Death of a Revolutionary

It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon of Aug. 20, 1940. Leon Trotsky finished his tea and strolled through a door of his house into a grass-grown, flower-strewn patio. He wandered about, pausing now & then to enjoy that most bourgeois of bourgeois things: a garden, not for food, but for pleasure. Geraniums were sprouting from pots, roses bursting in bloom, chickens cackling in coops, rabbits copulating in warrens, birds twittering with sunset nervousness in trees that overhung the 20-foot garden wall. The trees cast flickering shadows across the patio. The sky over Mexico City was sharp, clear blue, with puffy clouds in the distance.

Trotsky savored these things with special relish. All his life he had lived in a shadowy world of conspiracy and revolution. But now the great revolutionary's life had become singularly peaceful. His following had dwindled to a handful of devoted, inconsequential disciples. His written work was esteemed less for its revolutionary content than for its masterly prose.

At 60 Leon Trotsky was a successful author with an adoring wife, a house in the suburbs and enough money to live in smug comfort. A lifetime devoted to the destruction of the middle class had made him one of its members.

But he could not quite believe it. A revolutionary smell clung to him like the faint, unmistakable odor of the cell and the cellar. It showed in his quack-doctor's beard and stump-speaker's hair, in his thin, restless hands and his flashing, nearsighted eyes; in his quick, alert, high-shouldered walk as he strolled about his garden. It persisted in his plotter's habits of thought, which made him the most potent critic of the regime he broke with and always a latent threat to it. The fate that all revolutionaries fear had pursued him wherever he went, from Turkestan to Mexico. His son and most of his kin had mysteriously died during the years of his exile. Only three months ago he had barely escaped assassination (TIME, June 3). Mexico City was full of men & women whom he knew to be Stalinist agents. Nevertheless his life, at the moment, was peaceful.

The Visitor. Frank Jackson, who came to see him at 5:30 that afternoon, was not, he thought, one of these agents. Though Frank Jackson was suspected in Mexico City of being a shady character known as Leon Jacome, as Leon Haikys, as Jacques Mornard van den Dreschd and sometimes simply as el tipo Judio Frances (the French-Jewish type), Trotsky knew him as an admiring young disciple who contributed generously to the Fourth International. Six months before, Jackson had been brought to him by a Manhattan social worker named Silvia Ageloff, whose sister was once Trotsky's secretary. Jackson, a tall, dark, bespectacled young man, was a Yugoslav by birth, had entered Mexico on a Canadian passport, spoke English with a Brooklyn accent (erl for oil and oil for earl). The police and armed secretaries who guarded Trotsky day & night let him in without question.

Jackson asked Trotsky for criticism of a manuscript. Amiable Host Trotsky invited him into the house. They entered, Jackson in the lead, carrying a topcoat over his arm. In the dining room Natalie Sedova Trotsky met them, and, Russian-fashion, offered the guest a glass of tea. Jackson asked for water, drank it without disturbing the topcoat slung over his left arm. Then Trotsky and Jackson passed into the study. Jackson did not put down the topcoat.

The study was a barren room with uncovered floors and cream-colored walls hung only with a large map of Mexico. In its centre was a long wooden table stacked with books and manuscripts. Trotsky sat down there, began to read the manuscript his friend had brought. Jackson leaned over his shoulder. From under his coat, where he had hidden a pistol, a dagger and an Alpine pick, he chose the heaviest instrument. If he succeeded with this, he would make no sound, do his work with one quick blow.

"This Time. . . ." But Frank Jackson bungled. Like Trotsky, he had lived in the twilight world of conspiracy. A peasant or a worker would have known that to knock a man out, you have to put your weight behind a blow. The pick was sharp. It cut through Trotsky's skull, but the blow was not hard enough. Trotsky did not slump, did not even realize that he had been hit on the head. He thought he had been shot. He leaped from his chair, grappled with his assailant, bit his hand. Even with a knife and a pistol and a mattock, young Jackson did not know how to cope with the old man. Trotsky screamed, staggered into the dining room. Faithful Natalie Sedova met Jackson at the door, threw herself on him. Then came Bodyguards Jake Cooper and Joseph Hansen. Cooper clubbed Jackson, knocked him down, kicked his head and body. Hansen lowered Trotsky to the floor. Leon Trotsky, blood streaming from his broken skull, called to Cooper: "Don't kill him. This man has a story to tell."

Trotsky the historian remembered, even in the face of death, that history must record his end. To Natalie Sedova, who hovered over him, he told what had happened in the study. "I feel here," said Trotsky, pointing to his heart, "that this time they have succeeded."

