The last years of Staline and Trotsky

[Combat]

Ce texte pro-trotskyste analyse les caracteres individuels de Trotsky et Staline, ainsi que leurs situations familiales contrastees. Desole c'est un peu long et en anglais mais tres interessant. On y decrit un Trotsky tres organise et methodique(sauf lors de sa liaison avec Frida Kalho) et un Staline brutal dans son cadre familial. Sa femme se suicidera d'ailleurs, son premier fils sera sacrifie au main des nazis et le deuxieme mourra alcoolique a 41 ans. Staline y est presente comme etant encore plus solitaire et prisonnier que Trotsky a la fin de sa vie, malgre tout son pouvoir. Il meurt d'une comotion cereabrale a la suite d'une nuit arosee de vodka. Vraiment pas mal.

Socialist Action /March 2001


The Last Years of Stalin and Trotsky

By PAUL SIEGEL

"There is in the whole of history," says Isaac Deutscher in the third volume of his great biographical trilogy on Leon Trotsky, "hardly another case in which such immense resources of power and propaganda were employed against a single individual" as was employed in the Stalinist campaign of calumniation against Trotsky.1

The same power and propaganda were devoted to the fostering of a religious cult of Stalin that flourished most in the Soviet Union but extended beyond it throughout the world. Even the Roman emperors, although they were deified, were not so systematically and insistently adulated. It would seem, then, that in the titanic political struggle between the two men Stalin won a total, crushing victory, and yet Deutscher entitled the final chapter of his biography of Trotsky "Victory in Defeat."

In some sense this phrase, by which Deutscher expressed his belief that Trotsky's political ideas, though seemingly defeated, had proved to be basically valid, applies to the personal life of Trotsky in his later years as compared to that of Stalin. Full of calamity and sorrow as Trotsky's last years were, they were not without the solace of love and of comradeship in a common struggle or without the satisfactions wrested from that struggle, while the last years of Stalin, who had the power to minister to all his desires, were utterly desolate.

This is not apparent in Deutscher's biographies of Trotsky and Stalin, which are primarily concerned, especially that of Stalin, with political matters.2 "I admit," he wrote, "that I am inclined to study the politics rather than the private affairs of public men. And altogether apart from this, it is impossible to narrate the private life of Stalin" because of a lack of sources.3

Fortunately, however, since Deutscher wrote this, there have become available to us two books that give accounts of Stalin's later personal life-one by his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, and the other by one of his inner circle of intimates, Nikita Khrushchev.

Edward Crankshaw, in his introduction to "Khrushchev Remembers," rightly comments that despite Khrushchev's self-serving statements in the narrative as a whole, his "hair-raising picture of [Stalin's] way of doing business in his later years is evidently true as far as it goes-which is a long way." Crankshaw adds that his "picture of Stalin himself confirms and amplifies the picture given us first by Milovan Djilas in his superb "Conversations with Stalin," and then by Svetlana Alliluyeva in "Twenty Letters to a Friend."4

Indeed, the mutual corroboration of Khrushchev and Alliluyeva (and also the corroboration of the Yugoslav emissary Djilas, who, although not an intimate of Stalin, saw him in intimate settings) testifies to the authenticity of their accounts.

Deutscher's biographical trilogy on Trotsky has been superseded in many respects since its publication by Pierre Broue's 1000-page "Trotsky" (Fayard, 1988), a work of monumental scholarship, which has unfortunately not been translated into English. Broue's biography, however, is, like Deutscher's, primarily political and has little to say about Trotsky's mode of life in Mexico.

There have also become available descriptions of Trotsky by the political associates who lived in his household in Coyoacan, Mexico. Inspired by his ideas, they risked their lives to protect him and work with him, but their admiration of him was not uncritical.

Jean Van Heijenoort, the secretary who was with Trotsky ever since Trotsky's exile in Turkey, had, his authorized biographer tells us, highly ambivalent "Oedipal" feelings about him.5

As in the case of Khrushchev and Alliluyeva, the descriptions of Heijenoort, Joseph Hansen, and others in the Coyoacan household corroborate each other, testifying to their authenticity.6

We have, therefore, pictures of the last years of both Stalin and Trotsky that furnish dramatic contrasts of which it is interesting to take note. These contrasts are pointed up by the fact that, despite the enormous difference in circumstances between the despotic ruler of one-sixth of the world's land area and the harried former commander of the Red Army guarded by a handful of followers, there was a basic similarity in their situations. Each felt himself and was regarded by others close to him as being a kind of prisoner.

