CHAPTER 5

The Trouble with Father

Trotsky and Natalia were stunned by the sudden loss of their elder son, Trotsky’s favorite, who was named after his father. “Goodbye, Leon, goodbye, dear and incomparable friend,” Trotsky wrote in a moving tribute several days after Lyova’s death. “Your mother and I never thought, never expected that destiny would impose on us this terrible task of writing your obituary.” This was not the only passage in Trotsky’s eulogy where poignancy was allowed to obscure grim reality. The truth is, Trotsky and Natalia had substantial reason to fear that they would outlive Lyova—indeed all of Trotsky’s children and grandchildren. Such an outcome was foreshadowed by an incident that took place in Moscow twelve years earlier.

A stormy scene erupted in the Politburo on October 25, 1926, a moment that would prove to be a turning point in the fortunes of the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. For several months their faction had carefully upheld a fragile truce with the Party’s majority, led by Stalin and Bukharin, but events now conspired to shatter the accord. Lenin’s political testament, suppressed in the Soviet Union since his death in 1924, had just been published in The New York Times, including the explosive postscript that sounded the alarm about the danger to the Party posed by Stalin and called for his removal as general secretary. The Opposition leaders, who had heretofore helped suppress circulation of the document under the pressure of Party discipline, decided to endorse the Times version of the testament as authentic. This infuriated Stalin, who used the occasion of the Politburo meeting to launch a blistering attack on his rivals, demanding their complete submission.

When Stalin was finished, Trotsky rose to protest against this diatribe, warning that Stalin’s malevolence posed a threat to the very existence of the Party. In that moment, Trotsky appears to have been overwhelmed by a feeling of liberation, as though someone had untied his hands. Turning to Stalin, he pointed an accusing finger at him and declared: “The First Secretary poses his candidature to the post of gravedigger of the revolution!” Stalin turned pale and became flustered, then rushed out of the hall, slamming the door behind him. The meeting ended in an uproar. The next morning the Central Committee voted to remove Trotsky from the Politburo.

Trotsky’s outburst had dramatically escalated the crisis. His own allies were dismayed that he had needlessly insulted Stalin. Immediately after the Politburo session, several comrades convened at his Kremlin apartment, where Natalia awaited his return. Among them was Yuri Pyatakov, who was especially upset. “You know I have smelled gunpowder, but I have never seen anything like this!” he said, gulping down a glass of water. “This was worse than anything! And why, why did Lev Davidovich say this? Stalin will never forgive him unto the third and fourth generation!” When Trotsky entered, Pyatakov confronted him: “But why, why have you said this?” Exhausted but calm, with a wave of his hand Trotsky brushed the question aside. The damage had been done; the breach with Stalin was irreparable.

Trotsky would recall this episode several years later, as reports of the arrests and deportations of his family members in the USSR reached him in France. “At the time,” he wrote in his diary in 1935, “the words about my children and grandchildren seemed remote, rather a mere turn of phrase. But here we are—it has reached my children and my grandchildren…what will become of them?”

Now, in February 1938, in shock from their most tragic loss, Trotsky and Natalia once again had occasion to recall Pyatakov’s oracle and to contemplate Stalin’s vengefulness. Yet the enigmatic circumstances surrounding Lyova’s death cast doubt on the culpability of the gravedigger in the Kremlin. Whether Lyova died a natural death or was murdered is a mystery unlikely ever to be resolved.

Earlier that month, Lyova had published a special issue of the Bulletin of the Opposition devoted to the recently issued not-guilty verdict of the Dewey Commission. The publication of the Bulletin came as a relief both to Lyova and to his father, who had become impatient by its delayed appearance. In his February 4 letter to Trotsky accompanying a copy of the proofs, Lyova gave no hint of his failing health: the sharp abdominal pains, the loss of appetite, the lassitude.

On February 9 Lyova’s appendicitis became acute. In part out of mistrust toward the French Trotskyists, he decided to avoid the French hospitals and instead chose to enter a small private clinic owned and run by Russian émigré doctors and staff. The clinic employed both Red and White Russians, spanning the entire spectrum of political enmity toward Trotsky, with the inevitable Stalinist police informants among them. Lyova registered at the clinic under the false identity of a French engineer, using his companion Jeanne’s family name, Martin. Evidently he was unconcerned that his illness or the effects of the anesthesia might induce him to speak in his mother tongue.

Emergency surgery took place that same evening and the patient appeared to be recuperating well, until the night of February 13 and 14, when he was seen wandering the unattended corridors, half-naked and raving in Russian. He was discovered in the morning lying on a cot in a nearby office, critically ill. His bed and his room were soiled with excrement. A second operation was performed on the evening of February 15, but after enduring hours of agonizing pain, the patient died the following morning. Lyova was a week shy of turning thirty-two.

According to the doctors, the cause of death was an intestinal blockage, but Trotsky and Natalia could only assume that their son had been poisoned by the GPU. An autopsy turned up no sign of poisoning or any other evidence of foul play, yet Lyova’s relapse seemed unaccountable to his parents, who retained an image of their son as a vibrant young man. And if poison was not involved, then why had one of the doctors asked Jeanne, just before Lyova’s death, if he had recently spoken of suicide? Then there was the matter of the Russian clinic, a choice that must have seemed perverse, especially considering that one of the family’s most trustworthy friends in Paris was an eminent physician who could have arranged for Lyova to have the best medical care.

