CHAPTER 8

The Great Dictator

It was March 1939, and Pavel Sudoplatov was being driven to an important meeting in the Kremlin in the company of NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, who sat beside him. Sudoplatov was head of the Administration for Special Tasks, an elite unit that specialized in sabotage, abduction, and assassination of enemies of the people on foreign soil. Sudoplatov’s predecessor had been arrested the previous November, and he feared his own arrest after being denounced by a colleague as a “typical Trotskyist double-dealer.” When Beria summoned him, he suspected the worst. The car entered the Kremlin through the Spassky Gate on Red Square, and drove down a dead end alongside the old Senate building. Only then did Sudoplatov realize that Beria was taking him to meet with Stalin.

The two men entered the building and walked up the staircase to the second floor, then down a long, wide, carpeted corridor past offices behind tall doors, like rooms in a museum, Sudoplatov thought. “I was apprehensive and tense with enthusiastic excitement.” He could feel his heart beating as Beria opened the door and they entered an enormous reception room, from where they were led into Stalin’s office.

Stalin, dressed in his trademark gray Party tunic and old baggy trousers, invited his guests to sit at a long table covered with a green baize cloth. Nearby stood his desk, its papers arranged in perfect order. On the wall behind the desk was a photograph of Lenin; on an adjacent wall were images of Marx and Engels. Stalin appeared focused, poised, calm. Sudoplatov was impressed by his self-confidence and ease. The steady gaze of the dictator’s honey-colored eyes gave the impression that he was listening to every word. Beria, dressed in a modest suit with an open collar, adjusted his pince-nez and came right to the point, recommending that Sudoplatov be appointed deputy director of the NKVD’s foreign department.

Stalin frowned, a reaction that might have completely unnerved an uninitiated visitor, but Sudoplatov had seen this expression before. The pipe in Stalin’s hand, though stuffed with tobacco, was not lit. “Then he struck a wooden match with a gesture known to all who watched newsreels, and moved an ashtray close to him.” Stalin ignored Sudoplatov’s nomination and told Beria to summarize his foreign intelligence agenda. This was Sudoplatov’s third meeting with the Soviet leader, and once again he took note of Stalin’s gruffness, which he assumed was “an inseparable component of his personality, just like the stern look that came from the smallpox marks on his face.”

As Beria spoke, Stalin rose from his chair and began to pace slowly back and forth in his soft Georgian boots. Sudoplatov’s promotion, Beria proceeded to explain, would enable him to mobilize all resources necessary for the liquidation of that most treacherous enemy of the people, the renegade Trotsky. Stalin must have been thinking it was high time.

Ten years earlier, he had chosen to banish Trotsky from the Soviet Union. At the time, he was not yet powerful enough to have his vanquished enemy executed—not openly anyway, and he could not risk an assassination. Deportation, Stalin assumed, would cut off all potential avenues for Trotsky’s political comeback in the USSR. He probably figured that the exile would remain isolated, without friends or funds, and that he would become tainted by his foreign associations. Within a few years, however, as Trotsky denounced him relentlessly in interviews, articles, pamphlets, and books, Stalin came to regret having let the “chatterbox” out of his grasp.

Trotsky knew this instinctively. “Stalin would now give a great deal to be able to retract the decision to deport me,” he wrote privately in 1935. “How tempting it would be to stage a ‘show’ trial! But the danger of exposure is too great.” Once again Trotsky underestimated his adversary, who then cast him in the role of mastermind of the elaborate conspiracies exposed in three spectacular show trials. Stalin’s bitterness about having allowed Trotsky to get away was assuaged by the exile’s usefulness as a satanic symbol of treason and heresy. Stalin could not have invented another scapegoat like Trotsky. And alarms about one and another “Trotskyist center” in the USSR would not have served Stalin nearly so well had the traitor not been alive and living abroad.

Once the show trials were over, Trotsky had outlived his usefulness. Sudoplatov records Stalin’s complaint, at their March 1939 meeting, about the “treacherous infiltrations” of the Trotskyists in the international Communist movement; once the looming European war broke out, such machinations would endanger the Soviet state by hindering its subversion operations behind enemy lines. Stalin may have portrayed Trotsky as a threat to national security for the benefit of the young intelligence officer sitting before him, but in fact he was under no illusion about the dangers posed by the tiny Trotskyist movement, either to Soviet security or to his own grip on power. Paranoia, in other words, did not influence Stalin’s calculations.

Envy, hatred, revenge—these provided motivation enough for Stalin to want Trotsky dead. A few years after the Revolution he was heard to say: “The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and then go to sleep.” For Stalin there was no greater object of loathing than Trotsky, that “operetta commander” who had dared to ridicule him as the “outstanding mediocrity” of the Party and denounce him as the “gravedigger” of the Revolution.

When Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin and joined Trotsky in opposition in 1926, they carried dire warnings about their erstwhile ally. As Trotsky launched into a critique of Stalin’s policies toward China, Great Britain, and other countries, Kamenev interrupted him: “Do you think that Stalin is now considering how to reply to your arguments? You are mistaken. He is thinking of how to destroy you.” Zinoviev and Kamenev drew up a joint testament, kept safely hidden, which warned that in the event of their “accidental” deaths, Stalin should be held responsible. They advised Trotsky to do the same.

For years Stalin had to remain content with Trotsky’s mere political destruction—although in the purge that followed the Kirov murder in December 1934, he was able to strike at the exile’s family members living in the USSR. After learning of his son Seryozha’s arrest in Moscow, Trotsky wrote about Stalin in a diary entry: “His craving for revenge on me is completely unsatisfied: there have been, so to speak, physical blows, but morally nothing has been achieved…. At the same time he is clever enough to realize that even today I would not change places with him: hence the psychology of a man stung.”

The idea that the dictator might choose to administer the ultimate “physical blow” still seemed improbable. “Naturally, Stalin would not hesitate a moment to organize an attempt on my life, but he is afraid of the political consequences: the accusation will undoubtedly fall on him.” That was before the Terror and the trials and the cascading charges against Trotsky of treason, espionage, sabotage, and assassination. By 1939, after the bloody annihilation of the Old Bolsheviks and of the Red Army command, and with Hitler’s troops capturing headlines with their occupations of Austria and then Czechoslovakia, Stalin had no inhibitions about hunting down the outlaw Trotsky in distant Mexico. The fugitive fully comprehended the danger.

