Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
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Markin comment on this article:
As is well-known in revolutionary circles many times the children of famous Reds tend to be either apolitcal, non-political, or anti-political. Those like Karl Liebknecht (son of Wilhelm, leader of the early German Social-Democratic Party), and here Leon Sevov, Leon Trotsky's older son, have big shoes to fill. As the Leon Trotsky memorial for his fallen son points out-Leon Sedov did just fine, just fine, indeed.
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LEON SEDOV
Son, Friend, Fighter
By Leon Trotsky
As I write these lines, with Leon Sedov’s mother by my side, telegrams of condolence keep coming from different countries. And for us each telegram evokes the same appalling question: “Can it really be that our friends in France, Holland, England, the United States, Canada, South Africa and here in Mexico accept it as definitely established that Sedov is no more?” Each telegram is a new token of his death, but we are unable to believe it as yet. And this, not only because he was our son, truthful, devoted, loving, but above all because he had, as no one else on earth, become part of our life, entwined in all its roots, our co-thinker, our co-worker, our guard, our counsellor, our friend.
Of that older generation whose ranks we joined at the end of the last century on the road to revolution, all, without exception, have been swept from the scene. That which Tsarist hard-labour prisons and harsh exiles, the hardships of emigration, the civil war and disease had failed to accomplish has in recent years been achieved by Stalin, the worst scourge of the revolution. Following the destruction of the older generation, the best section of the next, that is, the generation which awakened in 1917 and which received its training in the twenty-four armies of the revolutionary front, was likewise destroyed. Also crushed underfoot and completely obliterated was the best part of the youth, Leon’s contemporaries. He himself survived only by a miracle, owing to the fact that he accompanied us into exile and then to Turkey. During the years of our last emigration we made many new friends, some of whom have entered intimately into our lives, becoming, as it were, members of our family. But we met all of them for the first time in these last few years when we had already neared old age. Leon was the only one who knew us when we were young; he became part of our lives from the very first moment of his self-awakening. While young in years, he still seemed our contemporary. Together with us, he went through our second emigration: Vienna, Zurich, Paris, Barcelona, New York, Amherst [concentration camp in Canada], and finally Petrograd.
While but a child – he was going on twelve – he had, in his own way, consciously made the transition from the February revolution to that of October. His boyhood passed under high pressure. He added a year to his age so that he might more quickly join the Komsomol [Communist youth], seething at that time with all the passion of awakened youth. The young bakers, among whom he carried on propaganda, would award him a fresh loaf of white bread which he happily brought home under his arm, protruding from the torn sleeve of his jacket. Those were fiery and cold, great and hungry years. Of his own volition Leon left the Kremlin for a proletarian student dormitory, in order not to be any different from the others. He. would not ride with us in an automobile, refusing to make use of this privilege of the bureaucrats. But he did participate ardently in all Red Saturdays and other “labour mobilizations”, cleaning snow from the Moscow streets, “liquidating” illiteracy, unloading bread and firewood from freight cars, and later, as a polytechnic student, repairing locomotives. If he did not get to the war front, it was only because even adding two or as much as three years to his age could not have helped him; for he was not yet fifteen when the civil war ended. However, he did accompany me several times to the front, absorbing its stark impressions, and firmly understanding why this bloody struggle was being waged.
The latest press reports speak of Leon Sedov’s life in Paris under “the most modest conditions” – much more modest, let me add, than those of a skilled worker. Even in Moscow, during those years when his father and mother held high posts, he lived not better but worse than for the past few years in Paris. Was this perhaps the rule among the youth of the bureaucracy? By no means. Even then he was an exception. In this child, growing to boyhood and adolescence, a sense of duty and achievement awakened early. In 1923 Leon threw himself headlong into the work of the Opposition. It would be entirely wrong to see in this nothing more than parental influence. After all, when he left a comfortable apartment in the Kremlin for his hungry, cold and dingy dormitory, he did so against our will, even though we did not resist this move on his part. His political orientation was determined by the same instinct which impelled him to choose crowded street cars rather than Kremlin limousines. The platform of the Opposition simply gave political expression to traits inherent in his nature. Leon broke uncompromisingly with those of his student friends who were violently torn from “Trotskyism” by their bureaucratic fathers and found a way to his baker friends. Thus, at seventeen he began the life of a fully conscious revolutionist. He quickly grasped the art of conspiratorial work, illegal meetings, and the secret issuing and distribution of Opposition documents. The Komsomol rapidly developed its own cadres of Opposition leaders.
Leon had exceptional mathematical ability. He never tired of assisting many worker-students who had not gone through grammar school. He engaged in this work with all his energy; encouraging, leading, chiding the lazy ones – the youthful teacher saw in this work a service to his class. His own studies in the Superior Technical Academy progressed very favourably. But they took up only a part of his working day. Most of his time, strength, and spirit were devoted to the cause of the revolution.
In the winter of 1927, when the police massacre of the Opposition began, Leon had passed his twenty-second year. By that time a child was born to him and he would proudly bring his son to the Kremlin to show him to us. Without a moment’s hesitation, however, Leon decided to tear himself away from his school and his young family in order to share our fate in Central Asia. En this he acted not only as a son bat above all as a co-thinker. It was essential, whatever the cost, to guarantee our connection with Moscow. His work in Alma Ata, during that year, was truly peerless. We called him our Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Police and Minister of Communications. And in fulfilling all these functions he had to rely on an illegal apparatus. Commissioned by the Moscow Opposition centre, comrade X, very devoted and reliable, acquired a carriage and three horses and worked as an independent coachman between Alma Ata and the city of Frunze (Pishpek), at that time the terminus of the railroad. It was his task to convey the secret Moscow mail to us every two weeks and to carry our letters and manuscripts back to Frunze, where a Moscow messenger awaited him. Sometimes special couriers also arrived from Moscow. To meet with them was no simple matter. We were lodged in a house surrounded on all sides by the institutions of the GPU and the quarters of its agents. Outside connections were handled entirely by Leon. He would leave the house late on a rainy night or when the snow fell heavily, or, evading the vigilance of the spies, he would hide himself during the day in the library to meet the courier in a public bath or among the thick weeds on the outskirts of the town, or in the oriental market place where the Kirghiz crowded with their horses, donkeys and their wares. Each time he returned excited and happy, with a conquering gleam in his eyes and the precious booty under his clothing. And so for a year’s time he eluded all enemies. What is more, he maintained the most “correct”, almost “friendly”, relations with these enemies who were “comrades” of yesterday, displaying uncommon tact and restraint, carefully guarding us from outside disturbances.
The ideological life of the Opposition seethed like a cauldron at the time. It was the year of the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International. The Moscow packets arrived with scores of letters, articles, theses, from comrades known and unknown. During the first few months, before the sharp change in the conduct of the GPU, we even received a great many letters by the official mail services from different places of exile. It was necessary to sift this diversified material carefully. And it was in this work that I had the occasion to realize, not without surprise, how this little boy had imperceptibly grown up, how well he could judge people – he knew a great many more Oppositionists than I did – how reliable was his revolutionary instinct, which enabled him, without any hesitation, to distinguish the genuine from the false, the substance from the veneer. The eyes of his mother, who knew our son best, glowed with pride during our conversations.
Between April and October we received approximately 1,000 political letters and documents and about 700 telegrams. In this same period we sent out 550 telegrams and not fewer than 800 political letters, including a number of substantial works, such as the Criticism of the Draft Programme of the Comintern, and others. Without my son I could not have accomplished even one half of the work.
So intimate a collaboration did not, however, mean that no disputes or occasionally even very sharp clashes arose between us. Neither at that time, nor later in emigration and this must be said candidly – were my relations with Leon by any means of an even and placid character. To his categorical judgements, which were often disrespectful to some of the “old men” of the Opposition, I not only counterposed equally categoric corrections and reservations, but I also displayed toward him the pedantic and exacting attitude which I had acquired in practical questions. Because of these traits, which are perhaps useful and even indispensable for work on a large scale but quite insufferable in personal relationships people closest to me often had a very hard time. And inasmuch as the closest to me of all the youth was my son, he usually had the hardest time of all. To a superficial eye it might even have seemed that our relationship was permeated with severity and aloofness. But beneath the surface there glowed a deep mutual attachment based on something immeasurably greater than bonds of blood – a solidarity of views and appraisals, of sympathies and antipathies, of joys and sorrows experienced together, of great hopes we had in common. And this mutual attachment blazed up from time to time so warmly as to reward us three-hundred-fold for the petty friction in daily work.
Thus four thousand kilometres from Moscow, two hundred and fifty kilometres from the nearest railway, we spent a difficult and never-to-be-forgotten year which remains in our memory under the sign of Leon, or rather Levik or Levusyatka as we called him.
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In January 1929, the Political Bureau decided to deport me “beyond the borders of the USSR” – to Turkey, as it turned out. Members of the family were granted the right to accompany me. Again, without any hesitation Leon decided to accompany us into exile, tearing himself forever from his wife and child who he dearly loved.
A new chapter, with its first pages almost blank, opened in our life. Connections, acquaintances, and friendships had to be built anew. And once again our son became all things for us: our go-between in relations with the outside world, our guard, collaborator and secretary as in Alma Ata, but on an incomparably broader scale. Foreign languages, with which he had been more familiar in his childhood than he was with Russian, had been almost completely forgotten in the tumult of the revolutionary years. It became necessary to learn them all over again. Our joint literary work began. My archives and library were wholly in Leon’s hands. He had a thorough knowledge of the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, was very well acquainted with my books and manuscripts, with the history of the party and the revolution, and the history of the Thermidorian falsification. In the chaos of the Alma Ata public library he had already studied the files of Pravda for the Soviet years and gathered the necessary quotations and references with unfailing resourcefulness. Lacking this precious material and without Leon’s subsequent researches in archives and libraries, first in Turkey, later in Berlin and finally in Paris, not one of my works during the past ten years would have been possible. This applies especially to The History of the Russian Revolution. Vast in point of quantity, his collaboration was by no means of a “technical” nature. His independent selection of facts, quotations, characterizations, frequently determined both the method of my presentation as well as the conclusions. The Revolution Betrayed contains not a few pages which I wrote on the basis of several lines from my son’s letters and the quotations which he sent from Soviet newspapers inaccessible to me. He supplied me with even more material for the biography of Lenin. Such collaboration was made possible only because our ideological solidarity had penetrated our very flesh and blood. My son’s name should rightfully be placed next to mine on almost all my books written since 1928.
In Moscow, Leon had lacked a year and a half to complete his engineering course. His mother and I insisted that while abroad he return to his abandoned science. In Prinkipo a new group of young co-workers from different countries had meanwhile been successfully formed, in intimate collaboration with my son. Leon consented to leave only because of the weighty argument that in Germany he would be able to render invaluable services to the International Left Opposition. Resuming his scientific studies in Berlin (he had to start from the beginning), Leon simultaneously threw himself headlong into revolutionary activity In the International Secretariat he soon became the representative of the Russian section. His letters for that period to his mother and myself show how quickly he has acclimatized himself to the political atmosphere of Germany and Western Europe, how well he judged people and gauged the differences and countless conflicts of that early period of our movement. His revolutionary instinct, already enriched by serious experience, enabled him in almost all cases to find the right road independently. How many times were we gladdened when, upon opening a letter just arrived, we discovered in it the very ideas and conclusions which I had just recommended to his attention. And how deeply and quietly happy he was over such coincidences of our ideas! The collection of Leon’s letters will undoubtedly constitute one of the most valuable sources for the study of the inner pre-history of the Fourth International.
But the Russian question continued to occupy the centre of his attention. While still in Prinkipo he became the actual editor of the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition from its inception (the middle of 1928), and took complete charge of this work upon his arrival in Berlin (the beginning of 1931), where the Bulletin was immediately transferred from Paris. The last letter we received from Leon written on February 4, 1938, twelve days before his death, begins with the following words: “I am sending you page-proofs of the Bulletin for the next ship will not leave for some time, while the Bulletin will come off the press only tomorrow morning.” The appearance of each issue was a minor event in his life, a minor event which demanded great exertions; making up the issue, polishing the raw material, writing articles, meticulous proof-reading, prompt correspondence with friends and collaborators, and, not the least, gathering funds. But how proud he was over each “successful” number!