Such were the perplexities that afflicted the grieving parents, who secluded themselves in their bedroom at the Blue House. Joe Hansen recalled hearing Natalia’s “terrible cry”—perhaps at the moment she was told the news. Otherwise silence reigned over the house. For several days, the staff caught only an occasional glimpse of Trotsky or Natalia, and the mere sight of them was heartbreaking. Tea was passed to them through a half-opened door, the same ritual as five years earlier when they learned of the suicide of Trotsky’s daughter Zina in Berlin. Yet for Trotsky the loss of Lyova was indeed incomparable. As he explained in a press release on February 18, “He was not only my son but my best friend.”

 

LYOVA WAS ONLY eleven years old at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. He idolized his father, who once allowed the boy to accompany him to the front on his armored train. Lying about his age, Lyova joined the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, before reaching the minimum age and later moved out of his parents’ Kremlin apartment in order to live in a proletarian student hostel. When Trotsky led the Opposition against Stalin, Lyova plunged headlong into its activities, dropping out of technical school to become his father’s closest aide and bodyguard. “Lyova has politics in his blood,” Trotsky remarked approvingly. When the Opposition went down to defeat at the end of 1927, Lyova decided to leave behind his wife and son and join his parents in exile.

On the evening of January 16, 1928, Trotsky, Natalia, and Lyova were preparing to depart a wintry Moscow by train for Central Asia. Their baggage had been taken to the station ahead of them, and the family gathered in the apartment Trotsky and Natalia had occupied since moving out of the Kremlin the previous autumn. They were joined by twenty-year-old Seryozha, whose aversion to politics had recently mellowed, in part due to his father’s tribulations. As the evening progressed, the family assembled in the dining room to await the police. The train was scheduled to depart at 10:00 p.m. As they nervously watched the clock, the appointed hour passed and they puzzled over this.

Shortly afterward, a GPU official telephoned to inform Trotsky that his departure would be delayed for two days. This produced further puzzlement until friends arrived with the news that a “tremendous demonstration” by Trotsky’s supporters at the station had caused the postponement. They described an unruly scene of resistance around the railroad car reserved for Trotsky. His supporters set up a large portrait of their hero on the roof of the car, as people cheered and shouted “Long live Trotsky!” Demonstrators blocked the tracks and clashed with the GPU and the local police, which led to casualties on both sides and arrests.

The mood at Trotsky’s apartment was suddenly buoyant. For the next few hours, jubilant supporters kept telephoning with descriptions of what had transpired at the station, and deep into the night family and friends turned over the possibilities. Late the next morning the doorbell rang and two women friends entered. A moment later the doorbell rang again and the apartment filled with GPU agents in civilian clothes—a surprise abduction was under way. Trotsky, still in his pajamas, was handed an arrest order but did not intend to cooperate. He and Natalia and the two guests locked themselves in a room, and tense negotiations ensued through the glazed glass door, until the agents decided to telephone for instructions. The calm was broken by the sound of shattering glass, as an arm reached inside to unlock the door.

One of the GPU men on the scene, a former Red Army officer named Kishkin who had often accompanied Trotsky on his armored train, behaved oddly, as though distressed by the Red commissar’s reversal of fortune. As the agents broke through the door he kept repeating, “Shoot me, Comrade Trotsky, shoot me.” Trotsky replied coolly: “Don’t talk nonsense, Kishkin. No one is going to shoot you. Go ahead with your job.” They found Trotsky’s slippers and put them on him, then his fur coat and winter hat. Still he refused to move, at which point the policemen lifted him in their arms and began to carry him off.

Natalia hurriedly pulled on her snow boots and fur coat and walked out to the landing. The door slammed behind her and she heard a commotion on the other side of it. A moment later she watched as the door flew open and her two sons burst out, followed by the women guests. “They all forced their way through with the aid of athletic measures on Seryozha’s part.” Descending the stairs, Lyova frantically tried to rally support, ringing every doorbell and crying out, “They’re carrying Comrade Trotsky away!” His efforts were hopeless. “Frightened faces flashed by us at the doors and on the staircase,” Natalia remembered.

Seryozha sounds like a real bruiser. At one point during the drive to the train station the policemen had trouble containing him inside the speeding car. He tried to jump out near the workplace of Lyova’s wife in order to alert her to her husband’s unscheduled imminent departure. As frigid air rushed in through the open door, the agents struggled to restrain the young athlete and appealed to Trotsky to convince his son to relent.

When they arrived, Trotsky had to be lifted out of the car and carried into the station, which was nearly empty: this time there would be no protesters to obstruct his departure. A desperate Lyova tried to recruit supporters from among the scattering of railway workers, shouting, “Comrades, look! They’re carrying Comrade Trotsky away!” A GPU agent named Barychkin, someone who used to accompany Trotsky on his hunting and fishing trips, grabbed Lyova by the collar and tried to cover his mouth with his hand. Natalia says that Seryozha intervened with “a trained athlete’s blow in the face,” which forced the policeman to retreat. This was no proud mother’s idle boast. Several years later Trotsky recorded in his diary that Natalia was tormented by the thought that this “thoroughly corrupted and depraved” GPU man would be allowed to take his revenge on Seryozha in his prison cell. “He will remind Seryozha of that now,” she told her husband.