Trotsky thought of himself as a prisoner under the sentence of death, whose execution, although it could be delayed, would surely come. Jake Cooper, one of his American guards, tells us, "After Trotsky was murdered, his companion Natalia said that every morning when he got up, he would say, another day and we're still alive."7 Surveying the attempt to transform his house in Mexico into a fortress, in which he participated, he said: "It reminds me of the first prison I was in. ... It is not a home; it is a medieval prison."8

So too, although it is not so readily apparent, was Stalin a prisoner. Fearful of the hatred that he knew must have been provoked on the part of many as a result of his sweeping terroristic measures, he sought, like Trotsky, to make his residence impregnable.

The prisoner of the Kremlin

Khrushchev tells of how members of his inner circle would whisper to each other as they observed the continually added security measures-bolts, barricades, double walls with watchdogs between them, and all kinds of alarm systems-that surrounded Stalin's dacha. In the automobile caravans in which he traveled from the Kremlin to the dacha, Stalin marked out a different route each time, not telling his bodyguard or anyone else in advance which route he would take.He had a special train, we are told by his daughter, on which there was no other passenger, and no one else was allowed on the platform: "It was a sinister, sad, depressing sight."9 He would sometimes remark with deep sadness, she says, that visits to public places that other people were able to enjoy were not open to him. He was "a prisoner of his own fame."10

But even more devastating than this restrictiveness was the sense of loneliness and desolation that came to him in old age. He was like one living in solitary confinement. "He was so isolated from everyone by this time, so elevated, that he seemed to be living in a vacuum. He hadn't a soul he could talk to. ... It was the system of which he himself was a prisoner and in which he was stifling from loneliness, emptiness and lack of human companionship."11

Khrushchev likewise speaks of Stalin's sense of profound loneliness, using a figure of speech that suggests a prisoner in an ever contracting cell: "He was always depressed when he was alone. It was as though the walls were closing in on him."12
Stalin, says Alliluyeva, led a monkish existence in bare surroundings devoid of luxurious furnishings or other kinds of amenities. The only recreation was movies in the Kremlin theater-often American cowboy movies-huge, lavish dinners, and heavy drinking parties with the members of his inner circle.13

"The whole crowd would come for dinner: Beria, Malenkov, Zhdanov, Bulganin and the rest. I found it dull and exhausting to sit three or four hours at the table listening to the same old stories as if there were no news and nothing whatever going on in the world! It made me dead tired and I would go off to bed. They sat up late into the night."14

Alliluyeva was not alone in finding the dinners exhausting. The participants at Stalin's soirees, whose presence was of course compulsory, also found the "interminable, agonizing dinners"-as Khrushchev puts it-"frightful," the movies generally uninteresting, and the drinking a dreaded ordeal that they tried to escape by secretly ordering the waiters to bring them colored water instead of wine.

Stalin, a heavy drinker himself, enjoyed getting his aides dead drunk. He "found the humiliation of others very amusing."15

Once he had the stout Khrushchev do a Ukrainian folk dance, squatting with difficulty on his haunches and kicking out his heels. "When Stalin says dance," commented Khrushchev to Mikoyan, "a wise man dances."16

The conviviality of the occasions was not heightened by Stalin's suspiciousness. For fear of poison, he didn't partake of any dish or wine until someone else had tasted it before him. He would transparently urge his guests in the manner of an attentive host to try some delicious-looking food or some fine wine for which it was evident that Stalin-who, says Djilas, ate like a glutton in fear of there not being enough for him-was himself longing.17

Adding to the strain was the fact that Stalin lived haphazardly, often being up most of the night and sleeping a good part of the day, while the others had to be back at work in the morning. None of the guests dared show that they were tired.

Business was conducted likewise in accordance with Stalin's inner needs. "He needed people around him all the time," says Khrushchev. "It's true that sometimes State and Party questions were decided, but we spent only a fraction of our time on those. The main thing was to occupy Stalin's time so he wouldn't suffer from loneliness."18

Trotsky's household in Mexico

Leon Trotsky's conduct of his life in Mexico was far different from Stalin's. To begin with, it was not governed by suspicion, as Stalin's was. His guards sought to institute a system in which everyone who entered had to be searched for weapons and no one was allowed to see him alone, but Trotsky would have none of this.

"He could not bear having his friends submit to search," Hansen wrote. "Mutual suspicion in his eyes was a disintegrating force much worse than the inclusion of a spy in the organization, since such suspicions are useless anyway in uncovering a highly skilled provocateur."19

Further, it lacked the irregularity that made things so difficult for Stalin's entourage. Van Heijenoort says of Trotsky, "His whole personal life was rigidly organized by the quality called singleness of purpose. ... As a rule he did not work less than 12 hours a day, and sometimes, when it was necessary, much more."