During the first years of emigration he engaged in a vast correspondence with Oppositionists in the USSR. But by 1932 the GPU destroyed virtually all our connections. It became necessary to seek fresh information through devious channels. Leon was always on the lookout, avidly searching for connecting threads with Russia, hunting up returning tourists, Soviet students assigned abroad, or sympathetic functionaries in the foreign representations. To avoid compromising his informant, he chased for hours through the streets of Berlin and later of Paris to evade the GPU spies who trailed him. In all these years there was not a single instance of any one suffering as a consequence of indiscretion, carelessness or imprudence on his part.
In the files of the GPU he was referred to by the nickname “synok” or “Little Son”. According to the late Ignace Reiss, in the Lubyanka they said on more than one occasion: “The Little Son does his work cleverly. The Old Man wouldn’t find it so easy without him.” This was the actual truth. Without him it would not have been easy. Without him it will be hard. It was just for this reason that agents of the GPU, worming their way even into the organizations of the Opposition, surrounded Leon with a thick web of surveillance, intrigues and plots. In the Moscow trials his name invariably figured next to mine. Moscow was seeking for an opportunity to get rid of him at all costs!
After Hitler assumed power, the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition was immediately banned. Leon remained in Germany for several weeks, carrying on illegal work, hiding from the Gestapo in different apartments. His mother and I sounded the alarm, insisting on his immediate departure from Germany. In the spring of 1933 Leon finally decided to leave the country which he had learned to know and to love, and moved to Paris where the Bulletin followed him. Here Leon again resumed his studies. He had to pass an examination for the French intermediate school and then for the third time to begin with the first term in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the Sorbonne. In Paris he lived under very difficult conditions, in constant want, occupying himself with scientific studies at the University at odd moments; but thanks to his exceptional ability he completed his studies, i.e., obtained his diploma.
His main efforts in Paris, even to a greater extent than in Berlin, were devoted to the revolution and to literary collaboration with me. During recent years Leon himself began to write more systematically for the press of the Fourth International. Isolated indications, especially the notes on his reminiscences for my autobiography, made me suspect while still in Prinkipo that he had literary gifts. But he was loaded down with all sorts of other work, and inasmuch as we held our ideas and subject matter in common, he left the literary work to me. As I recall, in Turkey he wrote only one major article: Stalin and the Red Army – or How History is Written, under the pseudonym of N. Markin, a sailor-revolutionist to whom in his childhood he was bound by a friendship deepened by profound admiration. This article was included in my book The Stalin School of Falsification. Subsequently his articles began to appear more and more frequently in the pages of the Bulletin and in other publications of the Fourth International, written each time under the pressure of necessity. Leon wrote only when he had something to say and when he knew that no one else could say it better. During the period of our life in Norway I received requests from various places for an analysis of the Stakhanovist movement which to some extent caught our organizations by surprise. When it became clear that my prolonged illness would prevent me from fulfilling this task, Leon sent me a draft of an article by him on Stakhanovism, with a very modest accompanying letter. The work appeared to me excellent both in its serious and thorough analysis as well as in the terseness and clarity of its presentation. I remember how pleased Leon was by my warm praise! This article was published in several languages and immediately provided a correct point of view upon this “socialist” piecework under the whip of the bureaucracy. Scores of subsequent articles have not added anything essential to this analysis.
Leon’s chief literary work was his book, The Red Book on the Moscow Trial, devoted to the trial of the Sixteen (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, et al.). It was published in French, Russian and German. At that time my wife and I were captives in Norway, bound hand and foot, targets of the most monstrous slander. There are certain forms of paralysis, in which people see, hear and understand everything but are unable to move a finger to ward off mortal danger. It was to such political paralysis that the Norwegian “Socialist” government subjected us. What a priceless gift to us, under these conditions, was Leon’s book, the first crushing reply to the Kremlin falsifiers. The first few pages, I recall, seemed to me pale. That was because they only restated a political appraisal, which had already been made, of the general condition of the USSR. But from the moment the author undertook an independent analysis of the trial. I became completely engrossed. Each succeeding chapter seemed to me better than the last. “Good boy, Levusyatka!” my wife and I said. “We have a defender!” How his eyes must have glowed with pleasure as he read our warm praise! Several newspapers, in particular the central organ of the Danish Social Democracy, said with assurance that I apparently had, despite the strict conditions of internment, found the means of participating in the work which appeared under Sedov’s name. “One feels the pen of Trotsky ...” All this is – fiction. In the book there is not a line of my own. Many comrades who were inclined to regard Sedov merely as “Trotsky’s son” -just as Karl Liebknecht was long regarded only as the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht – were able to convince themselves, if only from this little book, that he was not only an independent but an outstanding figure.
Leon wrote as he did everything else, that is, conscientiously, studying, reflecting, checking. The vanity of authorship was alien to him. Agitational declamation had no lures for him. At the same time every line he wrote glows with a living flame, whose source was his unfeigned revolutionary temperament.
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This temperament was formed and hardened by events of personal and family life indissolubly linked to the great political events of our epoch. In 1905, his mother sat in a Petersburg jail expecting a child. A gust of liberalism set her free in the autumn. In February of the next year, the boy was born. By that time I was already confined in prison. I was able to see my son for the first time only thirteen months later, when I escaped from Siberia. His earliest impressions bore the breath of the first Russian revolution whose defeat drove us into Austria. The war, which drove us into Switzerland, hammered into the consciousness of the eight-year-old boy. The next big lesson for him was my deportation from France. On board ship he conversed, in sign language, about the revolution with a Catalan stoker. The revolution signified for him all possible boons, above all a return to Russia. En route from America, near Halifax, the eleven-year-old Levik struck a British officer with his fist. He knew whom to hit; not the sailors who carried me off the ship, but the officer who issued the orders. In Canada, during my incarceration in the concentration camp, Leon learned how to conceal letters not read by the police and how to place them unobserved in the mail box. In Petrograd he found himself immediately plunged into the atmosphere of Bolshevik-baiting. In the bourgeois school where he happened to be enrolled at the beginning, sons of liberals and Social Revolutionaries beat him up because he was Trotsky’s son. Once he came to the Wood-Workers’ Trade Union, where his mother worked, with his hand all bloody. He had had a political discussion in school with Kerensky’s son. In the streets he joined all the Bolshevik demonstrations, took refuge behind gates from the armed forces of the then People’s Front (the coalition of Kadets, SRs and Mensheviks). After the July Days, grown pale and thin, he came to visit me in the jail of Kerensky-Tseretelli. In the home of a colonel they knew, at the dinner table, Leon and Sergei threw themselves, knives in hand, at an officer who had declared that the Bolsheviks were agents of the Kaiser. They made approximately the same reply to the engineer Serebrovsky, now a member of the Stalinist Central Committee, when he tried to assure them that Lenin was – a Germany spy. Levik learned early to grind his young teeth when reading slanders in the newspapers. He passed the October Days in the company of the sailor Markin who, in leisure moments, instructed him in the cellar in the art of shooting.
Thus a future fighter took shape. For him, the revolution was not an abstraction. Oh, no! It seeped into his very pores. Hence derived his serious attitude toward revolutionary duty beginning with the Red Saturdays, and tutoring of the backward ones. That is why he later joined so ardently in the struggle against the bureaucracy. In the autumn of 1927 Leon made an “Oppositional” tour to the Urals in the company of Mrachkovsky and Beloborodov. On their return, both of them spoke with genuine enthusiasm about Leon’s conduct during the sharp and hopeless struggle, his intransigent speeches at the meetings of the youth, his physical fearlessness in the face of the hooligan detachments of the bureaucracy, his moral courage which enabled him to face defeat with his young head held high. When he returned from the Urals, having matured in those six weeks, I was already expelled from the party. It was necessary to prepare for exile. Be was not given to imprudence, nor did he make a show of courage. He was wise, cautious, and calculating. But he knew that danger constitutes an element in revolution as well as war. Whenever the need arose, and it frequently did, he knew how to face danger. His life in France, where the GPU has friends on every floor of the govern mental edifice, was an almost unbroken chain of dangers. Professional killers dogged his steps. They lived in apartments next to his. They stole his letters and archives and listened in on his phone conversations. When, after an illness, he spent two weeks on the shores of the Mediterranean – his only vacation for a period of years – the agents of the GPU took quarters in the same pension. When he arranged to go to Mulhausen for a conference with a Swiss lawyer in connection with a legal action against the slanders of the Stalinist press, a whole gang of GPU agents was waiting for him at the station. They were the same who later murdered Ignace Reiss. Leon escaped certain death only because he fell ill on the eve of his departure, suffered from a high fever and could not leave Paris. All these facts have been established by the judicial authorities of France and Switzerland. And how many secrets still remain unrevealed? His closest friends wrote us three months ago that he was subject to a danger too direct in Paris and insisted on his going to Mexico. Leon replied: The danger is undeniable, but Paris today is too important a battle post; to leave it now would be a crime. Nothing remained except to bow to this argument.
When in the autumn of last year a number of foreign Soviet agents began to break with the Kremlin and the GPU, Leon naturally was to be found in the centre of these events. Certain friends protested against his consorting with “untested” new allies: there might possibly be a provocation. Leon replied that there was undoubtedly an element of risk but that it was impossible to develop this important movement if we stood aside. This time as well we had to accept Leon as nature and the political situation made him. As a genuine revolutionist he placed value on life only to the extent that it served the struggle of the proletariat for liberation.
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On February 16, the Mexican evening papers carried a brief dispatch on the death of Leon Sedov following a surgical operation. Absorbed in urgent work I did not see these papers. Diego Rivera on his own initiative checked this dispatch by radio and came to me with the terrible news. An hour later I told Natalia of the death of our son – in the same month of February in which 32 years ago she brought to me in jail the news of his birth. Thus ended for us the day of February 16, the blackest day in our personal lives.
We had expected many things, almost anything, but not this. For only recently Leon had written us concerning his intention to secure a job as a worker in a factory. At the same time he expressed the hope of writing the history of the Russian Opposition for a scientific institute. He was full of plans. Only two days prior to the news of his death we received a letter from him dated February 4, brimming with courage and vitality. Here it is before me. “We are making preparations,” he wrote, “for the trial in Switzerland where the situation is very favourable both as regards so-called ‘public opinion’ and the authorities.” And he went on to list a number of favourable facts and symptoms. “En somme nous marquons des points.” [Well, we are scoring points] The letter breathes with assurance concerning the future. Whence then this malignant disease, and lightning death? In twelve days? For us, the question is shrouded in deep mystery. Will it ever be cleared up? The first and natural supposition is that he was poisoned. It presented no serious difficulty for the agents of Stalin to gain access to Leon, his clothing, his food. Are judicial experts, even if untrammelled by “diplomatic” considerations capable of arriving at a definitive conclusion on this point? In connection with war chemistry the art of poisoning has nowadays attained an extraordinary development. To be sure the secrets of this art are inaccessible to common mortals. But the poisoners of the GPU have access to everything. It is entirely feasible to conceive of a poison which cannot be detected after death, even with the most careful analysis. And who will guarantee such care?
Or did they kill him without resorting to the aid of chemistry? This young and profoundly sensitive and tender being had had far too much to bear. The long years of the campaign of lies against his father and the best of the older comrades, whom Leon from his childhood had become accustomed to revere and love, had already deeply shaken his moral organism. The long series of capitulations by members of the Opposition dealt him blows that were no less heavy. Then followed in Berlin the suicide of Zina, my older daughter, whom Stalin had perfidiously, out of the sheerest vindictiveness, torn from her children, her family, her own milieu. Leon found himself with his older sister’s corpse and her six-year old boy on his hands. He decided to try to reach his younger brother Sergei in Moscow by phone. Either because the GPU was momentarily disconcerted by Zina’s suicide or because it hoped to listen in to some secrets, a phone connection, contrary to all expectations, was made, and Leon was able to transmit the tragic news to Moscow by his own voice. Such was the last conversation between our two boys, doomed brothers, over the still-warm body of their sister. Leon’s letters to us in Prinkipo were terse, meagre and restrained when they described his ordeal. He spared us far too much. But in every line one could feel an unbearable moral strain.
