CHAPTER 9

To the Finland Station

On August 8, 1939, Trotsky’s grandson Seva arrived in Coyoacán from France. He was escorted by Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, old friends of Trotsky and Natalia. Alfred, Trotsky’s contemporary and one of the founders of the French Communist Party, was a supporter of the Left Opposition until he broke with Trotsky in 1930 and withdrew from politics. The two men, whose friendship survived their political break, had not seen each other since a visit to Prinkipo in 1929. Trotsky and Natalia felt relieved to be reunited with Seva, now thirteen years old and perhaps their sole surviving family member. And they were rejuvenated by the appearance of their old friends. There was much reminiscing about Paris at the turn of the century and much discussion about Europe in the looming shadow of war.

Two days later, the family and their guests headed to Taxco for an extended stay, taking advantage of an arrangement Trotsky had with the pioneering American historian of Latin America, Hubert Herring. Herring put his Taxco home at Trotsky’s disposal in exchange for his participation in Herring’s occasional Mexico seminars. The Taxco idyll was interrupted on August 21 by the shocking news that Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was headed to Moscow to conclude a nonaggression pact between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Two days later, in a festive late-night ceremony in the Kremlin, Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, put their signatures on the Nazi-Soviet pact, as a beaming Stalin looked on jubilantly. The world was stupefied. The Nazis and the Communists, supposedly ideological opposites, had declared their mutual friendship. The treaty cleared the way for Germany to invade Poland, whose security had been guaranteed by Britain and France. War in Europe, long anticipated, was now imminent.

Joe Hansen was at Trotskyist headquarters in New York City, having been replaced as Trotsky’s American secretary guard—driver by Irish O’Brien, Hansen’s close friend from Salt Lake City. O’Brien assumed that the news of the pact was the signal to break camp in Taxco and return to Coyoacán to monitor the crisis. To his surprise, Trotsky insisted that the pact was of secondary importance. He would not budge.

Back at the house on Avenida Viena, O’Brien’s wife, Fanny, was deluged with requests from news organizations all over the world for Trotsky’s analysis of Stalin’s treaty with Hitler. Unable to get through by telephone, she took a bus to Taxco in order to alert Trotsky to the urgency of his return. Nonetheless, and to O’Brien’s bafflement, “the OM refused to be disturbed.” Only when O’Brien showed him an anxious letter from Hansen saying that the American comrades were waiting for his assessment and his guidance did Trotsky snap to and give the order to start packing.

O’Brien, who was less inclined than Hansen to hero-worship the Old Man, was chagrined at his nonchalance. By delaying his return from Taxco he had squandered an opportunity to make a sizable sum of money from interviews and articles for the major newspapers, news services, and magazines. By the time the vacationers arrived back in Coyoacán on August 30, the offers were drying up. Two days later, Germany invaded Poland. On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

There was a hint of smugness in Trotsky’s show of imperturbability at this historic moment. For years he had been predicting a rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler, a prospect that began to appear more likely after Germany’s absorption of Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938, and especially after the Munich Agreement had sanctioned Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. Munich failed to appease Hitler, of course, and when German troops marched into Prague in March 1939, Trotsky felt certain that a Nazi-Soviet accord was in the works.

Trotsky tragically underestimated Stalin, but from early on he was keenly sensitive to the danger posed by Hitler. His writings of the early 1930s that sounded the alarm about the Nazi menace were among the most perceptive and prescient he ever produced. He denounced the Comintern’s policy of labeling the German Social Democrats “social fascists,” which he predicted would facilitate the rise of the National Socialists. He took Mein Kampf seriously, warning that if Hitler came to power, the Red Army should immediately be mobilized.

As the Nazis consolidated dictatorial control in 1933, Trotsky changed his mind about remaining inside the Comintern as the Left Opposition. The only way forward, he decided, was to build a Fourth International, to replace the Communist Third International, which had superseded the Socialist Second International, the successor to Karl Marx’s original. The goal was to unite the Trotskyists—the self-styled “Bolshevik-Leninists”—into an organization that would become the true standard-bearer of proletarian internationalism.

Although for the next several years Trotsky and his comrades referred to themselves as members of the Fourth International, formally the organization came into existence only in the summer of 1938. The moment was hardly propitious. Worldwide there were only a few thousand Trotskyists, spread out among numerous marginal organizations in many countries and often riven by factionalism. The French Trotskyists, the most important “section” of the embryonic Fourth International in the early thirties, had been crippled by a factional split. By the time Trotsky arrived in Mexico in 1937, the United States was home to what was easily the largest of the Trotskyist groups, although its total membership probably never exceeded two thousand.

Nor did the movement’s growth prospects appear at all promising in that summer of 1938. In the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists had been either liquidated or banished to the camps. In Germany, Austria, and Italy, fascism reigned. In Spain, where Franco’s Falangist armies were pressing their offensive against the Republican Loyalists, the Trotskyists had been purged or forced to flee the country. In Asia, the Trotskyists were without a significant foothold, least of all in China, which had been fighting for its independence since the full-scale Japanese invasion the year before. It is no wonder, given this depressing state of affairs, that many Trotskyists were skeptical that this was an appropriate moment to launch a new International.

Trotsky himself, however, was the voice of supreme optimism. Western capitalism was in the throes of an economic depression from which it could not recover. Just as Marx had predicted, capitalism’s internal contradictions were ripening, most portentously in the United States, where President Roosevelt’s New Deal could only postpone the inevitable. Just as the First World War had carried the Bolshevik Party to power in 1917 on a wave of revolution, the next world war would precipitate a revolutionary tidal wave that would sweep the Bolshevik-Leninists to victory. Trotsky’s view of the matter was summed up by the title he gave to his new organization’s programmatic statement: “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International.”

The scene of the founding congress belied such optimism. It took place at the home of Alfred Rosmer in Périgny, a village outside Paris, on September 3, 1938. Twenty-one delegates were in attendance, representing Trotskyist sections in eleven countries. Max Shachtman, of the American group, presided. The delegates elected Lyova and two of Trotsky’s one-time secretaries, Rudolf Klement and Erwin Wolf—all three presumed murdered by the GPU within the past year—as honorary presidents. As a security precaution, it was arranged for the conference to complete its business in a single day. Votes were taken on various reports and resolutions, most of them written by Trotsky, with little time for genuine discussion. Only the Polish delegates openly questioned the wisdom of establishing a new International at a time when the political outlook was so grim.