Unlike the gluttonous Stalin, "he remained at the table as briefly as possible, and after sharing his meals for many years I could not say that I ever noticed on his face any mark of enjoyment for what he ate or drank."20

Trotsky was not one to kill time at the dining table or elsewhere. "He could fly into a rage," says Jake Cooper, "if a comrade came to a meeting just a few minutes late. He would say, 'Comrades, comrades, how can we make a revolution with people who can't attend a meeting on time?'"21

It should be remembered, of course, that Trotsky in Mexico, knowing his days to be numbered, was working desperately to expose the Moscow trials and to communicate his ideas on what had to be done by the revolutionary movement during those critical times.

Yet despite the pressure and the stress, the atmosphere of the household, in contrast to that of Stalin, was cheerful and animated. If Trotsky paid no attention to food, he did pay attention to people. "Dinner," says Charles Cornell, another American guard, "was usually a lively meal during which L.D. [Lev Davidovich, Trotsky's first name and patronymic] engaged everyone in conversation and joked with members of the household."22

"It was peculiar," recalls Jake Cooper, "that throughout this period he never lost his sense of humor. At every meal he would tease the guards about the amount they ate or the type of clothes they wore. He usually had everyone at the table thoroughly amused."23

Trotsky's playful teasing, it is clear, was not at all like Stalin's sadistic, bullying humor. Busy as Trotsky was, he did take time to participate in intellectual, cultural, and recreational activities. These did not consist of cowboy movies and drinking bouts.

Joseph Hansen tells us: "As part of their studies, the guards and secretaries arranged lively discussions in which he participated. In the evenings classical music came over the Telefunken radio. ... His youthful guards, a cross section of the international revolutionary socialist movement, were continually stirring up something, the American contingent even inveigling him into outdoor hobbies to replace his pacing back and forth as daily exercise."24

One of the outdoor hobbies that was for him a form of divertissement and relaxation was the tending and feeding of chickens and rabbits. As with everything he did, he threw himself into this activity wholeheartedly, taking care of his charges, says his wife, Natalia Sedova, even when he was feeling ill.25

He also invented another hobby for their infrequent outings: collecting giant cacti. He outdid, Sedova says, his youthful companions in carrying the cacti in the hot sun. This vigor contrasts with the unhealthy sedentary life and the physical and mental deterioration of Stalin in his last years, to which both Alliluyeva and Khrushchev refer.26

To be sure, however, Stalin outlived Trotsky, who was born in the same year as he, by a dozen years, dying at 73.

The death of Nadezhda Alliluyeva

In his final years, states Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin talked to her for the first time of her mother and the way in which she died when Svetlana was a girl of six. She asserts that his talk almost drove her out of her mind, for she had heard the terrible story from servants and relatives, and Stalin's sudden opening up about the matter, with which he seemed obsessed at the end of his life, was more than she could bear.27

Stalin's wife, who was one of Lenin's secretaries after the revolution, married him when she was 17 and he was 40. As a schoolgirl she looked up to him as a determined and devoted revolutionist. She herself, Svetlana was told by her nurse, her mother's friends, and others, believed in "the new ideals of man ... with the full fervor of revolutionary idealism, and there were people all around her whose conduct seemed to bear out her faith." But in the course of time she "suffered the most terrible, devastating disillusionment" in Stalin, though not in her ideals.28
Khrushchev, Svetlana, and Anna Larina, the widow of Bukharin, agree that Stalin treated Nadezhda Alliluyeva brutally and agree broadly on the circumstances of her death, but Larina gives what seems the most authentic account.

Anna Larina relates that Nadezhda would complain to Bukharin in Stalin's presence of Stalin's harshness and once told him privately that she agreed with him in his opposition to Stalin's forced collectivization of the peasants. Bukharin was present at a banquet on the anniversary of the October Revolution at which Stalin, half-drunk and in a rage, threw a receptacle of cigarette butts and orange peels at Nadezhda. The following morning she was found dead in a pool of blood, clutching a tiny pistol that had been given to her as a gift.29

Svetlana states that she was later told by her two aunts, who stayed with them during this time of crisis, that her father was in a state of shock for several days, from which he would emerge to burst into violent fits of rage. Nadezhda Alliluyeva had left a letter that, according to those who had seen it (apparently, Svetlana's nurse and Nadezhda's close friend, Polina Molotov, who saw the body before Stalin was called), was full of reproaches and accusations against Stalin-political as well as personal. For Stalin it meant that his wife was revealed as a hidden enemy.30