Material difficulties and privations Leon bore lightly, jokingly, like a true proletarian: but of course they too left their mark. Infinitely more harrowing were the effects of subsequent moral tortures. The Moscow Trial of the Sixteen, the monstrous nature of the accusations, the nightmarish testimony of the defendants, among them Smirnov and Mrachkovsky, whom Leon so intimately knew and loved; the unexpected internment of his father and mother in Norway, the period of four months without any news; the theft of the archives, the mysterious removal of my wife and myself to Mexico; the second Moscow Trial with its even more delirious accusations and confessions, the disappearance of his brother Sergei, accused of “poisoning workers”; the shooting of countless people who had either been close friends or remained friends to the end; the persecutions and the attempts of the GPU in France, the murder of Reiss in Switzerland, the lies, the baseness, the perfidy, the frameups – no, “Stalinism” was for Leon not an abstract political concept but an endless series of moral blows and spiritual wounds. Whether the Moscow masters resorted to chemistry, or whether everything they had previously done proved sufficient, the conclusion remains one and the same: It was they who killed him. The day of his death they marked on the Thermidorian calendar as a major celebration.
Before they killed him they did everything in their power to slander and blacken our son in the eyes of contemporaries and of posterity. Cain Djugashvili and his henchmen tried to depict Leon as an agent of Fascism, a secret partisan of capitalist restoration in the USSR, the organizer of railway wrecks and murders of workers. The efforts of the scoundrels are in vain. Tons of Thermidorian filth rebound from his young figure, leaving not a stain on him. Leon was a thoroughly clean, honest, pure human being. He could before any working-class gathering tell the story of his life – alas, so brief – day by day, as I have briefly told it here. He had nothing to be ashamed of or to hide. Moral nobility was the basic warp of his character. He unwaveringly served the cause of the oppressed, because he remained true to himself. From the hands of nature and history he emerged a man of heroic mould. The great awe-inspiring events which hover over us will need such people. Had Leon lived to participate in these events he would have shown his true stature. But he did not live. Our Leon, boy, son, heroic fighter, is no more!
His mother – who was closer to him than any other person in the world – and I are living through these terrible hours recalling his image, feature by feature, unable to believe that he is no more and weeping because it is impossible not to believe. How can we accustom ourselves to the idea that upon this earth there no longer exists the warm, human entity bound to us by such indissoluble threads of common memories, mutual understanding, and tender attachment. No one knew us and no one knows us, our strong and our weak sides, so well as he did. He was part of both of us, our young part. By hundreds of channels our thoughts and feelings daily reached out to him in Paris. Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us.
Goodbye, Leon, goodbye dear and incomparable friend. Your mother and I never thought, never expected that destiny would impose on us this terrible task of writing your obituary. We lived in firm conviction that long after we were gone you would be the continuer of our common cause. But we were not able to protect you. Goodbye, Leon! We bequeath your irreproachable memory to the younger generation of the workers of the world. You will rightly live in the hearts of all those who work, suffer and struggle for a better world. “Revolutionary youth of all countries! Accept from us the memory of our Leon, adopt him as your son – he is worthy of it – and let him henceforth participate invisibly in your battles, since destiny has denied him the happiness of participating in your final victory.
Showing posts with label theroy of permanent revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theroy of permanent revolution. Show all posts
Friday, August 19, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The 71st Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Trotsky’s Grandson in Moscow-A Conversation with Esteban Volkov (1989
Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*****
Trotsky’s Grandson in Moscow
A Conversation with Esteban Volkov
[From Workers Vanguard (US) no.474, 31 March 1989]
Of all the Bolshevik leaders executed on Stalin’s orders, Gorbachev has now juridically “rehabilitated” all but one: Leon Trotsky, co-leader together with Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution. And this gaping “blank space” in official Soviet history continues to haunt the regime. For it was Trotsky who opposed the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution, building the Left Opposition while others capitulated before Stalin; Trotsky who analyzed and fought against the system of bureaucratic misrule, Stalinism, which continues to this day. Trotsky carried forward the program of the early Comintern in the struggle for the Fourth International, counterposing to the Stalinist-nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country” the Leninist-internationalist program of world socialist revolution.
As Bukharin and the Right Opposition are raised to a place of honor, Trotsky is described in the pages of Pravda as a “demon of the Revolution” and a “failed dictator” as bad or possibly worse than Stalin (see our two-part article. Trotsky and the Gorbachev School of Falsification, WV Nos.464 and 466, 4 November and 2 December 1988). Yet despite the continuing “satanization” of the world revolutionary by Stalin’s heirs in the Kremlin, interest in Trotsky is mushrooming in the Soviet Union. Last November 15, hundreds crowded into the House of Culture of the Moscow Aeronautics Institute to participate in the first-ever “Trotsky evening.” Those who couldn’t get in crowded around the large (6 feet by 9 feet) display of photos in the entry under the title L.D. Trotsky, 1879-1940. We publish (see next page) a photo, never before printed, of this pathbreaking display.
“It was,” wrote the Paris daily Le Monde (22 November 1988), “the first time in 60 years that a public meeting took place in the USSR devoted to the creator of the Red Army, the first time that one could see or again see documents which showed him at Lenin’s side in the leading role in the revolution. The intensity of the people’s looks expressed the extent to which the history of this country is not its past, but its present.” And a month later, in the same location, participants in a meeting of the “Memorial” Society, founded to call for a monument to the victims of Stalin’s terror, were able to meet and hear Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban (Vsevolod) Volkov Bronstein, relating the murder of the Old Man in his Mexican exile by Stalin’s agent. Workers Vanguard recently spoke with Esteban Volkov about his experiences during his brief trip, the first time in 57 years he was able to return to the land of his birth.
Visit with a Long-Lost Sister
Volkov went to Moscow to meet his sister, Aleksandra Sakharovna, who was gravely ill with cancer. She died earlier this month at the age of 66, shortly before our conversation. Aleksandra and Vsevolod (Seva) were the children of Trotsky’s daughter Zinaida (Zina). Seva’s father, Platon Volkov, had been deported to Siberia in 1928 and then arrested in the wake of the 1934 Kirov affair, never to be heard from again. After Stalin expelled Trotsky from the USSR in 1929 and stripped him of his Soviet citizenship, Zina (whose health had broken down after the death of her sister Nina, whom she had nursed to the end) was left alone with two small children to care for. Zina was finally allowed to join Trotsky in early 1931, but was forced to leave her daughter behind, “a six or seven-year-old hostage to Stalin,” as Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher wrote. Two years later, her nerves shattered and her lungs destroyed by tuberculosis, Zina committed suicide in Berlin on the eve of Hitler’s takeover.
After decades without news of Aleksandra and years of trying to find her, contact was established through Pierre Broué, director of the Institut Leon Trotsky in Paris. A brief phone call was put through, and then Volkov applied for and received a visa. At a press conference in Paris after his trip, he said they were “really happy, joyous to meet each other. 1t was a little like people from a shipwreck who meet safe and sound on the beach.” Aleksandra had been condemned to ten years of internal exile in Kazakhstan during a major roundup of children of “enemies of the people” in 1949, but was freed after Stalin’s death. “She had Stalin to thank for having met her companion there, her husband Anatol,” reported Volkov. He also got to know Aleksandra’s circle of friends, including Olga Ivinskaya, Boris Pasternak’s companion, who met Aleksandra when they were both in prison.
“Aleksandra was always distressed,” Volkov told us, “that it was I who our mother took with her. It was Broué, who was first to find out why. Stalin had specified in the exit papers that she could only take her youngest child.” In an interview with the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad (10 December 1988), Aleksandra said, “I do not remember my grandpa. I was three years old when he was expelled to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan by Stalin ... My mother was a revolutionary. She wore a leather coat and, I believe, a gun. She taught me geography. The revolutionaries were afraid their children would stay ignorant.” After Zinaida was exiled, Aleksandra lived with her father, Sakhar Moglin, but within a year he, too, was arrested. She stayed with her stepmother and spent the summers with her grand mother, Trotsky’s first wife Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, until she was sent to the camps at Kolyma in 1936. “My grandma was good friends with Lenin’s wife Krupskaya,” said Aleksandra Sakharovna:
“They considered themselves educators of the people. They wanted to enlighten the masses. I also wanted to do that. The Revolution and the whole era around it are still very dear to me, even after my exile. I still remember telling a girlfriend, ‘I was raised to be a Communist’ ... I love the Revolution, whereas almost everything else I hate. My life has been awful.” “It is only in the last few months that Trotsky is written about in other than a negative way,” said his granddaughter. But she also had some biting comments about the current crop of glasnost commentaries about the founder of the Red Army. “You can’t figure out what the writer himself thinks about Trotsky. Look, for example, at the article by General Volkogonov in Pravda under the title Demon of the Revolution. That was a horrible piece that left an awful aftertaste. Volkogonov knows that the winds are turning and covers himself for all possibilities. You can go anywhere with that article.” Aleksandra Sakharovna summed up, “Trotskyism is something like an exploding bomb,” and a lot of people in the Soviet Union desperately want to smother it.
A Mountain of Dead Dogs
Isaac Deutscher remarked that in writing his biography, like Carlyle with Cromwell, he had to drag Trotsky out from under a huge load of calumny and oblivion, “a mountain of dead dogs.” In our talk, Esteban Volkov noted that after 60 years of distortion and lies by the bureaucracy about Trotsky’s role, “people’s ideas about Trotsky can’t escape all the prejudices and satanization.” Recently, Moscow News (26 February) published an interview with him titled, An Old House in Coyoacan, the site of Trotsky’s home in Mexico, now the Leon Trotsky Museum, of which Volkov is the curator. In response to Volkov’s statement that Trotsky gave his life to the fight for Marxism and socialism, the author, Mikhail Belyat, says he “could not dispute” this because “like the overwhelming majority of Soviet people I haven’t read Trotsky’s works in order to grasp the substance of his errors.”
Yet the clearing-up of a half century of Stalinist lies about Trotsky proceeds at an accelerating pace. The magazine Ogonyok filmed a video reportage on Volkov’s trip to Moscow. Moscow News, in its 19 March Russian edition, printed a lengthy article on Trotsky’s assassin Ramon Mercader, quoting Volkov and stating flatly, for the first time in the Soviet press, that the killer was “the direct executor” of “Stalin’s order.” And a week later, Moscow News published excerpts of the petition by Volkov and his daughters demanding “dropping the false charges and criminal slanders raised, on Stalin’s direct order, against the Russian Marxist revolutionary Lev Davidovich Bronstein, called Leon Trotsky, [and] authorization that his works be freely published.” Le Monde commented that “hardly a week passes without a journal evoking, in one way or another, the personality of the founder of the Red Army.”
We also spoke with Volkov about the sinister “Pamyat” (Memory) group in the Soviet Union, who have been parading about in black shirts and jackboots spewing out anti-Semitic filth. He compared this “fascistic” outfit to Nazi-loving “skinheads” in the capitalist West. Pamyat tried to disrupt the Trotsky evening in Moscow last November, heckling the speakers and then (after hecklers were removed) launching diatribes on “historical” subjects such as claiming that the directors of the gulag camps and other GPU officers were Jewish. In fact, their Russian-nationalist vituperation against “cosmopolitanism” is straight from Stalin’s “doctors’ plot” purge, combined with the anti-Semitism of the tsarist Black Hundreds, Russia’s Ku Klux Klan, whose version of lynching was murderous pogroms against the Jewish ghettos. The Soviet working people must mobilize to smash this deadly threat to the USSR (see Fascist Cancer in Gorbachev’s Russia, WV No.473, 17 March).