Trotsky, Natalia, and Lyova were placed in the railroad car for the first stretch of the journey to Alma Ata, in Kazakhstan. During the ensuing year of internal exile—Lyova’s apprenticeship in the art of conspiracy—he served as his father’s liaison with Trotskyists throughout the USSR. Trotsky wrote proudly of his son’s contributions in this period, “We called him our minister of foreign affairs, minister of police and minister of communications.” When Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union the following year, Lyova decided to accompany his parents, although he was not formally exiled himself. On Turkey’s Prinkipo island, he assisted Trotsky in the writing of his autobiography and his history of the Russian Revolution, served as editor of the Bulletin of the Opposition, and helped direct the assortment of parties and groupings that constituted the incipient international Trotskyist movement.

A few months into his Turkish exile, Lyova became homesick for Moscow and his family, and he decided to attempt to return to the USSR. He applied at the Soviet consulate in Istanbul, but several weeks later he was informed that his request had been rejected. He now had no alternative but to continue as his father’s aide-de-camp. Relations between Trotsky and Lyova were never easy, and they became increasingly fraught under the pressures of working together in isolation in a foreign land. Anyone who served as Trotsky’s secretary could testify that he was difficult to please, but only Lyova knew how difficult it was to please his father. Sensitive by nature, Lyova was deeply wounded by his father’s carping criticisms of his efforts as “slipshod,” “slovenly,” and worse. Trotsky was aware that his severity could be oppressive, but apparently he did not fully grasp its toll.

Lyova’s involvement with a woman placed a further strain on his relationship with his father. She was Jeanne Molinier, the wife of Raymond Molinier, at the time one of Trotsky’s most valued French followers and a frequent visitor to Prinkipo. At the end of one of the couple’s visits, Raymond returned to Paris alone, and not long afterward Lyova and Jeanne began an affair. Jeanne at first considered it no more than a fling, while Lyova took the matter so seriously that he even threatened to commit suicide unless Jeanne agreed to live with him. Trotsky strongly disapproved of the liaison, and a few years later, when the French Trotskyists split into two rival groups, he had even more reason to do so, as Jeanne sided with the renegade faction led by her former husband against the orthodox group under Trotsky and Lyova.

There is no telling how things might have developed had Lyova not gone to live in Berlin in February 1931. The rationale behind this move was to facilitate Trotsky’s leadership of the movement by having Lyova represent him at its organizational nerve center in the German capital. There Lyova would take full control of the Bulletin of the Opposition, whose publication would be transferred from Paris. In order to secure a German visa, he enrolled as a student at Berlin’s Higher Technical School. This was no mere ruse, however, as he was intent on resuming his education toward an engineering degree cut short in Moscow. The family’s sadness must have been tempered with relief. Perhaps the separation would make it easier for Lyova to serve as his father’s indispensable comrade.

As the years passed, the family would have plenty of occasions to consider what Lyova’s fate would have been had he managed to return to the Soviet Union in 1929. The decision to deny him a visa was made at the highest echelon. When informed of Lyova’s application, Stalin said with a sneer, “For him it’s all over. And the same for his family. Reject it.”

 

Before Lyova’s departure for Berlin, the family was joined on Prinkipo by Zina, the elder of Trotsky’s two daughters by his first marriage. She arrived from Moscow with her son, five-year-old Seva, a blond-haired boy with plumpish cheeks who spoke beautiful Russian, “with the singsong Moscow accent,” in Trotsky’s words. Many years later, Albert Glotzer, a young American Trotskyist who came to Turkey in this period, still remembered Seva’s high-pitched voice calling out to his grandfather, “Lev Davidovich!” boy was embarked on an extended period of upheaval, during which time he would lose, among others, his mother, his uncle Lyova, and then his grandfather, while he himself would barely escape death in the commando raid of May 1940.

It seems certain that Zina was already mentally unstable by the time she moved into her father’s house in Prinkipo. Her younger sister, Nina, had died of tuberculosis in 1928, a victim of the privations and persecution she was forced to endure because of her association with her father, who was in exile in Alma Ata during the final stage of her illness. Nina’s husband had been arrested and exiled, and she had lost her job. As Trotsky’s daughter, she had difficulty getting proper medical care. She died at twenty-six. Her two children were taken in by Trotsky’s first wife, Alexandra, in Leningrad.

Zina was also tubercular, and she received permission to go abroad for treatment. She was allowed to take along only one child, leaving behind her daughter from a previous marriage. Her husband, Seva’s father, an outspoken Trotskyist, had been arrested in 1929 and deported to Arkhangelsk, near the White Sea. Zina suffered from chronic depression and seemed to believe that close contact with her father could provide a cure.

Of Trotsky’s four children, Zina most resembled him, both physically and in her emotional intensity. She worshipped her father, and yet they barely knew each other. He had left his daughters as infants when he made his first escape from Siberia in 1902, and had had little contact with them over the years. Now father and daughter were to live together under the same roof. This arrangement would last nearly ten months, during which time the tension between them mounted until the lid almost blew off.

In Moscow Zina had been active in Opposition politics and twice had been detained by the police. Arriving in Turkey, she hoped to be welcomed as one of her father’s trusted disciples. Trotsky, however, refused to entertain the idea, not least because Zina’s increasingly evident instability made it impossible to trust her with confidential information. Zina was told that as she intended to return to Moscow after her convalescence this arrangement was for her own protection, though she took it instead as a form of rejection. She was intensely jealous of Lyova for his close collaboration with Trotsky, and during the brief period they overlapped in Turkey the two half-siblings clashed. Even more perilously, Zina competed with Natalia for Trotsky’s affections, which led to angry scenes between father and daughter, and when Trotsky raised his voice, Zina fell apart. “To Papa,” she often said, “I am a good-for-nothing.”

