Stephen Kotkin, a Stalin biographer, founded the Hoover History Lab at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Why should anyone care about Leon Trotsky in this day and age? A Marxist revolutionary who opposed but ultimately joined forces with Vladimir Lenin, he fought his entire life against markets and private property, parliaments and the rule of law, defending the Soviet state even as he denounced its leader, Joseph Stalin. That utopia imploded in ignominy decades ago.
Ignominy fades. Today, young Americans seem increasingly attracted to communism — a third of adults under 30, according a Cato Institute-YouGov poll last year, view communism favorably. A fresh look at Trotsky, perpetrator and victim of Soviet communism, might be in order.
His story is briskly told by author Josh Ireland in the new book “The Death of Trotsky.” The tale, succinctly: Stalin deported Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929, then spent much of the next decade trying to assassinate him, finally succeeding, in Mexico, in 1940.
Bert M. Patenaude told this story ably and reliably in 2009 in “Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky.” Long before that, actor Richard Burton had played Trotsky in a not very memorable 1972 film dramatization. Ireland endeavors to present the story as a thriller, and he partially succeeds.
Ireland’s “true story” begins inauspiciously with a false quote from Stalin (“Death solves all problems. No man, no problem”), one of innumerable Stalin “sayings” that originate in novels and course through the history books upon which Ireland’s narrative draws. That said, Ireland does employ a wide variety of works, including in Spanish and French, and writes with flair.
Long before the 1917 coup that brought Lenin’s group to power, Trotsky had diagnosed the inevitable consequences of one-party rule leading to one-man tyranny — then he did as much as anyone to make that prophecy a murderous reality. He was widely despised by other members of the Communist Party, and he neglected or disparaged his most dedicated followers. He not only enacted terror-massacres but also argued for them on moral grounds. He betrayed Natalia Sedova, his devoted second wife of 35 years, with Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, cuckolding her husband, Diego Rivera, who had helped him obtain refuge in Mexico.
Judiciously, the author elucidates Trotsky’s many flaws, and yet dramatically, he characterizes him as “arguably” Russia’s “leading literary critic” (very arguably). He portrays Stalin as consumed solely by paranoia, not by building a state and military-industrial complex. The author mostly omits the ideological and especially tactical disputes between Stalin and Trotsky, reducing their confrontation to psychodrama.
When it comes to disputes between Trotsky and the painter Rivera, we get politics as well as emotions. “Their disagreements included everything from the class structure of the Soviet state [to] Rivera’s relationships with the trade unions,” Ireland writes, adding that behind Trotsky’s back, Rivera branded him a Stalinist. The author depicts this as symptomatic of the “erratic, incoherent nature of Rivera’s Trotskyism.” Fair enough, but the artist inclined toward anarchism, and the tensions between anarchism and statist socialism have roiled the left since the mid-19th century.
When Ireland moves on to the assassination plot itself, the assassins’ personalities, and the murky world of Stalin’s secret police, or NKVD, the book acquires narrative force and allure.
Ramón Mercader del Río (a.k.a. Jacques Mornard, a.k.a. Frank Jackson and numerous other aliases), who had a knack for languages and deceit, succeeded where all others had failed, stabbing Trotsky in the skull with an alpine ice pick in tropical Coyoacán.
Blood spattered onto Trotsky’s manuscript of his biography of Stalin and other files on his desk. He died the next day, Aug. 21, 1940, in agony. His unfinished Stalin book would be published posthumously, in 1946, and shape a distorted, dismissive view of the Soviet ruler long after his own death from a stroke in 1953.
Moral squalor stemming from conviction oozes from nearly every page of this tale.
Ramón was apprehended and spent 20 years in a Mexican prison. Upon his release in 1960, Stalin’s heirs awarded him the Order of Lenin and eventually allowed him to emigrate to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, where he died of lung cancer in 1978. He was buried in Moscow at the prestigious Kuntsevo Cemetery, near Stalin’s former dacha, under one of his false names.
The NKVD wet-work operatives who oversaw this killing and others, to secret acclaim, were subsequently imprisoned on unrelated trumped-up charges by their own regime. Eventually released, they lived into their golden years, unlike their targets. One of them, Pavel Sudoplatov, outlived the U.S.S.R. and managed to publish a post-censorship memoir of his skullduggery. He did not live to see the censorship return.
Thanks to Sedova, his wife, Trotsky had managed to sell and ship a substantial part of his personal archive to Harvard University, accessible to researchers. She remained for a time at the cursed compound on Avenida Viena in Coyoacán, before resettling in Paris and dying in 1962. The Mexican government purchased the villa and in August 1990, on the assassination’s 50th anniversary, converted it into a museum. It claims to receive some 17,000 foreign visitors per annum. It lies near the Frida Kahlo Museum, which receives half a million annual visitors.
Ireland refrains from drawing lessons for the reader concerning Trotsky’s life and death.
“I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist,” Trotsky wrote in a last testament in 1940, with death closing in. “My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.” His gravestone, on the grounds of the Mexican villa, exhibits a hammer and sickle.
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