On the other hand. there are groups such as Memorial which is campaigning in the name of Stalin’s victims, although on a classless basis rather than from a Marxist perspective. In his speech to the Memorial meeting, Volkov spoke of the “extremely important work they are doing: denouncing all the crimes of Stalin.” He added, “They have been able to put many people in contact, for it is thanks to the existence of Memorial that we were able to find my sister Aleksandra.” At the Memorial exhibit, people fill out questionnaires about family members who suffered from the Stalinist repression, listing dates and locations of camps where they were held, so far as this is known. Esteban Volkov, whose grandfather and grandmother, mother, father and uncles (Leon and Sergei Sedov) were ail victims of Stalin, and who was himself wounded in the failed Siqueiros machine-gun attack on Trotsky, filled out a questionnaire along with countless others whose families and comrades were annihilated in the Stalinist counterrevolutionary terror.
At the Memorial meeting, Volkov was applauded as he spoke of the task of “constructing a genuine socialism” (Die Tageszeitung, 24 December 1988). Yet Memorial talks not of socialism but of abstract “democracy” based on supposed “common human values” which it places above “class interests” (from a Memorial appeal by Yevgeny Yevtushenko). In our conversation, Volkov spoke of Trotsky’s socialist fight against Stalinism: “He made an analysis, with Marxist methodology, arrived at an understanding of Stalinism with an exactness and precision which 50 years later is impossible to modify or add anything to. But we are seeing that the bureaucratic dictatorship has arrived at absolute bankruptcy. History has shown that they have no way out, no role to play except to paralyze, to prevent progress and create backwardness, suffering, poverty. The bureaucracy is presently aware of the need to implant changes, but it is afraid of returning to the course of genuine socialism with workers democracy, which would undermine its monopoly of political power. So they prefer to introduce changes in the direction of a market economy. with capitalist-style stimulus.”
Trotsky’s grandson underlined “the importance of the political revolution in the Soviet regime”: “That the working class really participates in decisions, in ruling, planning, And I think that we are arriving at the historical moment where efficient economic planning is perfectly realizable. Fifty years ago for technical reasons it would have been very difficult to carry out, even without the burden of the bureaucracy, because it was too complex to plan and coordinate on the scale of a country like Russia. But today with computers, communications systems, data banks – cybernetics – it can be done, very efficiently, rapidly and up-to-date, to go forward in a dynamic way. Not the infernal labyrinth of bureaucratic planning – total chaos. Today there is sufficient technology for very good planning. Of course, not overly rigid and detailed planning but rather laying out certain parameters which with prudent leeway meet the needs and requirements of the country.”
His brief visit to Moscow convinced him that many people in the Soviet Union hold Trotsky in great admiration. says Volkov. “But it’s almost impossible to get an objective view of Trotsky within the USSR. They need outside sources of information and access to his writings.” He has called for the juridical rehabilitation of his grandfather, to be declared innocent of all the charges by Stalin against him. But “politically it’s the bureaucracy that seeks historical legitimacy. The record of the Marxist revolutionary Trotsky is spotless.” And historically, he will assume his rightful place as the Soviet peoples reappropriate their own history. It is by returning to the road of Lenin and Trotsky that the Soviet working people and the workers of the world can open the way to authentic socialism. This will be the fitting homage to our forebears who set about building a proletarian state in Russia to the battle cry: “Long live the world socialist revolution!”
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*****
Trotsky’s Grandson in Moscow
A Conversation with Esteban Volkov
[From Workers Vanguard (US) no.474, 31 March 1989]
Of all the Bolshevik leaders executed on Stalin’s orders, Gorbachev has now juridically “rehabilitated” all but one: Leon Trotsky, co-leader together with Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution. And this gaping “blank space” in official Soviet history continues to haunt the regime. For it was Trotsky who opposed the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution, building the Left Opposition while others capitulated before Stalin; Trotsky who analyzed and fought against the system of bureaucratic misrule, Stalinism, which continues to this day. Trotsky carried forward the program of the early Comintern in the struggle for the Fourth International, counterposing to the Stalinist-nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country” the Leninist-internationalist program of world socialist revolution.
As Bukharin and the Right Opposition are raised to a place of honor, Trotsky is described in the pages of Pravda as a “demon of the Revolution” and a “failed dictator” as bad or possibly worse than Stalin (see our two-part article. Trotsky and the Gorbachev School of Falsification, WV Nos.464 and 466, 4 November and 2 December 1988). Yet despite the continuing “satanization” of the world revolutionary by Stalin’s heirs in the Kremlin, interest in Trotsky is mushrooming in the Soviet Union. Last November 15, hundreds crowded into the House of Culture of the Moscow Aeronautics Institute to participate in the first-ever “Trotsky evening.” Those who couldn’t get in crowded around the large (6 feet by 9 feet) display of photos in the entry under the title L.D. Trotsky, 1879-1940. We publish (see next page) a photo, never before printed, of this pathbreaking display.
“It was,” wrote the Paris daily Le Monde (22 November 1988), “the first time in 60 years that a public meeting took place in the USSR devoted to the creator of the Red Army, the first time that one could see or again see documents which showed him at Lenin’s side in the leading role in the revolution. The intensity of the people’s looks expressed the extent to which the history of this country is not its past, but its present.” And a month later, in the same location, participants in a meeting of the “Memorial” Society, founded to call for a monument to the victims of Stalin’s terror, were able to meet and hear Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban (Vsevolod) Volkov Bronstein, relating the murder of the Old Man in his Mexican exile by Stalin’s agent. Workers Vanguard recently spoke with Esteban Volkov about his experiences during his brief trip, the first time in 57 years he was able to return to the land of his birth.
Visit with a Long-Lost Sister
Volkov went to Moscow to meet his sister, Aleksandra Sakharovna, who was gravely ill with cancer. She died earlier this month at the age of 66, shortly before our conversation. Aleksandra and Vsevolod (Seva) were the children of Trotsky’s daughter Zinaida (Zina). Seva’s father, Platon Volkov, had been deported to Siberia in 1928 and then arrested in the wake of the 1934 Kirov affair, never to be heard from again. After Stalin expelled Trotsky from the USSR in 1929 and stripped him of his Soviet citizenship, Zina (whose health had broken down after the death of her sister Nina, whom she had nursed to the end) was left alone with two small children to care for. Zina was finally allowed to join Trotsky in early 1931, but was forced to leave her daughter behind, “a six or seven-year-old hostage to Stalin,” as Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher wrote. Two years later, her nerves shattered and her lungs destroyed by tuberculosis, Zina committed suicide in Berlin on the eve of Hitler’s takeover.
After decades without news of Aleksandra and years of trying to find her, contact was established through Pierre Broué, director of the Institut Leon Trotsky in Paris. A brief phone call was put through, and then Volkov applied for and received a visa. At a press conference in Paris after his trip, he said they were “really happy, joyous to meet each other. 1t was a little like people from a shipwreck who meet safe and sound on the beach.” Aleksandra had been condemned to ten years of internal exile in Kazakhstan during a major roundup of children of “enemies of the people” in 1949, but was freed after Stalin’s death. “She had Stalin to thank for having met her companion there, her husband Anatol,” reported Volkov. He also got to know Aleksandra’s circle of friends, including Olga Ivinskaya, Boris Pasternak’s companion, who met Aleksandra when they were both in prison.
“Aleksandra was always distressed,” Volkov told us, “that it was I who our mother took with her. It was Broué, who was first to find out why. Stalin had specified in the exit papers that she could only take her youngest child.” In an interview with the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad (10 December 1988), Aleksandra said, “I do not remember my grandpa. I was three years old when he was expelled to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan by Stalin ... My mother was a revolutionary. She wore a leather coat and, I believe, a gun. She taught me geography. The revolutionaries were afraid their children would stay ignorant.” After Zinaida was exiled, Aleksandra lived with her father, Sakhar Moglin, but within a year he, too, was arrested. She stayed with her stepmother and spent the summers with her grand mother, Trotsky’s first wife Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, until she was sent to the camps at Kolyma in 1936. “My grandma was good friends with Lenin’s wife Krupskaya,” said Aleksandra Sakharovna:
“They considered themselves educators of the people. They wanted to enlighten the masses. I also wanted to do that. The Revolution and the whole era around it are still very dear to me, even after my exile. I still remember telling a girlfriend, ‘I was raised to be a Communist’ ... I love the Revolution, whereas almost everything else I hate. My life has been awful.” “It is only in the last few months that Trotsky is written about in other than a negative way,” said his granddaughter. But she also had some biting comments about the current crop of glasnost commentaries about the founder of the Red Army. “You can’t figure out what the writer himself thinks about Trotsky. Look, for example, at the article by General Volkogonov in Pravda under the title Demon of the Revolution. That was a horrible piece that left an awful aftertaste. Volkogonov knows that the winds are turning and covers himself for all possibilities. You can go anywhere with that article.” Aleksandra Sakharovna summed up, “Trotskyism is something like an exploding bomb,” and a lot of people in the Soviet Union desperately want to smother it.
A Mountain of Dead Dogs
Isaac Deutscher remarked that in writing his biography, like Carlyle with Cromwell, he had to drag Trotsky out from under a huge load of calumny and oblivion, “a mountain of dead dogs.” In our talk, Esteban Volkov noted that after 60 years of distortion and lies by the bureaucracy about Trotsky’s role, “people’s ideas about Trotsky can’t escape all the prejudices and satanization.” Recently, Moscow News (26 February) published an interview with him titled, An Old House in Coyoacan, the site of Trotsky’s home in Mexico, now the Leon Trotsky Museum, of which Volkov is the curator. In response to Volkov’s statement that Trotsky gave his life to the fight for Marxism and socialism, the author, Mikhail Belyat, says he “could not dispute” this because “like the overwhelming majority of Soviet people I haven’t read Trotsky’s works in order to grasp the substance of his errors.”
Yet the clearing-up of a half century of Stalinist lies about Trotsky proceeds at an accelerating pace. The magazine Ogonyok filmed a video reportage on Volkov’s trip to Moscow. Moscow News, in its 19 March Russian edition, printed a lengthy article on Trotsky’s assassin Ramon Mercader, quoting Volkov and stating flatly, for the first time in the Soviet press, that the killer was “the direct executor” of “Stalin’s order.” And a week later, Moscow News published excerpts of the petition by Volkov and his daughters demanding “dropping the false charges and criminal slanders raised, on Stalin’s direct order, against the Russian Marxist revolutionary Lev Davidovich Bronstein, called Leon Trotsky, [and] authorization that his works be freely published.” Le Monde commented that “hardly a week passes without a journal evoking, in one way or another, the personality of the founder of the Red Army.”
We also spoke with Volkov about the sinister “Pamyat” (Memory) group in the Soviet Union, who have been parading about in black shirts and jackboots spewing out anti-Semitic filth. He compared this “fascistic” outfit to Nazi-loving “skinheads” in the capitalist West. Pamyat tried to disrupt the Trotsky evening in Moscow last November, heckling the speakers and then (after hecklers were removed) launching diatribes on “historical” subjects such as claiming that the directors of the gulag camps and other GPU officers were Jewish. In fact, their Russian-nationalist vituperation against “cosmopolitanism” is straight from Stalin’s “doctors’ plot” purge, combined with the anti-Semitism of the tsarist Black Hundreds, Russia’s Ku Klux Klan, whose version of lynching was murderous pogroms against the Jewish ghettos. The Soviet working people must mobilize to smash this deadly threat to the USSR (see Fascist Cancer in Gorbachev’s Russia, WV No.473, 17 March).