In talking to Svetlana about her mother, Stalin never blamed himself or expressed remorse. Instead, now in a state of advanced paranoia, as Khrushchev and Svetlana agree, he cast about for other culprits, "trying to discover 'who was guilty' and 'who put her up to it.'"31

The anniversary of the October Revolution (Nov. 7 on modern calendars) was associated in his mind with the suicide of his wife. "It ruined the holiday for him for all time, and in his last years he tried to spend November in the south."32

In contrast, in the Trotsky household, "each year, Nov. 7 was a holiday, all of us wearing a red carnation or red rose."33

Coincidentally, the anniversary was also Trotsky's birthday.

Personal relations with women

Trotsky, unlike Stalin, was tied to his wife by years of devoted companionship and love. In his will he said of her: "In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During almost 40 years of our common life she has remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She has undergone great sufferings ... but I find some comfort in the fact that she has also known days of happiness."34

Until recently no one has had anything to say about Stalin's relations with other women. However, the Russian historian Roy Medvedev, a usually reliable researcher, asserts without giving any evidence (apparently out of consideration for living persons) that he had some brief liaisons in the long interval between the death of his first wife-a submissive, religious Georgian woman-and his marriage to Nadezhda Alliluyeva, and also after the death of Alliluyeva.

In fact, Stalin had some children from these liaisons, including a son (whom Medvedev does not name) living in Moscow at the time of his writing. "None of these women had any influence on him, and he never saw any of these children. ... Family life ended for him in 1932 [at the time of Nadezhda's death]."35

Trotsky, however, was influenced by a woman who caused a temporary rift between him and Natalia Sedova. This woman was the painter Frida Kahlo, the wife of Diego Rivera, "a person remarkable for her beauty, character and intelligence," says Van Heijenoort, who subsequently became her lover and whom Kahlo told of her relationship with Trotsky.36

The marriage of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo was an open marriage in which both of them, while remaining deeply attached to each other, had many affairs.

Trotsky was taken with Kahlo, and Sedova was jealous.[B] The tensions between her and Trotsky were such that they secretly lived in two different households for two and a half weeks, but they wrote letters to each other every day, sometimes twice a day.

This correspondence between them was preserved in Trotsky's archives at Harvard by the concern of the two for the demands of history, even in these personal matters, a concern that contrasts with Stalin's wholesale falsifications of history described by Khrushchev in his secret speech to the Twentieth Congress. It was consulted by both Deutscher and Van Heijenoort.

Deutscher says that Sedova's letters "leave no doubt ... that this was the first time she felt she had reason to be jealous. "37

A less self-assured woman, he states, might have been jealous earlier, for "a woman's presence sometimes stimulated [Trotsky] to dashing displays of seductive verve and wit ... somewhat at variance with his high seriousness and his almost ascetic life." Sedova, however, confident of Trotsky's love, became jealous only on this occasion. Deutscher leaves open to question whether Sedova had any grounds for her jealousy.

Van Heijenoort asserts that a flirtation was going on between Trotsky and Kahlo that made those closest to Trotsky uneasy, but he leaves unclear whether the flirtation eventuated in an affair. Kahlo, however, told others that she had had some trysts with Trotsky at the home of her sister, a block and a half away from the Trotsky residence, to which Trotsky would secretly repair.38

In any event, Trotsky's involvement with Kahlo was utterly contrary to his habitual self-discipline and sense of political responsibility, for it risked a scandal that would have had grave political consequences.

Yet this was an extraordinary period for him. He was in the midst of a mid-life crisis. Suffering from severe headaches, dizziness, and high blood pressure, he frequently complained to Natalia of how old age had suddenly come upon him. To this she replied, "Pull yourself together. Get back to work. If only you do this, your cure will have begun."39

The sense of having grown old, the desire to escape from the confinement of his "prison," and the presence of an extremely attractive woman who, says her biographer, "deployed all her considerable seductive powers to attract Trotsky40 all seem to have had an impact on him.

Van Heijenoort believes that Trotsky and Frida agreed to disengage themselves from each other during a visit she paid him four days after he arrived at his temporary domicile. "Till then, they had let themselves glide down the slippery path of flirtation. Now, in view of the circumstances, it was impossible for them to go further without committing themselves completely. ... The two partners drew back. Frida was still very much attached to Diego, and Trotsky to Natalia."41

The entire episode, which began a few weeks after the conclusion of Trotsky's stupendous effort in the Dewey Commission hearings, lasted about two months.

