Trotsky (7 page)

Trotsky had been asked such questions during the hearings in Coyoacán. Typically he invoked the exigencies of the civil war in order to justify Bolshevik violence. Those who confronted him now, however, were far more knowledgeable about these matters. And they believed they could identify Bolshevism’s defining moment: the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921. Kronstadt was a fortress city and naval base on an island in the Gulf of Finland, some twenty miles west of Petrograd. The sailors there had played a crucial role in the revolutionary events of 1917. Trotsky, who was their favorite, honored them at the time as “the pride and glory” of the Russian Revolution.

Only a few years later, however, Kronstadt came to symbolize something entirely different. In the frozen winter of 1921, the sailors of Kronstadt, which was the main base of the Baltic fleet, rose up in rebel
lion against Bolshevik rule. They demanded an end to the Communist monopoly of power, genuine elections to the Soviets, and the cessation of political terror, among other things. A special target of their wrath was “the bloody Field Marshal Trotsky.”

The Bolsheviks portrayed the uprising as an act of counterrevolution, in danger of being exploited by Western imperialists and White Guard generals, who perhaps had instigated it. Red Army troops under the command of General Tukhachevsky crossed over the ice to crush the rebellion, which they managed to do only with great difficulty and after suffering heavy losses. Fifty thousand Red Army soldiers made the final assault against nearly 15,000 defenders. Afterward, hundreds if not thousands of rebels were executed without trial.

Trotsky’s critics now revived the memory of Kronstadt, making it the centerpiece of their case for an essential continuity between Bolshevism and Stalinism. Trotsky could hardly believe the bad timing of this assault on his reputation, in the middle of his campaign against the Moscow trials. “One would think that the Kronstadt revolt occurred not seventeen years ago but only yesterday,” he complained. He accused his critics of romanticizing the Kronstadt sailors, and he claimed he played no role in suppressing the rebellion, although in fact as war commissar his role was central. When he learned of the revolt, he issued a demand for unconditional surrender. The Petrograd authorities then warned the sailors not to put up resistance, or “you will be shot like partridges.”

Trotsky answered his critics in a series of short articles and in correspondence, while worrying about the effect this discussion might have on the deliberations of the Dewey Commission. A special source of concern was that one of his most troublesome antagonists on Kronstadt happened to be a member of the commission: Wendelin Thomas, the former German Communist, who had helped lead the Wilhelmshaven sailors’ revolt in November 1918. Thomas was still at it, accusing Trotsky of hypocrisy, in December 1937, on the eve of the commission’s announcement of its verdict. “That you should seek vindication, I regard as well and proper,” he wrote, “that you should deny vindication to your political opponents I regard as good Bolshevism.” Trotsky’s portrayal of the Kronstadt sailors as political rednecks seeking privileged food ra
tions was a slander, said Thomas. “You call to arms against the calumnies of the Russian state machine of 1937 but at the same time you attempt to excuse and justify the calumnies of the Russian state machine of 1921.”

On December 12, simultaneous with the publication of the complete record of the Coyoacán hearings, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials announced its verdict: the trials were a frame-up; Trotsky and his son were not guilty as charged. Trotsky was jubilant. He told his American secretary, “My boy, we have won our first great victory. Now things will begin to change.” The blow to Stalin, he said, was “tremendous.” The verdict would deliver a “great moral shock” to public opinion. The initial press coverage of the verdict he described as “the best we could hope for.” Even the Mexican press was “extremely favorable.”

Yet, unhappily for Trotsky, the truth kept marching on. On December 13, as the first stories about the verdict appeared in the American newspapers, Dewey made a radio broadcast on CBS, warning American liberals away from Soviet Communism. Now more than ever, Dewey said, he disagreed with the “ideas and theories of Trotsky,” including his defense of the USSR. “A country that uses all the methods of fascism to suppress opposition can hardly be held up to us as a democracy, as a model to follow against fascism. Next time anybody says to you that we have to choose between fascism and communism, ask him what is the difference between the Hitlerite Gestapo and the Stalinite G.P.U., so that a democracy should have to choose one or the other.”

Dewey expanded on this theme in an interview published in
The Washington Post
a few days later. The results of the Soviet experiment were now in, Dewey said, and one of the fundamental things they demonstrated was that democracy could not survive if it was restricted to a single political party. In Russia, the October Revolution had led to the gruesome travesty of justice enacted in the October Hall. Elsewhere, the outcome would differ only in degree. “The dictatorship of the proletariat has led and, I am convinced, always must lead to dictatorship over the proletariat and over the party. I see no reason to believe that something similar would not happen in every country in which an attempt is made to establish a Communist government.”