At the end of the day, a press release announced the historic initiative, although in order to keep the GPU off the trail of the dispersing delegates, the congress was said to have taken place in Lausanne. This deception accomplished nothing, though, because the Russian section was represented at the congress by the Soviet spy Mark Zborowski, who provided Moscow with a complete report, which included his own canny contribution to the proceedings. Upon the election of the International’s executive committee, Zborowski protested that the Russian section had not been given a seat. In response, the congress designated Trotsky as a secret and honorary member of the executive. Since Trotsky could not directly participate in the executive’s work, his place was filled by the GPU provocateur.

 

THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL was not the only historic congress involving the Trotskyists who gathered in Paris that summer. Among them was Sylvia Ageloff, a Brooklyn native in her late twenties. A short, frumpy dishwater blonde, with a pointed nose and a broad, lipless smile that suggested a smirk, Sylvia was the oldest of three Ageloff sisters, daughters of a Russian émigré father, all of them active in the Trotskyist movement. She was accompanied to Europe by a friend named Ruby Weil, who invited herself along as Sylvia’s traveling companion. The Ageloffs were aware of the rumor that Ruby had joined the Communist Party. What they did not know was that she was working for the GPU.

In Paris, Ruby looked up a friend of her sister, a Belgian in his mid-thirties by the name of Jacques Mornard, and introduced him to Sylvia. This encounter led to others, as Jacques took the ladies sightseeing in his Citroën and entertained them lavishly. In his excellent English, Jacques told them that he was studying journalism at the Sorbonne, that his generous supply of spending money came from his aristocratic parents, and that his father was a high-ranking Belgian diplomat. He proved to be the perfect dilettante, with a smattering of knowledge about art, music, and literature—only politics did not interest him.

Before long, Ruby decided to return to New York, leaving the field to Sylvia. Jacques was tall, lean, and muscular, with swarthy good looks. He took Sylvia to his favorite restaurants, always insisting on ordering the finest wines. The Belgian playboy intoxicated the homely Brooklyn social worker, and he seduced her. In other words, he did exactly what was expected of a penetration agent.

Jacques Mornard’s real name was Ramón Mercader. He was born in Barcelona in 1914, the son of a Catalonian father and a Cuban-born mother, Caridad. She acquired a taste for radical politics not long after she left her husband and moved to Paris with her four children in 1925. The children were shifted back and forth between mother and father, France and Spain. At age fourteen, Ramón entered a hotel management school in Lyon; he later returned to Barcelona and became assistant chef at the Ritz, the city’s premier hotel.

After the Spanish revolution in 1931, when the monarch fled the country and the Republic began its precarious existence, Ramón enlisted in the Spanish army, where he remained for two years and attained the rank of corporal. In 1934, he took part in the Catalonian uprising against rule by Madrid, serving with the Communist forces. After this rebellion was suppressed, Ramón was active in an underground cell of Communist youth in Barcelona. Arrested in June 1935, he was released when the Popular Front government was elected in Madrid at the beginning of 1936.

That summer, Franco and his generals launched their military assault on the Republic from Spanish Morocco. Ramón’s flamboyant mother, now a fervent Communist, distinguished herself by leading an impromptu attack on Francoist machine gun positions in a central plaza in Barcelona, a ferocious onslaught with homemade grenades and rifle fire that wiped out the Francoist units at the cost of many lives. Caridad and her sons Ramón and Pablo were among the first to enlist in the Republican people’s militia. Ramón served as a political commissar with the 27th Division on the Aragon front, with the rank of lieutenant.

The Spanish civil war became the NKVD’s training ground for political terrorism. It organized six schools for saboteurs, the largest with upwards of 600 students. Leonid Eitingon, the NKVD’s deputy resident in Spain, was responsible for training new recruits for commando and sabotage operations and for organizing detachments to carry out sabotage and terrorist acts deep inside enemy territory. Eitingon and Caridad Mercader became lovers, which made Ramón, who was recruited by the NKVD in February 1937, one of his special students. After serving for several months with a commando unit, Ramón was brought back from the front with a wounded arm.

Late in 1937 Eitingon sent Ramón to Paris. His forged Belgian papers identified him as Jacques Mornard. His NKVD code name was “Raymond.” Sylvia’s visit to Paris was a windfall for Ramón’s handlers. Although she had come as a tourist, after making contact with American Trotskyist friends there, she was asked to serve as a translator at the founding congress of the Fourth International. Jacques was absent from Paris at the time, which was a relief to Sylvia, because she was worried that her Trotskyism might alienate her lover and had, for the time being, chosen to conceal it from him.

The fact that Sylvia was keeping such a secret—or thought she was—made her less inclined to question some things about Jacques that did not add up: stories about his family in Belgium, his life in Paris, and his sudden absences. Sylvia had a master’s degree in psychology from Columbia, and when she expressed an interest in finding a job in Paris, Jacques arranged for her to ghost-write weekly synopses of books on psychology for a French newspaper syndicate. She was handsomely paid for her work, although she never saw the published results and Jacques refused to put her in direct contact with the syndicate. Sylvia sensed that her “job” was merely a tactful way for her lover to support her in Paris.

For the NKVD, it was money well spent. Sylvia herself was an insignificant figure in the Trotskyist movement, but Trotsky was especially fond of Sylvia’s sister Ruth. Ruth had been in Mexico at the time of the Dewey hearings and proved to be of enormous help as a translator, typist, and researcher. She did not live at the Blue House, but she visited almost daily and was considered a reliable and devoted comrade. Ramón’s NKVD controllers understood that Ruth’s sister would be welcomed into Trotsky’s home. Now they had to maneuver Sylvia—and Ramón—to Coyoacán. And the road to Coyoacán led through New York City.

 

A few weeks after the conclave in Paris, on Friday, October 28, 1938, at 8:00 p.m., the American Trotskyists gathered in the main auditorium of the Center Hotel, the future Hotel Diplomat, just off Times Square, on West 43rd Street. They came together to celebrate the founding of the Fourth International and the tenth anniversary of the American Trotskyist movement. New York had supplanted Paris as the center of Trotskyism, and on this night Times Square was its epicenter. An overflow crowd of up to 1,400 Trotskyists, sympathizers, and the curious packed the hall, including both galleries, paying twenty-five cents in order to witness the celebration and, more importantly, to hear Trotsky speak.

The hall was festively decorated with banners and streamers honoring the Fourth International and its American section, the Socialist Workers Party. Above the speakers’ platform hung a six-by-four-foot charcoal drawing, draped in red, of Lenin and Trotsky. The Trotsky youth, some fifty strong, most in their early twenties, performed ceremonial duties, outfitted in uniforms of blue denim and red ties, with red armbands that read “Young People’s Socialist League, 4th International.”