In his letters to Natalia, Trotsky expresses feelings he revealed to no one else. He addresses her as "my faithful one, my love, my victim" and says he is full of "shame and self-hatred."

He recalls all that they have been through together, "our pangs and memories," and expresses guilt-a guilt that contrasts with Stalin's lack of remorse about his wife's suicide-at the suffering she has incurred through him and gratefulness for the fortitude with which she has borne her sorrows and has helped to sustain him in his anguish.

"Then," says Deutscher, "his resilience and even joy of life come back: 'All will be well, Nata, all will be well-only you must recover and get stronger.'"42

The children as victims

Trotsky and Sedova had seen their children die before them. They had two sons, one who did not choose to engage in public life and one who did. As it happens, this was also true of Stalin.

According to Svetlana, Stalin's oldest son, Yakov, was unassuming and unambitious, had a quiet charm, and seemed to have inherited his gentle character from his mother, Stalin's first wife. Stalin had no use for him and bullied him unmercifully.

Yakov once tried to commit suicide, and Stalin despised him as a weakling more than ever after that. When Yakov was captured by the German army, Stalin refused to make the prisoner exchange that was offered him, and Yakov was executed by the Germans.43

Trotsky's second son, Sergei, rebelled against his father's dedication to politics, was himself apolitical, and gave evidence of becoming a brilliant mathematician and scientist. He was arrested by the GPU in 1936 and charged with attempting on his father's orders to engage in wholesale poisoning of workers in factory canteens.

Sedova wrote after Trotsky's death of the effect on him of Sergei's imprisonment: "Lev Davidovich was depressed beyond measure. 'Perhaps my death would have saved Sergei,' he said to me. At moments I felt he was sorry to be alive."44

To the world, however, Trotsky remained as indomitable as ever.

Trotsky never knew to the end of his days what Sergei's fate had been, although he realized Sergei must have perished. Later, a political prisoner freed and rehabilitated in 1956, who had shared a cell with Sergei, told of how he had refused to denounce his father and subsequently had participated in the famous hunger strike led by Trotskyists in the concentration camp at Vorkuta.45

Stalin's second son, Vasily, had a spectacular early career: he was a captain at 20 and a lieutenant general at 24, but these positions were achieved solely because of the desire of Stalin's underlings to curry favor with their boss.

Vasily, however, had started to drink from an early age and very soon became a hopeless alcoholic who was corrupted by those who sought to exploit him. Stalin browbeat and humiliated him in the presence of others, but this was not the way to make Vasily shape up. He died in 1962 at the age of 41, broken physically and mentally.45

Leon Sedov, Trotsky's older son, was his chief support in his struggle in exile against Stalin. When the news came of Leon's sudden death under circumstances that suggested the hand of the GPU, Trotsky and Sedova remained secluded in their room for many days, paralyzed by pain. His secretaries hesitated to break in on their grief but were worried about the condition of the couple. When, finally, they saw Trotsky at work at his desk, they were reassured. Trotsky was writing the obituary of his son.

In it he tells of Leon's dedication to the ideals of the revolution. As an adolescent he refused to live in the Kremlin with his parents, preferring to live like other members of the Young Communist League in a proletarian students' dormitory. He did not ride with them in a governmental automobile, taking the crowded streetcars rather than availing himself of privilege.

Leon Sedov participated ardently in the voluntary workers' teams, cleaning snow from the Moscow streets and performing other such chores. And so it was throughout his life. In Paris, working for the Fourth International, he lived in great poverty.

In speaking of their collaboration, Trotsky tells not without remorse of the exacting demands he made on Leon Sedov. Because he was a severe taskmaster, he acknowledges, "people closest to me often had a very hard time. And inasmuch as the closest to me of all the youth was my son, he usually had the hardest time of all. ... But beneath the surface there glowed a deep mutual attachment based on something immeasurably greater than bonds of blood," a sharing of aims and ideals and "of joys and sorrows experienced together, of great hopes we had in common."47

Sedov's death, says Hansen, resulted in an alteration in Trotsky: "After a time, I noticed a rather marked change in the Old Man [a term of respect and affection for Trotsky used by his associates, as it had been used for Lenin]. ... He did not seem to drive others as hard as he had before. He had more consideration, I felt, for the weaknesses in his collaborators."48