When Beria was done speaking, Sudoplatov heard Stalin say that the only significant political figure in the Trotskyist movement was Trotsky himself. “If Trotsky is finished the threat will be eliminated.” Previous attempts to organize Trotsky’s liquidation had come to naught. Now the assignment was to be handed to Sudoplatov, an experienced killer. The year before, he had carried out the assassination of the émigré Ukrainian nationalist Yevkhen Konovalets in Rotterdam. Konovalets had a sweet tooth, and Sudoplatov, having gained his confidence, contrived to present him with a booby-trapped box of chocolates. Sitting across a restaurant table from his target, Sudoplatov removed the box from his coat pocket and laid it flat on the table. Shifting the device to the horizontal position activated the timer. The two men shook hands and Sudoplatov left the restaurant. He walked into a nearby haberdasher’s shop, where he purchased a raincoat and a hat. Thirty minutes later, exiting onto the street, he heard a bang that sounded like the blowout of a tire. People began running toward the restaurant. Konovalets was dead.

Stalin instructed Sudoplatov to assemble a team of shock troops to carry out what he called the “action” against Trotsky. If the operation were successful, he pledged, the Party would always remember the service rendered by the participants, would see to their welfare and that of their families. Then Stalin stiffened and issued an order: “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year.”

 

The last time Trotsky and Stalin saw each other was in October 1927, at the Central Committee meeting that voted to expel Trotsky from that body. On the drive back to their Kremlin apartment, Natalia did her best to calm her husband, who was highly agitated. “But they cannot tear me away from history!” he declared, a statement that was equal parts defiance and self-consolation. The fact is, however, they had already begun to alter Trotsky’s role in accounts of the Revolution. The Man of October was being remade into the Judas Iscariot of the Party.

Fiercely jealous of his place in history, Trotsky was determined to put up a fight. He would be well equipped to do so, thanks in part to a misunderstanding among Stalin’s policemen. The order for Trotsky’s expulsion from the country said nothing about his personal archives: crates and trunks stuffed full of Soviet-era documents, including copies of his correspondence with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders and the records of the Opposition since 1923. He was allowed to take these incriminating documents with him into exile, together with his personal library. When Stalin found out, he was incredulous. In the aftermath, several people were arrested, including three GPU agents.

The passport Trotsky was handed as he boarded the steamer Ilich, leaving Odessa for Istanbul in February 1929, listed him as a writer. This must have pleased him. As a youth he had dreamed of becoming a writer, but he chose instead to subordinate his literary work, like everything else, to the revolution. During the Soviet years, his extended writing projects on literature and culture offered him an escape from the stresses and strains of political life. In exile he would have the opportunity to devote himself to serious writing. He would in fact be compelled to do so in order to support himself, to pay for his protection, and to fund the Bulletin of the Opposition. It was these considerations, rather than vanity, that persuaded Trotsky, not long after he had settled in Turkey, to accept an offer from Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York to publish his autobiography. One year later, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography was selling briskly in English, Russian, German, and French editions.

Trotsky took obvious pleasure in composing the book’s early chapters, which contain vivid recollections of growing up on his father’s prosperous farm in the southern Ukraine, his schooling in Odessa, his turn to radicalism, and his first prisons and Siberian exile. The writing of the later sections, however, which recount his battles with Stalin and the other “epigones,” took a toll on his nerves and his health. Here Trotsky was forced to answer the favorite question of journalists, comrades, and perfect strangers, one he had come to dread: “How could you lose power?” The question was naive, he thought, as if losing power was like losing a watch or a wallet. Once more he had to explain that his defeat came at the hands not of a man but of a machine. It was not Stalin who had triumphed over him, but the ascendant bureaucracy Stalin personified.

The success of My Life led to a publishing contract from Simon & Schuster for a book on the Russian Revolution. Trotsky spent the better part of two years on the project, drawing on his memory and imagination, his books and archives, as well as library books that were shuttled back and forth to him in Turkey by comrades in Paris and Berlin. The result was Trotsky’s masterpiece, The History of the Russian Revolution, a hugely detailed narrative account of Russia’s upheaval, from the fall of the Romanovs to the Bolshevik coup d’état. Written in Russian, it was published in English translation in three volumes in 1932 and 1933.

The History is best appreciated as a work of literature. The narrative pulses with drama and coruscates throughout, as Trotsky switches effortlessly back and forth between the movements of armies and of crowds and the actions of individuals. There are powerful set pieces. An encounter on a Petrograd street during the February days between a demonstration of 2,500 Petrograd workers and a detachment of Cossacks, the czar’s enforcers, is especially memorable, as is the Red Guards’ assault on the Winter Palace during the October insurrection. The portraits of individual actors are sharply drawn. Trotsky subjects the opponents of the Bolsheviks—be they monarchists, liberals, or socialists—to his corrosive blend of irony, sarcasm, and mockery. Not only are they invariably found guilty of being on the wrong side of history; they are typically both wicked and stupid. George Bernard Shaw once remarked that “When Trotsky cuts off his opponent’s head, he holds it up to show that there are no brains in it.”

Trotsky’s History, while free of jargon, is unmistakably the work of a Marxist historian. The author claimed to be objective in his presentation of facts, but he did not pretend to be impartial. Despite the mounting suspense he is able to sustain throughout his narrative, the outcome is never in doubt. Russia must overcome its backwardness by leaping over the bourgeois stage of history directly into socialism. The Provisional Government, personified at the pivotal stage by the charismatic socialist lawyer and politician Alexander Kerensky, is doomed to defeat, as are the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the other rival parties of the Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet.

The masses are the collective heroes of the drama, yet ultimately only the Bolshevik Party can lead the way and seize power in the name of the workers and peasants. It was Trotsky himself who directed the October putsch, but here he goes out of his way to remove himself from the narrative. Instead, as he did in My Life, he deliberately places himself in Lenin’s shadow. Without Lenin, Trotsky states explicitly, the Bolsheviks would not have taken power in October, and probably not at all—a remarkable statement from someone who believed that impersonal social forces determined the course of events.

Trotsky idolized Lenin, and yet here his elevation of the Bolshevik leader was in part an act of self-aggrandizement. Trotsky’s name was inseparably linked to Lenin’s in the context of the Revolution. Trotsky was Red October’s chief of staff, Lenin’s second-in-command. Thus, in exalting Lenin, he was by implication also lifting himself onto the pedestal. This was intended as a slap at Stalin’s historians, who had begun to portray the dictator as Lenin’s right-hand man from the moment the Party’s leader arrived in Petrograd. Stalin had been famously described as a “gray blur” in 1917. Trotsky’s account leaves him in obscurity.