Although his skull was fractured and his brain pierced, although paralysis was already creeping down his left side, Leon Trotsky clung to consciousness. In a Green Cross hospital he dictated to Hansen a clear-minded statement:

I am close to death from the blow of a political assassin, who struck me in my room. I struggled with him. He had entered the room to talk about French statistics. He struck me. Please say to our friends: I am sure of the victory of the Fourth International. Go Forward!

Four Internationals. For 25 hours and 30 minutes Leon Trotsky hung on to life with the tenacity that had distinguished his career since he became a revolutionary at the age of 17. In the hospital he underwent two brain operations while his assassin was treated in a room across the hall. Natalie Sedova never left him. He lost consciousness soon after he was put to bed. If a man's past life passes before him at such times, some strange scenes appeared to Trotsky in his coma: the first trip of nine-year-old Lev Davidovich Bronstein from the farm in Kherson Province to school in Odessa; his first brush with Marxism in the seventh grade in Nikolayev; his conversion to the cause after the woman Vetrova burned herself to death in a prison cell; his first arrest in 1898; prison in Moscow, where he married Alexandra Lvovna; Siberia in 1900; escape to England in 1902, without Alexandra but with a passport forged in the name of Trotsky, which stuck; his meeting with Lenin in London. . . .

The First International had been formed in London in 1864, based on the famed Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. But it had already died of talk. The Second International (founded in Paris in 1889) for which Lenin and Trotsky worked was a loose association of national labor organizations and Socialist parties, of which the Russian parties had the most revolutionary vigor.

Through the mind of the man who lay dying in Mexico may have passed visions of stirring revolutionary days: the abortive Russian revolution of 1905, which got him exiled to Siberia again; his escape to Vienna, where he wrote for Pravda; Balkan war correspondence from Constantinople in 1913; more plotting in Zurich and Paris; expulsion from France in 1916; Spain and ten weeks in the U. S., where he played in My Official Wife with Clara Kimball Young, worked as a waiter in a restaurant on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue, edited a Bronx newspaper; his return to Russia after the March Revolution of 1917, where he joined Lenin, helped to stage the October Revolution, conducted the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations with Germany. Because it seemed a major point of proletarian protocol, he wired Lenin to ask whether he should wear a tailcoat to the peace celebration. Lenin answered: "If it will help to bring peace, go in a petticoat."

If images did flicker through Trotsky's injured brain last week, some of them must have been of those great days when War Commissar Leon Trotsky whipped the demoralized rabble of the crushed Imperial Army into a new Red Army, drove the Whites and their allies out of Russia; the proclaiming of the Third International when he hoped that world revolution was at hand. There were also mistakes to remember, particularly the mistake of failing to return to Moscow for Lenin's funeral, a failure which under mined his popularity with the people, made him vulnerable to Stalin's intrigue. There followed expulsion from the Polit buro, exile to Turkestan, to Turkey, to France, to Norway, finally to Mexico, where last week fate caught up with him.

Having seen one revolution succeed after Russia had cracked under the stress of war, Trotsky acquired a lasting faith in the virtues of conspiracy. He never recognized, even when the world revolution failed to materialize, that most of his plotting was futile. His Fourth International (formed in Manhattan in 1928 by three expelled members of the Communist Party) proclaimed itself the party of the real workers' revolution, but it was split by schisms, numbered less than 5,000 members. Trotsky still believed the revolt of the workers would succeed. The force of that illusion made him a greater man than Joseph Stalin. It made him the man who did more to shake the world in his time than any except Lenin and Hitler.

The Reaction of most men to Leon Trotsky's death--but not of his former comrades in Moscow--was horror. For the moment it was all but forgotten that Trotsky himself was a terrorist. The world's dwindling community of civilized minds realized only that it had lost one of the supreme masters of prose of its time, wondered whether that brain had completed its last work--the biography of its implacable persecutor, Dictator Stalin. They wondered too what part the approaching completion of the biography might have played as a motive for the crime.

Possibly they would never know. They did know that about half of Trotsky's Life of Stalin was in Manhattan, already translated into English; that the rest, completely written but unrevised and untranslated, was in Mexico City. Publishers were not sure when they could go through with publication.

As far as Author Trotsky was concerned, publication of his Life of Stalin meant little. His literary reputation rested solidly on the three fat, incomparable volumes of his History of the Russian Revolution--his account of the social upheaval which he did much to inspire, foment and direct, and of which he had become the literary executor.

In Trotsky's murder, the strong arm of dictatorship had reached from one hemisphere to the other. But so low had the intellectual level of Communism fallen that there was not left an orthodox or heterodox Marxist capable of phrasing for murdered Comrade Trotsky 13 words comparable to those he spoke into the hush that followed Lenin's death: "Lenin is dead. The words are like great rocks falling into the sea."

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