Trotsky (39 page)

Hansen saw Mercader’s automatic pistol on Trotsky’s desk. Trotsky’s glasses lay there, too—one of the lenses was broken and out of the frame. On the floor Hansen’s eyes took in something he had earlier missed, a blood-soaked instrument that resembled a prospector’s pick: one end was pointed, like an ice pick, the other was flat and wide; the handle, about a foot long, had been cut down for concealment.

Hansen began punching Mercader, hitting him on the mouth and
on the jaw below the ear until the pain in his hand forced him to stop. The urge to kill was overwhelming, and Mercader sensed this. “Kill me! Kill me!” he pleaded. “I don’t deserve to live. Kill me. I did not do it on the order of the GPU, but kill me.” As they were beating him, he went in and out of consciousness, moaning several times, “They have imprisoned my mother.”

Suddenly Cornell burst into the room. “The keys aren’t in his car.” He searched Mercader’s clothing for them while Hansen raced out to open the garage doors. Moments later, Cornell was driving out of the garage.

While they waited for Cornell to return with the doctor, Natalia and Hansen kneeled at Trotsky’s side, holding his hands. “He hit you with a pick,” Hansen told him. “He did not shoot you. I am sure it is only a surface wound,” he said, this time without conviction. “No,” Trotsky responded, “I feel here”—pointing to his heart—“that this time they have succeeded.” Hansen again sought to reassure him, but Trotsky understood what was happening. “Take care of Natalia. She has been with me many, many years,” he said, as his eyes filled with tears. Natalia began to cry over her husband, kissing his hand.

Cornell arrived with Dr. Dutren. He examined the wound and said it was not serious, although his manner said otherwise. A few moments later the ambulance arrived, and the police entered to take away the assailant, who was bloodied and bruised. As they dragged him out of the study, he cried,
“Ma mère! Ma mère!”

The ambulance men brought in the stretcher. Natalia did not want her husband to be taken to a hospital: the risk of another attack was too great. Tense moments followed, as everyone waited for Trotsky to decide what to do. Hansen, Cornell, and Robins were kneeling beside him now. “We will go with you,” Hansen told him. “I leave it to your decision,” Trotsky said in a whisper. As they were about to place him on the stretcher, he again whispered, “I want everything I own to go to Natalia.” And finally, in a voice that wrenched the hearts of the men leaning over him, he said, “You will take care of her…”

Natalia and Hansen rode with Trotsky in the ambulance, which jolted over the potholes and plowed through the mud of Coyoacán’s near-impassable streets. The siren wailed incessantly en route to the city,
accompanied by the shrill whistles of the squadron of police motorcycles leading the way.

Trotsky remained conscious. His left arm was extended along the side of his body. It was paralyzed. His right hand wandered in circles over the white sheet, touched the water basin near his head, then found Natalia. Bending very low she asked him how he felt. “Better now,” she heard him whisper despite the din. “Better now”—this gave her hope.

Evening descended as the ambulance sped through the bustling streets of Mexico City, weaving its way through traffic toward the hospital. Trotsky whispered into Hansen’s ear: “He was a political assassin. Jacson was a member of the GPU or a fascist. Most likely the GPU.”

The sirens died away as the ambulance pulled up to the entrance of the Green Cross Emergency Hospital, where a crowd had gathered. Inside, they laid him down on a narrow cot. Silently the doctors examined the wound, as Natalia stood alongside her husband. On their instructions, a nurse began to shave Trotsky’s head. With a hint of a smile, he said to Natalia, “Look, we found a barber.”

Trotsky looked over at Hansen and gestured weakly with his right hand. “Joe, you…have…notebook?” Hansen leaned against the cot and with his broken right hand recorded Trotsky’s words. When Natalia then asked what he had said, Hansen replied, “He wanted me to make a note about French statistics.” This surprised Natalia, who thought it was strange for him to have his mind on French statistics at such a moment—or perhaps he was beginning to improve.

They began to undress the patient. Using scissors they cut away his blue jacket, then his knitted vest, then his shirt, and then they un-strapped his wristwatch. As they began to remove his pants, Trotsky said to Natalia, “I don’t want them to undress me…I want you to do it.” These words, spoken in a grave and sorrowful voice, were the last he ever spoke to Natalia. When she had finished, she bent over him and kissed his lips. He kissed her back. Again she kissed him, and again he responded. And then one final time.

Trotsky underwent surgery that evening. The doctors trepanned an area of the right parietal bone. Blood and gray matter spilled out from a wound three-quarters of an inch wide and two and three-quarters inches
deep. The direction of the pickax was from top to bottom, front to back, and right to left. Thus, it turned out, Jacson had not struck Trotsky from behind, as was initially believed, which might explain why the victim was able to prevent his assailant from striking him a second time.

