Trotsky (8 page)

By mutual decision of the parents and their son, Seryozha, as they called him, did not accompany the family into exile in 1929. Having rejected the life of politics to which his father and older brother, Lyova, devoted themselves absolutely, the athletic Seryozha joined a traveling circus for two years before pursuing a career in science and technology, becoming an instructor at a higher technical school in Moscow before the age of thirty. His parents believed that bringing Seryozha with them into exile would tear him from his roots and ruin his life.

In Moscow, Seryozha—who like his brother used his mother’s fam
ily name, Sedov—took precautions not to call attention to his family background. His letters were addressed to his mother only and were devoted exclusively to family news and mundane matters. The hope was that he and his family would be left in peace, and in fact this is the way things worked out for the first few years. But everything changed for Seryozha, as it did for countless other Soviet citizens, after the murder of Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov, a rising political star, on December 1, 1934. Kirov’s murder, which Stalin may have orchestrated and certainly exploited politically, set off a wave of arrests that launched the Great Terror of the next several years.

Trotsky’s younger son was among the victims. His final letter to his parents, then living near Grenoble, France, was written eight days after Kirov’s murder. It concluded with an ominous sentence: “The general situation is proving extremely difficult, much more difficult than you can imagine.” Trotsky and Natalia now became desperate for news of him. They hoped that his avoidance of politics would spare him, yet they could not help but imagine the worst. Late in May 1935, they learned that Seryozha had been arrested and was being held in a Moscow prison. They imagined him being brutally interrogated in his prison cell, and they blamed themselves for not having insisted that he accompany them into exile. They tried to maintain hope and to support each other, but this was not always possible, and on one occasion Natalia remarked bluntly to her husband: “They will not deport him under any circumstances; they will torture him in order to get something out of him, and after that they will destroy him.”

Natalia issued an open letter, published in Trotsky’s
Bulletin of the Opposition,
in which she declared her son’s innocence and appealed to Romain Rolland, André Gide, George Bernard Shaw, and other European intellectuals sympathetic to the USSR to press Moscow for a commission of inquiry into the repressions following the Kirov murder. Whatever political conspiracy was behind it, she wrote, it could not have involved Seryozha, whose aversion to politics was well known to the GPU, as well as to Stalin, “whose son was a frequent guest in our boys’ room.”

In the diary he kept in France in the spring of 1935, Trotsky records his wife’s “deep sorrow” and constant anxiety: “N. is haunted by the
thought of what a heavy heart Seryozha must have in prison (if he is in prison). Perhaps he may think that we have somehow forgotten about him, left him to his fate.” She asks her husband if he thinks that Stalin is aware of Seryozha’s case. “I answered that he never overlooks such ‘cases,’ that his specialty actually consists in ‘cases’ like this.”

Seryozha was held in a Moscow prison for several months before being deported to Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia. In January 1937, as his parents landed in Mexico, the Soviet press reported that he had been arrested and charged with attempting, on the instructions of his father, a mass poisoning of workers. Natalia issued another appeal on behalf of Seryozha, addressed “To the Conscience of the World,” but by now the situation was beyond hope. In his appearance before the Dewey Commission in April, Trotsky testified that the precise whereabouts in the Soviet Union of Seryozha, whom he referred to sarcastically as the “poisoner,” were still unknown. But in a statement to the press he predicted his fate: “Stalin intends to extract a confession from my own son against me. The G.P.U. will not hesitate to drive Sergei to insanity and then they will shoot him.”

Living in close quarters with Natalia produced its own particular brand of tension, but Frankel and Van felt a strong sense of loyalty to
“la chère,”
as they referred to her in private. This formed no small part of their concern about the behavior of her husband. Van says he decided to say nothing, but that “Jan Frankel, as I remember, ventured to speak to Trotsky about the dangers inherent in the situation.” Over the years this cautious recollection somehow mutated into a dead certainty that Frankel broke with the Old Man over the Frida affair. The real story is less dramatic. Having spoken his mind to Trotsky and withdrawn from the Blue House, Frankel was in a better position to confront him about the Frida matter. Perhaps he also had a clearer sense of the looming catastrophe.