Zina’s lungs responded to treatment, but her mental health deteriorated. She was prone to fits of anger and delirium. Trotsky began to encourage her to go to Berlin for psychoanalysis, a proposal she resisted until he prevailed. She departed from Turkey near the end of 1931, leaving young Seva behind. According to Zina, in their final conversation her father said to her: “You are an astonishing person. I have never met anyone like you.” “He said that,” she told Lyova, “in an expressive and severe voice.”

In Berlin, she continued to slide—with some assistance from the Kremlin. On February 20, 1932, the Soviet government deprived Trotsky and all his family members abroad of their Soviet citizenship. For Zina, this meant that she would never again be able to see her daughter, her husband, or her mother. At the same time, she sensed her father drifting away from her emotionally, and increasingly she blamed her condition on the growing distance between them. Lyova saw her occasionally, and one such encounter left him shaken. “Zina is terribly oppressed, depressed, she looks utterly destroyed,” he wrote to Trotsky. “I pity her, Papochka, very, very much. It’s painful to look at her.” Lyova urged his father to write to Zina, but Trotsky was incapable of sending his daughter the kind of letter she was increasingly desperate to receive.

Trotsky, meanwhile, was angry that his daughter had left Seva in his care. “Mama is tied down both hands and feet by Seva,” he complained to Lyova in June 1932. “We must settle the question of Seva as quickly as possible.” Yet Van asserts that when he arrived in Prinkipo in October 1932 to take up his secretarial duties, he found a “gentle, quiet little boy, who went to school in the morning and made himself scarce in the house. Natalia was far from being ‘tied hands and feet’ by him.” Inconvenience aside, one can only speculate on the source of Trotsky’s discomfort. Glotzer recalls that at school Seva “suffered the usual little cruelties inflicted by children” because he was different. One day, he remembers, Trotsky asked him if he could teach Seva how to box. Their first lesson broke down almost immediately, never to be resumed.

Seva was reunited with his mother in Berlin in the final days of 1932, but his presence may have aggravated her condition, perhaps by exacerbating the feeling that her father had rejected her. Two weeks earlier, on December 14, she had written in her final letter to him: “Dear Papa, I expect a letter from you, if only a few lines.” On January 5, 1933, she barricaded herself in her apartment and turned on the gas taps. She had taken steps beforehand to arrange for Seva to be with friends and left instructions to explain to the boy that she was confined in a hospital for infectious patients. “Poor, poor, poor child. But nothing could be more horrible for him than a psychologically deranged mother.” The barricade she constructed inside the door of her apartment ensured that rescue was impossible. She was thirty-one years old.

In Prinkipo, when the news arrived by telegram Trotsky and Natalia immediately isolated themselves in their room. The household understood that something terrible had happened, but the nature of the tragedy was revealed only with the arrival of the afternoon newspapers. A few days passed before Trotsky emerged from his room and returned to work. “Two deep wrinkles had formed on either side of his nose and ran down both sides of his mouth,” Van observed. His first act was to compose an open letter to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in which he placed the blame for his daughter’s death on Stalin: by forever cutting off Zina from her family in Moscow, the dictator had driven her to madness and suicide.

This was how Trotsky explained Zina’s death to her distraught mother, Alexandra, then in Leningrad, but she refused to believe it. “I will go mad myself if I do not learn everything,” she wrote to him after receiving the news. As a radical young activist in the southern Ukraine in the 1890s, Alexandra Sokolovskaya had introduced Trotsky, then known as Lev Bronstein, to Marxism. The lovers had married in a Moscow transit prison in 1900, submitting to this bourgeois ceremony in order to be sent jointly into Siberian exile. There, two years later, convinced that her husband was destined for greatness, she encouraged him to escape and pursue his ambitions among the Russian Marxist émigrés in Europe. She remained a loyal Trotskyist through the 1920s and raised two fervent Oppositionist daughters. Now she had lost them both.

“Where is my bright radiant darling,” Alexandra grieved, “where is my Zina?” She quoted a letter Zina sent her a few weeks before her death in which she blamed her illness on her father’s indifference toward her. “Papa never writes to me,” she complained repeatedly. “He will never write to me again.” Nor did she believe she would ever be able to see him again.

“I wrote to her that it was not so tragic as it seemed to her,” Alexandra recounted to Trotsky, “that much is explained by your character, by the difficulty you have expressing your feelings, although often you understand that this has to be done.” Unlike Trotsky, Alexandra was not inclined to attach any special significance to Zina’s loss of her Soviet citizenship. Zina was a “public person” whose life was never focused on her husband or her children. She prized above all her father’s “tender solicitude, but she did not get enough of it.” Psychoanalysis, it was obvious to Alexandra, was hardly appropriate for someone like Zina. “She was by nature very reserved, and getting her to talk was very difficult. This was a quality she acquired from both of us. And yet here she was forced to talk about things that she didn’t want to talk about.”

Of course, had Zina remained in Russia, Alexandra understood, tuberculosis would have killed her. “Our daughters were doomed,” she declared, and she feared that the same was true of their grandchildren. “I look at them in horror. I no longer believe in life, I don’t believe that they will get to grow up. All the time I expect some new catastrophe.” She wondered whether Trotsky would assume care for Seva.

“It was hard for me to write this letter and it is hard to send it off,” she concluded. “Forgive me this cruelty towards you, but you should know everything about our kinfolk.”

Trotsky’s response to this letter sought to explain and console. He wrote it in his own hand and gave it to Van in a sealed envelope, which he himself had addressed “in his fine handwriting.” The letter was sent by registered mail, according to Van, with proof of delivery requested. “The return receipt never came back.”