When Trotsky learned about Dewey’s statements he was indignant, though of course he could say nothing publicly. Meanwhile, his critics kept nipping at his Achilles heel. Kronstadt would not go away. Well into 1938, Trotsky was forced to defend himself in articles about the rebellion and in one long essay on politics and morality. “Idealists and pacifists have always blamed revolution for ‘excesses,’” Trotsky wrote. “The crux of the matter is that the ‘excesses’ spring from the very nature of the revolution, which is itself an ‘excess’ of history.” In this sense, Trotsky said, “I carry full and complete responsibility for the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion.”

For Trotsky, it came down to the question of whether the end justified the means. “From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.” Dewey challenged Trotsky’s reasoning in a brief rebuttal article called “Means and Ends.” Dewey had no objection to the ultimate end Trotsky put forward, which sounded vaguely like egalitarian socialism. But Dewey detected that Trotsky was deducing acceptable means from an outside source: the Marxist concept of “class struggle,” which Dewey classified as “an alleged law of history.” Dewey contended that while class struggle might indeed be an appropriate means, it had to be justified and not simply taken on faith.

Dewey, the pragmatist, was alert to the mutual shaping of ends and means. Trotsky, the Marxist, was guided by his belief in an iron law of historical progress. To Dewey, Trotsky was the prisoner of an ideology. “He was tragic,” Dewey said in delivering his ultimate verdict on Trotsky a dozen years later. “To see such brilliant native intelligence locked up in absolutes.”

T
he departure of the Dewey Commission in mid-April 1937 brought something of a reprieve for Trotsky and his staff at the Blue House after the sweatshop days of the hearings. For several weeks afterward there was more to do to reinforce the case for Trotsky’s innocence of the charges brought against him in the Moscow trials: more documents to be collected, more testimonies solicited, and all of it translated into English and sent to New York, where the commission continued its deliberations. Trotsky took a break from these activities in early May, when he headed for the mountains and to Taxco, a silver-mining town of red-tiled roofs and narrow, steeply winding cobblestone roads beneath an imposing Spanish Baroque cathedral, in those days about a four-hour drive from Mexico City.

Yet for Trotsky, a relaxing vacation was out of the question. Mentally he worked overtime trying to anticipate Stalin’s next move and those of his provocateurs and assassins. He agonized over the fates of family members left behind in the Soviet Union. And throughout he continued to suffer from the headaches, dizziness, and high blood pressure that had plagued him for years.

Natalia and the staff had hoped that the Taxco getaway would allow Trotsky to rest a bit and enable him to return to work reinvigorated, but this was not the way it turned out. In a letter to Trotskyist headquarters in New York City, one of his American secretaries, Bernard Wolfe, assessed the situation this way on May 26: “The old man relaxed a little bit at Taxco, but suffered, I think, from being shut in and having people
around constantly. Now, since his return, he is not feeling well and is trying to rest as much as possible—the last months have been a terrible strain for him.” The Blue House should have felt nearly empty after the crush of the Dewey hearings, yet the size of the household—secretaries, guards, and kitchen staff—left Trotsky with little privacy. Nor was escaping the house a simple proposition. Such was the concern for the Old Man’s safety that an excursion into the environs of Mexico City required the presence of four bodyguards and all the preparations of a military expedition. And until later that year the automobiles for such outings had to be borrowed, which made planning ahead more difficult and left little room for spontaneity.

The strain on Trotsky took a toll on his secretaries, although as one of the American newcomers, Wolfe was not as vulnerable as the two European veterans, Jan Frankel and Jean van Heijenoort. Frankel, a native of Prague, had joined up with Trotsky in 1930 in Turkey, where he was first exiled after his deportation from the Soviet Union. Van Heijenoort—or Van, as Trotsky called him—came on board in 1932 from his native France. Along with Lyova, Trotsky’s elder son and right-hand man now based in Paris, these men were Trotsky’s essential
adjutants
during the exile years. More than mere secretaries, Frankel and Van served as translators, political advisers, and bodyguards.

Van also worked as Trotsky’s archivist, organizing his papers, both in-house and later at Harvard and Stanford. Afterward, he revealed what it was like to work in close quarters with the Old Man, and in the process he got some things off his chest. “Trotsky displayed all his amiability with visitors and newcomers,” Van recalled. “He would talk, explain, gesture, ask questions, and at times be really charming. The presence of a young woman seemed to give him special animation. But the more one worked with him, the more demanding and brusque he became.” The situation in Mexico was exacerbated by living in close quarters and the unrelieved security regime. “You treat me like an object,” Trotsky once complained to Van.