The dangers extended well beyond the health of Trotsky’s marriage.
Every nightmare scenario revolved around Diego, who as yet had no notion of what was going on. “Since he was morbidly jealous,” Van testifies, “the least suspicion would have caused an explosion.” A scandal would compromise Trotsky’s reputation while feeding the fury of the Mexican Communists and thereby jeopardizing his security. Diego might feel honor-bound to evict Trotsky from the Blue House; perhaps he would throw his support behind the Communists in their unending pressure campaign against the government to terminate Trotsky’s asylum in Mexico.

Or Diego might simply decide to terminate Trotsky. Frida had warned previous lovers that her husband’s jealousy could conceivably incite him to murder. One of those lovers was Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, with whom Frida had an extended liaison in 1935. He later recounted that when a sock of his turned up at Frida’s house, “Diego came by with a gun. He always carried a gun. The second time he displayed his gun to me was in the hospital. Frida was ill for some reason, and I went there, and he showed me his gun and said: ‘Next time I see you, I’m going to shoot you!’”

Diego had a habit of threatening people, and he wielded his pistol like an exclamation point, so perhaps there was no reason to fear that he would actually use it as a deadly weapon. But there was no telling what acts of revenge he might be driven to if he were humiliated by the public airing of his wife’s affair with the great Trotsky—the man he had helped gain refuge in Mexico.

By the beginning of July, the atmosphere at the Blue House was becoming unbearable, because the discord between Trotsky and Natalia had turned venomous. The only possible remedy was a temporary separation. On July 7, Trotsky left Coyoacán and moved to a hacienda owned by a friend of Diego’s near San Miguel Regla, some eighty miles northeast of Mexico City. Here Trotsky would be able to enjoy the outdoors, to fish and ride horseback. Accompanying him were police sergeant Jesús Casas, who commanded the police garrison guarding the Blue House, and Sixto, one of Rivera’s chauffeurs.

Four days after Trotsky’s arrival at the hacienda, on July 11, Frida paid him a visit. Natalia had wanted to come along on this trip, but Frida had maneuvered to leave her behind. Their meeting was neither
secret, nor very private. Frida traveled in the company of Frederico Marin, a brother of Diego’s first wife and a medical doctor, whose presence probably provided Frida with the pretext for her visit, just as Trotsky’s failing health served as the cover story for his retreat to the hacienda.

Whatever calculations lay behind their rendezvous on that rain-soaked July day, their affair was quickly coming to an end. Van believes that during Frida’s visit, the two made a joint decision to call a halt. “Now, in view of the circumstances, it was impossible for them to go further without committing themselves completely. The stakes were too high. The two partners drew back.” Frida’s alleged remark that she had become “very tired of the old man” might indicate that she alone drew back. Yet she was sufficiently inspired to undertake an arduous nine-hour round-trip by automobile in order to spend a few hours in Trotsky’s company.

After Frida and her traveling companions departed, Trotsky wrote to Natalia of his unexpected visitors and about the enjoyable—though not too enjoyable—time they passed together, expressing his regret that she had not felt well enough to undertake the journey. Trotsky tries so hard to make the visit seem uneventful that he ends up sounding like a man with something to hide. “This letter is purely descriptive,” he concludes awkwardly, “but it exhausts everything that would interest you.”

Hurt and angered at having been left out, and apparently fearing that her husband was part of the conspiracy, Natalia wrote to him demanding an explanation. In his overwrought reply, Trotsky tried to reassure her that her exclusion had been Frida’s doing. “Come!” he exclaims, declaring his innocence. His letter sheds light on the nature of the stormy conversations leading up to their separation, which featured a predictable psychological maneuver on his part. Thrown on the defensive about his relationship with Frida, he went on the attack, accusing Natalia of having had an affair of her own almost twenty years earlier, when they occupied an apartment in the Kremlin.

The alleged infidelity was supposed to have occurred in 1918, after Natalia had been appointed director of the museums department of the People’s Commissariat of Education. A young comrade on her staff had become infatuated with her, and she had deflected his attentions.
So said Natalia. Trotsky could not be certain. It is unclear whether his suspicion took hold back in the Kremlin days or more recently, as he surveyed the marital landscape with a conscience troubled by his own transgressions and derelictions. Whatever the case, he kept turning the matter over in his mind and confronting Natalia, who called his behavior “recidivism.”