On the strength of the clamorous reception and respectable sales of The History of the Russian Revolution, the American publisher Doubleday, Doran & Company signed Trotsky to a contract for a biography of Lenin. When he began the new project, he was living in Barbizon, France, some thirty miles south of Paris, where he conducted his research using books brought to him by Lyova. During a sedate autumn and winter of 1933–34, he wrote the initial chapters covering Lenin’s youth. Further progress was stalled when his asylum came under hostile scrutiny and he was forced to move, first within France and then to Norway. In retrospect, the villa on the island of Prinkipo seemed like a writer’s paradise.

When Trotsky arrived in Mexico in January 1937, Time magazine gave its readers the impression that the exile was eager to return to work on his biography of Lenin. But Trotsky’s life was in a state of upheaval and his financial situation was extremely precarious. He owed the Norwegian government hundreds of dollars in taxes and he had left behind unpaid medical and legal bills totaling hundreds more. It was only thanks to the generosity of Diego Rivera that he was comfortably situated in Coyoacán.

Trotsky had been counting on income from the sale in the United States of a small book about Stalinism he completed in Norway just before the first trial in August 1936, a work that had already appeared in France as The Revolution Betrayed. Instead, he learned that his literary agent in New York, Max Lieber, had failed to sell the manuscript. Nor, it appeared, had he even tried. Moreover, Lieber’s elusiveness had jeopardized potentially lucrative deals for interviews and articles. Trotsky was flummoxed: his agent, he said, was behaving like a “counter-agent.”

“What is the matter with Lieber?” he inquired impatiently of a comrade in New York. “Has he perhaps become connected with the Stalinists?” Indeed, he had. Lieber’s literary agency served as a front for Soviet espionage activity, including that of Whittaker Chambers, shortly to become the most important American defector from Communism.

Once Lieber was dropped, an agreement was quickly reached with Doubleday to publish The Revolution Betrayed, which came out in March 1937. But Doubleday was insisting that Trotsky complete his biography of Lenin, for which he had been paid his full advance of $5,000 three years earlier. Yet Trotsky needed income. He figured that a book on the Moscow trials could be the best-seller that would rescue him financially. He began to cobble together from his recent short articles and other odds and ends a counterindictment he called “Stalin’s Crimes.” Harper & Brothers agreed in principle to bring out such a book, but when plans were made to publish the transcripts of the Dewey Commission hearings, Trotsky felt compelled to abandon his project.

In the summer of 1937, the need for money inspired Trotsky to try his hand at writing magazine articles, but he was quick to realize that his style was “not sufficiently adapted to the average man on the New York street.” He floated the idea of updating My Life to include the years since 1929, but he himself was reluctant to take it up. He decided instead to move forward on the Lenin biography, but that effort was cut short early in September by the departure of his Russian typist, who suddenly decided to get married. In December, still adrift and without a typist, Trotsky warned the New York office that his financial position was “extremely acute.”

On February 16, 1938, the day Lyova died, a breakthrough occurred in New York, where Trotsky’s new agent, Alan Collins, of the well-regarded Curtis Brown literary agency, worked out an arrangement whereby Harper & Brothers would buy out Trotsky’s contract with Doubleday. The new deal would require him to write two biographies: first a popular life of Stalin, followed by the monumental study of Lenin. Trotsky would receive $5,000 for the two books.

Overwhelmed by grief at the death of his son, Trotsky could hardly imagine undertaking a biography of the man he assumed had just had him killed. Yet the monetary reward was tempting. By this point, the household was on the edge of insolvency. Natalia was borrowing funds from the Mexican comrades and becoming extremely worried, and there was only so much of this that she was able to hide from her husband. From New York, Jan Frankel wrote an anxious letter to Van saying that unless Trotsky accepted the Harper proposition, they would be unable to implement the plan to increase the guard at the Blue House.

Ten days after Lyova’s death, Trotsky finally relented, signaling to Harper that he found their proposal “totally acceptable.” The truth is, he was not in a position to refuse. As Van advised Frankel: “Le vieux semble disposé (à contre-coeur).”

Having been warned by the Doubleday editors about Trotsky’s inability to meet a deadline, Harper decided on a hardheaded arrangement for paying its new author. The $5,000 advance for the two books would be spread out in ten payments of $500 each, delivered at two-month intervals. The British publisher, Nicholson and Watson, would divide its payment of $2,500 for the Stalin book into four installments. The Stalin biography was to be 80,000 words in length and be completed within six months; the Lenin book would be 150,000 words, written during the subsequent eighteen months. The details of the contract were still being negotiated when the first advance check arrived in Coyoacán at the end of April, just as the work was getting under way.

At the time, it was commonly assumed that Trotsky set out to write a life of Stalin as a way to settle scores with his old foe. But in fact, in signing his book contract he raised not the proverbial sword, but the shield. To defend himself from Stalin’s assassins, Trotsky would have to write his biography.

 

“Beginning in 1897, I have waged the fight chiefly with a pen in my hand,” Trotsky wrote in his autobiography. In 1902, during his first escape from Siberia, he was nicknamed Pero, Russian for the Pen, a tribute to his journalistic achievements in exile. Over the years, he was always obsessing about his pen. And yet most of his literary output since the early 1920s, from his correspondence to his books, he produced by dictation, a practice that enabled him to draw on his skills and experience as an orator.

Listening to Trotsky’s resonant voice as he gave dictation, one could imagine its power when he harangued his troops without the aid of a microphone. Dictating in Russian, he would pace the floor of his study, speaking without interruption for an hour or two, sometimes longer. His secretaries marveled at his ability to conjure up lengthy passages of beautifully crafted prose from a few pages of notes in his hand. The clicking keys of the typewriter signaled their concurrence and urged him forward. Punctuation was left entirely to the discretion of the typist, who understood that Trotsky hated to be interrupted. If asked to stop or repeat something, he would easily lose his train of thought and his patience.