The first medical bulletin stated that although the results of the operation were “very satisfactory,” the prognosis was grave. Trotsky was still in a coma and was paralyzed on the left side. The chief surgeon was quoted as saying that the patient’s chances were one in ten. The New York comrades made arrangements to send down Dr. Walter Dandy, director of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University.

Natalia remained at Trotsky’s bedside through the night, despite the urging of the doctors to get some sleep. She sat beside him, dressed in a white hospital gown, holding his hand. She was waiting for him to wake up and take control of himself, as he had always done, and her hopes rose and fell with his breathing, which was alternately regular and calm, then rapid and heavy.

Hansen, Robins, and Cornell stood guard at the hospital. During the evening, Colonel Salazar arrived to question Mercader, who was being treated for his wounds in a room two doors down the corridor from Trotsky. His face was bruised and swollen, both eyes were blackened, and the gashes Robins had inflicted to the top of his head needed stitches. In Mercader’s raincoat the police found a dagger nearly fourteen inches long. His gun, a .45 Star automatic, had eight bullets in the magazine and one in the firing chamber. He was also carrying a large sum of money—$890—which seemed to indicate that he had plans to flee Mexico after the attack.

A letter of confession, written in French, was also found on the assailant, presumably meant to be discovered only upon his death. From its telltale misspellings to its author’s claim to be a disillusioned follower of Trotsky, it bore the fingerprints of the NKVD. Jacson had been driven to murder, the letter alleged, because Trotsky had been pressuring him to break with Sylvia, one of the “Minority rabble,” and go to the Soviet Union to engage in acts of sabotage and organize the assassination of Stalin.

Under questioning by the police, the assailant began to spin a web of tangled lies about his background, his contacts in Mexico City, and
his movements before the attack. “It was a veritable maze,” said Colonel Salazar. Yet Mercader’s account of the details of his crime had the ring of authenticity. He said he closed his eyes before striking the blow, which could explain why it failed to knock Trotsky unconscious. “The man cried out in a way that I shall never forget as long as I live,” said Mercader. “His cry was ‘aaaaaah…’ very long. Infinitely long. And it appears to me still in these moments that this cry penetrates my brain.”

Trotsky rose up like a madman, Mercader said, threw himself on him and bit his hand. “You see, here, I still have the marks of his teeth.” Mercader pushed him away and he fell to the floor but managed to get up and leave the room. “I remained like one demented, without knowing what to do. At this time people entered and beat me.” He begged Trotsky’s guards to kill him, he said, but they refused. “I want to die.”

This was the fate that Sylvia now wished for him. Upon hearing that Jacson had attacked Trotsky, she rushed over to the house as a horrible truth began to sink in. She informed the police that the Canadian Frank Jacson was really a Belgian named Jacques Mornard—though of course this was nowhere close to the bottom of things. She was placed under arrest and transferred to the Green Cross hospital in a state of nervous collapse. Every time the detectives mentioned Trotsky’s name, she sobbed uncontrollably. She cursed Mornard as a Stalinist agent and kept screaming at her interrogators, “Kill him! Kill him!”

During the day after the attack, Trotsky remained in a coma. His blood pressure and pulse approached normal, but the doctors offered little hope. A press release composed by Hansen for distribution to the dozens of reporters gathered at the hospital revealed Trotsky’s last words, as recorded by Hansen, before he slipped into unconsciousness: “I am close to death from the blow of a political assassin, who struck me down in my room. I struggled with him. He had entered the room to talk about French statistics. He struck me. Please say to our friends that I am sure of the victory of the Fourth International. Go Forward!”

Hansen telephoned Dobbs at noon New York time to say that Trotsky’s condition was getting worse. He had lost all his reflexes, including control of his eyelids. An hour later Hansen reported a sharp rise in blood pressure. Dobbs sent a telegram to each branch of the
Socialist Workers Party warning that the outlook was bleak. “We will all do everything possible to help preserve the flickering life of our Old Man.”

In Los Angeles, Jan Frankel recognized the hand of the GPU and puzzled over how it was that Trotsky had been left alone with his assailant. In Minneapolis, Hank and Dorothy Schultz searched their memories for missed clues about Jacson and cursed themselves for having been played as his pawns. In Baltimore, Van was out taking a walk on the morning of August 21 when he glanced down at a sidewalk stack of sale copies of
The New York Times
and spotted the headline in the middle of the front page: “Trotsky, Wounded by ‘Friend’ in Home, Is Believed Dying.” He headed home to listen for reports on the radio, racked with guilt for having left Trotsky’s side before the real danger set in.

