The Prophet Irrelevant

I mentioned last December that I visited the house, now a museum, of Leon Trotsky when I was in Mexico City, his last place of exile (The Artists and the Revolutionary). I walked through the bedroom where the bullet holes from the assassination attempt of May 1940, led by the artist David Siqueiros, can still be seen. And then there is the study where Ramon Mercader lethally assaulted him with an ice pick in August of that same year, a time when the world’s attention was elsewhere. Finally, in the garden, there he is: his grave, with the hammer and sickle carved. The whole thing simply filled me with a sense of melancholy, not readily dispelled by the hot Mexican sun.


I have no sympathy at all for Trotsky as a politician or a thinker. But, my, how could I not be moved by a fate of a man who went from the height to the depths of history in such a short space of time; the hero of 1917 to the exile and outcast of 1940, living constantly in fear of his life. No longer the prophet armed, not even unarmed; simply irrelevant.


Trotsky was the author in so many ways of his own doom. A brilliant organiser, the man who created the Red Army almost single-handed and led it to victory in the Civil War, he was still a very poor judge of people, and quite hopeless when it came to playing the treacherous back-stabbing political game so favoured by the Bolshevik party, which became particularly intense after Lenin went into decline, suffering successive strokes before his death in January, 1924. Above all he misjudged Stalin, his nemesis, describing him as a ‘grey blur’, dismissing him in the most condescending and racist terms in a highly tendentious biography.

There is a tendency to assume that if Trotsky, rather than Stalin, had been the victor in the internecine party struggles of the 1920s things would have been so much better. I see no evidence at all for this. His conduct during the Civil War and after was just as brutal as any other Bolshevik apparatchik. More than that, the Stalinist programme of collectivisation and industrialisation, pursued with such murderous energy after 1928, was earlier the programme of Trotsky and the left opposition. Trotsky as Vohzd may have been less paranoid than Stalin. I do not believe he would have been less murderous, especially given that both men shared the same visceral hatred for the Russian peasantry.

When he died that August all those years ago he had long since been bypassed by the main currents of history, his rag-bag followers organised, if that’s the word, in the so-called Fourth International, another irrelevance. He died the last victim of the Moscow Show Trials, a victim of the relentless malice of Stalin, a victim of his own delusions. My previous assessment of the man still stands;

…one has to reflect that, in his days of power, it was he who denied life to others, who acted in a brutal and oppressive fashion, a fashion that closed so many futures forever. Too much was sacrificed on that abstract alter to which he dedicated his life, the alter of a frightful idol. We all, each and every one of us, only ever live in a perpetual present. It is a terrible thing to destroy others in the name of a bloodless utopia.

The Artists and the Revolutionary

When I was in Mexico city a couple of years ago one of the places I visited was La Casa Azul –the Blue House-in the suburb of Coyoacán, where Frida Khalo, the painter, was born and where she lived for so many years with Diego Rivera, her husband and Mexico’s greates muralists.

I also visited, not too far away, the house that Leon Trotsky lived in during the last part of his Mexican exile, where he was murdered with an ice pick, and in the grounds of which he is now buried. Both of these palaces are now museums. The Trotsky museum is particularly poignant in that the bullet holes from an earlier assassination attempt that same year can still be seen on the walls of one of the bedrooms.

The destiny of the artists and the revolutionary were closely connected. Trotsky, under permanent threat from the Stalinists, found refuge in Mexico after Rivera intervened on his behalf with President Lázaro Cárdenas. Once there he and Natalia Sedova, his wife, were accommodated by Frieda and Diego in the Blue House.

Frida had a brief affair with Trotsky in the summer of 1937, not long after he came to Mexico, sometimes suggested as the reason for his break with Rivera. But this did not come until the winter of 1938-39, while Frida was absent at an exhibition of her work in New York and then Paris.


The breach, according to Hayden Herrera, the author of Frida, was caused by a combination of personal and political differences. Rivera had an expansive personality, one that did not harmonise well with that of the didactic and humourless Trotsky. More and more the two men came into open disagreement, over the nature of the Soviet state, over trade union work, and over Rivera's support for Francisco Mujica's bid for the Mexican presidency.

But these disagreements in point of detail came down to one big thing: Riviera was simply not the kind of man who could fit easily within the narrow political and personal discipline demanded by people like Trotsky. He was, as he told the old Bolshevik, 'a bit of an anarchist', which is as good an assessment of his politics-and his personality-as any. In Paris Frida reported the breach in a letter to a friend "Diego has now fought with the Fourth International and told piochitas [Trotsky] to go to hell in a very serious manner." And as far as she was concerned he was completely right, despite their earlier relationship.