Trotsky was known as a literary stylist and he worked hard at it. As he wrote to Cass Canfield, the president of Harper & Brothers, after he began work on the Stalin biography: “At least one-third of my working time is devoted to the literary form of the book. I must have a perfect translation.” But a perfect translation is always elusive, and Trotsky’s Russian presented special challenges. He took full advantage of the freedom afforded by Russian syntax to manipulate the word order within a sentence in order to express emphasis or nuance or for dramatic effect. He refused to concede a trade-off between precision and style, and was always trying to bend the rules of English, French, and German grammar. He complained that Max Eastman’s translation of his History of the Russian Revolution was full of errors, despite its magnificent style.

For the Stalin biography, a scholar of Russian literature was hired to translate Trotsky’s chapters in New York as each was completed. Unlike in the past, Trotsky himself would not be able to consult books borrowed from a major library. Instead, a comrade in New York would serve as his researcher, while queries could be sent to the Paris comrades, who had better access to old Russian newspapers and other obscure sources. The research and translation phases of the work were thus in good hands, but Trotsky had yet to find a replacement for his Russian typist. After fifteen years of dictation, he had lost the habit of writing by hand, except for short texts. Without the services of a Russian collaborator, he would not be able to meet his deadline.

While the search was under way, a comrade from New York with serviceable Russian was asked to fill in, but Trotsky chafed at the slow pace and the constant interruptions. She was replaced in the first week of May by Sara Weber, who had worked for Trotsky in Turkey and during the previous summer in Coyoacán. She arrived from New York in the first week of May, intending to stay for six months, through the completion of the Stalin book, but a family illness forced her to scale back this commitment. So, while the work proceeded, Trotsky continued to be preoccupied by the search for a permanent typist.

Security concerns complicated the search. In May, Frankel sent word about a candidate in his native Czechoslovakia, a young woman of eighteen who reportedly was an expert typist in Russian. The hitch was that the woman in question, whose parents had emigrated from the Soviet Union, was thought to be a Communist. Van entered Trotsky’s study and gave him the news. With a theatrical sweeping motion of his left arm, Trotsky exclaimed: “Let her come! We shall win her over!”

Van and Frankel advised against it, but Trotsky was undaunted. “She is a quite young girl of eighteen,” he wrote to Frankel. “I do not believe that she can be a terrible agent of the G.P.U. Even if she comes with some sympathies for the Stalinists and with some wicked intentions against us (which I consider impossible, for nobody would entrust diabolical schemes to a little girl without experience), even in that case we feel strong enough to watch her, to control her, and to re-educate her.” Trotsky, who tended to see the hand of the GPU in unlikely places, here detected nothing but an expert typist with perfect Russian. A month later, he was still importuning Frankel: “A girl of eighteen cannot make conspiracies in our home: we are stronger. In two or three months she would be totally assimilated.”

In August, just as Sara Weber was preparing to leave Coyoacán, Trotsky discovered the Dictaphone. He had resisted the idea a year earlier, but when it turned out that Diego owned one—an Ediphone in need of minor repairs—he felt he ought to give it a try. Like most people of a certain age, Trotsky was initially skeptical of the new technology. Hansen says he behaved “like a peasant shying away from an optician—grandpa never wore no glasses.” Whenever he got stuck, he would run into the patio calling, “You see? You see? Your American machine…it don’t work.” After Hansen showed the Old Man what he had done wrong, “he would make a little hissing sound in his teeth and then settle down again to more dictating.”

Once Trotsky got the hang of it, his enthusiasm for his recording machine was unbounded. He began to bring it into his bedroom so he could dictate at night. A Russian émigré living in Mexico was hired to replace Sara, but she was a novice typist, and soon Trotsky had created a backlog of recorded text. New York was asked to send down a fresh supply of wax cylinders, as well as a shaving machine so they could be erased and reused.

The work moved ahead over the summer and into the autumn, despite the frequent intrusion of more pressing matters: the French police investigation into Lyova’s death, the battles with Lyova’s widow over custody of grandson Seva and Trotsky’s papers, the Klement murder in Paris, travels with Breton and Diego, and preparations for the founding congress of the Fourth International in Paris that September. There was the usual stack of mail to answer, but Trotsky had sworn off “guerrilla polemics” until further notice. For considerable stretches, the long workdays were devoted exclusively to the Stalin book, with breaks for a meal, a siesta, and sometimes an evening discussion.

Like all historical research, Trotsky’s job was one of excavation. In this case, however, progress was slowed by multiple layers of falsification about the youth and early career of Joseph Djugashvili. The man who became Stalin was born a year before Trotsky, in 1878, to a violent, drunken cobbler in Gori, a small town in Georgia, in the Caucasus, the mountainous southern reaches of the Russian Empire. In 1894 he entered the seminary in Tblisi, the Georgian capital, where he was exposed to nationalist and other subversive influences. He was expelled from the seminary in 1899, the year he became a professional revolutionary and adopted the pseudonym Koba, taken from the hero of a Georgian novel, an intrepid, avenging Caucasian outlaw. In 1902 he was arrested and exiled to Siberia, the first of seven such banishments, from which he made six escapes. The collapse of the Russian autocracy freed him for the final time.

Unlike the better-educated bourgeois revolutionaries living in European emigration, like Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin operated in the underworld of revolutionary politics inside Russia. As his biographer, Trotsky faced the challenge of establishing even the basic facts about Stalin’s movements and activities before 1917. This required a careful sifting through the differing versions put forward in a succession of official histories and in memoirs both friendly and hostile. When did Stalin become a Marxist? Which of the Party congresses abroad did he attend? When did he first meet Lenin? What was his involvement in the bank robberies carried out in the Caucasus to raise funds for the Party? Was Stalin in fact an agent of the czarist secret police, as nagging rumor had it?

In piecing this story together, Trotsky had to accommodate the awkward truth of Lenin’s promotion of Stalin to the top ranks of the Party. In 1913, a year after Stalin was brought onto the Central Committee and the year he adopted the pseudonym Stalin, meaning Man of Steel, Lenin enthused about his “wonderful Georgian” in a letter to writer Maxim Gorky. Stalin had just visited Lenin in Cracow, where the two men worked on the protégé’s article about Marxism and the nationalities question in Russia. This now became his area of expertise, and after the Revolution he was named People’s Commissar of Nationalities. He may have been a gray blur on the revolutionary stage in 1917, but when the Party’s new elite decision-making body, the Politburo, was created the following year, Stalin took his place on it, alongside Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Nikolai Krestinsky.