The mass meeting began with the singing of the “Internationale.” The program included speeches from the party’s leaders, each accompanied by mounting anticipation of the performance of the evening’s headliner, Comrade Trotsky, who naturally was saved for last. When the moment finally arrived, it was after ten o’clock. The audience fell silent as thirty male comrades came forward and positioned themselves below the front of the stage. They stood with arms folded and faces hardened in an attitude of defiance. The organizers were taking no chances, remembering that Trotsky’s attempt to address an audience at the New York Hippodrome the year before had been sabotaged.

The lights were extinguished and a spotlight beam illuminated a photographic portrait of Trotsky placed at the center of the stage. “I hope that this time my voice will reach you and that I will be permitted in this way to participate in your double celebration,” Trotsky began in his heavily accented English. The Bolshevik-Leninists, he continued, were genuine Marxists, governed not by wishful thinking but by an objective evaluation of the march of events. Trotsky’s analysis of those events, which lasted close to fifteen minutes, came across clearly, despite some hiss and the occasional crackle from the gramophone record.

There was certainly no mistaking Trotsky’s revolutionary optimism. The Communist International, he reminded his audience, had become a “stinking cadaver.” The Fourth International had replaced it as the world party of socialist revolution. Its victory in the coming revolution was assured. “During the next ten years the program of the Fourth International will become the guide of millions and these revolutionary millions will know how to storm earth and heaven. Long live the Socialist Workers Party of the United States! Long live the Fourth International!” The hall erupted in tumultuous applause.

Trotsky’s uplifting message notwithstanding, the Socialist Workers Party, the nucleus of the newborn Fourth International, was divided against itself. The party, all of ten months old, had been founded after a near-decade of Trotskyist splits and mergers. It was led by three able men of widely different backgrounds and talents: James Cannon, Max Shachtman, and James Burnham.

Cannon, the party’s leader, was born in 1890 in rural Kansas, the son of Irish immigrants with strong socialist convictions. In his youth he was an itinerant organizer for the trade unionist Industrial Workers of the World and a member of the Socialist Party of America. He belonged to the Socialist left wing, which in 1919 broke away to form the first Communist party in the United States. Cannon sat on the presidium of the Comintern in Moscow in 1922 and 1923, and he attended its sixth congress in 1928. Shortly afterward, he along with Shachtman and a third comrade were expelled from the party for their Trotskyist sympathies, and together they formed the Communist League of America, the original American Trotskyist group.

By the late 1930s, Cannon, with his stocky build, thick gray hair, and florid complexion, fit the stereotype of the jovial, hard-drinking Irishman. He operated out of the party’s headquarters near Union Square, but his political base was the Teamsters organization in Minneapolis. A forceful public speaker, he spent eight months in 1936 and 1937 agitating among the seamen and cannery workers on the California coast, and he maintained ties to the unionized automobile workers in Ohio and Michigan.

Max Shachtman was born in 1904 in Warsaw, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, and was brought to New York as a small child. He was the party’s leading journalist and its most brilliant orator. Shachtman, like Cannon, had a keen wit, and he was able to exploit his Yiddish accent in the service of a laugh line, especially when addressing his constituents in the Bronx.

Unlike Cannon and Shachtman, James Burnham was not a professional revolutionary. The son of an executive of the Burlington Railroad, Burnham, a relative newcomer to the movement, was born in Chicago in 1905. He was educated at Princeton and Oxford, and taught philosophy at New York University, where he came to national attention as co-editor of the journal Symposium and as coauthor of a well regarded textbook, Introduction to Philosophical Analysis. Burnham was the party’s leading theorist, and he and Shachtman edited its monthly journal, New International. His Manhattan address, 34 Sutton Place, testified to his privileged circumstances, as did his occasional appearance at political meetings in a tuxedo, donned earlier in the evening for some high society social gathering.

Burnham and Cannon coexisted uneasily. Cannon was wary of Burnham’s social and academic status, while Burnham objected to Cannon’s authoritarian management style, his anti-intellectualism, and the crude invective he hurled at his opponents: “scoundrels,” “bloodhounds,” “sons-of-bitches,” “shysters,” “miserable,” “contemptible,” “sniveling,” “stinking,” and so on. Burnham also criticized Cannon for blindly following Trotsky’s lead. “The tendency in your letters to lump together all our opponents as ‘Stalinist agents,’” he complained to Cannon in June 1937, “(analogous to, and perhaps copied from, T’s recent habit of calling everyone who disagrees with him a ‘G.P.U. agent’) seems to me unprofitable.”

The real trouble between the two men started when Burnham began to challenge Trotsky’s position on what was known in the movement as the “Russian question.” Trotsky had long maintained that despite the repressiveness of the Soviet bureaucracy, even the purges and the Terror, the fundamental achievement of the October Revolution—the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production—remained intact. The USSR, Trotsky said, was a “degenerated workers’ state,” deeply flawed but still salvageable for socialism and therefore deserving of “unconditional defense” should it come under military attack. Any attempt by Bolshevik-Leninists to deny the proletarian nature of the Soviet Union, Trotsky had warned, would be regarded as “treason.”

In 1937, Burnham, together with another comrade, Joseph Carter, began to argue that the Soviet bureaucracy was no mere caste, as Trotsky insisted, but a new exploiting class, and that therefore the USSR could not be characterized as a workers’ state, not even a degenerated one. Burnham and Carter described the Soviet system as “bureaucratic collectivism.” An increasing number of comrades thought this analysis made sense, to the point where, toward the end of 1937, Cannon alerted Trotsky that the party was experiencing “a little epidemic of revisionism.” From this and other reports reaching him, Trotsky learned that the opposition was centered in New York, and was especially strong among the youth.

At the founding congress of the Socialist Workers Party, which convened in Chicago on December 31, 1937, Burnham and Carter’s statement on the Russian question received only four out of seventy-five votes. Cannon hoped this would end the matter, but the controversy became more acute under the pressure of events, including the third Moscow trial in March 1938 and continued Soviet treachery against the non-Communist left in Spain. What was the difference, a growing number of comrades openly began to ask, between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR?