T
ROTSKY’S BREATHING HAD
become more rapid now, early in the evening of August 21, alarmingly so. Natalia, losing her composure, asked the doctors what it meant. For the next twenty minutes they worked to save the patient, but at 7:25 Trotsky’s last struggle ended.

Colonel Salazar stepped out the front door of Green Cross Hospital and uttered the words that became the next day’s headline around the world: “Gentlemen! Trotsky is dead!” This set off a mad scramble for the telephones by the hundred or so Mexican and foreign correspondents on the scene.

When it was over, Natalia knelt down and pressed her face against the soles of her husband’s feet. Until the very end she had waited for him to awaken and decide matters for himself. She would see this happen, though only several months later, in a dream. She had moved out of their bedroom, and into the adjacent room that once belonged to Seva, at the base of the T. Trotsky came out of his study, passed through their bedroom, and entered her room. He appeared vibrant and was immaculately dressed. His white hair was thick and full. His eyes were a piercing blue. He walked over to her, stood there a moment, then said calmly, “Everything is finished.”

T
rotsky’s ashes are buried in the patio of his home in Coyoacán, beneath a monolith engraved with a large hammer and sickle. The Mexican government bought the house from Natalia in November 1940 and arranged for her to reside there as its caretaker. Over the next twenty years, she maintained the house just as it was when Trotsky lived there, leaving untouched even the remaining bullet holes from the May 1940 assault.

Natalia also kept a close eye on Trotsky’s political legacy. In the United States, the Red Decade of the 1930s ended with a veritable stampede from Marxism. This exodus was abetted by an outpouring of patriotism during the Second World War, despite the wartime alliance between the United States and “Uncle Joe” Stalin’s USSR. Trotsky’s Fourth International persisted nonetheless, led from New York by James Cannon and the Socialist Workers Party. Into the postwar years, the Fourth International continued to adhere to Trotsky’s old position that Stalin’s USSR was a degenerated workers’ state, a designation it also applied to the Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe, which had been occupied by the Red Army at the end of the war.

Natalia was increasingly skeptical of this assessment. She believed that, were Trotsky alive, he would not consider the postwar USSR to be any kind of workers’ state. Privately she told the leaders of the Fourth International that Stalinism had by now completely destroyed the Revolution and that the so-called people’s democracies of Eastern Europe were nothing more than Soviet vassal states.

The last straw for Natalia was the Korean War, which broke out in June 1950 and which Trotsky’s disciples portrayed as the mortal struggle of the East’s colonial peoples against American imperialism. Natalia resigned from the Fourth International, a decision she explained at great length in an open letter to its Executive Committee. In it she recalled the greeting sent to her by a recent congress of the Socialist Workers Party, which had assured her that the party continued to be guided by Trotsky’s ideas. “I must tell you that I read these lines with much bitterness,” Natalia said. “As you will see from what I am writing you, I do not see his ideas in your politics.”

Stalin’s death in March 1953 was a major turning point in Soviet history. Beria was executed later that year, as the Terror came to an end and the camps began to release their prisoners. Emerging as Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a momentous speech to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956 denouncing Stalin’s crimes and his cult of personality. Khrushchev limited his criticism to the wickedness of Stalin and his henchmen, carefully avoiding a wholesale indictment of the Soviet system.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization led to the political rehabilitation of selected victims of Stalin’s Terror—though not the defendants in the major purge trials, and certainly not Trotsky, whose name and image had been thoroughly erased in Stalin’s time from books, museums, and films. Trotsky remained useful as a Soviet bogeyman, however. When Mao Zedong accused Khrushchev of “revisionism” and challenged his leadership of the world communist movement, the Kremlin condemned the Chinese Communists for their “neo-Trotskyist deviation.”

After Khrushchev’s speech, Natalia addressed a letter to the Soviet government, in the person of Kliment Voroshilov, her husband’s old antagonist going back to the days of the Russian civil war. As chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Voroshilov was now formally head of state. Natalia wrote to ask for information about her son Seryozha. The last news she heard about him was of his arrest in January 1937 as a mass poisoner. Natalia never received a reply to her letter.