These were Trotsky’s preoccupations in the middle of 1938, as he hustled to meet his publisher’s deadline. On July 1, he sent off the first chapter of a projected dozen. A second chapter was finished in mid-August and a third in mid-September, at which time he wrote to his agent: “I must inform you that the whole book will be far more than 80,000 words, I believe 120,000.” The reason, he explained, was the need for completeness. In truth, however, Trotsky was finding it impossible to write a popular biography of Stalin. Too often, the author felt compelled to pause the narrative in order to discredit Stalin’s flatterers. As a result, the writing was tedious and repetitive, as though written for the Society of Old Bolsheviks instead of the Book of the Month Club.

Alan Collins, his agent, voiced concern that Trotsky had changed the conception of the book and that at his current pace he would not be able to meet his November 1 deadline, in which case Harper would withhold further payments. Collins was not placated by Trotsky’s announcement, made at the end of September when he delivered a fourth chapter, that he hoped to finish the book by February 1.

After several comrades in New York echoed Collins’s apprehension, Trotsky responded with a vigorous defense. Stalin was not a figure from the Middle Ages, after all, but a present-day tyrant. He was, moreover, a man whose life and career had been systematically falsified and distorted. “I knew the situation well enough before I went into this work, but at every page I am two or three times surprised, astonished, bewildered by this international conveyor of historical, theoretical, and literary frame-ups.” Because of this deplorable state of affairs, said Trotsky, his handling of historical sources had to be fully transparent, even at the cost of disrupting the narrative. Otherwise, Stalin’s liberal sympathizers would accuse him of being partial and subjective. “My book on Stalin must be unattackable, or better not to be written at all.”

Despite his agent’s unease, in mid-October Trotsky received his third payment from Harper, together with the third installment from his British publisher. A month later he sent off a fifth chapter, informing his agent that he was now working simultaneously on the sixth and seventh, which took the coverage of Stalin’s life through the Russian Revolution. The writing would proceed more quickly now, Trotsky assured Collins, because as the story entered the Soviet period, he would be able to draw on his own experiences and memories of his subject.

As it turned out, however, crossing the threshold of 1917 had the opposite effect on Trotsky. For when he began to narrate the story of his contest with Stalin, his health gave out—just as it had fifteen years earlier, at the crucial juncture.

 

“Health is revolutionary capital and must not be wasted,” Trotsky was always admonishing his staff. The need for vigilance about one’s health was a Bolshevik principle that originated with Lenin. His obsession with matters of health and fitness—both his own and that of his comrades—inspired the convention whereby the physical well-being of Party officials was the business of the Politburo.

Like Lenin, Trotsky believed in a strict regimen and physical exercise. He was passionate about hunting and fishing, although life as an endangered exile restricted his opportunities. In Turkey, he occasionally shot quail, but fishing became his regular form of exercise. He liked to set out well before dawn, dragging along guards and secretaries, to cast lines or nets into the Sea of Marmara, which teemed with fish. Fishing for Trotsky was strenuous work. He threw his entire being into it. Returning with his catch from these exhausting labors, he began the workday refreshed and energized.

After Trotsky left Turkey in 1933, he had fewer occasions to hunt and to fish. This was especially the case in Mexico, where his movements were restricted by concerns about his safety. During his first year at the Blue House, he often paced the patio. Then came the security renovations in the spring of 1938, which led to the landscaping of the back patio. Trotsky decided to lend a hand, and he quickly realized that this was the kind of demanding physical exercise that he had been missing. He became a gardening addict, the master of the hoe, the trowel, and the shovel. He planted several species of fern, and it was not long before nasturtiums grew luxuriantly throughout the back patio.

In late summer, the cactus was Trotsky’s new obsession. Cactus expeditions became a routine activity, with the entire staff pressed into service. When the Dodge and the Ford came to rest at the designated location, Trotsky and his helpers emerged with picks and buckets and got to work. Trotsky was especially fond of a species called the viejo—Old Man Cactus—a phallus-shaped plant covered with long snowy white strands of hair. Some of the species singled out for removal were fiercely armed with heavy spines. The largest weighed nearly two hundred pounds, and the workers’ sweat poured freely under the blazing sun as the cacti were uprooted and then loaded into the automobiles. Looking on, Natalia made jokes about this punishing form of “penal labor.” Trotsky said it was the next best thing to hunting.

During these and similar outings, Trotsky liked to regale his young friends with hunting stories from his Soviet days. Many were simply humorous episodes, like the time Lenin had to drag an unwilling Zinoviev out of a haystack by his boots. It did not take much to get LD reminiscing, as Hansen could testify. Over New Year’s 1938, he and Trotsky were hiking through a field near Taxco. “We flushed a covey of mourning doves and that started the Old Man telling me about hunting trips in the Caucasus mountains.” In the telling, Trotsky made it sound like “the best hunting ground in the world for variety and size of birds such as quail, sage hens, and pheasants.”

Inspired by these recollections, the following day they bought a supply of 12-gauge shells and drove to a lake twenty miles outside of town. Game was scarce, yet Trotsky, who had lost none of his quickness and accuracy with a shotgun, shot four mourning doves. The next evening Hansen escorted him to the same spot. “We tried to get some ducks but they were wary and flew out into the lake. A couple of snipe he shot fell into the water near shore where it was swampy.” Hansen waded out to retrieve these trophies and was promptly relieved of his shoes. As it was getting dark, they had to return to the car. Hansen would have to drive back to Taxco in his bare feet.

Trotsky on a cactus hunt, winter 1939–40.

Alexander H. Buchman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives

This gave Trotsky an opening to poke fun at his vulnerable secretary. It was the first time in his life, he said, that he had a chauffeur without shoes. How did Hansen expect to get past the Taxco authorities barefooted? How could he prove that he was the owner of the automobile when he did not even own a pair of shoes? The Old Man was making the most it, and yet the sight of Hansen’s bare feet triggered inescapable memories of a different kind of hunting story, one that changed the course of Soviet history.

 

ON A SUNDAY in October 1923, Trotsky was in the marsh country north of Moscow, in a region called Zabolotye—literally Beyond the Swamps. Here the Dubna River would spill its banks and flood the surrounding countryside for miles, creating lakes, swamps, and marshes densely bordered by tall reeds. “In the spring,” Trotsky remembered, “the place is visited by geese, storks, ducks of all kinds, curlew, snipe, and all the rest of the swamp brotherhood.” Trotsky’s boatman, Ivan Vasilevich Zaitsev, was the duck lord of this territory, like his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him. “He has no interest in moorcocks, woodcocks, or curlews. ‘Not my guild,’ he will say cursorily. But he knows the duck through and through, its feathers, its voice, its soul.”