Van says that Trotsky’s appearance changed markedly in the first half of 1933. “The two furrows that had appeared on his face after Zina’s death did not disappear and, with time, grew deeper.” His hair grayed considerably, and he began to comb it to the side “instead of wearing it proudly brushed back.” Within those few months, “his features became what they would remain till his death.”

It was also at this time that Trotsky shed the habit of casually remarking about his adversaries, “You know, they should be shot”—a practice he probably adopted during the Revolution, when it was more than just a manner of speaking. “After the spring of 1933,” Van claims, “the word vanished from his vocabulary. He would no longer allow himself this kind of irony.”

Two years later, in the spring of 1935, with the Great Terror under way, Alexandra was arrested and exiled to Siberia. She was shot in 1938.

Trotsky’s sons-in-law, already in exile, were rearrested in 1935 and sent farther on. Both were later shot, Seva’s father in 1936.

That same year, Trotsky’s sister, Olga Kameneva, four years his junior, who was at one time an official in the Soviet foreign ministry, was arrested and imprisoned shortly after her former husband, Lev Kamenev, was executed in the wake of the first Moscow trial. Her two sons were shot in 1936; she was shot in 1941.

Trotsky had an older sister, Elizaveta, who died of natural causes in the Kremlin in 1924. He had an older brother, Alexander, a former director of a sugar factory with whom he had maintained only distant relations since the early 1920s. The elder Bronstein was “unmasked” in February 1938 as an agent of his brother, “the bandit chieftain Trotsky.” He was shot in April. Natalia’s brother, Sergei Sedov, was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to five years in a camp, where he died the following year.

After the arrest of Alexandra, her daughter Nina’s orphaned children were placed in the care of Alexandra’s ailing sister in the Ukraine. They disappeared without a trace.

 

Zina’s death in Berlin in January 1933 occurred as the National Socialists were storming their way to power in Germany. On January 30, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. A month later came the Reichstag fire which the Nazis used as the pretext to arrest communists and socialists and suspend civil liberties, as they moved toward the establishment of a one-party state. Lyova and Jeanne barely managed to escape Germany, fleeing to Paris, which became the new headquarters of the sparse and struggling Trotskyist movement.

As Trotsky’s chief lieutenant in Berlin and then Paris, Lyova carried a tremendous load. He served as his father’s liaison with the many and fractious Trotskyist groups, edited and published the Bulletin of the Opposition, and acted as Trotsky’s literary agent in Europe. Himself penniless, he constantly worried about his parents’ lack of funds. From Moscow he received despairing letters from his wife, Anna, a daughter of the proletariat, who wrote of the hardships suffered by her and their boy, Leon, and who threatened to commit suicide. She would be arrested and shot one month before Lyova’s death. Their son would vanish completely. Lyova’s relationship with Jeanne was volatile and often contentious. In early 1935 they became surrogate parents to Seva, who arrived from Vienna where he had been sent to live with friends of the family after his mother’s death. Now nine years old, he had forgotten his Russian and French; at school in Paris he was taunted as “le Boche” (the German).

Devotion to his father kept Lyova going, yet his father often made his life miserable. “I think that all Papa’s deficiencies have not diminished as he has grown older,” Lyova wrote to his mother, “but under the influence of his isolation…have gotten worse. His lack of tolerance, hot temper, inconsistency, even rudeness, his desire to humiliate, offend and even destroy have increased.” Having thus unburdened himself, Lyova decided not to mail this indictment, but in any case his mother would not have disagreed with it. “The trouble with father, as you know, is never over the great issues, but over the tiny ones,” she observed, resigned to her husband’s arbitrary ways. “What is to be done—nothing can be done,” was a refrain of her letters to her son, and on one occasion she commiserated, “I am writing as you are, with my feelings and my eyes closed.”

During Trotsky and Natalia’s two-year sojourn in France, which began in the summer of 1933, father and son were able to confer directly on political and other matters, especially during the winter of 1933–34, when Trotsky lived in Barbizon, thirty miles outside Paris. Trotsky was later forced to move to Norway, which left Lyova alone to absorb the shock of the Moscow trial in August 1936. Lyova remembered these Old Bolsheviks as family friends from his childhood days. Lev Kamenev had been an uncle to him. Now prosecutor Vyshinsky railed against them as “scum” and “vermin.” The very fact of such a trial was astonishing; its outcome was inconceivable. On a Paris street, when Lyova read the news that all sixteen of the accused had been executed, he became hysterical, bawling uncontrollably, with no concern to hide his face. People stopped and stared as he walked by, crying like a child.

That autumn, when the Norwegian government, under pressure from Moscow, interned Trotsky and Natalia, the somewhat shy and insecure Lyova was forced to emerge from his father’s shadow. The trial itself made this inevitable by charging both Trotsky and his son with having masterminded an elaborate conspiracy to bring down the Soviet regime. This frame-up needed to be exposed, and with Trotsky in confinement the responsibility fell on Lyova. With vital assistance from Van, he produced a careful refutation of the purge trial evidence under the title The Red Book on the Moscow Trial, published in French, German, and Russian. In Norway, Trotsky was allowed to read a copy. “I became completely engrossed,” he later wrote in admiration of his dead son. “Each succeeding chapter seemed to me better than the last. ‘Good boy, Levusyatka!’ my wife and I said. ‘We have a defender!’ How his eyes must have glowed with pleasure as he read our warm praise!”

Trotsky and Natalia in the patio of the Blue House, 1937.

