Trotsky
Authors: Bertrand M. Patenaude
Downfall of a Revolutionary
Prologue:
A Miraculous Escape
1
Armored Train
2
Mastermind
3
Man of October
4
Day of the Dead
5
The Trouble with Father
6
Prisoners and Provocateurs
7
Fellow Travelers
8
The Great Dictator
9
To the Finland Station
10
Lucky Strike
11
Deadline
Epilogue:
Shipwreck
A Miraculous Escape
I
n the early-morning hours of May 24, 1940, Leon Trotsky slept soundly inside his villa in Coyoacán, a small town on the southern outskirts of Mexico City. The house was heavily guarded. Five Mexican policemen occupied a brick
casita
on the street just outside the high walls of the property. Inside were Trotsky’s private bodyguards, five in all, including four young Americans. One of them, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker by the name of Robert Sheldon Harte, started his shift that night at 1 a.m. posted inside the barred door to the garage, which was the only entrance to the house. His comrades were asleep in a row of outbuildings set against one of the inside walls of the roughly rectangular patio.
Trotsky had spent most of the previous day dictating a manifesto about the war in Europe and kept at it late into the evening. His major work in progress, a biography of Joseph Stalin commissioned by the New York City publishing house Harper & Brothers, was a year and a half overdue. The war was now a huge distraction, in part because of the bitterly divisive debates it had sparked among his followers in the United States, home to the most formidable of the Trotskyist splinter groups around the world.
Once the most internationally famous leader of the Soviet Union, Trotsky now made his living as a freelance writer. A literary stylist known for his sardonic wit, his most acclaimed work in the West was his panoramic history of the Russian Revolution, published in the early 1930s after he had been exiled by Stalin. He had agreed to write the
biography of his archenemy only because he needed the money to support himself and to pay for his security in Mexico. The generous advance from the American publisher was long gone, but the book was nowhere near completion and had become a millstone around his neck. Trotsky often said to his wife, Natalia, that he had become disgusted with it and that he longed to return to writing his biography of Lenin.
Nor were Trotsky’s editors in New York especially pleased with the completed chapters. It had been a mistake to expect Trotsky to write an objective biography of the man who had destroyed him politically, wiped out his followers and his family, and transformed his image in the Soviet Union from a dashing hero of the Bolshevik Revolution into its Judas Iscariot. Trotsky’s name was readily invoked to account for every accident and failure in the USSR, from a train derailment, to a factory explosion, to a missed production quota. His theatrical appearance—the piercing gaze magnified by the thick lenses of his round glasses, the shock of turbulent hair, the thrusting goatee—and his propensity for striking dramatic poses were a boon to the Soviet caricaturists. He was portrayed as several varieties of barnyard animal, including a pig branded with a swastika feeding at the trough of fascism, and in the title of a cartoon that exploited another favorite motif, “The Little Napoleon of the Gestapo.”
It is little wonder then that the Stalin biography had become a slog, and that the Second World War provided Trotsky with a good excuse to procrastinate. The war also gave him the opportunity to earn much-needed income by writing articles for American magazines about the latest diplomatic and military maneuvers. Trotsky’s appeal as an analyst of international affairs spiked in August 1939, when the world was stunned by the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, a turnabout he had predicted. What did the inscrutable, pipe-smoking Georgian dictator in the Kremlin have in mind when he signed a friendship treaty with his ideological opposite, Adolf Hitler? Trotsky was asked to assess the pact and then its bloody aftermath, as the Wehrmacht and the Red Army swallowed up Poland while the Kremlin asserted its mastery over Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and then invaded Finland. Hitler’s preoccupations were France and Great Britain, but it was only a matter of time, Trotsky confidently predicted, before the Führer would turn his armies eastward and invade the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s pact with Hitler forced the Soviet cartoonists to expunge the swastikas and the jackboots from their anti-Trotsky propaganda. Communist parties loyal to Moscow had to follow suit, among them the Mexican Communists, who were relentless in their efforts to compromise Trotsky’s asylum by portraying him as a meddler in Mexican politics. They had been banging this drum ever since his arrival in Mexico in January 1937, yet the anti-Trotsky campaign they launched in the winter of 1939–40 was more violent and sustained than any that had come before. Its slogan was a point-blank “Death to Trotsky!” And by the time the May Day marchers were shouting in unison for the traitor to be expelled, Trotsky had convened a meeting of his guards to warn them that his enemies were creating the atmosphere for an armed attack on the villa.