On that frosty Sunday morning, at the conclusion of the hunt, Zaitsev was delivering Trotsky to his automobile, which was waiting for him on a rise of land. “From the canoe to the automobile I had to walk about a hundred steps, not more. But the moment I stepped onto the bog in my felt boots my feet were in cold water. By the time I leaped up to the automobile, my feet were quite cold.” Once inside the car, Trotsky took off his boots and tried to warm his feet by the heat of the engine. He came down with the flu and a high fever, later diagnosed as a paratyphoid infection.

In Moscow, the doctors ordered Trotsky to bed, and that is where he spent much of the rest of the autumn and winter of 1923–24. Lenin was mortally ill, and the succession struggle had broken out into the open, with Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin closing ranks against Trotsky. Owing to Trotsky’s confinement, Politburo meetings took place at his Kremlin apartment. From an adjacent room, Natalia could hear her husband’s heated arguments and the impassive responses of his rivals. “After each of these meetings, L.D.’s temperature mounted; he came out of his study soaked through, and undressed and went to bed. His linen and clothes had to be dried as if he had been drenched in a rainstorm.”

Trotsky’s illness continued to plague him for years. He would experience low-grade fevers, sometimes exceeding 100 degrees, that lasted for days, even weeks, at a time. They were accompanied by fatigue, headaches, numbness, and pains in his limbs, but it was the fevers that debilitated him. As he recalled in his autobiography, “my high temperature paralyzed me at the most critical moments and acted as my opponents’ most steadfast ally.” The decisive moment occurred in January 1924, in the days following the death of Lenin.

Feverish and exhausted and needing to escape Moscow, on January 18 Trotsky headed south for the Black Sea resort of Sukhumi. The rail journey was slowed by drifting snows, but Trotsky’s load seemed to lighten the farther he traveled from the capital. On Tuesday, January 22, as his train stood in the station of Tblisi, Georgia, a grim-faced aide walked into the working end of Trotsky’s railroad car and handed him a telegram. The message, signed by Stalin, informed him that Lenin had died the previous evening. Trotsky immediately cabled back: “I deem it necessary to return to Moscow. When is the funeral?” The reply came about an hour later: “The funeral will take place on Saturday. You will not be able to return on time. The Politburo thinks that because of the state of your health you must proceed to Sukhumi. Stalin.”

Lenin had been seriously ill for the better part of two years, and a stroke he suffered the previous March had left him severely disabled. Still, his doctors had held out hope for his recovery, and Trotsky, already deeply depressed, took the news hard. A delegation of local officials came to his car and urged him to write a tribute to their fallen comrade. “But I had only one urgent desire,” he recalled in My Life, “and that was to be alone. I could not stretch my hand to lift the pen.” Nonetheless, while the train was held up for a half-hour, Trotsky wrote his eulogy. The text was sent by wire to Moscow and published two days later in Pravda and Izvestiia under the title “Lenin is no more.” Having performed his duty, Trotsky resumed his journey toward the Black Sea.

In Moscow, Lenin’s body lay in state for four days not far from the Kremlin inside the ornate Hall of Columns, in an eighteenth-century neoclassical building that was once the Club of the Nobility and would later serve as the venue for the Moscow trials. More than half a million people entered the vast hall, which was draped in black and red banners and ribbons, and filed past Lenin’s bier. Outside, bonfires burned day and night to warm the unbroken stream of mourners, who stood in line for hours in the extraordinary cold in order to pay their last respects to their beloved “Ilich,” Lenin’s patronymic and affectionate nickname.

All the major Bolshevik leaders were observed beside Lenin’s open coffin—all, that is, except for Trotsky. Reporting from Moscow for The New York Times, Walter Duranty described a series of false rumors that Trotsky was about to return from the Caucasus and at last take his rightful place among the mourners. “More than once crowds assembled to greet him at the station, and official photographers were sent to wait chilly hours before the Hall of Columns to film his entry.” Trotsky’s absence generated not only puzzlement but also resentment among those who took it as a sign of disrespect.

With Party and government officials journeying to Moscow from across the country—some from farther away than Tblisi—the funeral was postponed by one day until Sunday. No one informed Trotsky of the postponement, and he later concluded that Stalin had lied to him about the day of the funeral in order to keep him away from Moscow. Trotsky maintained that he could not possibly have arrived in time for a Saturday funeral: The distance from Tblisi combined with the severe weather conditions made it impossible. “I had no choice,” he explained.

But Trotsky was no ordinary traveler. He was the head of the Soviet military. Extraordinary measures could have been taken in order to speed his journey to the capital. Max Eastman, who had befriended Trotsky and was living in Soviet Russia at that time, came to the conclusion that the embattled warlord had no desire to return to Moscow. His mysterious fevers were psychosomatic. What sickened him were the intrigues, the name-calling, and the backstage politics at which he proved to be completely inept. In Eastman’s view, Trotsky did have a choice. “In ten minutes he could have had a locomotive on the other end of the train and been on his way north to attend the funeral and make a funeral oration that might have been crucial, and would certainly have been historic.”

The funeral was held on Sunday, January 27, on an arctic Red Square, where the temperature hovered at thirty-five degrees below zero. Starting at ten o’clock in the morning, thousands of mourners, bundled up against the cold, some carrying banners, flags, and portraits of Lenin, walked past the coffin and the makeshift mausoleum. The smoke from the bonfires merged with the frozen breath of hundreds of thousands of people to produce an icy fog that hung over the square, in Duranty’s phrase, “like a smoke sacrifice.”

Confusion as to Trotsky’s whereabouts also hovered over Red Square. “To the last many believed he would come,” Duranty reported. “A dozen times came a cry from the throng around the mausoleum, ‘There’s Trotsky,’ or ‘Trotsky’s here,’ as anyone in a military greatcoat faintly resembling Trotsky passed before us.” But Trotsky was a thousand miles away, in Sukhumi, among the mimosa and the camellias in the bright, warm January sun. At the rest house where he and Natalia were staying, the veranda looked out upon enormous palm trees and to the sea beyond.