Albert Glotzer Papers, Hoover Institution Archives

When the second Moscow trial began, Lyova’s parents were in distant Mexico. Once again, old comrades and family friends were arrested as “enemies of the people” and confessed the most fantastic of crimes, carried out with inspiration and assistance from abroad by Trotsky and Lyova. Victor Serge, the Brussels-born Russian Trotskyist writer who won his release from Soviet captivity in 1936 as a result of a campaign by left-wing writers and activists—a rare bit of good fortune—came to Paris and sought out Lyova. “More than once, lingering until dawn in the streets of Montparnasse,” he recalled, “we tried together to unravel the tangle of the Moscow trials. Every now and then, stopping under a street lamp, one of us would exclaim: “We are in a labyrinth of sheer madness!’”

It was around this time, in the first weeks of 1937, that Lyova began to have concerns about his safety. He sensed the presence of a spy in his midst, and he wondered if the GPU might try either to kidnap him or to kill him and make his death look like something other than murder. He published a statement in a Paris newspaper declaring that he was of sound health, both physically and mentally, and that were he to die suddenly, it would likely be as a victim of Stalin’s secret police.

Lyova’s relations with his father came under increasing strain as Trotsky and his staff prepared for the Dewey Commission hearings that April. Documents were urgently required, chiefly depositions from European witnesses in order to expose the many internal contradictions of the evidence presented in Moscow. Much of this burden fell on Lyova, who initially questioned the value of such a counter-trial. As Trotsky’s demands proliferated, so did his reproaches of his son for delays and incompetence. The success of the hearings in Coyoacán brought only partial relief, because the commission continued its investigations from New York City.

“I am a beast of burden, nothing else,” Lyova complained to his mother that summer. “I do not learn, I do not read.” He had precious little time and energy to devote to his studies of math and physics at the Sorbonne, his third attempt—after Moscow and Berlin—to complete an engineering degree. Money was a constant source of worry, both in Paris and in Coyoacán. To cover expenses he proposed to take a job in a factory, dismissing his mother’s suggestion that he earn a living as a writer. “I cannot aspire to do any literary work; I do not have the light touch and the talent that can partly replace knowledge.”

Lyova was depressed, and perhaps, as speculation has it, his condition impaired his judgment, which led him to enter a Russian clinic pretending to be a French engineer. Van, whose French upbringing and acquaintance with Lyova make his testimony authoritative, calls this disguise “a ridiculously transparent pose,” even had Lyova been in perfect health. “In two minutes, other Russians could not have failed to realise that he was Russian.” It turns out, however, that the transparency of Lyova’s deception, and the fact that he ended up roaming the corridors speaking delirious Russian, probably made no difference. The fact is, the moment he set out from his apartment on rue Lacre-telle for the clinic, his closest comrade picked up the telephone and alerted the GPU.

His real name was Mark Zborowski. In the movement he went under the pseudonym Étienne. His GPU code names were “Mack” and “Tulip.” He was born in Russia, near Kiev, in 1908 and later emigrated with his parents to Poland, where at some point in the 1920s he took up radical politics, joined the Communist Party, and served time in prison for organizing a strike. In 1928, he and his wife moved to France, where he seems to have become something of a professional student, first in Rouen, then in Grenoble, then in Paris at the Sorbonne, where he decided to specialize in ethnology, eventually obtaining a degree at the École des Hautes Études. Perennially hard up for money, he was easily recruited by the GPU. By befriending Jeanne he was able to infiltrate Lyova’s circle, making himself useful and, before long, indispensable as Lyova’s personal assistant. One quality that set him apart from the other Trotskyists in Paris served to ingratiate him with Lyova: the two men could converse together in Russian.

Looking back on Zborowski long after his identity as a spy had been exposed, Van remembered a man with a “sullen, frowning face” and a “colorless manner,” who behaved “rather like a mouse. He did not make himself conspicuous in any way…. There was nothing you could grapple with in him, except his insignificance.” As it happens, Lyova suspected that the mouse might be a rat. His doubts about Zborowski would come in waves lasting five or six days, but after each wave receded, their friendship was restored. Lyova never told Trotsky about his suspicions, which over time seem to have evaporated entirely.

So complete did Lyova’s trust become that he granted Zborowski access to his mailbox and to Trotsky’s most confidential files, some of which were stored in Zborowski’s apartment. Before leaving Paris for a few weeks in August 1937, Lyova wrote to his father: “In my absence, my place will be taken by Étienne, who is on the closest terms with me here, so the address stays the same and your missions can be carried out as if I were in Paris myself. Étienne can be trusted absolutely in every respect.” Based on this and similar evidence, Van judged Lyova’s blindness toward Zborowski to be “astonishing”—although Van himself had to confess, “I never had any special suspicions about him.”

It seems that Zborowski’s role was limited to that of informant and finger man, as in November 1936 when thieves made off with a portion of Trotsky’s archives stored in an apartment on rue Michelet—files that ended up in the Kremlin. Zborowski kept Moscow thoroughly acquainted with the activities of Trotsky and Lyova, who were assigned the unimaginative code names “Old Man” and “Sonny.” Lyova came to confide in Zborowski and these confidences were passed along to Moscow in top secret reports. One item in particular must have come under special scrutiny. At the end of the second Moscow trial, in January 1937, Lyova is supposed to have remarked to Zborowski: “There’s no reason to hesitate any longer, Stalin must be killed.” This sounds like one of Lyova’s emotional outbursts, but Zborowski framed it as an endorsement of assassination.

