Trotsky’s vanity, unlike Stalin’s, was, practically speaking, frivolous. There was something more histrionic about it. He had shown himself no less ruthless than Stalin. Indeed, at the time of the Civil War, he had ordered executions on a greater scale than Stalin or anyone else. Even in this, he showed some of the attributes of a poseur—the Great Revolutionary dramatically and inexorably carrying out the cruel will of history. If Trotsky had come to power, this concern for his image would no doubt have made him rule in a less ruthless, or, rather, a less crudely ruthless, fashion than Stalin. The Soviet peoples would perhaps have been able to say
… What his hard heart denies,
His charitable vanity supplies.
Stalin’s pragmatic approach gave the impression of a sounder man, and in a sense this was a true impression. He was always capable of retreat—from the calling off of the disastrous collectivization wave in March 1930 to the ending of the Berlin Blockade in 1949. Stalin’s skills in Soviet political methods make Trotsky look superficial, and the conclusion seems inevitable that he had far more to him than his rival. A mind may be intelligent, abilities may be brilliant; yet there are other qualities less apparent to the observer, without which such gifts have a certain slightness to them. Trotsky was a polished zircon; Stalin was a rough diamond.
Trotsky and his son Lev Sedov had been deprived of Soviet citizenship on 20 February 1932. They had not, as is sometimes said, been condemned to death by the courts, at least not openly. It had been announced as part of the verdicts in the Zinoviev and Pyatakov Cases that they would be liable to immediate arrest and trial “in the event of their being discovered on the territory of the U.S.S.R.”
Trotsky boldly challenged the Soviet Government to seek his extradition from Norway, which would have meant the examination of his evidence in the Norwegian courts. Instead, it put pressure on the Norwegian Government to expel Trotsky. Through the painter Diego Rivera, he obtained asylum from President Cardenas of Mexico, and on 9 January 1937 reached that country in a Norwegian tanker.
Like Lenin, who welcomed and protected Malinovsky and other Tsarist spies within the Bolshevik Party, even when they came under suspicion from the rest of his entourage, Trotsky proved gullible about his contacts. Lenin’s defense had been the rather inadequate one that even while Malinovsky was betraying Bolsheviks, he was also having to work hard and well to make new ones. Trotsky took the view that if he refused to meet any but his oldest and closest disciples, he would lose important opportunities to preach his doctrines and gain new followers.
The plot against Trotsky was tied in with the murky world of Soviet espionage in the United States, and some of it was only unraveled after the arrest of Jack Soble in 1957.
Soble had spied on Trotsky as early as 1931 and 1932, with useful results. The next NKVD agent to penetrate Trotsky’s political family was the extraordinary Mark Zborowski, of whom it has been said that he everywhere “left behind a trail of duplicity and blood worthy of a Shakespearean villain,” and who, after establishing himself in the United States as a respectable anthropologist at Columbia and Harvard, was finally exposed and convicted on charges of perjury in December 1958, getting a five- to seven-year term.91
Zborowski had managed to become Sedov’s right-hand man, and had access to all the secrets of the Trotskyites. He was responsible for the robbery of the Trotsky archives in Paris in November 1936. Although he never committed any murders himself, remaining a finger man, he seems to have played some role in the killing of Ignace Reiss.92 He also nearly procured the death of Walter Krivitsky in 1937, and did succeed in having Trotsky’s secretary, Erwin Wolf, murdered in Spain. The young German Rudolf Clement, secretary of Trotsky’s Fourth International, seems also to have been conveyed into his murderer’s hand by Zborowski, in 1938. A headless body found floating in the Seine in Paris was tentatively identified as Clement’s; in any case, he has not been seen since. On 14 February 1938 Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov died in suspicious circumstances in a Paris hospita1.93 Since Zborowski was the man who rushed him there, there is a very strong presumption that he informed the NKVD killer organization of the opportunity which now presented itself.
That Trotsky himself survived as late as 1940 is probably due to the breakdown of the NKVD Foreign Department as a result of Yezhov’s and then Beria’s purge of it and the difficulties produced by the defection of high officers like Lyushkov and Orlov.
Moreover, after some sort of attempt on Trotsky’s life which seems to have been made in January 1938, very strict security measures were taken at the villa where he now settled at Coyoacán, outside Mexico City. Apart from Trotsky’s own guards, considerable police protection was provided.