On the other hand, the death of Nadezhda Alliluyeva-for whom, Svetlana, Khrushchev, and Anna Larina agree, Stalin had a perverse love, brutal as he was toward her-only made him harder and more merciless than ever. For the schoolgirl Svetlana, her family, and the members of the household, it seemed as though "the deaths of such close friends of my mother's as Bukharin, Kirov, and Ordzhonikidze" were simply "the destruction of everything that had to do with her" and the purges were the "systematic elimination of her very spirit ... so that everything would be exactly the opposite of what she had stood for."49

"Trotsky immediately put me at ease"

In addition to becoming less hard-driving, Trotsky seems to have acquired through his suffering a greater ability to converse with ordinary humanity in ordinary situations (he was immensely superior at inspiring it in revolutionary times to rise to heroic heights, appealing to the best in human nature).50

Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin's Commissar of Education, whose "Revolutionary Silhouettes," published in 1923, is remarkable in its perception and in its candor in discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the Bolshevik leaders, spoke of Trotsky as having "a kind of inability or unwillingness to be at all caressing and attentive to people, an absence of that charm which always surrounded Lenin," adding, "but in the ocean of great events, where such personal features lose their importance, only his favorable side came to the front."51 His guards in Mexico, however, remember his warmth in the midst of all that beset him.

Jake Cooper, describing how Trotsky received him when he came to him as a guard, wrote, "He immediately put me at ease. ... To me it was like meeting your grandfather, or your dad. ... He was so grateful for the comrades who came from the United States to assist him in what he was doing." Knowing Cooper's interest in boxing, Trotsky told him, with his customary playful humor, "Jake, Louis knocked out Goday in six rounds. I guess it won't be long before Roosevelt takes Louis into his cabinet."52

Stalin, unlike Trotsky, was regarded when he was striving for power as very approachable. Deutscher wrote that "he was more accessible to the average official or party man than the other leaders. He studiously cultivated his contacts with the people who in one way or another made and unmade reputations, provincial secretaries, popular satirical writers, and foreign visitors."53 But in his later years he became isolated and remote, with an undisguised angry contempt for his retinue.54

Stalin's ability to maneuver and manipulate, to play off people against each other, and to make use of the worst in human nature, appealing to cupidity and fear-combined with his determination and strength of will, his ruthlessness and organizational ability by which he patiently built up a machine dependent upon him-enabled him to win power in a time of reaction, when, in a beleaguered and isolated country devastated by civil war and famine, a bureaucracy grew up whose privileges he enhanced and on which he based himself. But the very qualities that enabled him to gain power turned against him in his later years.

His policy of ruthless extermination made him justifiably afraid for his life. His own duplicity and contempt for humanity made him unable to trust anyone, leaving him desolately alone. His envy of all those above him and his gnawing sense of intellectual and cultural inferiority, the mainspring of his ambition, made him insatiably demand the flattery to whose intoxication he succumbed, causing him to lose touch with reality.

So insistent was Stalin's demand to be acclaimed as an incomparable genius that, Khrushchev reports, he personally supervised a biography of himself, strengthening its grossly fulsome adulation and adding a sentence about his great modesty.55 For a man to extol himself in this manner and then praise himself for his modesty requires, it would seem, a high degree of mental disassociation.

Trotsky, self-assured as he was-and sometimes, as Lenin said in his testament, excessively so-required no flattery. He was indeed embarrassed by overwrought praise. When the French surrealist poet Andre Breton wrote him that he had been inhibited in his meeting with Trotsky by the consciousness of having been in the presence of one whom he considered the greatest man alive, Trotsky replied, "Your eulogies seem to me so exaggerated that I am becoming a little uneasy about the future of our relations."56

Both Stalin's megalomania and his paranoia are exemplified in his statement to the members of his Political Bureau: "You are blind like young kittens; what will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies."57

The Soviet Union, he was sure, could not survive without him. The irony is that the occasion of this remark on his superior perspicacity was his supposed discovery of the "doctors' plot," a conspiracy of doctors to poison Soviet leaders that existed only in his own mind. With Stalin's belief in the necessity of his presence for his country's survival, we may compare the certitude of the dying Trotsky, expressed to Joseph Hansen, of the victory of the Fourth International after his death.

Neither friend nor foe ever found Trotsky's lucidity of thought to have been impaired. He himself was scornful of an American newspaper that accompanied an article of his after his expulsion from the Soviet Union with a prefatory editorial note to the effect that the blows its author had suffered had evidently not affected his clarity of thought, connecting, he said, "the power of reasoning and a government post."58

Trotsky, who, as Lunacharsky said, valued his place in history but not the trappings of power or the exercise of power for its own sake,59 subsequently suffered far more than the loss of a governmental post. In addition to the tremendous personal blows he received, it seemed as if he had forever been thrust into the pit of infamy to which Stalin's propaganda machine had consigned him.