These threats put a strain on Trotsky’s nerves and his health. He was now sixty years old. He suffered from high blood pressure and insomnia, among other ailments. The best medicine was vigorous outdoor exercise. Trotsky loved to hunt and fish, yet the possibilities were limited in Mexico because of concerns for his safety. A picnic outing required the presence of several armed bodyguards and a detail of Mexican police.
Trotsky in the patio of his “fortress,” winter 1939–40.
Alexander H. Buchman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives
The Old Man, as his followers affectionately referred to Trotsky, adapted to his more restrictive environment by hunting for various species of cactus, which were transplanted to the patio in Coyoacán. These exhausting expeditions into the countryside were organized once every several weeks. Trotsky’s daily exercise these days revolved around his other new hobby, caring for the rabbits and chickens he kept in hutches and a caged yard in the patio. It was prison life, Trotsky often said, and his staff felt the same way. He chafed at his confinement and yearned to find an outlet for his restless energy. Adhering to routine, late in the evening of May 23 he had taken a sedative before going to bed.
A
T ABOUT FOUR
o’clock in the morning the nighttime quiet was shattered by the sound of automatic gunfire. Summoned from a deep sleep, Trotsky thought he was hearing fireworks, that the Mexicans were celebrating one of their fiestas. Coming to his senses, he realized that “the explosions were too close, right here within the room, next to me and overhead. The odor of gunpowder became more acrid, more penetrating. Clearly what we had always expected was now happening: we were under attack.”
Natalia was quicker to react. She hustled Trotsky off his bed and onto the floor, sliding down on top of him and into a corner of the room. Gunfire came through the two doors facing each other on opposite sides of the room and through the French windows just above the couple, creating a three-way crossfire. As bullets ricocheted off the walls and the ceiling, Natalia hovered protectively over her husband until he communicated to her through whispers and gestures to lie flat next to him. Splinters of glass and plaster flew in all directions in the darkness. “Where are the police?” Trotsky wondered, his mind now racing: “Where are the guards? Tied up? Kidnapped? Killed?” And what had become of Seva? One of the rooms from which the gunfire came was the bedroom of the couple’s fourteen-year-old grandson.
The barrage lasted several minutes. For a moment everything went silent, and then they heard the dull thud of an explosion. The door to Seva’s room swung open, admitting a fiery glow. Raising her head slightly, Natalia glimpsed a figure in uniform standing at the threshold and silhouetted against the flames, “his helmet, his distorted face, and
the metal buttons on his greatcoat glowing red,” she recalled afterward. The intruder seemed to be inspecting the Trotskys’ bedroom for signs of life. Although there were none, he raised a handgun and fired a round of bullets into the beds, then disappeared.
From the boy’s room came a loud, high-pitched shriek: “Dedu-shka!” It was Seva, calling out in Russian: “Grandfather!” The cry was part warning, part plea for help. For the grandparents, this was the most distressing moment of all. They got up off the floor and went over to his room, which was empty. A small fire was burning the floor beneath a wooden wardrobe, which crackled in the heat. “They’ve taken him,” Trotsky said, fearing that his young American comrades and everyone else in the house had been killed. Sporadic gunfire could still be heard from the patio. Natalia grabbed blankets and a rug to try to smother the fire, as Trotsky reached for his gun.
The American guards had been pinned down in their quarters by an attacker dressed in a police uniform and armed with a Thompson submachine gun. Hearing the rattle of machine guns inside the house, they visualized a massacre. As the gunfire eased up, the chief of the guard, Harold Robins, looked out his door and saw Seva standing in the lighted doorway of the kitchen, crying and speaking gibberish. Robins called to the boy to come to his room and ordered a fellow guard to kill the light. He then aimed his submachine gun across the yard in the direction of the retreating raiders, but the weapon jammed when he tried to shoot. Another guard, Jake Cooper, took aim with his pistol at a man running toward the garage exit, but seeing the stranger’s police uniform, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. Still another guard, Charles Cornell, took a potshot at a different “policeman” retreating toward the garage. These were the only shots the guards managed to fire.