The sudden reappearance of the minor functionary from long ago was unquestionably convenient for Trotsky, enabling him to turn the tables on his wife. Yet his display of masochistic jealousy was no mere pose. “I have been reliving our yesterdays, that is, our pangs of memories, pangs of my torment,” he said, referring to his suspicions about her extramarital affair. This “insignificant question stands before me with such force, as though our entire life hangs on the answer to it…And I run to get a piece of paper and write down the question. Natalochka, I’m writing to you about this with self-hatred.”

In this and subsequent letters, Trotsky’s emotions bounce back and forth between euphoria and agony, repentance and revenge. “Your letter brought me happiness, tenderness (how I love you, Nata, my only one, my eternal one, my faithful one, my love and my victim!)—but also tears, tears of pity, of repentance and…torment. Natalochka, I will burn my stupid, pitiful, self-serving ‘questions.’ Come!”

In his hour of torment, Trotsky cannot keep still. “After every two or three lines I stand up, walk about the room and weep tears of self-reproach and of gratitude to you, and above all tears for the old age that has taken us by surprise.”

They had met in Paris in the autumn of 1902. Trotsky, who turned twenty-three that November, had recently escaped from eastern Siberia; he had spent three years in czarist prisons and exile there, following his arrest for distributing radical texts to the dockworkers of the Ukrainian city of Nikolaev, near the Black Sea. From Siberia Trotsky headed straight to London for his historic first meeting with Lenin, and from there he made his way to the Continent to lecture on Marxist theory to the radical Russian émigré colonies. This brought him to Paris, where he met Natalia Sedova, a smart and attractive young woman who was a member of the radical group associated with the Russian newspaper
Iskra (The Spark),
of which Lenin was a leading figure. The daughter of
wealthy parents of noble birth, Natalia had been expelled from an exclusive boarding school in Kharkov, in the Ukraine, for reading radical literature and was now a student of art history at the Sorbonne. Like everyone else in the audience that autumn day in Paris, she was impressed by Trotsky’s oratory, which “exceeded all expectations.” Dialectical materialism had never sounded more appealing, and the two young radicals began seeing each other.

In Natalia, a slight, oval-faced woman with irrepressible wavy brown hair and full lips, Trotsky had a charming and knowledgeable guide to the sights of Paris, especially its art, and the two spent hours touring the Louvre. Trotsky, the Ukrainian farm boy, proved to be a reluctant tourist, however, and generally behaved like a boor, dismissing Paris with the comment: “Resembles Odessa, but Odessa is better.” Natalia later recalled that her companion “was utterly absorbed in political life, and could see something else only when it forced itself upon him. He reacted to it as if it were a bother, something avoidable. I did not agree with him in his estimate of Paris, and twitted him a little for this.” Trotsky later attested that in Paris “I came face to face with real art” for the first time and that he learned to appreciate it only “with great difficulty” and only thanks to Natalia’s persuasive presence. “I had my own world of revolution, and this was very exacting and brooked no rival interests.”

The comrades became lovers, which presented Natalia with a dilemma, because she already had a lover. Trotsky was married, but his wife, Alexandra, and their two small children had been left behind in distant Siberia. Natalia felt torn, and she hesitated before committing herself to Trotsky. “He never forgave me,” she confided to a friend after Trotsky’s death. “It always kept coming up.”

Trotsky interrupted the separation with a visit to Coyoacán for three days, July 15 to 18, but his time together with Natalia did nothing to put him at ease. Upon his return to the hacienda, he writes to her that
he has decided to confine all his disturbing thoughts and feelings to a personal diary, which they can read together when he rejoins her; this way his letters will not upset her. A moment later, however, he is unable to restrain himself: “I just wanted to say—and it’s not a criticism—that my ‘recidivism’ (as you write) was inspired to a certain extent by your recidivism. You continue (it’s hard even to write about it!) to compete, to rival…With whom? She is nobody to me. You are everything to me. No need, Nata, no need, no need, I beg of you.”