And yet he was able to retain his mental and emotional equilibrium. What sustained him was his belief that history would finally vindicate him. Trotsky observed that after Nero's death, "his statues were smashed and his name was scraped off everything. The vengeance of history is more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary. I venture to think that this is consoling."60

The final days

In his testament Trotsky described himself looking out from his window upon "the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere" and commented, "Life is beautiful. Let future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. ... I shall die with unshaken faith in the communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion."61

Stalin and Trotsky died as they had lived in the last years of their lives-Stalin isolated, Trotsky struggling against his enemies, thinking of those close to him, and expressing confidence in the victory of his ideas.

Stalin, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage after a dinner (at which he had gotten drunk) that had lasted until five or six in the morning, was found paralyzed the next day and unable to speak.62 He remained in this condition for three days until he died.

His daughter describes his death thus: "The last hours were nothing but a slow strangulation. The death agony was horrible. ... At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death. ... Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened. ... He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. ... The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh."63

Trotsky too died from a cerebral hemorrhage, his resulting from an attack with an icepick by a GPU agent of Stalin. Deutscher, relying on the accounts of Joseph Hansen, Natalia Sedova, and the chief of the Mexican secret police, Salazar, describes Trotsky's death as follows:

The assassin struck a terrific blow on Trotsky's head with his icepick, as Trotsky bent over a manuscript the assassin had asked him to read. The mighty blow did not bring instant death, as his assailant had expected. Instead Trotsky uttered a "terrible, piercing cry" and, his skull smashed, grappled with him furiously in his last struggle, even wrenching the icepick from him.

When his guards and Natalia rushed into the room, Trotsky stood there for a moment and then slumped to the floor. Aware that he was dying, he told his wife, "Natasha, I love you," as she bent over him, holding his head and wiping the blood off his face. Then he said of the 13-year-old grandson living with them, "Seva must be kept out of all this." Addressing Hansen in English, he told him, "Take care of Natalya; she has been with me many, many years."

With splinters of his skull embedded in his brain and a portion of the brain damaged or destroyed, his mind continued to function lucidly. Hearing the cries of the assassin, as the guards beat him with their revolver butts, he said, struggling to rouse himself to speak clearly, "He must not be killed; he must be made to talk."

On his bed in the hospital to which he had been transported, he made a great effort to dictate a final message to Hansen for his followers. His last words, blurred, barely audible, and full of pauses, were: "Please say to our friends, I am sure ... of victory ... of Fourth International ... go forward."64

1 Isaac Deutscher, "The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 26.

2 Isaac Deutscher, "Stalin: A Political Biography" (Oxford University Press, 1949), viii.

3 "Khrushchev Remembers," ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), xv and ix.

4 Anita Feferman, "Politics, Logic and Love: The Life of Jean Van Heijenoort' (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1993), 169 and passim.

5 Joseph Hansen, Trotsky's American secretary, wrote, "He could be a severe taskmaster. Life quickly became miserable for anyone ... who found it insurmountably difficult to learn preciseness, thoroughness, workmanship."

6 "Introduction," Leon Trotsky, "My Life" (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), xiii.

7 Jake Cooper, "Memories of Trotsky" in "My Brother, My Comrade: Remembering Jake Cooper," ed. Mark Harris (San Francisco: Walnut, 1994), 99.

8 Joseph Hansen, "With Trotsky to the End," in "Trotsky: The Man and His Work: Reminiscences and Appraisals" (New York: Merit Publishers, 1969), 23.

9 Svetlana Alliluyeva, "Twenty Letters to a Friend" (New York: Harper & Row, 1967),195.

10 Alliluyeva, 202.

11 Alliluyeva, 193, 195.

12 Nikita Khrushchev, "Khrushchev Remembers" (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 133.

13 See also Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 76: "[The dinners were the] only luxury in Stalin's otherwise monotonous and somber life."

14 Alliluyeva, 191.

15 Khrushchev, 301,300.

16 Khrushchev, 301.

17 Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, 152.

