Death in Coyoacán

In 1939, while Stalin and Hitler were allied against the democratic West, the predecessor of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and its chairman, Texas Democratic congressman Martin Dies, sought testimony from one of the world’s leading authorities on Soviet Communism. But the witness was living outside the United States, and a visa to cross the border and appear before the committee was denied him. Less than a year later, the prospective witness had been murdered in a brutal, flamboyant manner.

The man who desperately wished to “name names” to the House committee was Leon Trotsky, exiled in Mexico. Although his death had been ordered by Stalin since the mid-1930s, the invitation to appear before the committee–where Trotsky intended to disclose the full extent of Soviet financing and control of Communists in America and around the world–must have made his killing even more urgent to the Russian dictator. Certainly, had the exile been allowed to answer the committee’s invitation, today’s common wisdom about communism in America, about the House Committee on Un-American Activities, about testifying before it, and even about Leon Trotsky himself, might be very different.

Or perhaps not. The continued–or better, revived–discussion of Trotsky is mysterious. The Bolshevik political doctrine he adopted only months before the Leninist revolution of 1917 has been thoroughly discredited. In today’s Russia his name is barely known, particularly among the young. His books are unread, out of print, or issued here and there, in various languages, by obscure political sects. And yet his name remains vivid in modern history. At one end of an equally low spectrum of memory, he is recalled as the victim of an attack by a Soviet agent wielding, it is said, an ice-pick. (In reality, the fatal weapon was a mountaineer’s climbing axe.) At the other end, he is viewed as an inspiration for neoconservatism–an equally garbled association.

Bertrand Patenaude’s new book is not a biography, although it comes with a blurb from Misha Glenny claiming that it “gets closer to Trotsky’s essential character than any of the vast tomes devoted to him in the past.” What vast tomes are those? The only full-length biography, admittedly vast in its extent, is Isaac Deutscher’s trilogy–The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast–still in print after more than 50 years. Although Deutscher’s Trotsky has its failings, they are mainly ideological. The onetime Trotskyist Deutscher had made his peace with Stalin in the decades after Trotsky’s death, and, following this course, he paralleled the action of most of Trotsky’s surviving loyalists. The Trotskyist movement today consists mainly of uncritical enthusiasts for Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and, until his death, Slobodan Milo evic.

But the faults in Deutscher are perceptible only to a handful of initiates: One hesitates to use the term specialists, since after Deutscher little original in English on the subject has been written on the basis of primary sources. Patenaude himself is a researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and has availed himself of resources held there. Trotsky papers are also kept at Harvard, which Patenaude visited, and at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which he did not. (Russian archives, which must be extensive and definitive, have not been opened to scholars.) Patenaude’s work so closely echoes Deutscher’s, except for trivial details, that a reader is entitled to ask whether there is much that is really new to say about Trotsky. Far from being a biography of the man, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary is a kind of adventure-cum-mystery story, focusing on Trotsky’s Mexican exile and assassination.

This chronological emphasis is understandable, since if today’s readers know much about Trotsky, it typically has to do with his love affair with Frida Kahlo, the Mexican Communist artist and latter-day feminist icon. And the story of the killing itself is both fascinating in its convoluted preparations and lurid in its outcome.

Until the murder of John F. Kennedy 23 years later, the assassination of Leon Trotsky was the most famous such act of the 20th century. Or at least, the best-known with a background comprehensible to most of the world, since the 1914 double shooting of the Habsburg crown prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo was a murky affair when it happened–and to those who remember anything about it (and they are few outside the Balkans), it remains surprisingly opaque.

By contrast, the brazen killing of an isolated and politically weak émigré, a hemisphere away from Moscow, should have disabused anybody about the “benevolence” of Soviet policies and habits, especially since it occurred while the Stalin-Hitler alliance was in effect. But the capacity of Communists and their acolytes (then known as fellow-travelers) to ignore the reality before them has always been remarkable, and constitutes another story entirely.

Patenaude’s narrative begins with the arrival of Trotsky and his second wife Natalia Sedova, a daughter of the Russian nobility, in Mexico in 1937. White of hair and beard, he was 57 years old; the nickname used by those who worked with him–“the Old Man”–was a reference to authority of the kind usually granted military commanders or ship’s captains, rather than an indicator of age. (It was also considered a serious gaffe among his followers when used by those who did now know him personally.)

The passage to Mexico had been long and tortuous. Expelled from Soviet Russia to Turkey in 1929, Trotsky was sent to France, following Soviet pressure, in 1933, then to Norway in 1935, and finally to Mexico two years later. He was welcomed by President Lázaro Cárdenas, as well as by Diego Rivera and Rivera’s lover Kahlo. He moved with his wife, secretaries, and bodyguards into the “Blue House” where Kahlo had grown up, in a small village then outside Mexico City called Coyoacán.

