotsky’s name. The obelisk was soon raised, but it would be fifty years from his death before the museum was opened. The memorial itself was rather primitive. A hammer and sickle was engraved on a concrete slab nine feet tall and inscribed simply ‘Leon Trotsky’. Later, behind the simple column, a flagpole was erected with a red flag at half-mast. For as long as she was alive Natalya ensured that the grave was surrounded by fresh flowers. The strange monument is still there, guarded by Trotsky’s grandson Seva, now known as Esteban Volkov. It seems that the obelisk is the chief monument both to Trotsky and to the ephemeral idea of world revolution.
Indeed, it may be Trotsky’s only surviving monument. Of the three chief leaders of the revolution, Trotsky was worst served as far as ‘monumental propaganda’ is concerned. Stalin had his monuments by the thousands, and they only began to disappear gradually after his death. The greatest number of such sculptural symbols, however, was dedicated to Lenin. Had Trotsky died, say, during the civil war, his monuments would still be standing. Paradoxically, perhaps, his tragic death has preserved his memory better than that of some of his other comrades-in-arms.
The leaders of the revolution, having demolished the tsarist symbols, within a few years began populating the centres of Soviet citities with their own statues, and Trotsky was no exception. In September 1920 Leonid Krasin, an old Bolshevik and a senior figure in Soviet diplomacy, wrote to Lenin that an English sculptress was ‘travelling around with Kamenev and it is absolutely necessary that you should allow at least once in your life a halfway decent bust of yourself, which she is entirely capable of making and very quickly’.155 At the time when this note was written, the country was convulsed by civil war, starvation and ruin, but the bust of the leader could be regarded as ‘absolutely necessary’. Soon, very soon, banal representations of the leader would be scattered throughout the land. In the same month Trotsky received a letter from a school friend, the artist Nikolai Skoretsky, in which he reported: ‘The talented sculptor Grinshpun is dying to see you, as he wants to properly complete the bust he has begun of you in the spirit of Rodin’s Rochefort.’156 Whether this was ever done has not been established. On the other hand, the author has met a ninety-year-old retired colonel called Filip Mikhailovich Nazarov, a St George’s cavalryman who in his own words ‘was five times wounded and took the oath five times’, who evidently made a large sculpture of Trotsky in 1921, on the orders of the Red Army Political Section. ‘The sculpture turned out quite big,’ he recalled, ‘some ten feet tall. I made it out of plaster, then coated it with a protective glaze in khaki. I moulded the head separately. Trotsky was shown with his coat unbuttoned and his arms folded behind him.’ Asked whether Trotsky knew of this monument, the amateur sculptor replied: ‘The monument was erected in the village of Klementievo in the Mozhaisk district of Moscow Province in a large artillery camp. Soon after it was set up, an order from Trotsky was read out before the assembled ranks encouraging me in my work.’ As for the fate of the statue, ‘some time in 1927 or 1928 it was taken down. In the 1930s I was dead scared they might suddenly remember it was I who had made it. In good time, of course, I destroyed all the photographs and sketches of it and the notice of Trotsky’s thanks.’
In November 1923 Trotsky’s assistant Sermuks laid before him a note from Max Eastman: ‘The sculptor Joe Davidson, of whom I’m sure you’ve heard, is in Moscow. He has made busts of nearly all the famous people in the West and was the official sculptor of the Allied heroes of the World War, but he himself is a radical and a good friend of mine. He has already done busts of Kalinin, Radek, Chicherin, Rakovsky, Litvinov, Ioffe, Krasin and others. You don’t have to pose for him, as he can complete a model of you in one session of three or four hours while you are working.’157
The artist V. Deni wrote in July 1921: ‘Would you find it possible, before the arrival of the Petrograd artists Brodsky and Voshchilov, to give an hour to the popular sculptor Andreev to sketch you in pastels?’158 Of course, since the rest of the Bolshevik leaders were immortalizing themselves so rapidly, Trotsky could hardly refuse. Where the Davidson and Andreev busts disappeared to after his ostracism is not hard to imagine.
These trivial facts serve to show yet again how all triumphant revolutionaries fall into the trap of personalizing their victory. Monuments created during their subjects’ lifetime cannot serve human memory, only vanity. These mass monuments were the shameful landmarks of idolatry.
Trotsky avoided the epidemic of the ‘monument harvest’, not because he was more self-effacing than the others, but simply because there was not time to plant his plaster, bronze and marble image throughout the country. He was lucky in this sense. His concrete obelisk in Mexico is a genuine memorial, more perhaps to his personality than to his political life. What has in fact remained in our memory? Why has the name of Trotsky for so many decades attracted the attention of historians, philosophers, writers and film-makers? What does the obelisk in a foreign country signify? The chasm of history is uniformly deep for everyone, and only major historical figures, such as Trotsky, do not disappear from view. Stalinism imbued the Soviet mind with a strictly negative image of Trotsky, as having brought the people nothing but suffering and terror. Certainly, Trotsky had believed that by perfecting the dictatorship of the proletariat the regime could solve all social questions. In June 1927, while still a member of the Central Committee, he remarked in his unpublished notes on the national question that ‘coexistence and collaboration between different national groups, and the equalization of economic and cultural development, are restrained by force from the centre … precisely over the national question our fundamental differences might acquire the sharpest expression.’ He proposed that the solution to these questions could be found ‘only by preserving and strengthening the proletarian dictatorship of the centralized workers’ state and the planned economy.’159 As always, the dictatorship.
The obelisk in Mexico reminds us that it was Trotsky who first understood Stalin and Stalinism from within, who first saw the outline of the reaction and signs of Bolshevik degeneration. The bitterness and tragedy of his fate make his life memorable. After all, the grey, everyday and ordinary have little chance of surviving in the human memory. The grave in Mexico bears witness that the image of the revolutionary, which becomes sharper with time, plays a great role in historica
l memory.
Stalin’s silhouette, however camouflaged, has always been bloody. His name is a synonym for political cruelty. Lenin was wrapped up in sugary phrases and swathed in official propaganda, his biographers, and indeed the inertia of Russian thinking, wanting only a ‘good tsar’. But Lenin was not a god, he was a mortal man. As N. Valentinov wrote, Lenin, ‘having drawn a circle around himself, trampled underfoot and cut down with the axe everything outside that circle’. Valentinov, who had spent many hours in conversation with Lenin, had been amazed to discover in him ‘blind intolerance and rage’. Lenin rewarded him ‘with a stream of abuse, as soon as he realized I did not share his views’.160 Soviet citizens for decades were permitted to know only the shining genius of Lenin. The unbounded hagiographic literature distorted the image of a man who had been wrong in many ways, theoretically and politically, and whose actions were to have such dire consequences for Russian history.
Trotsky was not an ideological idol, but a personality with the widest possible spectrum of strong intellectual and moral qualities mixed with uncompromising Leninist intolerance and vanity. The obelisk in Mexico reminds us neither of a fearful tyrant nor an ‘unsurpassed genius’, but of the advocate of revolution who became its victim and at the same time the bearer of the violence which corrupted that same revolution. Berdyaev remarked that Trotsky, ‘the organizer of the Red Army, the advocate of world revolution, in no way arouses the feeling of terror which is aroused by the genuine Communist in whom personal self-awareness, personal thought, personal conscience have been utterly extinguished, and who has become one with the collective’. This man, Berdyaev wrote, ‘is like Lenin but is less vicious in polemics’.161
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