On the other hand. there are groups such as Memorial which is campaigning in the name of Stalin’s victims, although on a classless basis rather than from a Marxist perspective. In his speech to the Memorial meeting, Volkov spoke of the “extremely important work they are doing: denouncing all the crimes of Stalin.” He added, “They have been able to put many people in contact, for it is thanks to the existence of Memorial that we were able to find my sister Aleksandra.” At the Memorial exhibit, people fill out questionnaires about family members who suffered from the Stalinist repression, listing dates and locations of camps where they were held, so far as this is known. Esteban Volkov, whose grandfather and grandmother, mother, father and uncles (Leon and Sergei Sedov) were ail victims of Stalin, and who was himself wounded in the failed Siqueiros machine-gun attack on Trotsky, filled out a questionnaire along with countless others whose families and comrades were annihilated in the Stalinist counterrevolutionary terror.
At the Memorial meeting, Volkov was applauded as he spoke of the task of “constructing a genuine socialism” (Die Tageszeitung, 24 December 1988). Yet Memorial talks not of socialism but of abstract “democracy” based on supposed “common human values” which it places above “class interests” (from a Memorial appeal by Yevgeny Yevtushenko). In our conversation, Volkov spoke of Trotsky’s socialist fight against Stalinism: “He made an analysis, with Marxist methodology, arrived at an understanding of Stalinism with an exactness and precision which 50 years later is impossible to modify or add anything to. But we are seeing that the bureaucratic dictatorship has arrived at absolute bankruptcy. History has shown that they have no way out, no role to play except to paralyze, to prevent progress and create backwardness, suffering, poverty. The bureaucracy is presently aware of the need to implant changes, but it is afraid of returning to the course of genuine socialism with workers democracy, which would undermine its monopoly of political power. So they prefer to introduce changes in the direction of a market economy. with capitalist-style stimulus.”
Trotsky’s grandson underlined “the importance of the political revolution in the Soviet regime”: “That the working class really participates in decisions, in ruling, planning, And I think that we are arriving at the historical moment where efficient economic planning is perfectly realizable. Fifty years ago for technical reasons it would have been very difficult to carry out, even without the burden of the bureaucracy, because it was too complex to plan and coordinate on the scale of a country like Russia. But today with computers, communications systems, data banks – cybernetics – it can be done, very efficiently, rapidly and up-to-date, to go forward in a dynamic way. Not the infernal labyrinth of bureaucratic planning – total chaos. Today there is sufficient technology for very good planning. Of course, not overly rigid and detailed planning but rather laying out certain parameters which with prudent leeway meet the needs and requirements of the country.”
His brief visit to Moscow convinced him that many people in the Soviet Union hold Trotsky in great admiration. says Volkov. “But it’s almost impossible to get an objective view of Trotsky within the USSR. They need outside sources of information and access to his writings.” He has called for the juridical rehabilitation of his grandfather, to be declared innocent of all the charges by Stalin against him. But “politically it’s the bureaucracy that seeks historical legitimacy. The record of the Marxist revolutionary Trotsky is spotless.” And historically, he will assume his rightful place as the Soviet peoples reappropriate their own history. It is by returning to the road of Lenin and Trotsky that the Soviet working people and the workers of the world can open the way to authentic socialism. This will be the fitting homage to our forebears who set about building a proletarian state in Russia to the battle cry: “Long live the world socialist revolution!”
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The 71st Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-How it Happened-Natalia Sedova Trotsky
Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
******
Markin comment on this article:
Of course Natalia Sedova was Trotsky's "wife" for most of their lives and suffered the many exiles, imprisonments, privations and other unsettling problems that confronted the great revolutionary. She, unlike Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, was not intensely political but more a steadfast companion and rock solid force behind the big man of history. Her later turning away from the work of the Fourth International and her husband's defense of the Soviet experience in reaction to her personal tragedies and an impressionistic view of the post-World War Cold War situation does not negate the earlier critical support she gave to his efforts.
********
Natalia Sedova Trotsky
How it Happened
Written:1940
First Published:1941 (English translation)
Source: Fourth International
Online Version: Natalia Sedova Internet Archive, December 2001
Transcribed/HTML Markup: Mike Bessler (original markup by ETOL)
(Tuesday, August 20, 1940; 7 o'clock in the morning)
"You know, I feel fine today, at all events, this morning; it's a long time since I felt so well... Last night I took a double dose of the sleeping drug. I noticed that it does me good."
"Yes. I recall that we observed this in Norway when you used to feel run-down much more often... But it isn't the drug itself that does you good, it's sound sleep, complete rest."
"Why yes, of course."
As he opened in the morning or closed at night the massive steel shutters built in our bedroom by our friends after the attack of May 24 on our home, L. D. would occasionally remark: "Well, now no Siqueiros can get at us." And upon awakening he would greet me and himself by saying, "You see, they didn't kill us last night after all, and yet you are still dissatisfied." I defended myself as best I could... Once, after such a "greeting," he added pensively: "Yes, Natasha, we received a reprieve."
As far back as 1928, when we were being exiled to Alma-Ata, where the unknown awaited us, we had a talk one night in the compartment of the train which was taking us into exile... We could not sleep, after the tumult of the last weeks, and especially the last days, in Moscow. In spite of our extreme fatigue, the nervous excitement persisted. I recall that Lev Davidovich said to me then: "it's better this way (exile). I am not in favor of dying in a bed in the Kremlin."
But this morning he was far from all such thoughts. Physical well-being made him look forward eagerly to a "really good" day's work. Vigorously he walked out into the patio to feed his rabbits, after performing swiftly his morning toilet and dressing just as quickly. When his health was poor, the feeding of the rabbits was a strain on him; but he couldn't give it up, as he pitied the little animals. It was difficult to do it as he wanted to, as was his custom--thoroughly. Besides, he had to be on guard; his strength had to be conserved for another, different kind of work--work at his desk. Taking care of the animals, cleaning their cages, etc., provided him, on the one band, with relaxation and a distraction, but, on the other hand, it fatigued him physically; and this, in turn, reflected on his general ability to work. He became completely absorbed in everything he did, regardless of the task.
I recall that in 1933 we departed from Prinkipo for France, where we lived in a lonely villa not far from Royan, by the shores of the Atlantic. Our son together with our friends had arranged for this villa which was called "Sea-Spray." The waves of the turbulent ocean came into our garden, and salt spray would fly in through the open windows. Surrounded by our friends, we lived under semi-legal conditions. We would have on occasion as many as twenty people. Eight or nine lived on the premises. In view of our position, it was out of the question to call in a housekeeper or someone to help in the kitchen. The whole burden fell on Jeanne, my son's wife, and on Vera Molinier, and I also helped. The young comrades washed the dishes. Lev Davidovich, too, wanted to help with the housework and began washing dishes. But our friends protested: "He should rest after dinner. We can manage ourselves." Besides, my son Leva told me: "Papa insists on using a scientific method of dish-washing, and this eats up too much of our time." In the end, L. D. had to retire from this occupation.
The middle way, the lackadaisical attitude, the semi-indifferent manner, these he knew not. That is why nothing tired him so much as casual or semi-indifferent conversations. But with what enthusiasm did he go to pick cacti with a view to transplanting them in our garden. He was in a frenzy, being the first on the job and the last to leave. Not one of the young people surrounding him on our walks into the country and working with him outdoors could keep pace with him; they tired more quickly, and fell behind one after the other. But he was indefatigable. Looking at him, I often marveled. Whence did he draw his energy, his physical endurance? Neither the unbearably hot sun, the mountains nor descents with cacti heavy as iron bothered him. He was hypnotized by the consummation of the task at hand. He found relaxation in changing his tasks. This also provided him with a respite from the blows which mercilessly fell upon him. The more crushing the blow the more ardently he forgot himself in work.
Our walks, which were really war-expeditions for cacti, became more and more rare because of "circumstances beyond our control." However, every now and then, having had his fill of the monotony of his daily routine, Lev Davidovich would say to me: "This week we ought to take a whole day off for a walk, don't you think so?"
"You mean a day for penal labor?" I would twit him.
"All right, let's go, to be sure."
"It would be best to get an early start. Shouldn't we leave around six in the morning?"
"Six is all right with me, but won't you get too tired?"
"No, it will only refresh me, and I promise not to overdo it."
Usually Lev Davidovich fed his fondly-watched rabbits and chickens, from a quarter past seven (sometimes 7:20) till nine o'clock in the morning. Sometimes he would interrupt this work to dictate into the dictaphone some order or some idea which occurred to him. That day he worked in the patio without interruption. After breakfast he assured me that he felt fine and spoke of his desire to begin dictating an article on conscription in the United States. And he actually did start to dictate.
At one o'clock Rigault, our attorney in the case of the May 24th attack, came to see us. After his departure, Lev Davidovich looked into my room to tell me, not without regret, that he would have to postpone work on the article and to resume preparing the material for the trial in connection with the attack upon us. He and his attorney had decided that it was necessary to answer El Popular in view of the fact that L. D. had been accused of defamation at a banquet given by that publication.
"And I will take the offensive and will charge them with brazen slander." he said defiantly.
"Too bad, you won't be able to write about conscription."
"Yes, it can't be helped. I have to postpone it for two or three days. I have already asked for all the available materials to be placed on my desk. After dinner, I shall start going over them. I feel fine," he once again assured me.
After a brief siesta, I saw him sitting at his desk, which was already covered with items relating to the El Popular case. He continued to be in good spirits. And it made me feel more cheerful. Lev Davidovich had of late been complaining of enervation to which he succumbed occasionally. He knew that it was a passing condition, but lately he seemed to be in greater doubt about it than ever before; today seemed to us to mark the beginning of improvement in his physical condition. He looked well too. Every now and then I opened the door to his room just a trifle, so as not to disturb him, and saw him in his usual position, bent over his desk, pen in hand. I recalled the line, "One more and final story and my scroll is at an end." Thus speaks the ancient monk-scribe Pimen in Pushkin's drama "Boris Godounov," as he recorded the evil deeds of Czar Boris.
Lev Davidovich led a life close in semblance to that of a prisoner or a hermit, with this difference that in his solitude he not only kept a chronological record of events but waged an indomitably passionate struggle against his ideological enemies.
Brief as that day was, Lev Davidovich had until five in the afternoon dictated into the dictaphone several fragments of his contemplated article on conscription in the United States and about fifty short pages of his exposure of El Popular, i.e. of Stalin's machinations. It was a day of physical and spiritual equanimity for him.
Jacson Appears
At five, the two of us had tea, as usual. At twenty minutes past five, perhaps at half past, I stepped out on the balcony and saw L. D. in the patio near an open rabbit hutch. He was feeding the animals. Beside him was an unfamiliar figure. Only when he removed his hat and started to approach the balcony did I recognize him. It was "Jacson."
"He's here again," it flashed through my mind. "Why has he begun to come so often?" I asked myself.
"I'm frightfully thirsty, may I have a glass of water?" he asked, upon greeting me.
"Perhaps you would like a cup of tea?"
"No no. I dined too late and feel that the food is up here," he answered, pointing at his throat. "it's choking me." The color of his face was gray-green. His general appearance was that of a very nervous man.
"Why are you wearing your hat and topcoat?" (His topcoat was hanging over his left arm, pressed against his body.) "It's so sunny today."
"Yes, but you know it won't last long, it might rain." I wanted to argue that "today it won't rain" and of his always boasting that he never wore a hat or coat, even in the wont weather, but somehow I became depressed and let the subject drop. Instead I asked:
"And how is Sylvia feeling?"
He did not appear to understand me. I had upset him by my previous question about his topcoat and hat. And he was completely lost in his own thoughts, and very nervous. Finally, as if rousing himself from a deep sleep, he answered me: "Sylvia?... Sylvia?..." And catching himself, he added casually: "She's always well."
He began to retrace his steps towards Lev Davidovich and the rabbit hutches. I asked him as he walked away: "Is your article ready?"
"Yes, it's ready."
"Is it typed?"
With an awkward movement of his hand, while he continued to press against his body his topcoat in the lining of which were sewn in, as it was later revealed, a pickaxe and a dagger, he produced several typewritten pages to show me.
"It's good that your manuscript is not written by hand. Lev Davidovich dislikes illegible manuscripts."