It was after this that Trotsky and Natalia moved to the house in Avenida Viena, a place that was effectively turned into a fortress. It was there in February 1940 that he wrote what was to become known as Trotsky’s Testament, which concludes by thanking his wife before descending in to whimsy;

In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

Standing in that place, in the room where he was so brutally murdered it is possible to feel something of the personal tragedy of the man, of the tragedy of the history. But one has to reflect that, in his days of power, it was he who denied life to others, who acted in a brutal and oppressive fashion, a fashion that closed so many futures forever. Too much was sacrificed on that abstract alter to which he dedicated his life, the alter of a frightful idol. We all, each and every one of us, only ever live in a perpetual present. It is a terrible thing to destroy others in the name of a bloodless utopia.

The Murder of the Romanovs

The decision to murder the Russian royal family reveals much about the inner workings of the Bolshevik Party at the time. The official story given out was that the task had been delegated to the Ural Soviet, though the murder of the Tsaritsa Alexandra and the five children was kept secret for over a year after the event.

It is still not been proved conclusively just how the decision to kill the family was arrived at; if it was central, or if it was local; and, if central, who exactly was involved. However, I can offer you a reasonable amount of circumstantial evidence that points quite firmly at Moscow.

For the Ural Soviet the presence of the royal family at Yekaterinburg was a growing concern, especially as the Czech Legion and other White forces approaching the town from the east. Rather than risk moving them they decided on execution, though they were unwilling to act without the approval the Council of Commissars in Moscow. Ivan Goloschekin, a member of the Ural Soviet who also happened to be a friend of Yakov Sverdlov, a close political associate of Lenin, was sent to Moscow to take soundings on the matter. He was told by Sverdlov that the government was still considering putting Nicholas on trial, an idea favoured by Trotsky. However, the steady advance of the Whites towards Yekaterinburg changed this, and Goloschekin was able to return with the news that Moscow had delegated the whole business to the Ural Soviet.

With Lenin's permission Sverdlov formally announced the death of Nicholas at a meeting of the Executive Council on 18 July 1918. Nothing was said of the fate of the Empress Alexandra and the five children, though an official statement was issued that they had all been moved. However, both Lenin and Sverdlov knew that they were all dead. They had been so advised by telegram from Yekaterinburg. The statement was a lie.

A year passed before the government admitted that they had all been shot, though the Social Revolutionaries were blamed. However, the real link between Moscow and the Urals was later made clear in a conversation between Sverdlov and Trotsky. Trotsky reports this in his memoirs thus;

"My next visit to Moscow took place after the fall of Yekaterinburg. Talking to Sverdlov, I asked in passing: 'Oh, yes, and where is the Tsar?
'It's all over,' he answered. 'He has been shot.'
'And where is the family?'
'And the family along with him.'
'All of them?', I asked, apparently with a touch of surprise.
'All of them,' replied Sverdlov. 'What about it?' He was waiting to see my reaction, I made no reply.
'And who made the decision?', I asked.
'We decided it here. Ilych [Lenin] believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally round, especially under the present difficult circumstances.'
I did not ask any further questions and considered the matter closed. Actually, the decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of the summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay only complete victory or complete ruin...This Lenin sensed well."

Sverdlov was certainly implicated in the murder of the entire family. It is difficult to accept that he would not have cleared this with Lenin, who, in my estimation, is guilty by association. He certainly deserves part of the 'credit' for this atrocity.

Since I wrote this I now have sufficient leads to conclude that there was something else at work, an indication that the Tsar and his family were early victims of the forms of struggle that were to become commonplace among the Bolsheviks in years to come. Although approved by the Central Committee the projected trial of the Tsar was very much Trotsky's favoured project, one where he would have appeared as prosecutor-in-chief. It would have added greatly to his prestige, and Sverdlov knew this. You see, the ideological struggles of the pre-Revolution days were about to give way to struggles over power. Sverdlov understood this in the way that Trotsky did not; and it was Sverdlov-in collaboration with the Ural Soviet-who did his best to undermine the projected trial.

Take a look again at the exchange reported by Trotsky in his Memoirs-it shows his surprise and Sverdlov's gleeful defiance. It's almost as if he is inviting Trotsky to object, which clearly he could not do. He had been outmaneuvered, decisively so, and his subsequent gloss was little more than a feeble attempt to make the best of the situation. In this, Sverdlov, the administrator, represented the Party, the old Bolshevik core, against the mercurial Trotsky, the former Menshevik. Sverdlov died in 1919, but the challenge to Trotsky was soon to be taken up by an even more formidable opponent.