Here the dissenters could support their arguments with quotations from Trotsky’s recent book The Revolution Betrayed, where he described Stalinism and fascism as “totalitarian” twins bearing a “deadly similarity.” The essential difference, in Trotsky’s view, was that the Soviet government had nationalized the means of production. But for an increasing number of comrades, this was a distinction without a difference. A factional fight was brewing by the summer of 1939, even before the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Trotsky failed to appreciate the enormous shock the pact produced on his followers. For many of them, the aftershocks were no less disorienting. Trotsky had been predicting that the Kremlin would reach a purely defensive agreement with Nazi Germany, as a way to keep the war off Soviet territory for as long as possible. The Soviet invasion of Poland, which began on September 17, only two and a half weeks after the German assault from the west, demonstrated that the pact was no mere nonaggression treaty, but an aggressive military alliance. This confounded the Trotskyists and, it seems clear, staggered Trotsky himself.

The Germans had launched their blitzkrieg with a massive attack from the air that destroyed the Polish air force and communication lines. As bombs rained from the sky, German armored columns plunged deep into the Polish interior, up to thirty miles ahead of the infantry, scattering civilians, spreading terror, and leaving the Poles no chance to mount a coordinated defense. In three weeks, western Poland was entirely overrun. Only Warsaw managed to hold out for another week under the Luftwaffe’s relentless aerial bombardment.

By comparison, the Soviet invasion from the east was more like an occupation. The Poles there had been ordered not to fight because it was believed—or at least hoped—that the Red Army was entering to join the fight against the Germans. Instead, the Soviets arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of Poles to remote regions of the USSR. Tens of thousands more Poles were executed. The most infamous episode came to be known as the Katyn Forest Massacre, in which more than 21,000 Polish reserve officers who had been mobilized at the outbreak of the war—the large majority of them teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other members of Poland’s intelligentsia—were shot to death and buried in mass graves. The Soviets would later attempt to place responsibility for this atrocity on the German armies that invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa.

As the German and Soviet armies erased Poland from the map, Trotsky dictated a long article called “The USSR in War,” which he completed on September 25. Much of it was devoted to a theoretical discussion about whether Stalinism, fascism, and even the New Deal constituted a new political paradigm, so-called bureaucratic collectivism. Trotsky turned back this theoretical challenge, but in doing so he said something entirely unexpected. Socialism, he announced, was about to face its ultimate test. If the Second World War did not spark a proletarian revolution in the West, or if the proletariat were to take power but then surrender it to a privileged bureaucracy as in the USSR, this would confirm the emergence of a new form of totalitarianism. In that case, Trotsky acknowledged, “nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society ended as a Utopia.”

Less than a year earlier, Trotsky had presented a vision of the Bolshevik-Leninists preparing to storm heaven and earth. Now he appeared to be harboring doubts about the entire socialist project, and this admission took his followers by surprise. It also undermined their confidence in his analysis of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, which was another surprising part of his article. In Trotsky’s view, the Red Army, far from behaving like a mirror image of the Wehrmacht, was serving as a vehicle for progress in Poland by expropriating the large landowners and nationalizing the means of production. In other words, despite the reactionary nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Soviet Union was objectively spreading the features of socialism abroad. Most of Trotsky’s American comrades found this judgment difficult to square with what common sense told them about the Soviet subjugation of Poland.

“The USSR in War,” instead of uniting the Socialist Workers Party, served to sharpen its discord. Shachtman had now joined forces with Burnham. Together they declared that the Soviet Union could in no sense whatsoever be classified as a workers’ state, that the Soviet invasion of Poland was an act of imperialism, and that the party should disavow its pledge to defend the USSR unconditionally. A serious factional fight had broken out. Trotsky now put everything aside in order to devote his energies to preventing the party from splitting in two. Anyone familiar with his past record as a conciliator in factional politics could have anticipated that disaster lay ahead.

 

At the zenith of Trotsky’s glory, after he had masterminded the Bolshevik insurrection in October 1917 and then led the Red Army to victory in the civil war, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar of Education, wrote a profile of him. Among the inevitable comparisons with Lenin, one came out decidedly in Trotsky’s favor. Lenin, although irreplaceable as the chief executive of the Soviet government, “could never have coped with the titanic mission which Trotsky took upon his own shoulders, with those lightning moves from place to place, those astounding speeches, those fanfares of on-the-spot orders, that role of being the unceasing electrifier of a weakening army, now at one spot, now at another. There is not a man on earth who could have replaced Trotsky in that respect.”

And yet, Lunacharsky testified, “Trotsky was extremely bad at organizing not only the Party but even a small group of it.” The same charismatic personality that swept people off their feet was “clumsy and ill-suited” to working within a political organization. He could electrify crowds, but not persuade individuals. “He had practically no wholehearted supporters at all.”

Lunacharsky based this judgment on Trotsky’s career since 1902, after his first escape from Siberia and arrival in London. It was Lenin who arranged for him to be brought to western Europe and who introduced him into the émigré circle of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In March 1903, at Lenin’s suggestion, Trotsky was co-opted onto the editorial board of the party’s organ and power center, Iskra. Lenin sized up the twenty-three-year-old Trotsky as “a man of exceptional abilities, staunch, energetic, who will go further.”

The honeymoon ended abruptly four months later, at the second congress of the Russian Social Democrats. The delegates assembled in Brussels, but then transferred to London to escape the attentions of the Russian secret police. The congress was attended by forty-three delegates representing twenty-six Marxist organizations. Trotsky held the mandate of the Siberian social democrats. Several issues divided the delegates, most importantly the definition of party membership. Lenin advocated a strictly centralized party, with all members participating in revolutionary activity—participating, as opposed to merely cooperating, which was the less restrictive formula proposed by Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod, close colleagues of Lenin who now closed ranks against him.

This fundamental disagreement was compounded by others. When Lenin proposed to reduce the Iskra editorial board from six members to three, the move was seen by his opponents as a further attempt to consolidate his control over the party. After a vote taken toward the end of the conference was won by Lenin’s supporters, they became known as Bolsheviki, Russian for Majoritarians, while Martov, Axelrod, and the others were labeled Mensheviki, the Minoritarians. On the crucial votes, Trotsky was with the Mensheviks.

Trotsky’s reaction to the split was self-contradictory. He declared himself in favor of party unity yet launched extremely bitter polemical strikes at Lenin, whom he accused of behaving imperiously and of advocating a dangerous centralism. The most violent of these attacks took the form of a lengthy pamphlet called Our Political Tasks, published in Geneva in 1904. Here Trotsky called Lenin “malicious,” “hideous,” “dissolute,” “demagogical,” and “morally repulsive,” among other epithets. He compared Lenin to Robespierre and, more trenchantly, a “slovenly lawyer.”