18 Khrushchev, 299.

19 Hansen, 19.

20 Jean van Heijenoort, "Lev Davidovich" in "Trotsky: The Man and His Work," 45.

21 Jake Cooper, "Speech to Trotsky Commemoration Meeting," in "My Brother, My Comrade: Remembering Jake Cooper," 109.

22 Charles Cornell, "With Trotsky in Mexico," in "Trotsky: The Man and His Work," 65~6.

23 Cooper, "Speech to Trotsky Commemoration Meeting," 109.

24 Hansen, "Trotsky 'Psychoanalyzed,'" in "Trotsky: The Man and His Work," 82.

25 Natalia Sedova Trotsky, "How It Happened," in "Trotsky: The Man and His Work," 35.

26 Khrushchev, 307-08; AIliluyeva, 196-97, 206-07.

27 Alliluyeva, 113.

28 Alliluyeva, 105.

29 Anna Larina, "This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's Widow" (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 141-42,291.

30 Alliluyeva, 112-13.

31 Alliluyeva, 113. On Stalin's paranoia, see Khrushchev, 257-58,307-08; Alliluyeva, 196-97.

32 Alliluyeva, 193-94.

33 Hansen, "Introduction," in Trotsky, "My Life," xiv.

34 Deutscher, "The Prophet Outcast," 479.

35 Roy Medvedev, "Let History Judge" (Columbia University Press, 1989), 55,303.

36 Heijenoort, "With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 110. For the relationship between Van Heijenoort and Kahlo, see Feferman, 169-70.

37 Deutscher, "The Prophet Outcast," 384.

38 Hayden Herrera, "Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo" (Harper & Row, 1983), 210.

39 Deutscher, "The Prophet Outcast," 386.

40 Herrera, 209.

41 Van Heijenoort, "With Trotsky in Exile," 112.

42 Deutscher, "The Prophet Outcast," 384-85.

43 AIliluyeva, 157-59,162-63.

44Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky, "The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky," (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 219.

45 Deutscher, "The Prophet Outcast," 362-63,401-02.

46 Alliluyeva, 212-21.

47 Leon Trotsky, "Leon Sedov," in "Portraits: Political & Personal" (Pathfinder, 1977), 193.

48 Hansen, "Introduction," in Leon Trotsky, "My Life," xxiii. Van Heijenoort also noticed this change but did not attribute it to the death of Sedov. After speaking of Trotsky's occasional tension in his relations with himself, he says ("With Trotsky in Exile," 27), "Strangely enough, later on, in Mexico, Trotsky's relations with the secretaries and guards were somehow simpler, perhaps more reserved, but also less variable. He was indeed older at the time, but possibly his impatience had lost its cutting edge against the American placidity." In referring to "the American placidity," Van Heijenoort, himself, says Feferman, a moody person, was no doubt thinking of Hansen, who was known for his imperturbability and upon whom Trotsky had become most reliant.

49 Alliluyeva, 140.

50 An illustration of Trotsky's ability to inspire people is given in Roy Medvedev, "Let History Judge," 107-08. Medvedev relates a story told by Pavel Aksyonov, a survivor of the civil war. Several thousand demoralized and embittered deserters from the Red Army were being attended by only a few guards. As Trotsky prepared to address them, the deserters, who could easily have swept aside the guards and killed Trotsky, advanced, shouting threats, and the guards raised their rifles to fire warning shots in the air. Trotsky's voice rang out: "These are not White Guard scum ... but revolutionary fighters. Withdraw the guards!" The account continues: "Within five minutes [Trotsky's] every sentence was being greeted with enthusiastic shouts." According to Aksyonov, "There were a great many similar episodes. . . in Trotsky's activity during the civil war."

51 Quoted by Max Eastman, "A Note About the Author," in Leon Trotsky, "The History of the Russian Revolution" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937), xiii. Van Heijenoort comments ("Lev Davidovich," 45) that Trotsky was devoid of "what is called bonhomie" but that "a certain sweetness was not lacking."

52 Cooper, "Speech to the Trotsky Commemoration Meeting," 98,108. See also Hansen's description ("Introduction: With Trotsky in Coyoacan," xi) of Trotsky's warmth at their first meeting.

53 Deutscher, Stalin, 273-74.

54 Alliluyeva, 195.

55 Khrushchev, 605-06.

56 Deutscher, "The Prophet Outcast," 432.

57 Khrushchev, 601.

58 Trotsky, "My Life," 582.

59 Eastman, xv.

60 Deutscher, "The Prophet Outcast," 456.

61 Deutscher, "The Prophet Outcast," 479-80.

62 Khrushchev, 631.

63 Alliluyeva, 10. This description, however, may be colored by Svetlana's religiosity. Khrushchev, who was also present at Stalin's death, speaks (319-20) of his "death throes" but does not give the details given by Svetlana.

64 Deutscher, "The Prophet Outcast," 504-06.




Socialist Action /March 2001