An opera, they say, is not over until the fat lady has sung. A revolution is not complete until its leader has got rid of all his possible detractors, competitors and everyone who ‘knows too much’ about what really happened. Think no further than Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
In April 1920 the Communist Party threw a big party for Lenin’s fiftieth birthday, which was also celebrated by the publication of volume after volume of his Collected Works. Famous foreigners who came to shake his hand included Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells from Britain. The latter went to Gosizdat, the state publishing house and asked for the royalties from all the millions of copies of his books published in Russia, only to learn that copyright was not recognised by the Soviet government, although they were quite happy to give him as much cash as he wanted to spend in Russia, on condition that not a single rouble left the country.210 Another visitor to the Kremlin was Inessa Armand, by then in such poor health that Lenin sent her to a sanatorium in the Caucasus, where she died in a cholera epidemic that September, her body being buried beneath the Kremlin wall, genuinely mourned by her former lover. Alexandra Kollontai was also very ill, but took over the reins of Zhenotdel and was elected a member of the executive at the All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 8 December. At that congress, she joined the Workers’ Opposition faction within the Bolshevik Party, fighting the increasing bureaucratisation of the Soviet state – a faction that would be banned with other groups at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky progressed from being an ardent supporter of the CPSU to blowing out his brains in despair at what the revolution had become by 1930.211
Before the end of 1921 Lenin’s health was also visibly failing, to the point where the Politburo ordered him to take a month’s leave at his villa in Gorki, twenty miles south of Moscow, where Krupskaya and his sister could look after him in peace and quiet. He, however, felt so ill that he begged both his wife and Stalin to procure some cyanide so he could commit suicide. Instead, the Politburo brought eminent doctors, who could be relied upon to remain discreet, from abroad to examine him. Their opinions included the theory that Kaplan’s bullets in his neck were giving him blood poisoning. In April 1922 the bullets were belatedly removed surgically, but the problems continued, leading some specialists to believe that he was suffering from syphilis while others – later proved right by autopsy after his death – considered that the most likely cause of his symptoms was arteriosclerosis. In May 1922 this led to his first stroke with temporary paralysis and loss of speeech, followed by a second one in December, which did not stop him demanding from his sick bed the death penalty for the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party during their show trial. They were instead sent to prison until eventually falling victims to Stalin’s great purges. The leading Mensheviks were likewise sent to concentration camps.
In 1922 Kollontai’s voice was effectively silenced. Sent to serve with the Soviet legation in Oslo, from then until her retirement for health reasons in 1945, she was kept abroad as a diplomat while her work on the status of women was progressively sidelined in the USSR. This did not stop her being an effective ambassador to Norway and Sweden, a member of a trade delegation to Mexico, as a delegate to the League of Nations, and in the negotiations of the Finno-Soviet peace treaty of 1940. From 1946 until her death in 1952 at the age of eighty, she was an adviser to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In December 1922 Lenin dictated pismo k kongresu – a composite letter to the congress, in which he attacked Trotsky, Kamenev, Bukharin, Zinoviev and others in the leadership for their individual failings, but also the people as a whole for their idleness, illiteracy, lack of punctuality and initiative. It was the letter of a grumpy old man. In it, he specifically recommended that Stalin be removed from the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party, arguing that:
Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated excessive power in his hands and I am not convinced that he will manage to use this power with adequate care. Against this, Comrade Trotsky, as shown by his struggle with the Central Committee, is distinguished by his outstanding talents. He is certainly the most able person in the current Central Committee, but has an excess of self-confidence and preoccupation with burocracy.
At the beginning of January 1923, Lenin added:
Stalin is too crude, and this defect … becomes unacceptable in the position of General Secretary. I therefore propose to the comrades that they should devise a means of removing him from this job and should appoint to this job someone else who is distinguished from comrade Stalin in all other respects only by the single superior aspect that he should be more tolerant, more polite and more attentive towards comrades, etc.
