Trotsky had objected to Lenin’s machine right up to 1917, but having then accepted it, had never again denounced it in principle or seen that Stalinism, or something like it, was its natural product. The furthest he went was to say that it was “rather tempting” to suggest that the Stalin system was “already rooted in Bolshevik centralism, or, more sweepingly, in the underground hierarchy of professional revolutionaries.”88
Since Stalinist historiography is so extravagantly unreliable, there has been a tendency for historians to accept Trotsky’s account of certain events. In the intrigues following Lenin’s death, he was by no means straightforward, but at once “devious and faint-hearted,” and his own account is “pathetic in its half-truths and attempts to gloss over the facts.”89 This is natural enough, and the only problem is why Trotsky’s virtually unsupported word should have been so widely accepted. Partly, no doubt, because his books, written under the comparatively critical eye of the West, were not so wildly and unashamedly falsified as their Stalinist competitors; partly because the Trotskyite tradition has trickled here and there into the mainstream of independent historical writing. But Trotsky had never failed in his duty to suppress or misrepresent facts in the interests of politics. And his general reliability on the period in question could have been considered in the light of his accusation that Stalin poisoned Lenin. There is no evidence whatever that this is true, and Trotsky himself only brought it up many years later—in 1939. The only serious point in favor of it is not evidential at all, but simply a consideration of cui bono insofar as Lenin’s death saved Stalin from the loss of his main positions of power. But it is more reasonable to see in Trotsky’s accusation a lesser, mirror image of Stalin’s own habit of mind in making wild accusations of treachery against political opponents.
When people say that Trotsky had an attractive personality, they are speaking mainly of his public persona, his appearance before great meetings, his writings, his dignity. But even so, he repelled many who felt him to be full of vanity, on the one hand, and irresponsible, on the other, in the sense that he tended to make a bright or “brilliant” formulation and press it to the end regardless of danger.
Stalin’s colorless, short-view remarks carried more conviction. Their very drabness gave them a realism. In a period of comparatively down-to-earth problems, the great revolutionary (like the great “theoretician” Bukharin) did not feel at home. Whatever his aberrations, Trotsky had a good deal in him of the European Marxist tradition. As Russia lapsed into isolation, the Asian element he had before the Revolution denounced in the Bolsheviks came to the fore. A Soviet diplomat told Ciliga that the country was, after all, Asiatic: “The way of Gengis Khan and Stalin suits it better than the European civilization of Lev Davidovich.90
Trotsky’s vanity, unlike Stalin’s, was, practically speaking, frivolous. There was something more histrionic about it. He had shown himself no less ruthless than Stalin. Indeed, at the time of the Civil War, he had ordered executions on a greater scale than Stalin or anyone else. Even in this, he showed some of the attributes of a poseur—the Great Revolutionary dramatically and inexorably carrying out the cruel will of history. If Trotsky had come to power, this concern for his image would no doubt have made him rule in a less ruthless, or, rather, a less crudely ruthless, fashion than Stalin. The Soviet peoples would perhaps have been able to say
… What his hard heart denies,
His charitable vanity supplies.
Stalin’s pragmatic approach gave the impression of a sounder man, and in a sense this was a true impression. He was always capable of retreat—from the calling off of the disastrous collectivization wave in March 1930 to the ending of the Berlin Blockade in 1949. Stalin’s skills in Soviet political methods make Trotsky look superficial, and the conclusion seems inevitable that he had far more to him than his rival. A mind may be intelligent, abilities may be brilliant; yet there are other qualities less apparent to the observer, without which such gifts have a certain slightness to them. Trotsky was a polished zircon; Stalin was a rough diamond.
Trotsky and his son Lev Sedov had been deprived of Soviet citizenship on 20 February 1932. They had not, as is sometimes said, been condemned to death by the courts, at least not openly. It had been announced as part of the verdicts in the Zinoviev and Pyatakov Cases that they would be liable to immediate arrest and trial “in the event of their being discovered on the territory of the U.S.S.R.”
Trotsky boldly challenged the Soviet Government to seek his extradition from Norway, which would have meant the examination of his evidence in the Norwegian courts. Instead, it put pressure on the Norwegian Government to expel Trotsky. Through the painter Diego Rivera, he obtained asylum from President Cardenas of Mexico, and on 9 January 1937 reached that country in a Norwegian tanker.
Like Lenin, who welcomed and protected Malinovsky and other Tsarist spies within the Bolshevik Party, even when they came under suspicion from the rest of his entourage, Trotsky proved gullible about his contacts. Lenin’s defense had been the rather inadequate one that even while Malinovsky was betraying Bolsheviks, he was also having to work hard and well to make new ones. Trotsky took the view that if he refused to meet any but his oldest and closest disciples, he would lose important opportunities to preach his doctrines and gain new followers.
The plot against Trotsky was tied in with the murky world of Soviet espionage in the United States, and some of it was only unraveled after the arrest of Jack Soble in 1957.
Soble had spied on Trotsky as early as 1931 and 1932, with useful results. The next NKVD agent to penetrate Trotsky’s political family was the extraordinary Mark Zborowski, of whom it has been said that he everywhere “left behind a trail of duplicity and blood worthy of a Shakespearean villain,” and who, after establishing himself in the United States as a respectable anthropologist at Columbia and Harvard, was finally exposed and convicted on charges of perjury in December 1958, getting a five- to seven-year term.91
Zborowski had managed to become Sedov’s right-hand man, and had access to all the secrets of the Trotskyites. He was responsible for the robbery of the Trotsky archives in Paris in November 1936. Although he never committed any murders himself, remaining a finger man, he seems to have played some role in the killing of Ignace Reiss.92 He also nearly procured the death of Walter Krivitsky in 1937, and did succeed in having Trotsky’s secretary, Erwin Wolf, murdered in Spain. The young German Rudolf Clement, secretary of Trotsky’s Fourth International, seems also to have been conveyed into his murderer’s hand by Zborowski, in 1938. A headless body found floating in the Seine in Paris was tentatively identified as Clement’s; in any case, he has not been seen since. On 14 February 1938 Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov died in suspicious circumstances in a Paris hospita1.93 Since Zborowski was the man who rushed him there, there is a very strong presumption that he informed the NKVD killer organization of the opportunity which now presented itself.
That Trotsky himself survived as late as 1940 is probably due to the breakdown of the NKVD Foreign Department as a result of Yezhov’s and then Beria’s purge of it and the difficulties produced by the defection of high officers like Lyushkov and Orlov.
Moreover, after some sort of attempt on Trotsky’s life which seems to have been made in January 1938, very strict security measures were taken at the villa where he now settled at Coyoacán, outside Mexico City. Apart from Trotsky’s own guards, considerable police protection was provided.
The planning of the attempts on Trotsky was now entrusted to a large staff, who made minute preparations. The Trotsky dossier in the NKVD registry at 2 Dzerzhinsky Street occupied three floors.94