At 3:55 p.m., as the Moscow sky darkened, Lenin’s coffin was lifted and carried into position by eight pallbearers: Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Molotov, Tomsky, Rudzutak, and Dzerzhinsky. At four o’clock, the coffin was lowered into the vault. At that moment, an explosion of sound erupted, as factory sirens, steamship whistles, train whistles—everything that could make noise—blared for three minutes, punctuated by salvos of rifle and cannon fire. The effect was deafening.

At four o’clock precisely, every radio broadcast and every telegraph line in the country transmitted the same message: “Stand up, comrades, Ilich is being lowered into his grave!” Lying on the veranda covered with blankets, Trotsky heard the thunderous booms of an artillery cannonade coming from somewhere on the shore below and wondered about the reason. “It is the moment of Lenin’s burial,” he was told.

Delayed by the snow, the Moscow newspapers began to arrive in Sukhumi carrying memorial speeches, obituaries, and articles about the funeral. The mail brought disconsolate letters from comrades in Moscow, none more anguished than that of seventeen-year-old Lyova. Bedridden with the flu and a high fever, he had left his sickbed to visit the Hall of Columns and see Lenin for the last time. There he waited and waited for his father to appear. His letter conveyed his agonized incomprehension. Trotsky tried to blunt the force of his son’s reproach by ascribing it to youthful despair: “I should have come at any price!”

 

This was the historical terrain Trotsky was about to revisit when he fell ill in December 1938. His cryptogenic fever and related symptoms had plagued him during much of his time in France and Norway, but since arriving in Mexico he had managed to remain generally healthy. Under the stresses and strains of the first few months, he experienced episodes of nervous agitation, sweats, and the usual persistent insomnia. He lost ten pounds, in part because his colitis was aggravated by new foods and unfriendly bacteria. That September he complained about headaches and chest pains, as he did in the tumultuous days of February 1938, but on both occasions a medical examination detected no signs of a heart problem.

Now, in the winter of 1938–39, the fifty-nine-year-old exile began to experience symptoms of his old illness—lethargy, dizziness, headaches—although not the mysterious fever. He did not leave the house for more than two months that winter. His only exercise came from tending to his newly acquired rabbits and chickens, housed in coops and hutches in the back patio. When Frankel offered to send down an American doctor, Trotsky responded stoically: “Nothing is new other than an aggravation of the chronic things. The general name of my illness is ‘the sixties’ and I do not believe that in New York you have a specialist for this malady.”

Writing and dictating helped Trotsky maintain his inner balance, so the loss, yet again, of his Russian typist was an additional setback. In December she became ill, then briefly returned to work, until a car accident on January 1 landed her in the hospital. Trotsky pleaded his hard luck case to his agent, who was able to convince Harper to pay out the fourth and final installment of the Stalin advance, which arrived in the middle of February. Still the typist failed to return, and Trotsky found it impossible to write by hand. In mid-March he again appealed to New York for help: “I am almost desperate.”

Trotsky’s sense of despair was magnified by his feud with Rivera and the subsequent preparations to move out of the Blue House. The new residence, several blocks away at Avenida Viena 19, was in dilapidated condition. Painters and masons would have to be hired. The walls surrounding the expansive garden would need to be augmented and lights and alarms installed. A room would have to be made ready for grandson Seva, expected to arrive from Paris in the summer. These renovations would be expensive, and no longer was Diego on the scene to help out with a loan.

In the first week of May, just as Trotsky was preparing to move into the new house, he found a Russian typist, barely qualified but acceptable. Four weeks later, he managed to send off another section of the manuscript, at which point he advised his agent that the coverage of the story after 1917 would be less detailed and more “synthetic” than the earlier chapters. He hoped to finish the book within a few months, he said, “if nothing extraordinary happens,” a reference to the ominous war clouds gathering over Europe.

By now Trotsky was thoroughly disgusted with his subject and with the product he was turning out, and he wanted simply to be done with it. As he knew, the style of the work was ponderous and forbidding, marred by crude formulations such as “Stalinism is counterrevolutionary banditry.” The narrator’s tone was that of an aggressive prosecuting attorney, introducing hearsay and innuendo to demonstrate cruelty in Stalin or suggest duplicity, darkly hinting, based on no hard evidence, that the cunning Georgian was at one time an agent provocateur.

The Man of the Apparatus remains a gray figure, with dull face, yellow eyes, and guttural voice. His outstanding qualities are insatiable ambition, exceptional tenacity, and “never-slumbering envy.” This hardly seems an adequate description of the man Lenin sized up as one of the two most capable Bolshevik leaders, together with Trotsky. That was in 1922, the same year that Stalin, with Lenin’s endorsement, was named general secretary of the Party. It was not long afterward, in Trotsky’s account, that Stalin stepped out from behind a curtain onto history’s stage “in the full panoply of power.” He was already a dictator, although not even he realized it as yet. The outcome of the struggle to succeed Lenin was decided by the time of his death. Trotsky, in other words, never had a chance.

Only one person could have stopped the Stalinist juggernaut, Trotsky suggested, and that was Lenin himself. In the final year of his life, Lenin became alarmed by the power Stalin had accumulated and sought to remove him as general secretary. He failed to do so only because he ran out of time. And his time was cut short, Trotsky now realized, by Stalin himself: In order to ensure his victory, Stalin had hastened Lenin’s death.

How had Trotsky arrived at this shocking conclusion? He remembered that in the final year of his illness, Lenin had asked Stalin to obtain potassium cyanide for him to use should his suffering became unbearable. Stalin informed a Politburo meeting of this surprising request, conveyed to him by Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. No vote was taken, but the consensus in the room was that Lenin’s appeal must be rejected. At the time, Trotsky saw nothing sinister in this episode.

His thinking began to change under the influence of the Moscow trials, with their bizarre accusations of poisonings by Kremlin doctors, under the direction of secret police chief Yagoda. At the time of the second trial in January 1937, his son Seryozha was arrested for allegedly attempting a mass poisoning of workers. A year later came Lyova’s mysterious death, the result, Trotsky assumed, of poisoning by the GPU. In February 1939, the death of Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, further fueled his suspicions. By now, Trotsky’s view of the more distant past had come into sharper focus. In 1922, Lenin had warned about Stalin, “This cook will prepare nothing but peppery dishes.” In fact, Trotsky now concluded, “They proved to be not only peppery but poisoned, and not only figuratively but literally so.”