(signed) Lenin, 4 January 1923212
Lenin’s wish was that this should be read out to all the delegates at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, but his third stroke the previous month left him again paralysed and unable to speak. Hoping that he might recover, Krupskaya hid the letter for several months. After he fell into a coma and died at his home in Gorki on 21 January 1924 his body was transported to Moscow, to lie in state at the House of Unions under the gaze of hundreds of thousands of the party faithful shuffling past. Later it was embalmed against Krupskaya’s wishes and placed in the specially constructed mausoleum on Red Square, like that of a pharoah in his pyramid. Several times re-embalmed as its condition deteriorated, and removed from Moscow during the Second World War, so that the Germans could not get their hands on it, the corpse became an unmissable stop on three generations of Communist visitors’ tours of Moscow. The other great tribute was the renaming of Petrograd as Leningrad, which it remained until 1991, when the city reverted to its original name of St Petersburg.
Krupskaya rather ingenuously handed the ‘letter to the congress’ to the party’s Central Committee Secretariat, with the request that it be read out at the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924. At that congress a version of Lenin’s testament was read out after being edited by Stalin to exclude any criticism of himself, and particularly Lenin’s recommendation that he should be replaced by Trotsky, ‘despite [Trotsky’s] arrogance and bureaucratic tendencies’.
When Krupskaya eventually managed to see Stalin and protest about this political sleight of hand, she threatened to tell the next congress herself what Lenin had actually written. Stalin had insulted her before, earning a reproof from Lenin. This time, he growled at her, ‘Look here, old woman. If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll appoint another widow to Lenin.’213 The complete contents of Lenin’s ‘letter to the congress’ or political testament were not made public until the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, thirty-two years after it had been written, when Nikita Khrushchev unveiled all Stalin’s crimes, except those in which he had personally collaborated.
Defying Stalin after Lenin’s death, Trotsky openly criticised his leadership, in response to which the Politburo launched a propaganda war against him. Stalin’s dilemma was that Trotsky, although not much liked, was too well known and respected at all levels in the party to be assassinated or imprisoned. In 1925, however, he was fired from his post as Commissar for War on the grounds that the civil war phase was ended. In 1926 he was expelled from the Politburo, which was entirely under Stalin’s thumb, and expelled from the party itself the following year, being exiled to Alma-Ata, then the capital of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. There, among other privations, the postal services withheld much of his incoming mail and did not forward many of his outgoing communications. On 2 June 1928 he wrote an open letter containing many complaints, of which this is an excerpt:
One of my two daughters, Nina, is gravely ill with galloping [tuberculosis. She] is 26 years old, she has two babies, her husband is in exile. From the hospital my daughter wrote me on March 20 that she wished to ‘liquidate’ her illness in order to return to her job, but her temperature was high. Had I received this letter in time I could have telegraphed her and our friends to have her stay in the hospital. But the letter she mailed on March 20 was delivered to me only on June 1st. It was in transit for 73 days, i.e., it remained for more than two months in the pocket of a [Party] scoundrel corrupted by impunity. My oldest daughter Zina – she is 27 – has also been “running a temperature” for the last two, three years. I should like very much to have her here but she is now taking care of her sister. Both of my daughters have of course been expelled from the Party and removed from their jobs, although my elder daughter, who used to be in charge of a Party school in Crimea had been transferred a year ago to a purely technical post. In a word, these gentlemen who smashed my secretariat are diligently occupying themselves with my family.214
After twelve months in Kazakhstan, Stalin exiled Trotsky entirely from the USSR. He first sought asylum with Russia’s traditional enemy, Turkey, and was allowed to set up house on the Black Sea island of Prinkipo, where he devoted himself to writing a history of the revolution. Two KGB illegal agents, Romanian Zoya Zarubina215 and her husband Yakov Blumkin, who had murdered Count Mirbach in 1918, were posted with false papers to Turkey. To finance their espionage work there Blumkin sold on the black market valuable Hassidic manuscripts looted from Russian museums and synagogues, but gave some of the money thus obtained to Trotsky. His wife denounced this deviation from orders to Moscow Centre, with the result that two Chekists were sent with orders to entice Blumkin on board a Soviet merchant ship in a Turkish port. Immediately on the ship’s arrival in Russia, Blumkin was arrested and shot.216