To judge from these police files, in the month of November 1937 Lyova was experiencing some kind of mental crisis. One explanation for this was a letter he had received from his father rejecting a proposal put forward by Lyova’s comrades that he leave Paris for Mexico. Lyova learned of Trotsky’s decision at a time when he had begun to fear for his life. The source of his alarm was the circumstances surrounding the recent defection of Ignace Reiss, a Soviet spy based in Europe. Reiss went into hiding after being ordered to return to Moscow, the first of several such desertions by men who had good reason to believe that their next trip home would be their last. Having orchestrated the murders of many of Lenin’s closest comrades, Stalin was now intent on exterminating those who knew about his crimes, starting with the inquisitors behind the show trials. Reports began reaching agents abroad about a bloodbath of their old comrades in the Cheka—the original name for the Soviet secret police—a purge that extended to the upper reaches of the GPU.

Reiss made contact with Trotsky’s allies and informed them that Stalin had decided to “liquidate Trotskyism” outside the USSR. He described the methods of torture and blackmail used to extract the purge trial confessions and portrayed doomed Trotskyists facing death with cries of “Long live Trotsky!” Reiss declared his loyalty to the Fourth International.

The liquidation of Trotskyism abroad, it turned out, began with Reiss himself. On September 4, 1937, his bullet-ridden body was found on a Swiss road near Lausanne where he had been lured to his death. The police ascertained that the gang that killed him had been tailing Lyova and had earlier in the year laid a trap for him near the Swiss border, an appointment with death that his ill health prevented him from keeping. The investigation revealed that the GPU was receiving detailed information about Lyova’s movements and activities, including the fact that he had arranged a rendezvous with Reiss two days later in the northern French city of Reims. Had Reiss eluded his killers in Switzerland, a GPU hit squad was waiting for him in Reims.

Against this sinister background, Lyova’s friends in Paris wrote to Trotsky and Natalia in early November 1937 urging them to persuade Lyova to get out of France and join them in Mexico. Lyova was sick, exhausted, and in danger, yet convinced he was “irreplaceable” in Paris and must “remain at his post.” This was not the case, they insisted. “He is able, brave, and energetic; and we must save him.”

Trotsky probably withheld these admonitions from Natalia. He replied to these friends that Lyova would be forced to lead the life of a “demi-prisonnier” in Mexico, which should serve him only as “le dernier refuge.” Trotsky also wrote directly to Lyova to quash the idea of his withdrawal from Paris. In the event that the French government decided to expel him, “Mexico always remains a possibility,” he assured his son; in the meantime, however, Lyova could count on the protection of the French police, which had assigned him a special guard after the Reiss murder. Whatever his feelings were about the prospect of moving in with his father, Lyova may have been discouraged by his preemptive settlement of the matter. “Voilà, mon petit, this is what I can tell you,” Trotsky concluded on an eerily fatalistic note. “It isn’t much. But…it’s all. Naturally, you should keep whatever money you can collect from the publishers. You will need it.” He signed off in his own hand: “Je t’embrasse. Ton Vieux.”

A GPU report from this period depicts “Sonny” as alcoholic and depressed. On one occasion, after several continuous hours of boozing, he apologized to “Mack” and “almost in tears begged his forgiveness for having suspected him of being an agent of the GPU when they first met.” He also confessed that he had “lost all faith” in his father’s cause as early as 1927, and that wine and women were now more important to him than anything else. Secret police reports of this type, written to satisfy the spymasters back in Moscow, must be approached with a great deal of skepticism. But if what Zborowski told his GPU handlers approximated the truth, it indicates that Lyova was in a downward spiral when appendicitis struck.

The Soviet intelligence officer who later organized Trotsky’s murder claimed that he and his colleagues were stumped when they learned of Lyova’s death. No one stepped forward to take the credit; no decorations were given out in secret ceremonies in the Kremlin. Nor, decades later, did the partial opening of the KGB archives help to clarify matters, though perhaps the orders to liquidate “Sonny” were issued verbally or the written evidence was destroyed once his case was closed. If so, this raises the question of what incentive there was to eliminate Trotsky’s son at a time when his most trusted comrade was a Soviet police informant. Or was Lyova’s murder—if murder it was—simply a way to lash out at Trotsky?

 

Mourning their loss, Lyova’s parents grappled with the deeper mysteries. “Both of them have aged terribly in this one day,” Hansen wrote on February 17, the day after that blackest day. “Poor poor Natalia. She is absolutely prostrated. When the news was broken to the OM, he said, ‘This is the finish of Natalia.’ They have remained in their room without coming out, windows and doors closed, the room in darkness. They are utterly agonized.” As a precaution, the staff decided to remove the small automatic pistol that served as a paperweight on Trotsky’s desk.

Trotsky’s grief was compounded by guilt for his censorious treatment of Lyova. How could it be otherwise, after the long stream of invective? “Slovenliness bordering on treachery” was how he characterized his son’s performance in a letter from February 1937. “It is difficult to say which are the worst blows, those from Moscow or those from Paris…. [A]lthough in recent months I have had to endure a lot, I have not experienced such a dark day as today, after receiving your letter. I opened the envelope confident that I would find the affidavits, but instead found excuses and promises.”

Expressions of remorse would follow and help mollify his incomparable friend, but only until the next dressing-down. On one occasion, long-suffering Lyova struck back, reminding Trotsky of his limited resources—“sometimes I do not even have the money to buy postage stamps”—and objecting to the way his father belittled him to other comrades. “I thought that I could count on your support. Instead you are making me your butt and are telling all and sundry about my ‘criminal carelessness.’”

