Max's Letter

A descendant of Daniel Webster returned good for evil, last week, to famed Lev Davidovitch Trotsky. The descendant is Poet Max Eastman, 45, sometimes considered a dilettante radical, onetime editor of the brilliant but now defunct review, The Masses* and author of Since Lenin Died. Of this volume Comrade Trotsky wrote in his potent yesterdays: 'fallacious and mendacious . . . exploits single incidents of the [Communist] party discussion . . . perverts the meaning of facts." Since writing those lines Trotsky has been exiled to the remote vicinity of Chinese Turkestan because he dared to continue "party discussion" in a party which demands blind obedience. Last week, at Manhattan, Poet Max Eastman returned good for evil by making public a letter from Russian Communist friends purporting to reveal, for the first time, precise details of M. Trotsky's enforced setting out from Moscow (TIME, Jan. 30).

The letter told that Trotsky's departure on the day scheduled was prevented by 10,000 sympathizers who bought tickets at the station from which he was scheduled to leave Moscow and then stood like a herd of cows upon the tracks so that his train could not leave. Next day 47 sympathizers were arrested for loitering near his house. Finally, continues the letter: "The police agents threatened to take Trotsky [from his house] by force. . . . Trotsky refused to go. The police picked up his overcoat and began to force him into it. His wife tried to communicate with somebody by telephone and they dragged her roughly from the instrument. Trotsky's son attempted to defend his father and was subdued in a fist fight.

"Finally they dragged Trotsky out of his house by main force, put him in an automobile and drove him at high speed to the Faustovo station, forty miles from Moscow.

"He was placed in a compartment with two soldiers on guard. On the road he fell sick. At Samara they took him from the train in a serious condition and doctors were summoned. That is all we know. That is really how it happened."

Cabled despatches, possibly tampered with by the Soviet Censor, have uniformly declared that Trotsky left Moscow in the passive presence of a crowd which merely collected at the station, sang Communist songs, and wailed, "Oh how sad!" as his train chuffed out.

* Not to be confused with The New Masses, struggling, Manhattan organ of mass and class conscious intelligentsia.