Van observes of Trotsky that “the three persons toward whom he allowed himself to be the most brusque were Lyova, Jan Frankel, and me.” Frankel had taken over as Trotsky’s principal secretary in February 1931, after Lyova left Turkey for Berlin. With his dark hair and eye-
brows, squarish head, dour mien, and the inevitable cigarette between his fingers, Frankel at thirty-two looked like a somewhat rumpled version of Edward R. Murrow.

It seems that Trotsky’s brusqueness—and his explosive temper—may have exceeded the limits of Frankel’s tolerance in the days surrounding the Dewey hearings. “One day Trotsky went to Frankel’s room to ask him for a document,” Van remembered, “and the document was not ready. Trotsky went back to his study and slammed the door. It was a glazed door with many panes, whose putty had long since been eroded by the Mexican rains. Under the impact, the panes fell out, one after another, the crystal din of each fall reverberating throughout the house.”

The end of the hearings did nothing to lighten the atmosphere. “Unfortunately,” Frankel wrote to a comrade in New York on June 8, “all my predictions have been fulfilled. Our friend, since the departure of the Commission, has been extremely tired, not to say ill. Under these circumstances, all the negative aspects of his external life have become sharper and more critical. The confined life in a small house, without any liberty of movement, surrounded constantly by other people, with no possibility of finding even a corner in the patio where there is no disturbance, creates a terrible tension for him.” The tension led to clashes between the two men, until matters reached the point where Trotsky insisted that Frankel move out of the house. That was at the beginning of June. In October Frankel would leave Mexico for New York and the headquarters of the American Trotskyist organization. For the time being, he continued to serve the Old Man loyally in Coyoacán. This included advising the New York comrades about the requirements of the household and appealing for the scarce funds needed to fill them.

One critical need was for an automobile. Diego and Frida often contributed the use of their cars and drivers, but after the hearings Diego went off to the countryside to paint. Frida, who had lately taken ill, could no longer be imposed upon. Her sister, Cristina, who often served as chauffeur in these early months, had recently undergone surgery and was in the hospital. “Thus the old man doesn’t leave the house for weeks at a time,” Frankel informed New York. “He is a real prisoner.” Trotsky’s physician, meanwhile, had recommended an extended
period of rest for him away from Mexico City, but “here as well we are entirely paralyzed through the lack of money.”

An automobile would have gone a long way toward alleviating the problem, but Frankel now put forward a more radical recommendation: Trotsky and Natalia ought to be moved to a different house, one that would allow them greater freedom of movement. He had located what he believed was a far superior residence, one so desirable that “it would be a catastrophe to let this opportunity slip by.” Yet the new home would require hundreds of dollars to cover a six-month deposit on rent plus the costs of the move and of security installations—money, Frankel knew, that the cash-poor American Trotskyists were unlikely to be able to raise.

Frankel’s use of the word “catastrophe,” if not exactly alarmist, seems unwarranted by the circumstances his letter describes. It may have been inspired by an inconceivable turn of events in Coyoacán that he dared not divulge: Trotsky had become romantically involved with Frida Kahlo. The Old Man was having an affair.

Trotsky’s liaison with Frida, which got under way sometime after the hearings, did not come as a complete surprise to Frankel or to Van, who had heard stories of his various conquests during his glory days. Based on his observations of Trotsky’s behavior with Frida and, shortly afterward, with another Mexican woman, Van figured Trotsky to be an experienced philanderer. Yet this was Trotsky’s first romantic adventure since his exile from Russia in 1929. When he lived in Turkey, in France, and then in Norway, his opportunities for an extramarital affair were severely constrained. Now, at fifty-seven, in his final place of exile, Trotsky found that circumstances conspired in his favor.

It is no mystery why Trotsky was attracted to Frida Kahlo. The daughter of a German-Jewish immigrant father and a Mexican mother, at twenty-nine she was a striking and exotic beauty with black hair, audacious almond-shaped eyes beneath batwing eyebrows, and sensuous lips. She was even more attractive than contemporary photographs reveal, to judge by the testimony of the men who made her acquaintance in the late 1930s and were struck by her forceful personality, quick intelligence, and much more. An American friend of the Riveras who was no prude says that Frida could draw from “the richest vocabulary
of obscenities I have ever known one of her sex to possess.” She had experienced considerable hardship. Polio, contracted at the age of six, had left her with a withered right leg. At age eighteen came a tram accident that nearly killed her, shattering her pelvis, injuring her spine, and crushing her right foot. She was in nearly constant pain as a result of the injuries sustained in the accident and from the multiple surgeries and medical procedures she underwent to treat them—including, in her final decade, a succession of twenty-eight orthopedic corsets.