These fulminations recurred to the end. Trotsky’s penultimate letter to his son, dated January 21, 1938, perhaps the last one Lyova read, conveyed his exasperation that the issue of the Bulletin that was to feature the Dewey Commission’s verdict had yet to appear in print. He called this an “outright crime” and once again threatened to move the journal to New York. Lyova’s last letter to his father, sent on February 4, accompanied proofs of this special issue of the Bulletin—though this package would arrive too late for Trotsky to be able to convey his relief and appreciation.

Now, behind the blackened windows, Trotsky wrestled with his guilty conscience. Work on remodeling the Blue House had been halted, leaving the patio littered with brick, plaster, lime, and sand. On the morning of February 20, while inspecting the grounds, Hansen noticed that the French doors to Trotsky and Natalia’s bedroom were open. The OM was seated at a small table he had placed in the doorway for the light. He was writing Lyova’s obituary. “In the evening he was still there working under a lamp he had set up…. He worked very late.”

The result was his affecting tribute, “Leon Sedov—Son, Friend, Fighter,” which sketched scenes from his son’s life, beginning with a pregnant Natalia confined in a St. Petersburg jail during the Revolution of 1905. “His mother—who was closer to him than any other person in the world—and I are living through these terrible hours recalling his image, feature by feature, unable to believe that he is no more and weeping because it is impossible not to believe…. Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us.”

Trotsky’s testimonial was also a statement of partial contrition and self-exculpation. His intimate collaboration with his son had sometimes led to fierce clashes between them, he revealed, and not only over political matters. He admitted that Lyova had borne the brunt of the pedantic and exacting behavior that often made him insufferable to family and friends. “To a superficial eye it might even have seemed that our relationship was permeated with severity and aloofness,” he elucidated, laying down a marker for his future biographers. “But beneath the surface there glowed a deep mutual attachment based on something immeasurably greater than ties of blood—a solidarity of views and judgments, of sympathies and antipathies, of joys and sorrows experienced together, of great hopes we had in common. And this mutual attachment blazed up from time to time so warmly as to reward us three-hundred-fold for the petty friction in daily work.”

Lyova was hunted by the GPU, who intercepted his mail, stole his papers, and listened in on his telephone conversations, Trotsky affirmed. “His closest friends wrote us three months ago that he was subject to a danger too direct in Paris and insisted on his going to Mexico.” But Lyova objected that while the danger was undeniable, it would be criminal of him to abandon his post in the midst of the battle. “Nothing remained except to bow to this argument.” This was how Trotsky preferred to remember the episode, from the perspective of a mere bystander.

As to the cause of Lyova’s death, Trotsky held the GPU responsible. “This young and profoundly sensitive and tender being had had far too much to bear. Whether the Moscow masters resorted to chemistry, or whether everything they had previously done proved sufficient, the conclusion remains one and the same: It was they who killed him.”

Trotsky and Natalia’s isolation came to an end after several days, though it would be several weeks before they rejoined the rest of the household at the dinner table. The period of mourning was convoluted by the onset of a protracted struggle with Jeanne over custody of Seva and of Trotsky’s archives. At first, relations were warm, with Trotsky inviting Jeanne to come live in Mexico as “our beloved daughter.” Before long, however, a chill set in. It emerged that Lyova, in a testament he produced in great haste before his departure for the clinic, had left Jeanne as the executor of Trotsky’s papers. As an adherent of the breakaway group of French Trotskyists, Jeanne was not inclined to relinquish these archives. As surrogate mother to Seva, moreover, she had become attached to the boy and did not wish to give him up. In the face of Jeanne’s intransigence, Trotsky, who at the outset seemed open to the idea that Seva should be raised in Paris, became determined to gain custody of his grandson.

An agreement on the transfer of the archives was arranged within a few months, but the custody battle dragged on in court and was the subject of sensational press coverage. When the law eventually ruled in Trotsky’s favor, an overwrought Jeanne abducted Seva and hid him in a religious institution in the Vosges region of eastern France. He was rescued by Trotsky’s allies then nearly kidnapped by Jeanne’s confederates. It was not until August 1939 that the boy, then thirteen years old, was brought to Mexico.

Throughout this ordeal, Natalia retained feelings of compassion for Jeanne, and the two women consoled each other in a tearful correspondence. Trotsky could not abide such divided loyalties, and the resulting marital strife was registered by Hansen in his telegraphic penciled notes: “The only times of anger between OM & N—his banging window shattering glass—The translation from Russian—Why don’t you (get a divorce) go & marry/live with some one else”—an outburst, Hansen seemed to recall, that had to do with Seva.

One afternoon during those tempestuous days, while Trotsky was having a siesta, Natalia came to Van’s room very upset, with tears running down her cheeks. “Van, Van, you know what he told me?” she cried out. “You are with my enemies.” She quoted her husband in French then repeated his remark in the original Russian. Of course, Trotsky had his own reasons for being upset, Van allowed. “But the harsh fact remains that six weeks after Liova’s death, while Natalia was still devastated with grief, Trotsky had spoken to her in the most cutting and brutal terms possible.”

Meanwhile, Trotsky’s most treacherous enemy continued to elude detection, as the French Trotskyists nominated the reliable Étienne—agent provocateur Mark Zborowski—to take Lyova’s place in Paris. From Moscow, Zborowski was given a new assignment: to penetrate Trotsky’s household in Coyoacán.