Stalin implemented the docrine of krugovaya poruka, or collective responsibility, in Trotsky’s case to include all his family. Forbidden treatment for her illness, Trotsky’s daughter Nina died shortly after his letter quoted above. Her half-brother Sergei was brought from a labour camp in the Gulag to Moscow in 1937 and executed there by firing squad. Trotsky’s other son died in Paris, in circumstances that closely resembled an NKVD Shmersh217 assassination. But Stalin had eliminated all his political enemies inside the USSR and was not going to let Trotsky stay alive. In 1936, as the Spanish civil war began, he had been granted asylum in Mexico by President Lázaro Cárdenas and set up home with his second wife Natalya in a suburb of Mexico City called Coyoacán. Later, the grandson Seva was brought to Mexico to live with them. Unfortunately for Trotsky, Cárdenas also gave asylum after the Spanish civil war to many exiled Republicans. A group of twenty or so of these Spanish Communists, ordered by Moscow to break into the villa and kill Stalin’s last surviving personal enemy, disguised themselves in Mexican police uniforms and were allowed to enter the fortified villa early on 24 May 1940218 by an American guard, Robert Sheldon Harte, who had also turned off the alarm system. Overcoming the Mexican government guards, they sprayed the main bedroom with bullets from automatic weapons at waist height through the locked and barred door. Trotsky and his wife hid under the bed and miraculously survived. In the next bedroom, 13-year-old Seva was slightly wounded in one foot. The assailants and Harte departed in a hurry without checking that the target was dead. Harte, who ‘knew too much’ was later murdered by the Spaniards.
With Trotsky having allegedly signed a publishing deal with the American Hearst Corporation to write his potentially embarrassing history of the revolution, Stalin was furious at this failure and ordered Lavrenti Beria,219 head of the NKVD, which was the current successor of the Cheka, to finish the job. Beria passed the job to Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy director of the NKVD’s foreign service, who tasked the NKVD’s North American spymaster Nahum Eitingon with the execution. This approach was more subtle: Eitingon gave the job to Ramón Mercader, whose mother Maria Caridad was a political commissar responsible for murdering at least twenty POUM220 comrades during the Spanish Civil War and had trained her son in this bloodshed.
Posing as a Canadian businessman named Jacson [sic], Mercader was ordered to seduce Trotsky’s virginal secretary Sylvia Ageloff. As her lover, Mercader arrived at the re-fortified villa on 20 August 1940 with an ice pick and a dagger hidden under his raincoat, despite the fact that it was a fine day. Recognising him, the guards allowed him to enter. Minutes later, the ice pick was buried in Trotsky’s skull. He died the following day. At first Mercader refused to say why he had done the deed, but later told the police:
I hit him [with the ice pick] just the once and he gave out a piteous, shattering cry at the same time as he threw himself onto me and bit my left hand, as you can see for yourselves by these three teeth marks. Then he took some slow steps back. As soon as they heard the cry, people arrived. I didn’t try to escape.221
Roughed up by the guards, Mercader was arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison – Mexico having no death penalty. Eitingon was rewarded with promotion by the grateful General Secretary of the CPSU. Released in 1960, Mercader sought asylum in the USSR under the name Ramón Lopez, but could not settle in Russia and re-emigrated, to live in Castro’s Cuba, decorated with the medal of a Hero of the Soviet Union. After his death in Cuba, Mercader’s ashes were buried under the name Lopez in Kuntsevo cemetery, outside Moscow.
A contributing factor in the execution was Trotsky’s habit of telling everyone he met that a worldwide communist revolution was about to happen; Stalin wanted this too but preferred, as always, to work against the Western democracies in the shadows, while pretending, especially during the Second World War, that he was not their enemy.
Thus, on 21 August 1940, when Trotsky died in a Mexican hospital, the October Revolution could be said to be complete. Stalin had, in his customary manner, cut short the fat lady’s song.