A strong proponent of social democracy as a mass movement, Trotsky was genuinely repulsed by Lenin’s centralism, which placed professional revolutionaries in the vanguard and seemed to assume that workers were a hindrance to the revolution. Trotsky was thus a proponent of Menshevism against Bolshevism, yet in September 1904 he announced his break with the Mensheviks. The Russian Revolution of 1905, which catapulted him to fame as a leader of the short-lived St. Petersburg Soviet, validated his status as a revolutionary free agent.

As Czar Nicholas II called in the army and the police to crush the revolution, Trotsky was arrested, tried, and sentenced to a second term of exile in Siberia, from which he again escaped, landing in Vienna in 1907. There, for the next seven years, he made his living from journalism, much of it devoted to bringing about a reconciliation of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, who remained factions of the same party. His ineptitude as a conciliator served to isolate him further. Although he had closer personal ties to the Mensheviks, he managed to alienate them, even as he continued to earn the animosity of the Bolsheviks. After Lenin consummated the schism in 1912 by declaring the Bolsheviks to be a separate party, Trotsky bitterly denounced him: “The entire structure of Leninism is at present based on lies and falsification, and carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own destruction.”

Then came the world war and a string of catastrophic defeats for the Russian army led by Czar Nicholas, resulting in the collapse of the Russian autocracy in the February Revolution of 1917. Trotsky arrived in Petrograd in May, not long after Lenin. At first Trotsky turned down Lenin’s offer to join the Bolsheviks, but changed his mind in July, a few weeks before he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. It was Trotsky’s idea to cloak the Bolshevik coup against the Provisional Government in democratic legitimacy by timing it to coincide with the opening of a national Congress of Soviets about to gather in Petrograd. On the night of October 25, the congress was informed about the seizure by the Red Guards of the Winter Palace. Some delegates walked out of the hall. The Mensheviks accused the Bolsheviks of carrying out a putsch, and protested that some kind of political compromise ought to be agreed.

Trotsky showed no sympathy for his vanquished former comrades, only mockery and disdain. Taking the platform, he delivered History’s cruel verdict. The Bolshevik triumph, he declared, was a mass insurrection, not a conspiracy. “Our rising has been victorious. Now they tell us: Renounce your victory, yield, make a compromise. No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: You are bankrupt. You have played out your role. Go where you belong from now on: into the dustbin of history!”

From that moment on, Trotsky held tightly to the myth of Red October as a workers’ revolution. Try as he might, however, he could not obscure his long history of anti-Bolshevism, which his enemies in the Party preferred to characterize as his “Menshevism.” This goes a long way toward explaining Trotsky’s passivity in the struggle to succeed Lenin: as an outsider, he made a fetish of Bolshevik unity. He was, in any case, poorly equipped to lead a Party faction. He could not overcome his isolation. He had never acquired the habits necessary for working within a political organization, let alone for maneuvering in the corridors of power.

Max Eastman, who was electrified by the description of Trotsky in John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World and who then had the opportunity to watch Trotsky in action as head of the Left Opposition in Moscow, sized him up much the way Lunacharsky had done back in 1919. “In the time of revolutionary storm, he was the very concept of a hero,” Eastman observed. “But in calmer times he could not bring two strong men to his side as friends and hold them there.” In Eastman’s view, this more than anything else explained Trotsky’s loss to Stalin in the factional fight, and then the hopelessness of his efforts to organize an international opposition to Stalinism. “He could no more build a party than a hen could build a house.”

 

Cast out of the Communist Party and then the Soviet Union, Trotsky saw no irony in the fact that he ended up “sharing the bitter fate he had meted out to the Martovs and the Axelrods,” as one historian has put it. On the contrary, Trotsky’s account of the October events in The History of the Russian Revolution dramatized his banishment of the Mensheviks as a moment of triumph, showing no trace of remorse.

Eastman carried with him the section of Trotsky’s History that contained this passage—in the form of the publisher’s proofs of his English translation—when he and his wife visited Prinkipo in the summer of 1932. The Eastmans were paying a social call, but the visit would also give Trotsky an opportunity to verify the accuracy of Eastman’s version of the book. At forty-nine years of age, Eastman was strikingly handsome: tall, trim, and tan, with a shock of white hair and dark, pensive eyes. He had not seen Trotsky for several years, and once again he remarked on the pale blue color of his eyes, which a long line of journalists mysteriously kept insisting were black. On the second day of Eastman’s visit, they were incandescent with anger.

Trotsky had been disturbed by Eastman’s unorthodox views of Marxist theory, notably his debunking of the concept of dialectical materialism. Eastman’s visit to Prinkipo was an opportunity for Trotsky to set the amateur philosopher straight. When Eastman stood his ground, their argument threatened to spiral out of control, as neither man allowed the other to finish a sentence. “Trotsky’s throat was throbbing and his face was red; he was in a rage,” Eastman wrote in his diary. Natalia became worried as the altercation spilled over from the tea table into the study: “she came in after us and stood there above and beside me like a statue, silent and austere. I understood what she meant and said, after a long, hot speech from him: ‘Well, let’s lay aside this subject and go to work on the book.’ ‘As much as you like!’ he jerked out, and snapped up the manuscript.”

Eastman was a contrarian by nature. Born in upstate New York to two unconventional, liberal-minded Congregationalist ministers, he was educated at Williams College, and then studied philosophy at Columbia University under John Dewey, completing the requirements for a doctorate. He chose not to accept the degree, evidently because doing so might compromise his self-image as a revolutionary poet. He settled in Greenwich Village and became an influential figure in American radical politics and culture. In 1913 he published Enjoyment of Poetry and became an editor of The Masses, the pioneering magazine of socialist politics, art, and literature.

In 1917 The Masses was forced to close as a result of the tightening wartime censorship, and the following year Eastman and his fellow editors were twice tried and twice acquitted for violation of the Sedition Act, in connection with the magazine’s outspoken opposition to U.S. participation in the world war. He and his sister and fellow suffragist, Crystal, then founded a successor, The Liberator, which published John Reed’s initial reports from Petrograd on the Bolshevik Revolution. The first of these conveyed an invitation from Lenin and Trotsky: “Comrades! Greetings from the first proletariat republic of the world. We call you to arms for the international Socialist revolution.”

In 1922 Eastman went to Soviet Russia to see the experiment for himself. There he met the leading Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, who agreed to help Eastman write his biography. In 1924, Trotsky and the Oppositionists provided Eastman with the text of Lenin’s still-secret political testament, which Eastman then published in the West, creating a sensation. In the aftermath, Trotsky felt compelled to disavow Eastman in order to placate Stalin, but thereafter the two men were closely identified in the West, even before Eastman became his translator.