Frida compensated for her disabilities by transforming her appearance into her best-known work of art. She adopted as her signature costume the colorful apparel of the region of Tehuantepec, most notably the long skirt that hid her deformed right leg. During her extended convalescence after the accident in 1925, when for months she was bedridden, she began to paint seriously. She would use her art to portray her suffering, both physical and psychological, creating shocking imagery and symbolism, much of it intensely personal, as in her breakthrough painting,
Henry Ford Hospital,
a harrowing depiction of the abortion she underwent in Detroit in 1932. Her most compelling paintings indulge in the fantastic and the grotesque, deploying a morbid sense of humor to leaven the profusion of blood and tears. It is little wonder that in the late 1930s the Surrealists wished to claim her as their own.

From 1929, the year she married Diego, to the time she met Trotsky, Frida painted infrequently and in the enormous shadow of her husband’s artistic reputation. For now, she was mostly Mrs. Rivera. Her small, finely detailed paintings, depicting herself, sometimes her animals and friends, and occasionally a still life, exhibited none of the political consciousness or commitment that drew Trotsky to Rivera’s heavily populated epic frescoes on Mexican history, American industry and technology, and the Russian Revolution.

Shortly after Trotsky’s arrival in Mexico, Frida completed a self-portrait called
Fulang-Chang and I.
The artist, flanked by her pet monkey, looks back at the viewer with a self-assured and sensuous gaze. Trotsky and Natalia most likely saw this painting during one of their visits to the Riveras in nearby San Angel, where the painters occupied separate houses connected by a footbridge. Perhaps Trotsky was aware that in
the Mayan tradition, the monkey is a symbol of lust or promiscuity. In any case, he did not need a monkey to make him aware that Frida was interested. She was a well-practiced flirt and Trotsky knew how to reciprocate. The two spoke in English, which Frida flavored with the slang she had picked up during her three years in the United States. This left Natalia, who spoke no English at all, grasping for the meaning of their knowing exchanges.

Frida Kahlo, Mexico, 1937.

Bernard Wolfe Slide Collection, Hoover Institution Archives

“Frida did not hesitate to use the word ‘love,’ after the American fashion,” Van relates. “‘All my love,’ she would say to Trotsky upon leaving.” Trotsky may have been the first to cross the line when he began passing secret notes to Frida. “He would slip a letter into a book and give the book to her, often in the presence of others, including Natalia or Diego, with the recommendation that Frida read it. I knew nothing about this little game; only later did Frida tell me the story.”

Trotsky may have been emboldened by an awareness of Diego’s own brazen philandering, which included, most devastatingly for Frida,
an affair with her sister, Cristina, two years earlier. In the face of this betrayal, Frida became less inclined to contain her own sexual appetite, which seems to have been prodigious. Her “view of life,” she told Van, was “Make love, take a bath, make love again.”

Frida’s promiscuity and her relative youth might give the impression that, of the two of them, she was less invested in the relationship. Yet there is no reason to assume she did not fall hard for
piochitas
—or “little goatee,” as she referred to him. In her eyes, Trotsky’s reputation as a great revolutionary, Lenin’s twin star, remained untarnished by the Moscow frame-up trials. His remarkable performance at the Dewey hearings, which she witnessed as a spectator, demonstrated that he had lost none of his brilliance, courage, and charisma. And perhaps there was an additional source of attraction: an affair with Trotsky, her husband’s friend and political hero, would bring revenge for Diego’s affair with her sister.

Trotsky and Frida met at Cristina’s house on Calle Aguayo, a few blocks away from the Blue House. The members of the household were all aware of these assignations, says Van, including Natalia. “Late in June the situation became such that those close to Trotsky began to get uneasy. Natalia was suffering.” Natalia’s suffering would have been evident even to a perfect stranger, because she wore it on her face. The writer James Farrell, who attended the Dewey hearings, called Natalia’s “one of the saddest faces I have ever seen.” She was now fifty-five years old, but her features had aged beyond her years under the burden of the hardships and tragedies of the previous decade, none more heartrending for her and her husband than the uncertain fate of their younger son, Sergei.