Yet even with protection by the Mexican authorities, the end was nearer than Trotsky might have realized. The decision to liquidate him, wherever he could be found, had been made, and the assassin, a Spanish Communist named Ramón Mercader, would soon undergo intensive training for the assignment. Communists in the United States were actively seeking targets for use as infiltration shields in gaining entry to the Trotsky household.

One of these unfortunate marks was a Brooklynite named Sylvia Ageloff, whose sister Ruth occasionally went to Trotsky’s house to serve as a Russian-language secretary. Trotsky favored Ruth. Sylvia worked in New York City’s welfare department with a Communist named Ruby Weil, who went with Sylvia on a trip to Europe. Sylvia, who was not known for her romantic history, was introduced to the suave and handsome Mercader, who became her lover.

The seduction of Sylvia Ageloff gave the Soviets access to their quarry. The role of American Communists in the conspiracy, and its main coordination by way of cities north of the border, cannot be overstated. As Patenaude writes in his characteristically flashy (but in this case accurate) tone, “the road to Coyoacán led through New York City.” In reality, Trotskyism as an intellectual phenomenon was also centered in New York, but the Stalinists there were more determined than their opponents, and they had a specific agenda.

So Patenaude’s recounting of these grim events has a film-noir feeling. Trotsky and his ménage left the Blue House, and moved a few blocks away, when tensions over the manipulative Kahlo alienated Rivera as well as Trotsky’s wife, Natalia. In May 1940 the Mexican mural painter David Siqueiros led a party of Stalinist fanatics in a machine gun attack on the new residence, in which Trotsky’s grandson was shot in the foot; but Trotsky and Natalia escaped injury.

The Siqueiros attack remains something of a mystery, and may have been a feint intended to cover the penetration of the group by Mercader; he showed up for the first time four days later. He now possessed a fake identity as a Canadian with the misspelled name “Jacson.” (The Soviet passport forger responsible for this document was none too worldly.) With Sylvia Ageloff as his human passport, he again visited the Trotsky house, and three months after the Siqueiros assault, stood behind Trotsky as the latter sat in his workroom and read through a political essay Mercador had written.

The assassin knew his job. He realized that Trotsky could not resist the temptation to help form a writer’s work, and would concentrate on reading, lowering his gaze and leaving his back unprotected. Mercader struck his blow, and after a night and a day in a Mexico City hospital Trotsky died.

The assassin received a 20-year prison sentence, and on his release in 1960, his true identity was revealed by the writer Isaac Don Levine. Mercader went to Moscow, where he was decorated with the Order of Lenin, and honored as a Hero of the Soviet Union. He died in 1978, aged 64–four years older than his victim when the assassination occurred in 1940.

The most interesting questions about Leon Trotsky have yet to be asked in any new book. It is not enough to say that he was brilliant, or that he shared in responsibility for the horrors of communism, or that he defied Stalin unto death. He remained apart from the Bolsheviks until three months before their 1917 coup, and had been the most articulate critic of Lenin’s dictatorial methods.

What changed his mind? Could he simply not resist a ride on the train of revolutionary power? He was sympathetic to the United States, and expressed a desire to live under Franklin D. Roosevelt rather than Lázaro Cárdenas. (He had resided in New York before the Bolshevik Revolution.) What attracted him so strongly? At the end of his life he expressed an unexpected sympathy for Zionism in the face of Nazi atrocities, and even read the Bible, which he had been taught as a Jewish youth in Ukraine. He took to calling his adversary “Cain-Stalin.” How would he have greeted the founding of Israel? And had he not been killed, would the Soviet Army ever have rebelled against Stalin and returned him to command? Many thought that a real possibility; Trotsky was not among them.

As World War II began, Trotsky still clung to the idea that the Soviet Union was socialist and, therefore, progressive; but he also warned that if it did not reform in a democratic direction after the war–he specifically called for an end to a single-party state–socialism would have to be considered a utopian fantasy. Most of his intellectual adherents became conservatives or neoconservatives: James Burnham, a leading American Trotskyist, was a founder of National Review. Would Trotsky have followed them–and how far? He was only 60 when he died in 1940. What would he have had to say in 1950? His widow Natalia broke with the Trotskyists when they supported North Korea in the war that began that year. She died in 1962.

Unfortunately, Patenaude deals with no new issues in Trotsky’s life, and this volume is replete with errors indicating a hasty dependence on secondary sources. Ramon Mercader, for example, died in Cuba as an adviser to Castro, and not in Russia as Patenaude intimates. Moreover, without access to the Soviet archives, Patenaude has depended on unreliable memoirs which could well be Russian disinformation. His psychologizing is often jejune: Patenaude declares that, when Trotsky was expelled from Russia to Turkey, it “must have pleased him” that the Soviet passport he was handed described him as a “writer.”

A new, critical, far-reaching examination of the Trotsky conundrum–why his name retains its prominence when so many others are forgotten–remains to be written.

Stephen Schwartz is the author, most recently, of  The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony.