Trotsky, Stalin & Cardenas

(See front cover)

The arrival in Manhattan of Mr. & Mrs. Leon Trotsky as exiles was uneventful. He was born a Bronstein, she a Rosenfeld, and The Bronx is full of Bronsteins and Rosenfelds. Among these kinsmen some soon appeared who helped Mr. & Mrs. Trotsky find a suitable three-room flat on Vyse Avenue, The Bronx, enabled them to buy $200 worth of furniture on the installment plan by signing as endorsers their promise to pay. The local Russian-Jewish newspaper, Novy Mir ("New World"), took on Comrade Trotsky as an assistant editor at $15 per week, and although his spoken English was extremely halting his sharp eye quickly took the measure of Manhattan, his sharper pen promptly produced this editorial in the most brilliant Bronstein vein:

Chewing Gum In The Subway

"The car of the subway is jammed. At the station strong-bodied attendants pushed the passengers in the stomachs with their knees in order to be able to shut the steel doors of the cars. . . . The working population of New York has left today another part of its life's energy in the temples of Capital. Some of the people have become weaker; others have grown richer. In the subway are those who have become weaker. The color of their faces is greyish, their hands are hanging down weakly, their eyes are dim. . . . Only their jaws are moving, submissively, evenly, without joy or animation. . . . What are they trying to find in this miserable, degrading chewing? . . . When an infant, exhausted from hunger and crying, is pathetically moving its dull eyes, and there is no milk in the mother's breasts or in the bottle, the mother pushes a rubber nipple into the child's mouth-- and the child sucks it desperately. . . . F'or a while it deceives itself by the movement of its own lips.

"Thus it is with these people in the subway. . . . Capital does not like the working man to think and is afraid. ... It has therefore adopted measures. ... It has put up automats in each station and has filled them with disgusting candied gum. With an automatic movement of the hand the people extract from these automats pieces of sweetish gum, and they grind it with the automatic chewing of their jaws. . . . It looks like a religious rite, like some silent prayer to God-Capital."

It was on March 10, 1917 in Manhattan that Exile-Editor Leon Trotsky came out with this greatest of all Communist exposures of chewing gum, five days before the abdication of Nicholas II. Last week it was just as apt as it had been 20 years ago. And Leon Trotsky was once more a newly-landed exile in America, only this time he was in Mexico. After the Norwegian Government got tired of having him around (TIME, Dec. 28), put hin aboard a Norwegian tanker and landed him in Tampico (TIME, Jan. 18), he promptly began to receive appropriate honors as World Revolutionist No. 1. The Republic of Mexico is ruled by a political party whose orators refer to themselves with enthusiasm as "The Revolution! "* Mexico is today the only major Latin-American state whose Government admires Big Reds./-

Last week the President of Mexico General Lazaro Cardenas, sent a luxurious special railway car, El Hidalgo ("The Nobleman"), to fetch Comrade Trotsky from the seacoast to the 7,000-ft. high plateau on which stands Mexico City, Lest anyone do the Great Exile a mischief El Hidalgo stopped some miles outside the capital and Mr. & Mrs. Trotsky, with six Mexican detectives permanently assigned to them, alighted to finish their journey by motor car.* This whisked them to the spacious suburban residence of fat and smoldering Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera, an ardent Trotskyist, friend of President Cardenas, and casher-in on the John D. Rockefellers (Father & Son) who in art "know what they like."

Communist Paradoxes. In Moscow the official Soviet Foreign Office spokesman told correspondents amiably and without heat that the Stalin Regime has "no objection to Mexico's granting asylum to Trotsky," adding perfunctorily, "so long as Trotsky is not permitted to use Mexico as a base for plotting against the Soviet Union."

Considering that Stalin claims to believe that Trotsky successfully fomented the assassination of the Dictator's "Dear Friend Sergei" Kirov (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934 et seq.), and then hatched a conspiracy which had the death of Stalin as its objective (TIME, Aug. 24 et seq.), it was curious last week that official Moscow and the Party and press in Russia were indifferent to the honors President Cardenas was paying to Mexico's guest. Tremendous was the hullabaloo raised meanwhile by the Mexican Communist Party which is avowedly Stalinist. Its General Secretary,/- blatant Comrade Hernan Laborde, massed his Reds in Mexico City's St. Domingo Square and roared: "Down with Trotsky who is living in the home of the Capitalist Painter Rivera! . . . We demand the expulsion of Trotsky from Mexico. . . . Trotsky, the rotten bourgeois-stalking horse, has already broken his promise to refrain from politics in Mexico and has insulted the Soviet Government!"

So the Great Exile had, but the Soviet Government and its extremely obedient and vocal Russian Press gave no sign of having minded the following remarks by the Great Exile last week in Mexico city: "Soviet bureaucracy is sabotaging the Spanish Revolution in order not to frighten the French bourgeoisie! It does this first by preventing the proletariat in Spain from seizing power, secondly it does not give Spain the support it could give if Russia really intended to help the proletariat. Soviet bureaucracy is aiding Spain only just enough to save its face with the workers of the world!"

In Manhattan last week was 24-year-old Jean van Heijenoort, the French private secretary of truly international Trotsky, who generally keeps two or three polylingual secretaries busy handling his correspondence with Trotskyists in all parts of the world. After conferring with Trotsky Reds in Manhattan, Private Secretary van Heijenoort took plane to Mexico City. Already there was the first pilgrimage of U. S. Reds to the feet of the Great Exile. None has a name which makes news in the U. S. Press but in zeal and enthusiasm they were tops,* particularly one Max Schachtman who aspires to write the definitive biography of the Master.

To these rapturous radicals last week gentle, refined, soft-spoken Lev Davidovich Bronstein said, in the fatherly fashion of an old maestro soothing impatient pupils who want to play the violin before they know how, that he wants to go to New York.

World Revolution. Taking a world view--and both Stalinism and Trotskyism are simply variants on the Communist world theme--the establishment of Trotsky in Mexico is almost an ideal Red setup. As the Times of London has recently pontificated, there is reason to think that broad political developments in South American lands are now nearing the splits into Fascism and Communism which are making Europe feel strange and uncomfortable. In Europe the cleavage is now so sharp that no eminent cleaver is needed, but if Communism is to make further headway in those Latin-American republics which refuse to recognize Russia it needs the stirring glamour of a great Red personality in the Americas.

Such glamour and revolutionary talent cannot be that of an official Soviet personage or even a comrade known to be intimate with Stalin. Reason: nearly every country which has recognized the Stalin regime has exacted formal treaty pledges--as did President Roosevelt--that Soviet diplomats, consuls and such will not in practice work to foment the "World Revolution of the World Proletariat" to which every Communist is pledged in theory. Mr. Roosevelt went even further, exacting from Comrade Stalin a pledge not to have on Russian soil any organization or persons engaged in attempting to overthrow the U. S. Government, including even U. S. citizens so attempting.

Since the Dictator is the most prominent member of the Moscow International devoted to fomenting the World Revolution, it is doubtful in a strictly legal sense whether Comrade Stalin has a right to permit himself to stay in Russia under the pledges given Washington, but neither the Dictator nor the President is a legal stickler. What is certain is that no great Red could, under the treaty pledges Moscow has given, stay abroad and foment Revolution if he were not officially an outcast from Russia.

Most Popular Red. In Russia the political setup has now come to such a pass that production of the Soviet Encyclopedia of Literature has been halted, Soviet history books printed only recently have been withdrawn from the schools by order of Stalin, and a dispatch last week announced that the Commissariats for Education were expected to put some old Tsarist history books into Russian pupils' hands again. Reason: Soviet educators can agree that the Tsarist history books are wrong, cannot agree that any history of Russia written since the Revolution is even approximately right, and cannot find an eminent Soviet historian ready to risk his neck by writing a history which the Dictator might decide was wrong. At the bottom of this dilemma is Trotsky.

Today few U. S. citizens are louder in praise of Joseph Stalin than that emotional but influential lecturer and journalist, Dr. Anna Louise Strong. Yet on Sunday, May 24, 1925, she wrote in the New York Times: "Now that Lenin is dead, Leon Trotsky remains the most popular man in the Soviet Republic. . . . Russia's best organizer . . . Trotsky is more popular throughout Russia not only than any other man but than the whole of the Central Committee" of the Communist Party whose General Secretary was then, as now, Joseph Stalin.

Describing the Revolution of 1917, Dr. Strong continued, and she only mirrored what she was hearing in Moscow in 1925: "When the hour for action arrived, many of the Old Bolsheviks who had been Lenin's adherents for years wished to postpone the decisive blow. Trotsky, the new recruit, stepped into the breach and made the Revolution with Lenin. . . . Trotsky built an army out of worse than nothing; out of demoralized deserters who had determined never to fight again. . . . Trotsky is still today after endless attacks, the most popular and significant figure in the land."

These are fair samples of what the Russian historian of 1937 is up against in the way of awkward facts dating from the Revolution. The able correspondent Arno Dosch-Fleurot, who long served the New York World, was on the spot in Russia during the Revolution and has written: "While the faces of many individuals in the rush of events remain in my memory, I cannot remember even having seen Kamenev, Zinoviev or Stalin then. Later they and lots of people blossomed out, but in the days of 'do or die' there was just one big figure--TROTSKY." Lenin in the hottest days for Reds had skipped out of Petrograd (now Leningrad) to the safety of Finland.

Today when Soviet newsorgans mention Trotsky they never do so except in hysterically abusive terms which flatly contradict the facts of 1917. It is now Stalin who in those days of do or die largely made the Revolution, though the Dictator with becoming modesty calls himself "only the disciple of Lenin."

A whole Soviet generation is growing up to idolize Stalin--and dead Old Bolsheviks tell no tales. It is a fact that of the 1917 Communist Quintet (Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin) who won the Revolution and later became the undisputed masters of Russia, only Stalin and Trotsky have escaped death.

The last two of these Old Bolsheviks to fall, Kamenev (brother-in-law of Trotsky) and Zinoviev, were executed by a Stalin firing squad after trial proceedings of such a nature (TIME, Aug. 31) that today they are a festering scandal in Communist circles throughout the world. The supreme Trotskyist who, according to the Moscow verdict, was the instigator of Communists who sought to kill Stalin, is significantly alive.

"Trotsky Must Die!" Stalin in 1929 decreed the expulsion of Trotsky from Russia to Turkey, where Trotsky arrived loudly protesting. Declared Volkswille, the official organ of the German Communist Party then: "Trotsky must die, but Stalin does not dare to get rid of him in Russia. . . . Therefore Trotsky is to be taken to Turkey, where it will be easy to murder him."

Since this was printed, eight long years have passed. Trotsky has lived here and there in Europe, always kindling the flame of "Trotskyism" which is after all Communism. Today Trotsky is in Mexico-- the ideal country for an assassination-- and Stalin continues to disappoint the many Stalinists who continue to clamor for his extermination--but why should Stalin have Trotsky done away with?

The ruthless Dictator is practical. He and Trotsky are always spitting in each other's face, but at an Oriental bazaar the rug dealers think nothing of a little saliva--and J. Stalin is to his grim fingertips an Oriental, a Georgian brigand, bomb-thrower and safe-blower who is now on terms of diplomatic friendship with fellow Dictators, Presidents, Kings. If, by invoking Trotsky as a conspirator against himself, Stalin can conveniently bump off such Old Bolsheviks in Russia as do actually get in his way from time to time, so much to the good. If there were no Trotsky, or if Trotsky should be assassinated, the Ogpu would have to invent another Trotsky to serve purposes not wholly different from those served in England by what is called "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition."

Trotsky & Trotskyism, Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born 57 years ago in the Ukraine of peasant parents so prosperous that today in Russia they would be exterminated as kulaks. At only 19, this brilliant little Jew was already in the custody of Tsarist police as a revolutionist of mark. Bronstein's various escapes from Siberia were always theatrically brilliant, in contrast to the methodical escapes at the same period of Djhugashvili who is now called Stalin. Bronstein, when Tsarist Russia finally got too hot for him, escaped on a forged passport in which he whimsically gave himself the name of his last jailer, "Trotsky."

Straight went Trotsky to seek famed Lenin who then lived in London, writing in the Reading Room of the British Museum the revolutionary tracts which were to alter the world. Trotsky, always impatient, rushed immediately to Lenin's house and routed him out just before dawn. The majestically calm genius of Lenin and the excited, flashing genius of Trotsky led then and there to a long, foggy, disputatious walk in the vicinity of Westminster Abbey.

During the War the safest place in Europe was Spain, but Trotsky is physically no coward, and it was only to find outlet for his pacifism that he went to Spain. Pestered there by the police, he soon skipped on to Manhattan. After writing his immortal philippic on chewing gum in the subway, Leon Trotsky, on hearing that the Kerensky Government had seized Russia, returned the furniture he had been buying on the installment plan, borrowed his passage money and streaked for Petrograd. In this city (the Tsarist capital which is now Leningrad) at the time of the abortive Russian revolution of 1905, Trotsky had briefly figured as the president of the historic "First Soviet." A soviet is merely any representative group or council of workmen who have decided to call themselves a soviet.

Everyone read the screaming headlines and dispatches which, from the outbreak of the Bolshevist revolution in 1917 to the expulsion from Russia of Trotsky in 1929 made his name a household word in even land and stamped Bolshevism for all time with the trademark of "Lenin & Trotsky," but not everyone today could define Trotskyism.

Trotsky urged the industrialization oi Russia, and that was "Trotskyism" until he had been kicked out and it became Stalinism. Trotsky urged regimentation oi the Russian peasantry by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the peasants to be uprooted from their little holdings and forced onto vast collective farms with tractor; replacing horses and Moscow able at any moment to shut off the gasoline if the peasants got obstreperous. That too was "Trotskyism," bitterly denounced by Stalin until, Trotsky having been ousted, it became and is today Stalinism.