Two days earlier he had called on us, also wearing a topcoat and a hat. I did not see him then as, unfortunately, I was not at home. But Lev Davidovich told me that "Jacson" had called and had somewhat surprised him by his conduct Lev Davidovich mentioned it in a way which indicated that he had no desire to elaborate upon the matter, but at the same time he felt that he had to mention it to me, sensing some new feature about the man.
"He brought an outline of his article, in reality a few phrases--muddled stuff. I made some suggestions to him. We shall see." And Lev Davidovich added, "Yesterday he did not resemble a Frenchman at all. Suddenly he sat down on my desk and kept his hat on all the while."
"Yes, it's strange" I said in wonderment. "He never wears a hat."
"This time he wore a hat," answered Lev Davidovich and pursued this subject no further. He spoke casually. But I was taken aback: it seemed to me that on this occasion he had perceived something new about "Jacson" but had not yet reached, or rather was in no hurry to draw conclusions. This brief conversation of ours occurred on the eve of the crime.
Wearing a hat.. topcoat on his arm... sat himself down on the table--wasn't this a rehearsal on his part? This was done so that he would be more certain and precise in his movements on the morrow.
Who could have suspected it then? It stirred us to embarrassment, nothing more. Who could have foretold that the day of August 20, so ordinary, would be so fateful? Nothing bespoke its ominousness. From dawn the sun was shining, as always here, the whole day brightly. Flowers were blooming, and grass seemed polished with lacquer... We went about our tasks each in his own way, all of us trying in whatever we did to facilitate Lev Davidovich's work. How many times in the course of that day did he mount the little steps of this same balcony, and walk into this, his room, and sit down on this very same chair beside the desk... All this used to hem ordinary and is now by its very ordinariness so terrible and tragic. No one, none among us, not he himself was able to sense the impending disaster. And in this inability a kind of abyss yawns. On the contrary, the whole day was one of the most tranquil. When L. D. stepped out at noon into the patio and I perceived him standing there bareheaded beneath the scorching sun, I hastened to bring him his white cap to protect his head against the merciless hot rays. To protect from the sun... but even at that very moment he was already threatened with a terrible death. At that hour we did not sense his doom, an outburst of despair did not convulse our hearts.
I recall that when the alarm system in the house, the garden and the patio was being installed by our friends and guard posts were being assigned, I drew L. D.'s attention to the fact that a guard should also be posted at his window. This seemed to me at the time so palpably indispensable. But L. D. objected that to do so it would be necessary to expand the guard, increase it to ten which was beyond our resources both in point of money and of available people at the disposal of our organization. A guard outside the window could not have saved him in this particular instance. But the absence of one worried me. L. D. was likewise very touched by a present given him by our American friends after the attack of May 24. It was a bullet proof vest, something like an ancient shirt of mail. As I examined it one day, I happened to remark that it would be good to get something for the head. L. D. insisted that the comrade assigned to the most responsible post wear the vest each time. After the failure suffered by our enemies in the May 24 attack, we were absolutely certain that Stalin would not halt, and we were making preparations. We also knew that a different form of attack would be used by the G.P.U. Nor did we exclude a blow on the part of a "solitary individual" sent secretly and paid by the G.P.U. But neither the bullet-proof vest nor a helmet could have served as safeguards. To apply these methods of defense from day to day was impossible. It was impossible to convert one's life solely into self-defense--for in that case life loses all its value.
The Assassination
As "Jacson" and I approached Lev Davidovich the latter addressed me in Russian, "You know, he is expecting Sylvia to call on us. They are leaving tomorrow." It was a suggestion on his part that I should invite them to tea, if not supper.
"I didn't know that you intend leaving tomorrow and are expecting Sylvia here."
"Yes...yes... I forgot to mention it to you."
"It's too bad that I didn't know, I might have sent a few things to New York."
"I could call tomorrow at one."
"No, no, thank you. It would inconvenience both of us."
And turning to Lev Davidovich, I explained in Russian that I had already asked "Jacson" to tea but that he refused, complaining about not feeling well, being terribly thirsty and asked me only for a glass of water. Lev Davidovich glanced at him attentively, and said in a tone of light reproach, "Your health is poor again, you look ill... That's not good."
There was a pause. Lev Davidovich was loath to tear himself away from the rabbits and in no mood to listen to an article. However, he controlled himself and said, "Well, what do you say, shall we go over your article?"
He fastened the hutches methodically, and removed his working gloves. He took good care of his hands, or rather his fingers inasmuch as the slightest scratch irritated him, interfered with his writing. He always kept his pen like his fingers in order. He brushed off his blue blouse and slowly, silently started walking towards the house accompanied by "Jacson" and myself. I came with them to the door of Lev Davidovich's study; the door closed, and I walked into the adjoining room....
Not more than three or four minutes had elapsed when I heard a terrible, soul-shaking cry and without so much as realizing who it was that uttered this cry, I rushed in the direction from which it came. Between the dining room and the balcony, on the threshold, beside the door post and leaning against it stood... Lev Davidovich. His face was covered with blood, his eyes, without glasses, were sharp blue, his hands were hanging.
"What happened? What happened?"
I flung my arms about him, but he did not immediately answer. It flashed through my mind. Perhaps something had fallen from the ceiling--some repair work was being done there--but why was he here?
And he said to me calmly, without any indignation, bitterness or irritation, "Jacson." L.D. said it as if he wished to say, "It has happened." We took a few steps and Lev Davidovich, with my help, slumped to the floor on the little carpet there.
"Natasha, I love you.'" He said this so unexpectedly, so gravely, almost severely that, weak from inner shock, I swayed toward him.
"0...0... no one, no one must be allowed to see you without being searched."
Carefully placing a pillow under his broken head, I held a piece of ice to his wound and wiped the blood from his face with cotton...
"Seva must be taken away from all this..."
He spoke with difficulty, unclearly, but was--so it seemed to me--unaware of it.
"You know, in there--" his eyes moved towards the door of his room--"I sensed... understood what he wanted to do.... He wanted to strike me... once more... but I didn't let him," he spoke calmly, quietly, his voice breaking.
"But I didn't let him." There was a note of satisfaction in these words. At the same time Lev Davidovich turned to Joe, and spoke to him in English. Joe was kneeling on the floor as I was, on the other side, just opposite me. I strained to catch the words, but couldn't make them out. At that moment I saw Charlie, his face chalk-white, revolver in hand, rush into Lev Davidovich's room.
"What about that one" I asked Lev Davidovich. "They will kill him."
"No... impermissible to kill, he must be forced to talk," Lev Davidovich replied, still uttering the words with difficulty, slowly.
A kind of pathetic whining suddenly broke upon our ears. I glanced in a quandary at Lev Davidovich. With a barely noticeable movement of his eyes, he indicated the door of his room and said condescendingly, "It's he"... "Has the doctor arrived yet?"
"He'll be here any minute now... Charlie has gone in a car to fetch him."
The doctor arrived, examined the wound and agitatedly stated that it was "not dangerous." Lev Davidovich accepted this calmly, almost indifferently as though one could not expect any other pronouncement from a physician in such a situation. But, turning to Joe and indicating his heart, he said in English, "I feel it here... This time they have succeeded." He was sparing me.
The Last Hours
Through the roaring city, through its vain tumult and human din, through its garish evening lights, the emergency ambulance sped, weaving through traffic, passing cars, with the siren incessantly wailing, with the cordon of police motorcycles shrilly whistling. We were bearing the wounded man unbearable anguish in our hearts, and with an alarm that increased with every passing minute. He was conscious. One hand remained quietly extended along the body. It was paralyzed.
Dr. Dutren told me this after the examination at home, in the dining room, on the floor. For the other hand, the right, he couldn't find a place, describing circles with it all the time, touching me, as if seeking a comfortable place for it. He found it more and more difficult to talk. Bending very low I asked him how he felt.
"Better now," answered Lev Davidovich.
"Better now." This quickened the heart with keen hopes. The ear-splitting tumult, the whistles and the siren continued to wail but the heart pulsed with hope. "Better now."
The ambulance pulled up at the hospital. It stopped. A crowd milled around us. "There may be enemies," it flashed through my mind, as was always the case in similar situations. "Where are our friends? They must surround the stretcher..."
Now he was lying on the cot. Silently the doctors examined the wound. On their instructions, a "sister" began shaving his hair. I stood at the head of the cot. Smiling imperceptibly, Lev Davidovich said to me, "See, we found a barber too..."
He was still sparing me. That day we had talked about the necessity of calling a barber to give him a hair-cut, but did not get around to it. He was now reminding me of it. Lev Davidovich called Joe, who was standing right there, a few feet away from me and asked him, as I learned later, to jot down his farewell to life. When I inquired what Lev Davidovich had said to him, Joe replied, "He wanted me to make a note about French statistics." I was greatly surprised that it was something related to French statistics at such a time. It seemed strange. Unless perhaps his condition was beginning to improve...
I remained standing at the head of the cot, holding a piece of ice to the wound and listening attentively. They began to undress him. So as not to disturb him, his working blouse was cut with scissors; the doctor politely exchanged glances with the "sister" as if to encourage her; next came the knitted vest, then the shirt. The watch was unstrapped from his wrist. They then began to remove the remaining garments without cutting them, and he said to me then, "I don't want them to undress me... I want you to do it." He said this quite distinctly, only very sadly and gravely.
These were the last words he spoke to me. When I finished I bent over him and touched his lips with mine. He answered me. Again... And again he answered. And once again. It was our final farewell. But we were not aware of it.
The patient fell into a state of coma. The operation did not bring him out of this condition. Without removing my eyes, I watched over him all that night, waiting for the "awakening." The eyes were closed, but the breathing, now heavy, now even and calm, inspired hope. The following day passed the same way. By noon, according to the judgment of the doctors, there was an improvement. But toward the end of the day, a sharp change in the sick man's breathing suddenly took place. It became rapid, more and more rapid, instilling mortal fear. The physicians, the hospital staff surrounded the cot of the sick man. They were obviously agitated. Losing my self-control, I asked what this meant, but only one among them, a more cautious man answered. "it would pass," he said. The others remained silent. I understood how false was all consolation and how hopeless everything really was.
They lifted him up. His head slumped on one shoulder. The hands dangled like those in Titian's crucifixion: "The Removal from the Cross." Instead of a crown of thorns, the dying man wore a bandage. The features of his countenance retained their purity and pride. It seemed as if at any moment now he would straighten up and take charge himself. But the wound had penetrated the brain too deeply. The awakening so passionately awaited never came. His voice was also stilled. Everything was ended. He is no longer among the living.
Retribution will come to the vile murderers. Throughout his entire heroic and beautiful life, Lev Davidovich believed in the emancipated mankind of the future. During the last years of his life his faith did not falter, but on the contrary became only more mature, more firm than ever.
Future mankind, emancipated from all oppression will triumph over coercion of all sorts. He taught me to believe in this too.
November, 1940
Coyoacan, Mexico
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
******
Markin comment on this article:
Of course Natalia Sedova was Trotsky's "wife" for most of their lives and suffered the many exiles, imprisonments, privations and other unsettling problems that confronted the great revolutionary. She, unlike Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, was not intensely political but more a steadfast companion and rock solid force behind the big man of history. Her later turning away from the work of the Fourth International and her husband's defense of the Soviet experience in reaction to her personal tragedies and an impressionistic view of the post-World War Cold War situation does not negate the earlier critical support she gave to his efforts.
********
Natalia Sedova Trotsky
How it Happened
Written:1940
First Published:1941 (English translation)
Source: Fourth International
Online Version: Natalia Sedova Internet Archive, December 2001
Transcribed/HTML Markup: Mike Bessler (original markup by ETOL)
(Tuesday, August 20, 1940; 7 o'clock in the morning)
"You know, I feel fine today, at all events, this morning; it's a long time since I felt so well... Last night I took a double dose of the sleeping drug. I noticed that it does me good."