V
OROSHILOV STEPPED DOWN
as head of the Supreme Soviet on May 7, 1960. One day earlier, Ramón Mercader walked out of a Mex
ico City prison after serving a twenty-year sentence for Trotsky’s murder. Mercader’s stay in Mexico might have been much shorter. In 1944, Soviet intelligence hatched an escape plan for Mercader, who was informed of the plot. The conspiracy was frustrated by the unexpected return to Mexico of Caridad Mercader—this time not as an operative but as a rogue mother, guilt-ridden over the fate of her son. Caridad’s careless behavior in Mexico City may have thwarted the operation to liberate Trotsky’s assassin.

Caridad seems to have lost her bearings after the success of Operation Duck. In a private Kremlin ceremony on June 17, 1941, she and Leonid Eitingon were awarded the Order of Lenin for their role in Trotsky’s assassination, while Pavel Sudoplatov received the Order of the Red Banner. After the war, Iosif Grigulevich—the elusive “Felipe”—was presented with the Order of the Red Star. Ramón’s recognition would have to wait until his release and, as Stalin made clear, it would depend on how well he acquitted himself while behind bars.

In prison, Mercader stuck to his story about being a disgruntled Belgian follower of Trotsky by the name of Jacques Mornard. It was only thanks to Mexican detective work that his true identity was discovered in 1950, although he never confessed his ties to Soviet intelligence. When he was set free in May 1960—three months early, for reasons of secrecy—he went first to Cuba, then to Czechoslovakia, then to the Soviet Union. After his release, he rarely saw his mother. His brother Luis claimed that Ramón never forgave her for her recklessness in returning to Mexico City. “Thanks to her, I had to spend an extra sixteen years in prison,” he said.

On June 8, 1961, Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded Voroshilov as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, received Mercader in the Kremlin and, in a secret ceremony, awarded him the title Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin, and the Gold Star medal. The award citation praised him for displaying “heroism and bravery” in carrying out a “special task.”

N
ATALIA MOVED TO
Paris in 1960 and died there two years later. Her ashes are buried alongside her husband’s in the patio of the house in Coyoacán, which is now part of Mexico City. Seva and his wife
and children occupied the house until 1990, when it became a public museum financed and administered by the Mexican government, with Seva’s participation.

A few blocks away, the Blue House also became a favorite tourist attraction. After Trotsky’s death, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo became ardent supporters of Stalin’s USSR, and both painters contributed their talents to the burgeoning Stalin cult during the postwar years. Rivera’s long-term quest to rejoin the Mexican Communist Party finally succeeded in 1954, four years after Frida’s own admission to the party and two months after her death.

When Frida died, an unfinished portrait of Stalin stood on her easel in the Blue House, where she lived out her final days. It still stands in the same place in what is now the Museo Frida Kahlo. For many years, a small bust of Stalin adorned the bedroom where Trotsky and Natalia used to spend their nights. Visitors to the Blue House are not told that Trotsky once lived there—although as Frida has achieved cult status, more and more people have heard the story of how she had an affair with old man Trotsky, right under Diego’s nose.

At Frida’s funeral, Rivera was accompanied in the procession through the city streets by former president Lázaro Cárdenas and by Diego’s onetime nemesis David Alfaro Siqueiros. Siqueiros arrived there by a circuitous route. Six weeks after Trotsky’s murder, Colonel Salazar finally caught up with the fugitive painter, in Hostotipaquilla, a village in the state of Jalisco. Siqueiros was held for six months before his trial, during which time Mexican and Spanish intellectuals petitioned President Manuel Ávila Camacho to allow this national treasure to go free.

At the trial, Siqueiros spoke passionately in his own defense, justifying his extreme actions by pointing to the counterrevolutionary activity Trotsky had conducted from his Coyoacán redoubt. The purpose of the raid, he claimed, was not to murder Trotsky but rather “to help expose the treason of a political center of espionage and provocation” that violated Mexico’s independence and, moreover, undermined the defense of Republican Spain. Siqueiros criticized President Cárdenas and the Communist Party for tolerating Trotsky’s perfidy and forcing him to take matters into his own hands.

Siqueiros was acquitted of all the serious charges: homicide in the death of Robert Sheldon Harte, attempted homicide of Trotsky, criminal conspiracy, and the illegal use of firearms. He was still on the hook for the lesser charges of trespassing and breaking and entering, but he was released on bail. President Camacho summoned Siqueiros and told him he could have his liberty only if he left the country, which he did in April 1941, moving to Chile.

Siqueiros was allowed to return to Mexico in November 1943, although he did not steer clear of political controversy nor manage to stay out of jail. He went on to create some of his greatest works of art, perhaps none greater than the massive interior mural he painted in Chapultepec Castle on the history of Mexico:
From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to the Revolution,
which he completed in 1965. In 1966, the Mexican government awarded him the National Art Prize, and the following year the Soviet government honored him with the Lenin Peace Prize.