That explains why Trotsky was so disturbed by Eastman’s public repudiation of the dialectic, a principle of change conceived by Hegel in the early nineteenth century. Hegel believed that history unfolds in a logical process of inner conflict, in which change occurs because antagonistic forces collide and their antagonism is resolved in new, higher forms. Marx applied Hegel’s concept to human society, where this inner conflict takes the form of class struggle.

In Marx’s theory, the material base determines the relations of pro-duction—technology, inventions, systems of property—and these in turn determine the philosophies, governments, laws, cultural tastes, and moral values that dominate a society. As material conditions evolve, tensions build up until a point is reached where quantitative changes have qualitative consequences. That, said Marx, was how society advances. The great breakthroughs took the form of revolutions, which he called “history’s locomotives.” Marx labeled his philosophy “historical materialism” the term “dialectical materialism” was introduced after Marx’s death by Engels to denote an extension of dialectics beyond society to the world of nature.

Even before he went to Soviet Russia, Eastman was puzzled by the connection between Marx’s social theory of class struggle and the concept of the dialectic, which Marx claimed made his philosophy scientific and proved the inevitability of socialism. If that were the case, Eastman thought, then all one had to do was sit back and wait for socialism to arrive. Yet Eastman knew that Marxism was about changing the world, not just understanding it. Otherwise, why did Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, call upon the workers of the world to unite and throw off their chains? And why did Lenin, in the seminal pamphlet What Is to Be Done? published in 1902, call for a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries? Surely Lenin did not believe in socialism’s inevitability?

In Moscow, Eastman sat down in the library of the Marx-Engels Institute and applied his as yet rudimentary Russian to a study of the influence of the Hegelian dialectic on Marxism and on Bolshevism. To his dismay, he discovered that the Bolshevik leaders, Lenin included, were indeed true believers in the “science” of dialectical materialism as a universal law of motion, despite the fact that it was based on no empirical observation and, as Eastman saw it, belonged to the realm of metaphysics or religion rather than science.

Leaving the Soviet Union for the West, Eastman became obsessed with the idea of exposing Hegelian dialectics as a pseudo-scientific fraud. He made his case in a 1927 book called Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution, a work that predictably came under attack from the left. Eastman’s most formidable and relentless critic was Sidney Hook, a protégé of John Dewey, ally of the Communist Party, and Marxist professor of philosophy at New York University. Hook and Eastman were Dewey’s “bright boys” and two tenacious combatants, and their dispute over Marxist theory continued for several years.

Trotsky monitored the Eastman-Hook debate from Turkey. As he saw it, both men were afflicted with that peculiarly American disease, a pragmatist conception of empirical science. It was no mere coincidence, he thought, that both men were students of Dewey, one of pragmatism’s founding philosophers. In Trotsky’s eyes, Hook’s attempt to reduce Marxism from a science to a social philosophy was bad enough. Much worse, though, was Eastman’s outright dismissal of Hegel’s dialectic as an example of pre-Darwinian speculation and wishful thinking.

This is what provoked Trotsky’s fury when Eastman visited Prinkipo. As Eastman describes the action, “he became almost hysterical when I parried with ease the crude clichés he employed to defend the notion of dialectic evolution. The idea of meeting my mind, of ‘talking it over’ as with an equal, could not occur to him. He was lost.” For Trotsky there could be no meeting of the minds about Marxism. Those who sought to revise Marxist theory, he said, wished “to trim Marx’s beard.” Eastman was trying to decapitate him.

Not long after their face-off in Prinkipo, Trotsky published a letter in the American Trotskyist paper The Militant calling attention to Eastman’s “petty-bourgeois revisionism.” Eastman’s translation of the History was brilliant, of course, and Trotsky had thanked him for it. “But as soon as Eastman attempts to translate Marxian dialectics into the language of vulgar empiricism, his work provokes in me a feeling which is the direct opposite of thankfulness. For the purpose of avoiding all doubts and misunderstandings I consider it my duty to bring this to the knowledge of everybody.”

Four years later, Trotsky was still performing this duty. “When Shachtman and George Novack met his ship in Tampico in January 1937 and escorted him on the train to Coyoacán, they found him fixated on the subject of Eastman’s heresy. While Trotsky was pleased to learn that Dewey was one of his defenders, he expressed grave concerns about the dangers of Dewey’s pragmatism as manifested in Eastman’s revisionism. His vehemence took Shachtman and Novack by surprise. Here was a man who had just landed in a new world after being refused asylum by all the countries of Europe. Hunted by the Soviet secret police, only hours earlier he had been reluctant to disembark his ship out of fear for his life. Yet here he was, carrying on as though his real nemesis was not the tyrant Stalin but the infidel Eastman. “There is nothing more important than this,” he exhorted his two comrades. “Pragmatism, empiricism is the greatest curse of American thought. You must inoculate the younger comrades against its infection.”

Nor, meanwhile, had Eastman forgotten the Prinkipo face-off and Trotsky’s subsequent public rebuke. At the time Trotsky was vilifying him on the train from Tampico, Eastman had recently completed a translation of The Revolution Betrayed, a book he discussed in an article in Harper’s in March 1938. He endorsed its damning description of Stalin’s USSR, but he could not accept its argument that the Revolution’s betrayal was the result ultimately of Russia’s backwardness and isolation, an interpretation Trotsky supported by invoking dialectical materialism. Where had Trotsky been all these years? wondered Eastman. Had he learned nothing about the human condition from modern psychology, biology, or sociology? “It is not a question, as Trotsky thinks, of being ‘frightened by defeat’ or ‘holding one’s positions.’ It is a question of moving forward or being stuck in the mud. No mind not bold enough to reconsider the socialist hypothesis in the light of the Russian experiment can be called intelligent.”

Eastman had now added insult to heresy. Furious, Trotsky turned to Burnham and urged that Eastman be dealt with “mercilessly.” It appears that Trotsky was unaware that Burnham himself had for years been displaying symptoms of the American disease. Burnham was prepared to defend the October Revolution and Marxism, but not dialectical materialism, because it falsely guaranteed the inevitability of socialism. Trotsky woke up to this fact at a moment when a number of American intellectuals began to distance themselves from Marxism, among them Hook, who now decided that the dialectic belonged to mythology after all, and Dewey, who saw in Marxism’s Hegelian origins a strain of theology. Edmund Wilson, at work on a monumental history of socialist and communist thought from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution, weighed in with an essay in Partisan Review called “The Myth of the Dialectic.”