"Yes. I recall that we observed this in Norway when you used to feel run-down much more often... But it isn't the drug itself that does you good, it's sound sleep, complete rest."
"Why yes, of course."
As he opened in the morning or closed at night the massive steel shutters built in our bedroom by our friends after the attack of May 24 on our home, L. D. would occasionally remark: "Well, now no Siqueiros can get at us." And upon awakening he would greet me and himself by saying, "You see, they didn't kill us last night after all, and yet you are still dissatisfied." I defended myself as best I could... Once, after such a "greeting," he added pensively: "Yes, Natasha, we received a reprieve."
As far back as 1928, when we were being exiled to Alma-Ata, where the unknown awaited us, we had a talk one night in the compartment of the train which was taking us into exile... We could not sleep, after the tumult of the last weeks, and especially the last days, in Moscow. In spite of our extreme fatigue, the nervous excitement persisted. I recall that Lev Davidovich said to me then: "it's better this way (exile). I am not in favor of dying in a bed in the Kremlin."
But this morning he was far from all such thoughts. Physical well-being made him look forward eagerly to a "really good" day's work. Vigorously he walked out into the patio to feed his rabbits, after performing swiftly his morning toilet and dressing just as quickly. When his health was poor, the feeding of the rabbits was a strain on him; but he couldn't give it up, as he pitied the little animals. It was difficult to do it as he wanted to, as was his custom--thoroughly. Besides, he had to be on guard; his strength had to be conserved for another, different kind of work--work at his desk. Taking care of the animals, cleaning their cages, etc., provided him, on the one band, with relaxation and a distraction, but, on the other hand, it fatigued him physically; and this, in turn, reflected on his general ability to work. He became completely absorbed in everything he did, regardless of the task.
I recall that in 1933 we departed from Prinkipo for France, where we lived in a lonely villa not far from Royan, by the shores of the Atlantic. Our son together with our friends had arranged for this villa which was called "Sea-Spray." The waves of the turbulent ocean came into our garden, and salt spray would fly in through the open windows. Surrounded by our friends, we lived under semi-legal conditions. We would have on occasion as many as twenty people. Eight or nine lived on the premises. In view of our position, it was out of the question to call in a housekeeper or someone to help in the kitchen. The whole burden fell on Jeanne, my son's wife, and on Vera Molinier, and I also helped. The young comrades washed the dishes. Lev Davidovich, too, wanted to help with the housework and began washing dishes. But our friends protested: "He should rest after dinner. We can manage ourselves." Besides, my son Leva told me: "Papa insists on using a scientific method of dish-washing, and this eats up too much of our time." In the end, L. D. had to retire from this occupation.
The middle way, the lackadaisical attitude, the semi-indifferent manner, these he knew not. That is why nothing tired him so much as casual or semi-indifferent conversations. But with what enthusiasm did he go to pick cacti with a view to transplanting them in our garden. He was in a frenzy, being the first on the job and the last to leave. Not one of the young people surrounding him on our walks into the country and working with him outdoors could keep pace with him; they tired more quickly, and fell behind one after the other. But he was indefatigable. Looking at him, I often marveled. Whence did he draw his energy, his physical endurance? Neither the unbearably hot sun, the mountains nor descents with cacti heavy as iron bothered him. He was hypnotized by the consummation of the task at hand. He found relaxation in changing his tasks. This also provided him with a respite from the blows which mercilessly fell upon him. The more crushing the blow the more ardently he forgot himself in work.
Our walks, which were really war-expeditions for cacti, became more and more rare because of "circumstances beyond our control." However, every now and then, having had his fill of the monotony of his daily routine, Lev Davidovich would say to me: "This week we ought to take a whole day off for a walk, don't you think so?"
"You mean a day for penal labor?" I would twit him.
"All right, let's go, to be sure."
"It would be best to get an early start. Shouldn't we leave around six in the morning?"
"Six is all right with me, but won't you get too tired?"
"No, it will only refresh me, and I promise not to overdo it."
Usually Lev Davidovich fed his fondly-watched rabbits and chickens, from a quarter past seven (sometimes 7:20) till nine o'clock in the morning. Sometimes he would interrupt this work to dictate into the dictaphone some order or some idea which occurred to him. That day he worked in the patio without interruption. After breakfast he assured me that he felt fine and spoke of his desire to begin dictating an article on conscription in the United States. And he actually did start to dictate.
At one o'clock Rigault, our attorney in the case of the May 24th attack, came to see us. After his departure, Lev Davidovich looked into my room to tell me, not without regret, that he would have to postpone work on the article and to resume preparing the material for the trial in connection with the attack upon us. He and his attorney had decided that it was necessary to answer El Popular in view of the fact that L. D. had been accused of defamation at a banquet given by that publication.
"And I will take the offensive and will charge them with brazen slander." he said defiantly.
"Too bad, you won't be able to write about conscription."
"Yes, it can't be helped. I have to postpone it for two or three days. I have already asked for all the available materials to be placed on my desk. After dinner, I shall start going over them. I feel fine," he once again assured me.
After a brief siesta, I saw him sitting at his desk, which was already covered with items relating to the El Popular case. He continued to be in good spirits. And it made me feel more cheerful. Lev Davidovich had of late been complaining of enervation to which he succumbed occasionally. He knew that it was a passing condition, but lately he seemed to be in greater doubt about it than ever before; today seemed to us to mark the beginning of improvement in his physical condition. He looked well too. Every now and then I opened the door to his room just a trifle, so as not to disturb him, and saw him in his usual position, bent over his desk, pen in hand. I recalled the line, "One more and final story and my scroll is at an end." Thus speaks the ancient monk-scribe Pimen in Pushkin's drama "Boris Godounov," as he recorded the evil deeds of Czar Boris.
Lev Davidovich led a life close in semblance to that of a prisoner or a hermit, with this difference that in his solitude he not only kept a chronological record of events but waged an indomitably passionate struggle against his ideological enemies.
Brief as that day was, Lev Davidovich had until five in the afternoon dictated into the dictaphone several fragments of his contemplated article on conscription in the United States and about fifty short pages of his exposure of El Popular, i.e. of Stalin's machinations. It was a day of physical and spiritual equanimity for him.
Jacson Appears
At five, the two of us had tea, as usual. At twenty minutes past five, perhaps at half past, I stepped out on the balcony and saw L. D. in the patio near an open rabbit hutch. He was feeding the animals. Beside him was an unfamiliar figure. Only when he removed his hat and started to approach the balcony did I recognize him. It was "Jacson."
"He's here again," it flashed through my mind. "Why has he begun to come so often?" I asked myself.
"I'm frightfully thirsty, may I have a glass of water?" he asked, upon greeting me.
"Perhaps you would like a cup of tea?"
"No no. I dined too late and feel that the food is up here," he answered, pointing at his throat. "it's choking me." The color of his face was gray-green. His general appearance was that of a very nervous man.
"Why are you wearing your hat and topcoat?" (His topcoat was hanging over his left arm, pressed against his body.) "It's so sunny today."
"Yes, but you know it won't last long, it might rain." I wanted to argue that "today it won't rain" and of his always boasting that he never wore a hat or coat, even in the wont weather, but somehow I became depressed and let the subject drop. Instead I asked:
"And how is Sylvia feeling?"
He did not appear to understand me. I had upset him by my previous question about his topcoat and hat. And he was completely lost in his own thoughts, and very nervous. Finally, as if rousing himself from a deep sleep, he answered me: "Sylvia?... Sylvia?..." And catching himself, he added casually: "She's always well."
He began to retrace his steps towards Lev Davidovich and the rabbit hutches. I asked him as he walked away: "Is your article ready?"
"Yes, it's ready."
"Is it typed?"
With an awkward movement of his hand, while he continued to press against his body his topcoat in the lining of which were sewn in, as it was later revealed, a pickaxe and a dagger, he produced several typewritten pages to show me.
"It's good that your manuscript is not written by hand. Lev Davidovich dislikes illegible manuscripts."
Two days earlier he had called on us, also wearing a topcoat and a hat. I did not see him then as, unfortunately, I was not at home. But Lev Davidovich told me that "Jacson" had called and had somewhat surprised him by his conduct Lev Davidovich mentioned it in a way which indicated that he had no desire to elaborate upon the matter, but at the same time he felt that he had to mention it to me, sensing some new feature about the man.
"He brought an outline of his article, in reality a few phrases--muddled stuff. I made some suggestions to him. We shall see." And Lev Davidovich added, "Yesterday he did not resemble a Frenchman at all. Suddenly he sat down on my desk and kept his hat on all the while."
"Yes, it's strange" I said in wonderment. "He never wears a hat."
"This time he wore a hat," answered Lev Davidovich and pursued this subject no further. He spoke casually. But I was taken aback: it seemed to me that on this occasion he had perceived something new about "Jacson" but had not yet reached, or rather was in no hurry to draw conclusions. This brief conversation of ours occurred on the eve of the crime.
Wearing a hat.. topcoat on his arm... sat himself down on the table--wasn't this a rehearsal on his part? This was done so that he would be more certain and precise in his movements on the morrow.
Who could have suspected it then? It stirred us to embarrassment, nothing more. Who could have foretold that the day of August 20, so ordinary, would be so fateful? Nothing bespoke its ominousness. From dawn the sun was shining, as always here, the whole day brightly. Flowers were blooming, and grass seemed polished with lacquer... We went about our tasks each in his own way, all of us trying in whatever we did to facilitate Lev Davidovich's work. How many times in the course of that day did he mount the little steps of this same balcony, and walk into this, his room, and sit down on this very same chair beside the desk... All this used to hem ordinary and is now by its very ordinariness so terrible and tragic. No one, none among us, not he himself was able to sense the impending disaster. And in this inability a kind of abyss yawns. On the contrary, the whole day was one of the most tranquil. When L. D. stepped out at noon into the patio and I perceived him standing there bareheaded beneath the scorching sun, I hastened to bring him his white cap to protect his head against the merciless hot rays. To protect from the sun... but even at that very moment he was already threatened with a terrible death. At that hour we did not sense his doom, an outburst of despair did not convulse our hearts.
I recall that when the alarm system in the house, the garden and the patio was being installed by our friends and guard posts were being assigned, I drew L. D.'s attention to the fact that a guard should also be posted at his window. This seemed to me at the time so palpably indispensable. But L. D. objected that to do so it would be necessary to expand the guard, increase it to ten which was beyond our resources both in point of money and of available people at the disposal of our organization. A guard outside the window could not have saved him in this particular instance. But the absence of one worried me. L. D. was likewise very touched by a present given him by our American friends after the attack of May 24. It was a bullet proof vest, something like an ancient shirt of mail. As I examined it one day, I happened to remark that it would be good to get something for the head. L. D. insisted that the comrade assigned to the most responsible post wear the vest each time. After the failure suffered by our enemies in the May 24 attack, we were absolutely certain that Stalin would not halt, and we were making preparations. We also knew that a different form of attack would be used by the G.P.U. Nor did we exclude a blow on the part of a "solitary individual" sent secretly and paid by the G.P.U. But neither the bullet-proof vest nor a helmet could have served as safeguards. To apply these methods of defense from day to day was impossible. It was impossible to convert one's life solely into self-defense--for in that case life loses all its value.
The Assassination
As "Jacson" and I approached Lev Davidovich the latter addressed me in Russian, "You know, he is expecting Sylvia to call on us. They are leaving tomorrow." It was a suggestion on his part that I should invite them to tea, if not supper.
"I didn't know that you intend leaving tomorrow and are expecting Sylvia here."
"Yes...yes... I forgot to mention it to you."
"It's too bad that I didn't know, I might have sent a few things to New York."
"I could call tomorrow at one."
"No, no, thank you. It would inconvenience both of us."
And turning to Lev Davidovich, I explained in Russian that I had already asked "Jacson" to tea but that he refused, complaining about not feeling well, being terribly thirsty and asked me only for a glass of water. Lev Davidovich glanced at him attentively, and said in a tone of light reproach, "Your health is poor again, you look ill... That's not good."