Trotsky, meanwhile, had gone into his bathroom, where he could peer through a window that looked out into the patio toward the guards’ quarters. In the semidarkness, he saw a moving figure and called out, “Who is there?” The stranger answered too softly to be understood, so Trotsky fired his gun, missing the target’s head—which was fortunate, because the man Trotsky took for an intruder turned out to be Jake Cooper.
Natalia had smothered the fire in Seva’s room and returned to her own bedroom. Through the bullet holes in the door leading to Trotsky’s study, she observed a peaceful scene: “the papers and books looking immaculate in the calm glow of the shaded lamp on the desk.” She tried the door, but the impact of the bullets had jammed the lock. At that moment she heard Seva’s voice from somewhere in the patio, this time sounding joyous as he called out the names of friends who were staying at the house. A wave of relief swept over Trotsky and Natalia: The worst had not come to pass after all. They began pounding on the door. Moments later, three of the guards entered the study and forced open the door to the bedroom. Against all expectations, they found Trotsky and Natalia unharmed.
T
HE MEMBERS OF
the household gathered in the patio. Everyone was accounted for, except Bob Harte. Seva had been lightly wounded in the foot. At the sound of gunfire, he had scrambled under his bed and was grazed by a bullet shot through his mattress. Natalia had minor burns from extinguishing the fire, and Trotsky had a few scratches on his face from flying debris. Otherwise, no one was hurt.
From the roof, the guards could see that the five policemen in the
casita
had been tied up. Trotsky ordered his men to go outside and release them, but they hesitated because they could still hear gunfire in the distance and feared an ambush from the nearby cornfield. Trotsky insisted that the assault was over and that either the guards go out and untie the police immediately or he would do it himself.
The freed policemen described how twenty men dressed in police and army uniforms had surprised and overpowered them without firing a shot. Harte, they said, had opened the door for the assailants, apparently unaware of the danger—although it was impossible to say for sure. Nor were the policemen entirely certain whether Harte had been kidnapped or had left with the raiders of his own accord. Both automobiles had been taken, and the garage doors left wide open. The alarm system had been turned off, and the telephone wires were cut.
It was obvious that once the raiders were inside the patio, they knew the precise location of their target. Hundreds of bullets had riddled Trotsky’s bedroom, and more than seventy bullet holes were counted
in the doors, walls, and windows. Several bullets had sliced diagonally through the pillows and the bolster and the head of the mattress. Three homemade incendiary bombs were found in the patio unexploded. A fourth bomb had ignited the fire in Seva’s room.
“We marveled at our unexpected survival,” Natalia said later, even though the general sense of relief was tempered by concern for Harte. “It was a sheer miracle that we escaped with our lives.” Indeed, Trotsky would be congratulated on his “miraculous escape” by well-wishers near and far in the coming days, although his own view of the matter was more down-to-earth. “The assassination failed because of one of those accidents which enter as an integral element into every war,” he observed. He and Natalia had survived only because they had kept still and pretended to be dead, instead of calling for help or using their guns.
The armed attack delivered a shock, but it was not a surprise. Indeed, for a long time Trotsky had been ridiculed by the Mexican Communists for exaggerating the threat to his personal safety. Now he stood vindicated. Or did he? The Mexican detectives who arrived on the scene shortly after the attack were not convinced. The investigation was led by the chief of the Mexican secret police, Colonel Leandro Sánchez Salazar. He found it curious that Trotsky and Natalia and the household members appeared so calm under the circumstances. His suspicions mounted when Trotsky informed him that the perpetrator of the attack was none other than Joseph Stalin, by means of his secret police, the NKVD—although Trotsky persisted in referring to the organization by its former initials, the GPU. And by the time the colonel had finished counting the bullet holes in the bedroom walls and had pondered the spectacular incompetence of the raiders, he strongly suspected that Trotsky’s escape was not a miracle but a hoax, a way for him to draw sympathy to himself and to discredit his enemies.