For Trotsky, this was a disturbing trend, but for him the “greatest blow” came from Shachtman and Burnham in their rebuttal to the revisionists, a major article published in the January 1939 issue of New International called “The Intellectuals in Retreat.” Instead of attacking Eastman, Hook, and the others head on, the authors limited their criticisms to the realm of politics, and allowed that dialectical materialism was not essential to Marxist theory or practice. Trotsky was scandalized. This was, he scolded Shachtman, “the best of gifts to the Eastmans of all kinds.”

Burnham’s slide continued in spring 1939 with an article in Partisan Review that likened the dialectic to a human appendix: what Marxism needed was the intellectual equivalent of an appendectomy. Hansen wrote to inform Trotsky about this latest act of desecration, and also to report that there was much confusion throughout the party’s ranks concerning dialectical materialism, especially among the youth. Few comrades even professed to understand its meaning. Hansen passed along the remark of a comrade to the effect that “Trotsky does not write on the dialectic or on philosophy because he is incompetent to do so.” This must mean that Trotsky does not actually use the dialectic and that it really was a “metaphysical trapping,” just as Eastman said.

Hansen’s baiting letter helped convince Trotsky, once the factional fight in the Socialist Workers Party got under way, that the struggle against the opposition must be waged as a defense of Marxism’s core principles against the insidious American infection.

 

Events in Europe in the autumn of 1939 served to deepen the factional divide among the American Trotskyists. As the Red Army completed its occupation of eastern Poland, the Soviet government demanded from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia the right to establish military and naval bases and garrison troops on their soil. By mid-October, all three Baltic states had acquiesced. In New York, the Trotskyist Minority, led by Shachtman and Burnham, insisted that the party condemn these Soviet moves as acts of aggression, and they proposed a referendum on the unconditional defense of the USSR. Cannon rejected the idea and Trotsky backed him up. At a meeting of the party’s Political Committee on November 7, the vote was eight to four in favor of the Majority.

Then came the Soviet invasion of Finland, which followed the Helsinki government’s refusal to grant the territorial concessions demanded by Moscow. The Soviets first staged a series of border incidents accompanied by a loud propaganda campaign. The Red Army attacked on November 30. The Finns put up a stiff defense and battled the initial five-pronged Soviet assault to a stalemate. The Soviets then regrouped and concentrated their offensive against the Mannerheim Line, in southern Finland facing Leningrad: eighty-five miles of defensive fortification—snowbound trenches, pillboxes, and reinforced concrete structures—spanning the Karelian Isthmus, from the Gulf of Finland to Lake Ladoga. The Finnish defenders, donning white camouflage suits and employing mobile units on skis, had the initial advantage over the underprepared and underequipped troops of the Red Army, but everyone understood that time was not on their side.

In the United States, the cause of “little Finland” drew enormous public sympathy. Trotsky’s followers once again looked to Coyoacán. Surely the Finnish events would force their leader to revise his thinking about the USSR. Three weeks after the invasion, Trotsky’s analysis arrived in New York in the form of a long and scathing polemical article titled “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party.” Its entire first half was devoted to dialectical materialism and related theoretical questions, framed as an attack on Burnham and the revisionists. Taking Hansen’s cue, Trotsky included a primer on theory called “The ABC of Materialist Dialectics.”

Even those few party members who claimed to understand Trotsky’s discussion of the dialectic were not sure how it related to current debates. There was also considerable skepticism about Trotsky’s decision to emphasize the “petty-bourgeois” nature of the Minority: that there were too many clerical workers and too few factory workers in its ranks. Industrial workers, Trotsky observed, had a natural “inclination toward dialectical thinking.” That explained why the Majority held the correct position on the basic theoretical questions: “Cannon represents the proletarian party in the process of formation.”

Trotsky at his desk in his study, winter 1939–1940.

Alexander H. Buchman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Trotsky’s focus on Marxist theory and sociology elicited much head-scratching among comrades in both factions. But it was his analysis of the Finnish events that raised eyebrows. According to Trotsky, the Red Army in Finland was engaged in the expropriation of the large landowners and the introduction of workers’ control in industry, a preliminary step toward the expropriation of Finland’s capitalists. A Finnish civil war was now beginning, Trotsky contended, with the Red Army on the side of the workers and peasants, and the Finnish army on the side of the exploiters. In view of all this, Trotsky said, the Bolshevik-Leninists must continue to lend the USSR their “moral and material support.”

This interpretation of the Soviet invasion of Finland struck most comrades as utterly fantastic—even many in the Majority camp, although they could not say it openly. The notion of a civil war breaking out in Finland contradicted the known facts. So did the idea that the Red Army was imposing workers’ control over Finnish industry: everyone knew that the Russian workers themselves did not have that. And if the Finnish masses were rising up in support of the Red Army, why was the Soviet Union losing the war? A member of the Minority said privately what many other comrades were thinking: the Old Man had gone “completely haywire.”

Trotsky’s oddly timed preoccupation with the dialectic seemed designed to divert attention away from the inconvenient facts about the events in Finland. From New York, Sherman Stanley, whose allegiance to the Minority had cost him an assignment as secretary-guard in Coyoacán, complained directly to Trotsky. He was appalled by Trotsky’s argument that because the Soviet Union had nationalized the means of production, its “rape of Finland” was worthy of support. “Is not this the most monstrous and shameful non-sequitur in the history of our movement? Is not this worthy of the brazen ‘dialectical’ twisting so familiar in the history of Stalinism?”

Stanley and the Minority comrades were indignant that Trotsky had characterized them as “petty-bourgeois,” a time-honored Bolshevik term of abuse that Stalin had used to censure Trotsky during their struggle for power. To criticize party comrades this way, effectively labeling them class enemies, seemed unforgivable. Manny Garrett, of Brooklyn, called Trotsky’s article “disloyal, inaccurate, dishonest, and false to the core. L.D. has laid the gauntlet. We are ready to reply in kind.”

When Trotsky learned of these reactions he wrote to Cannon that the Minority comrades were now behaving like “enraged petty-bourgeois.” And since Cannon routinely circulated the texts of Trotsky’s letters at party headquarters, this comment was inflammatory, as was Trotsky’s remark about the need to unmask “Stalinist agents working in our midst” to provoke a split.

In fact, Trotsky was doing well enough on his own. Both factions interpreted his article as laying the basis for a split, an assumption that seemed confirmed by a statement he made to Shachtman: “I believe that you are on the wrong side of the barricades, my dear friend.” Yet farther along in the same letter, Trotsky indicated that he had not yet given up on Shachtman: “If I had the opportunity I would immediately take an airplane to New York City in order to discuss with you for 48 or 72 hours uninterruptedly. I regret very much that you don’t feel in this situation the need to come here to discuss the questions with me. Or do you?”