Trotsky had made this determination by the summer of 1939. At the time, he had been trying, without success, to earn money by selling articles to American magazines. His fortunes changed dramatically with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact on August 23 and the outbreak of war in Europe with the invasion of Poland a week later. Suddenly, he was in great demand as a commentator on world affairs. Life magazine, in its October 2 issue, which appeared as the Soviet and German armies were dividing Poland between them, published his appraisal of Stalin as a statesman.

Perhaps emboldened by the Soviet dictator’s sudden ignominy as Hitler’s new ally, in a sequel article Trotsky presented the evidence for his belief that Stalin had poisoned Lenin. “I realize more than anyone else the monstrosity of such suspicion. But that cannot be helped, when it follows from the circumstances, the facts and Stalin’s very character.” Trotsky drew a direct connection between Lenin’s untimely demise and his own absence from the funeral. Stalin, Trotsky hypothesized, feared that he would recall Lenin’s request for poison the year before and suspect a link to Lenin’s death. Arriving in Moscow for the funeral, Trotsky might interrogate Lenin’s doctors, perhaps even demand a new autopsy. Stalin could not take such a risk, so he maneuvered to keep him away. Unfortunately for Trotsky, this kind of speculation was more suited to True Crime than Life, whose editors demanded more facts and less conjecture. In response, Trotsky accused Life of caving in to “the Stalinist machine.”

 

TROTSKY’S MORBID SUSPICIOUSNESS had been exacerbated by the text of an anonymous letter he received at the beginning of May 1939, shortly after he moved into the new house. The letter, typed in Russian and mailed from San Francisco, was sent by someone who claimed to travel back and forth to the Soviet Union. The correspondent offered no further clues—genuine or fictitious—about his identity. His only motivation, he claimed, was to warn Trotsky about a possible assassination attempt.

The writer said he had heard a radio news report that Trotsky was leaving Diego Rivera’s house for a larger dwelling, in connection with the expected arrival of his thirteen-year-old grandson. The radio report indicated that the boy was the son of the deceased Lyova, but the writer said he knew that Lyova had no children. He surmised, therefore, that Trotsky was expecting the arrival of a grandson from the USSR. “This has aroused in me great alarm.”

The anonymous friend presented a series of terrifying scenarios for Trotsky to contemplate. The GPU might arrange for a provocateur to escort Trotsky’s grandson to Mexico: the impostor would claim that he had succeeded in deceiving the Soviet authorities by passing off the grandson as his own son. Or the GPU might contrive to send Trotsky a different boy posing as his grandson, with the assignment to kill him. Even if the real grandson were delivered, the writer warned, the GPU had had the time and the means to indoctrinate in him the necessity to commit a “heroic” act—in other words, an act of terrorism.

This was followed by a list of emphatic instructions: Trotsky must not allow anyone escorting his grandson to enter his home, whatever trust he may have felt toward that person in the past. When Trotsky’s grandson arrived, he must be searched to ensure he was not carrying poison. The boy must not be allowed access to weapons. Nor should entry be permitted to the boy’s friends, who could supply him with a weapon or poison, or who might directly carry out a terrorist act.

The writer closed by apologizing in the event that he had misheard the radio broadcast, or if his letter had the effect of spoiling Trotsky’s familial feelings toward his grandson. He asked that his communication be kept secret, because he planned to return to the USSR. “I wish you health and success in the struggle.”

These alarms could easily have been dismissed as a prank or a provocation, but Trotsky, who a year earlier had brushed aside the danger posed by an eighteen-year-old girl Stalinist, decided that they deserved to be taken seriously. His hunch was that the writer was the same person who had sent him the anonymous warning about his Paris comrade Mark Zborowski several months earlier, a letter he had strongly suspected to be the work of a provocateur. As it happened, Trotsky’s guess was correct: the author of the second anonymous letter, like the first, was GPU defector Alexander Orlov.

Orlov was now living in Los Angeles, still under a false name. In the spring of 1939 he was in San Francisco with his wife and daughter visiting the Golden Gate International Exposition. Orlov may have sincerely believed that young Seva was to be brought from the USSR. More likely he was feigning ignorance as a way to help obscure his identity, in which case his purpose once again was to arouse Trotsky’s suspicion against the spy Zborowski, who might be asked to escort Seva to Mexico. Whatever the case, the warning was meant in deadly earnest. The notion of a teenage boy being reprogrammed into a parricidal killer might seem far-fetched, but Orlov could tell hunting stories that would send shivers up your spine, including one about a booby-trapped box of chocolates.

At the time Orlov mailed his letter, he tried to reach Trotsky by telephone. He called in the evening asking for Natalia or for a secretary who spoke Russian. The call came on a different telephone system from the one installed in the new house. In order to take the call, Natalia would have had to go outside. It was after dark. Trotsky figured it was probably a hoax, and he had to assume it was a plot. Two days later the anonymous letter arrived from San Francisco in two copies, one each for Trotsky and Natalia.

Trotsky sent a copy to Frankel, saying it appeared to be legitimate. What possible motive could the GPU have in sending him such a letter? He supposed that the author was Walter Krivitsky, another Soviet defector living in hiding in the United States. If both anonymous letters came from the same source, Trotsky told Frankel, then the first letter merited more serious consideration. He wondered why he had not been informed of the results of the investigation of Zborowski he had ordered.

As Trotsky puzzled over the identity of his anonymous well-wisher, in room 735 of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NKVD in Moscow, spymaster Sudoplatov was putting together a team of operatives to carry out the “action” Stalin had assigned to him. To head the task force Sudoplatov recruited Leonid Eitingon, Orlov’s deputy and successor as chief of Soviet intelligence in Spain. Eitingon was a logical choice because the operatives would be recruited from the agency’s Spanish network.

The details of the operation were finalized on July 9, 1939. The plan to assassinate Trotsky was code-named Operation Utka, Russian for Duck. It envisioned an assortment of possible methods: “poisoning of food, of water, explosion in home, explosion of automobile using TNT, a direct strike—suffocation, dagger, blow to the head, gunshot. Possibly an armed assault by a group.” Which is to say, whatever it took to achieve the stated goal: “the liquidation of Duck.” Sudoplatov and Eitingon identified the Spanish comrades who were to carry out this very special task. They requested a budget of $31,000 over six months. In the first days of August, Stalin authorized the operation.