It was and is a major premise of "Trotskyism" that Communism cannot be successful in a single country unless it simultaneously is fomented in all countries anc they become presently Communist. On this point, the acts of Stalin show his theory now to be that a success can be made oi Communism in one single country, namely the Soviet Union, and that the bulk of its funds should be devoted to achieving success there at this time, not scattered to sow Communism in other countries. These two points of view are generally accepted today as representing "Trotskyism," on the one hand, and Stalinism on the other. At the time of the British Coal Strike (which precipitated the British General Strike of 1927), its leaders cried, "Thank God for Moscow!" and received through the Bank of England from the Soviet State Bank some $2,000,000. That shower of gold was "Trotskyism." The British General Strike fizzled. Stalin, the practical vowed to stop wasting Russia's money thus and concentrated all energies upon building up his Soviet Union at home.

In the minds of neutral observers there is no doubt whatever that Trotsky is an authoritative Communist, Stalin is an even more authoritative Communist, and that --supposing the time ever comes when the Soviet Union is a "success" and has money to spare--Moscow will again shower gold upon Communist parties in other lands, a policy which is so "Trotskyist" today and so sharply distinguished now from what is Stalinist.

"Land to the Peasants!" Most effective slogan used by Lenin & Trotsky to rally rural Russians to their Red standard in 1917 was "Land to the Peasants!"

Today the rulers of Mexico, styling themselves collectively "The Revolution," are at last taking seriously and actually carrying out the basic Mexican Constitutional law of 1917 which is simply a fulfillment of this same slogan.

President Cardenas, probably the most popular and conscientious chief executive Mexico has ever had, today makes zealous efforts to attune his Government's policy to the great mass of Mexicans, the peasants. Less than 25% of Mexican farm lands are owned by non-Mexicans and thus far President Cardenas has been careful not to antagonize prematurely the remaining "foreign landlords," or their governments.

It is almost impossible for a Latin-American regime to antagonize Good Neighbor Roosevelt, and the New York Times, in reporting the confiscation of 187 U. S.-owned estates, one of 27,000 acres, observed last week: "If the November election is any indication, the majority of Americans favor President Roosevelt's policy of not allowing individual Americans to loot our southern brothers."

While "our southern brothers" are looting U. S. capitalists discreetly, a much greater number of Mexican landlords are notified from time to time by the Government that their estates have been taken from them (in exchange for what the Mexican Congress calls "ironclad, guaranteed bonds" which they must accept) and parceled out among the local peasants. A Mexican peasant, once established on such land, is by no means sure that he will not be visited by a landlord's lynching party who may cut off his ears and throw them in his face. Incidents of this kind have their counterpart in irate bands of the newly-landed Mexican peasantry who burst in upon the gentry and do many a mischief. However, under strong President Cardenas, Mexicans are less & less cutting off each other's ears.

Under the law of 1917, as administered by the Cardenas Government, Mexican statesmen claim to be gradually "restoring" the country's lands to what they claim was the "communal status" of these lands centuries ago, prior to the arrival of the Spanish conquerors and their land-lordly Church. Today the Mexican peasant who is set down by the Government on a piece of land retains title to it only so long as he and his direct descendants live and continue to work it, after which the land automatically reverts to the "Mexican community."

Between Cardenas' "community" and the Communism of either Trotsky or Stalin there is every difference, but Mexico is nonetheless frankly a land of proletarian reform. As England's great, liberal Manchester Guardian observed in a gentlemanly salute to Trotsky last week, "Let us hope he will find a sure refuge in Mexico--a revolutionary country where a great revolutionary may be appreciated and understood." At latest reports, Host Diego Rivera had had to return to a hospital with a kidney ailment; Mrs. Trotsky had gone to bed with what seemed to be a recurrence of her malaria; Guest Trotsky, respectfully watched and waited on by dark-eyed young Hostess Rivera, had resumed dictation to his secretaries of his monumental Biography of Lenin, begun nearly two years ago.

*Mexican National Revolutionary Party.

/-No South American country today recognizes the Soviet Union.

*President Cardenas, too, usually alights in the suburbs and enters his capital in this manner, the safest.

/-Stalin is Dictator by virtue of his office as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Russia, finds it convenient to let Molotov be Premier and Kalinin President, as these offices are completely dwarfed by his power.

*Pilgrim No. 1 was Acting Secretary George Novack of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, whose most eminent member is Socialist Norman Thomas, no pilgrim as yet. Last June the Trotskyist Communists of the U. S. merged with the Thomasist Socialists. Normally benign, Mr. Thomas becomes vehement if given opportunity to deny "the canard" that perhaps Trotsky and Stalin are not altogether sincere undoers of each other's work. In the Thomas camp it is an article of faith that Stalin, as Dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, is an enemy of "true Socialism" while Trotsky is a friend. However, Mr. Thomas requested last week: "Don't call me a stooge for Trotsky!"

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