Instead, Shachtman carried on the debate in New York with Hansen, who was generally regarded as Trotsky’s proxy and whom the Minority reviled as an enforcer for the “Cannon clique.” Hansen’s recent articles and speeches had earned him a reputation for heavy-handed sarcasm, pompous irony, and a vulgarized Marxism. Cannon decided it was time to dispatch Hansen to the Bronx, Shachtman’s stronghold, where the Minority outnumbered—and outshouted—the Majority two to one. Cannon called this mostly Jewish rabble “declassed kibitzers” and “petty-bourgeois smart alecks.” After his first appearance, Hansen described the scene to Trotsky as a “madhouse.” “Where’s the civil war in Finland?” was the favorite Bronx jeer. Howls of laughter greeted his every mention of the dialectic, as if he had told a hilarious joke. And every reference to Minneapolis ignited an outbreak of heckling. In the Bronx, Hansen explained, the Minneapolis comrades were considered “provincials, blockheads, stupid yokels who don’t know anything but trade-union work and whose hands fly up like semaphores on a railroad whenever Cannon passes by.”

In Coyoacán, Trotsky gritted his teeth. He had lived in the Bronx during his brief sojourn in America in 1917, residing in a small row house on Vyse Avenue, in a working-class neighborhood that was home to Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. This experience now gave his mind’s eye a vivid picture of the problem. “The oppositionists, I am informed, greet with bursts of laughter the very mention of ‘dialectics.’ In vain,” Trotsky thundered, sounding eerily like a visitor from the Red Planet sent to warn the earthlings that resistance was futile. “This unworthy method will not help. The dialectic of the historic process has more than once cruelly punished those who tried to jeer at it.” He urged that “the Jewish petty-bourgeois elements of the New York local be shifted from their habitual conservative milieu and dissolved into the real labor movement.”

As for the “petty-bourgeois disdain” directed at the Minneapolis comrades, Trotsky offered a little history lesson. “At the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democrats in 1903,” he recollected, “where the split took place between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, there were only three workers among several scores of delegates. All three of them turned up with the majority. The Mensheviks jeered at Lenin for investing this fact with great symptomatic significance. The Mensheviks themselves explained the position the three workers took by their lack of “maturity.” But as is well known it was Lenin who proved correct.” The behavior of the Minority, Trotsky cautioned, bore a strong resemblance to the struggle of the Mensheviks against Bolshevik centralism.

Through the winter of 1939–40, Trotsky’s polemical battle against the Minority continued, thousands upon thousands of words, with major thrusts directed at Shachtman’s misreading of Bolshevik history and Burnham’s “brutal challenge” to Marxist theory. The effect they produced was entirely the opposite of what Trotsky intended. Even Cannon had to marvel at how “each contribution by the OM brought a worse reaction than the one previous.” In any case, minds had already been made up. As Burnham said, “The Finnish events were absolutely decisive.”

Cannon was now eager to toss the “petty-bourgeois windbags” into the dustbin of history. Trotsky, however, still held out hope for unity. When the Minority announced that it would convene its own national conference in Cleveland at the end of February 1940, he advised Cannon that the proper response was “a vigorous intervention in favor of unity by the majority.” “Back to the Party!” he exhorted his wayward comrades. Cannon, meanwhile, was denouncing those same comrades as “enemies and traitors” who had to be “fought without mercy and without compromise on every front” and subject to “the most ruthless punishment in the form of a war of political extermination.”

A special convention of the Socialist Workers Party was held in mid-April, with eighty-nine delegates and sixty alternates present, representing a total membership of 1,095. The Majority won every vote by the same total, 55 to 34. Shachtman announced that, backed by a large preponderance of the youth, the Minority had the support of at least half the membership and that it intended to form a separate party. Cannon could breathe a sigh of relief: the schism was accomplished. Stanley’s postmortem captured the general feeling of bitter regret on the Minority side: “The war broke out and we did nothing. The OM did nothing. One of the most important events of our epoch took place, and we were asleep. And we stayed asleep.”

 

THE SPLIT FOUND Jan Frankel on the other side of the barricades. He moved from New York to Los Angeles to work for the Minority. A comrade there described him to Trotsky as sick, jobless, next to penniless, and extremely disheartened by the war, which had crushed his native Czechoslovakia. Frankel blamed the split entirely on Trotsky. “The present fight in the American Party has been carried out in the traditional manner of the old Iskra days when Lenin and the OM engaged in their bitter polemics,” he said. These methods were completely inappropriate to radical politics in the United States in the 1930s. “The proof is in the split.”

Trotsky was shaken by the loss of yet another close comrade, and regretted that he could not sit down with Frankel and talk it over. Only one member of the Minority had so far made the pilgrimage to Coyoacán. She was Sylvia Ageloff, the Brooklyn social worker. She had come to Mexico City as a tourist, more or less. After she arrived, she wrote a note to Trotsky passing along greetings from her sister Ruth.

Sylvia was invited to come to the house on Avenida Viena the next day, January 26, 1940, to join a discussion about the factional struggle with another visitor, Farrell Dobbs, the Teamsters organizer whom Cannon had recently brought from Minneapolis to manage the New York office. Sylvia was a minority of one that day, among Trotsky, Dobbs, the guards, and the staff. Chief of the guard Harold Robins said that her remarks “beautifully indicate the attitude of the petty bourgeois Menshevism of the minority.”

The swaggering account of this meeting that Robins sent to New York, against the backdrop of Trotsky’s repeated warnings about Stalinist agents stirring the factionalist pot, raised anxieties there about Trotsky’s safety. Among those who felt a sudden sense of alarm was John Wright, Trotsky’s research assistant on the Stalin biography and a stalwart member of the Majority. Wright warned the staff in Coyoacán that “the factional struggle provides a perfect cover for the penetration of GPU provocateurs and assassins to Trotsky.” He urged that “utmost caution” be exercised. As an “absolutely iron bound” rule, even the most loyal visitor must be subjected to a personal search. “We are all very anxious on this point.”

Sylvia was not a threat, of course, certainly not as a debater, a fact that had prompted an outburst of bravado from Robins on Trotsky’s behalf: “The old man is dying to have a fighting minority supporter and he would consider it a pleasure I am sure if you would send him one with a bit of guts in him.” It turns out that the GPU was already calculating along the same lines. As Sylvia left Trotsky’s home late in the afternoon of January 26, waiting by the police guard house to drive her back to the city was the Canadian businessman Frank Jacson, otherwise known to her as Jacques Mornard. The penetration agent was now just outside the gates.