In his last years, Siqueiros was revered as a national institution, and when he died in 1974 he was given a hero’s burial. Early in his career his political activism had so often pulled him away from his art that as a muralist he was far less prolific than either Rivera or Orozco. In the end, however, he left behind an imposing body of work. Visitors to the Leon Trotsky Museum in Coyoacán can still view the scars left by his most politically inspired endeavor, on the walls of Trotsky’s old bedroom.

On the afternoon of June 27, 1941, a team of FBI agents and U.S. marshals raided the branch headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party in Minneapolis and St. Paul. They seized a large amount of radical literature, two red flags, and an autographed photo of Trotsky.

On the basis of this and other evidence, the federal authorities charged twenty-nine Trotskyist militants with conspiracy against the U.S. government. Four of the accused were national leaders of the Socialist Workers Party: James Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, Al Goldman, and
Felix Morrow. Fourteen others were connected to the Teamsters, including Ray Rainbolt, head of the union’s Defense Guard, and Dorothy Schultz, Hank’s wife and Twin Cities secretary of the Workers Defense League, as well as former Coyoacán guards Jake Cooper and Emil Hansen, the better half of the disgruntled duo of Bill and Emil.

The indictment contained two counts, the first of which charged the defendants with conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States through armed revolution. The prosecution sought to demonstrate that the accused took their inspiration from the Russian Revolution and their ideas from Lenin and Trotsky: “and accordingly, certain of the defendants would, and they did, go…to Mexico City, Mexico, there to advise with and to receive the advice, counsel, guidance, and directions of the said Leon Trotsky.” The second count invoked the Smith Act of 1940, which made it a criminal offense to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government. Among the evidence presented in court was Trotsky’s photograph and his writings, along with the published works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

All the defendants were cleared of the conspiracy charge, but eighteen of them were found guilty of violating the Smith Act, including Cannon, Dobbs, Goldman, Cooper, and Hansen. Their prison sentences ranged from a year and a day to sixteen months, which they began serving on January 1, 1944.

The Communist Party aided the Justice Department in prosecuting these Trotskyists by providing incriminating documents, some of which had been collected by Sylvia Caldwell, Cannon’s secretary, who was an informant for the NKVD. After she was exposed by a Communist defector in 1954, she was brought before a grand jury but refused to testify, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. She finally confessed to her NKVD past before a second grand jury in 1958.

That was the year that the law also caught up with Mark Zborowski, aka Étienne and “Tulip,” who was Lyova’s shadow and his successor as Trotsky’s right-hand man in Paris. Zborowski came to the United States in December 1941. In New York, where he moved in Russian émigré and Trotskyist circles, he reported on the activities of Al Goldman and Jean van Heijenoort, among others. He was also put on the trail of
Victor Kravchenko, a trade official whose defection to the United States in 1944 greatly embarrassed the Moscow government.

In New York, Zborowski continued his research in cultural anthropology, at first in association with the American Jewish Committee, then as a consultant to a Columbia University research project on contemporary cultures, sponsored by the U.S. Navy. This work led to his co-authorship in 1952 of
Life Is with People,
a groundbreaking study of the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe before World War II, with an introduction by Margaret Mead. In 1954 he began research at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in the Bronx on the rehabilitation of disabled people. It was at that time that he came under scrutiny from the FBI.

The noose tightened around Zborowski when Alexander Orlov, the Soviet defector who had gone underground in 1938, surfaced in New York. Orlov and his wife had been living on the NKVD funds he absconded with at the time of his defection and flight to the United States. As these funds ran low, he decided he would support himself by publishing his memoirs—although a carefully crafted version that would honor his pledge of secrecy to Moscow and at the same time not make him look like a man with blood on his hands. By a stroke of good luck, he completed his book manuscript on the eve of Stalin’s death, in March 1953, which generated enormous interest in what was published later that year as
The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes.

Orlov made his first big splash a month after Stalin’s death with a series of articles in
Life
magazine. According to Orlov, during his time as NKVD station chief in Spain, he functioned more or less as a political attaché, and played no role in the murder of Andrés Nin and others on the non-Communist left during the Spanish civil war. Orlov had known for years that he would have some explaining to do about his actions in Spain. Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, in a 1939 memoir, had identified Orlov as the NKVD’s chief terrorist there. The FBI assumed that Orlov was keeping secrets, although the agency’s interrogators failed to break him. Orlov dismissed Krivitsky’s claims about him as a “Trotskyist invention.” Krivitsky was not there to back up his assertions: in February 1941 he was found dead in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, a victim of suicide.