There was a pause. Lev Davidovich was loath to tear himself away from the rabbits and in no mood to listen to an article. However, he controlled himself and said, "Well, what do you say, shall we go over your article?"
He fastened the hutches methodically, and removed his working gloves. He took good care of his hands, or rather his fingers inasmuch as the slightest scratch irritated him, interfered with his writing. He always kept his pen like his fingers in order. He brushed off his blue blouse and slowly, silently started walking towards the house accompanied by "Jacson" and myself. I came with them to the door of Lev Davidovich's study; the door closed, and I walked into the adjoining room....
Not more than three or four minutes had elapsed when I heard a terrible, soul-shaking cry and without so much as realizing who it was that uttered this cry, I rushed in the direction from which it came. Between the dining room and the balcony, on the threshold, beside the door post and leaning against it stood... Lev Davidovich. His face was covered with blood, his eyes, without glasses, were sharp blue, his hands were hanging.
"What happened? What happened?"
I flung my arms about him, but he did not immediately answer. It flashed through my mind. Perhaps something had fallen from the ceiling--some repair work was being done there--but why was he here?
And he said to me calmly, without any indignation, bitterness or irritation, "Jacson." L.D. said it as if he wished to say, "It has happened." We took a few steps and Lev Davidovich, with my help, slumped to the floor on the little carpet there.
"Natasha, I love you.'" He said this so unexpectedly, so gravely, almost severely that, weak from inner shock, I swayed toward him.
"0...0... no one, no one must be allowed to see you without being searched."
Carefully placing a pillow under his broken head, I held a piece of ice to his wound and wiped the blood from his face with cotton...
"Seva must be taken away from all this..."
He spoke with difficulty, unclearly, but was--so it seemed to me--unaware of it.
"You know, in there--" his eyes moved towards the door of his room--"I sensed... understood what he wanted to do.... He wanted to strike me... once more... but I didn't let him," he spoke calmly, quietly, his voice breaking.
"But I didn't let him." There was a note of satisfaction in these words. At the same time Lev Davidovich turned to Joe, and spoke to him in English. Joe was kneeling on the floor as I was, on the other side, just opposite me. I strained to catch the words, but couldn't make them out. At that moment I saw Charlie, his face chalk-white, revolver in hand, rush into Lev Davidovich's room.
"What about that one" I asked Lev Davidovich. "They will kill him."
"No... impermissible to kill, he must be forced to talk," Lev Davidovich replied, still uttering the words with difficulty, slowly.
A kind of pathetic whining suddenly broke upon our ears. I glanced in a quandary at Lev Davidovich. With a barely noticeable movement of his eyes, he indicated the door of his room and said condescendingly, "It's he"... "Has the doctor arrived yet?"
"He'll be here any minute now... Charlie has gone in a car to fetch him."
The doctor arrived, examined the wound and agitatedly stated that it was "not dangerous." Lev Davidovich accepted this calmly, almost indifferently as though one could not expect any other pronouncement from a physician in such a situation. But, turning to Joe and indicating his heart, he said in English, "I feel it here... This time they have succeeded." He was sparing me.
The Last Hours
Through the roaring city, through its vain tumult and human din, through its garish evening lights, the emergency ambulance sped, weaving through traffic, passing cars, with the siren incessantly wailing, with the cordon of police motorcycles shrilly whistling. We were bearing the wounded man unbearable anguish in our hearts, and with an alarm that increased with every passing minute. He was conscious. One hand remained quietly extended along the body. It was paralyzed.
Dr. Dutren told me this after the examination at home, in the dining room, on the floor. For the other hand, the right, he couldn't find a place, describing circles with it all the time, touching me, as if seeking a comfortable place for it. He found it more and more difficult to talk. Bending very low I asked him how he felt.
"Better now," answered Lev Davidovich.
"Better now." This quickened the heart with keen hopes. The ear-splitting tumult, the whistles and the siren continued to wail but the heart pulsed with hope. "Better now."
The ambulance pulled up at the hospital. It stopped. A crowd milled around us. "There may be enemies," it flashed through my mind, as was always the case in similar situations. "Where are our friends? They must surround the stretcher..."
Now he was lying on the cot. Silently the doctors examined the wound. On their instructions, a "sister" began shaving his hair. I stood at the head of the cot. Smiling imperceptibly, Lev Davidovich said to me, "See, we found a barber too..."
He was still sparing me. That day we had talked about the necessity of calling a barber to give him a hair-cut, but did not get around to it. He was now reminding me of it. Lev Davidovich called Joe, who was standing right there, a few feet away from me and asked him, as I learned later, to jot down his farewell to life. When I inquired what Lev Davidovich had said to him, Joe replied, "He wanted me to make a note about French statistics." I was greatly surprised that it was something related to French statistics at such a time. It seemed strange. Unless perhaps his condition was beginning to improve...
I remained standing at the head of the cot, holding a piece of ice to the wound and listening attentively. They began to undress him. So as not to disturb him, his working blouse was cut with scissors; the doctor politely exchanged glances with the "sister" as if to encourage her; next came the knitted vest, then the shirt. The watch was unstrapped from his wrist. They then began to remove the remaining garments without cutting them, and he said to me then, "I don't want them to undress me... I want you to do it." He said this quite distinctly, only very sadly and gravely.
These were the last words he spoke to me. When I finished I bent over him and touched his lips with mine. He answered me. Again... And again he answered. And once again. It was our final farewell. But we were not aware of it.
The patient fell into a state of coma. The operation did not bring him out of this condition. Without removing my eyes, I watched over him all that night, waiting for the "awakening." The eyes were closed, but the breathing, now heavy, now even and calm, inspired hope. The following day passed the same way. By noon, according to the judgment of the doctors, there was an improvement. But toward the end of the day, a sharp change in the sick man's breathing suddenly took place. It became rapid, more and more rapid, instilling mortal fear. The physicians, the hospital staff surrounded the cot of the sick man. They were obviously agitated. Losing my self-control, I asked what this meant, but only one among them, a more cautious man answered. "it would pass," he said. The others remained silent. I understood how false was all consolation and how hopeless everything really was.
They lifted him up. His head slumped on one shoulder. The hands dangled like those in Titian's crucifixion: "The Removal from the Cross." Instead of a crown of thorns, the dying man wore a bandage. The features of his countenance retained their purity and pride. It seemed as if at any moment now he would straighten up and take charge himself. But the wound had penetrated the brain too deeply. The awakening so passionately awaited never came. His voice was also stilled. Everything was ended. He is no longer among the living.
Retribution will come to the vile murderers. Throughout his entire heroic and beautiful life, Lev Davidovich believed in the emancipated mankind of the future. During the last years of his life his faith did not falter, but on the contrary became only more mature, more firm than ever.
Future mankind, emancipated from all oppression will triumph over coercion of all sorts. He taught me to believe in this too.
November, 1940
Coyoacan, Mexico
Sunday, July 03, 2011
From The "Cindy Sheehan Soapbox"- Interview with Angela Davis on Latin America
Click on the headline to link to a Cindy Sheehan Soapbox entry, an interview with Angela Davis on Latin American and the so-called Bolivarian revolution. Of course we all called for her defense in the old days when she was under the gun of the American imperialist state around the Black Panthers, George Jackson and Ruchell McGee stuff but, apparently, her Stalinist two-stage theory of socialist revolution from her American Communist Party days, including here in the heartland, is still deeply ingrained in her political psyche-Markin.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
From The Pages of "Workers Vanguard"-"Economic Crisis and the Tunisia Uprising"
Markin comment:
Perhaps the most important point made by this article concerning the Arab Spring, Arab Revolution, Arab 1848 or the other myriad expressions of the democratic revolutionary outcome in the Near and Middle East comes near the end of the article. There the speaker notes that socialists, communists, and even those who call themselves Trotskyists speak, at most, only of a democratic revolution, no extension now or in the future to a socialist revolution like in the old days. Yet only Leon Trotsky’s strategic concept of the theory of permanent revolution in the year 2011 points the way forward in this area. Christ, this is one time it is practically a no-brainer to evoke the solution of a socialist revolution and still the reformists want to parse the thing down to something that might have been revolutionary, barely revolutionary, in the real 1848.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 982
10 June 2011
Economic Crisis and the Tunisia Uprising
The following is based on a report given by a comrade of the Ligue Trotskyste de France to a recent gathering of International Communist League members in Europe.
The reason the various uprisings that have been shaking the Arab world have taken place now and not five, ten or 20 years ago has, in my opinion, economic origins. The devastation of the world depression has added to a situation that had caused steady deterioration in the living conditions for the working masses of North Africa in the last 15 years or so, as seen especially in the huge rise in food prices and the slashing back of government food subsidies. The worsening of their conditions was caused by the adoption of IMF-dictated structural measures beginning in the 1980s and then various agreements, mainly between the European Union (EU) and North African countries, in the second part of the 1990s. This development needs to be traced in part to the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union.
The bottom line of the agreements was based on the imperialists’ promise that the European capitalists would outsource part of their industry to the countries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia). In reality, the domestic markets of these Arab countries are too small to draw massive foreign investment. Furthermore, industrial production outsourced from the European Union for export back to Europe was moved in large part to the capitalist sector in the Chinese deformed workers state. There is some spare parts production for the auto and aerospace industry in Tunisia, but the bulk of the export-oriented industry is cheap textile production with little value added.
The aim of the agreements was to dismantle tariff barriers between both sides of the Mediterranean and to do away with whatever minimal labor legislation had been in place. In fact, this process started first in Tunisia, and this is the country where it went furthest. So it is not a coincidence that the uprisings started in Tunisia.
This “neoliberalism” has left a devastated economy in North Africa. Of course, there are variations depending in particular on the presence or not of an important oil industry. Algeria is a major producer of oil and gas with significant production potential. However, heavy industry in Algeria, which had been built in the 1970s, has been largely dismantled. Steel production was downsized and then sold to Mittal Steel, among others. In general, from Morocco to Syria between 12 and 15 percent of the population is employed in industry, including light industry. The one exception is Tunisia, where the figure is above 20 percent.
The question of the impact of outsourcing on the strength of the working class and the trade unions is very relevant to North Africa. Labor regulations have been largely dismantled. There is a growing number of workers employed informally, through labor contractors, etc., including in the so-called “formal sector.” The head of the Tunisian high school teachers union told Informations Ouvrières (21 April), newspaper of the Lambertist Parti Ouvrier Indépendant:
“The great majority of the mobilizations demand a solution to the fundamental problem, which is employment and was a central demand of the revolution. There are very few strikes which raise the question of wage increases, even though this problem is far from negligible in many companies which do not respect any regulations and laws and underpay their workers. Most mobilizations want to end two plagues: outsourcing and temporary work.”
Representative of the growth of the informal sector proper was Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor who set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid in December, sparking the revolt.
There are also demographic reasons, which have come to a head in this period. After independence in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an explosive population growth due to the improvement of health systems. From around 1974 on, mass emigration to Europe was cut off as the European countries tightened their borders. While the life expectancy of the working class increased, the mass influx of youth provoked an explosion of the population able to work and consequently an explosion in structural mass unemployment rates.
This has been aggravated for college-educated youth. The governments in the Maghreb, particularly Tunisia, made a major effort to educate their youth. In the years after independence, when the development of national capitalism was based on a strong state sector and a significant teaching and health apparatus, the natural employment perspectives for college-educated youth were centered on the civil service. This has been increasingly reversed in the last 15 years or so, particularly as a result of IMF- and EU-dictated measures to reduce the public sector. As a result, the unemployment rate increases with the level of education. Even before the recent uprisings, it was due to reach catastrophic proportions in the next two or three years. Some 70,000 additional college graduates are scheduled to enter the labor market this fall, a large part of whom will be unemployed.
Since January, the situation in Tunisia has been made worse by the return of 20,000 Tunisians who had jobs in Libya and by foreign refugees from Libya, and has been aggravated as well by the catastrophic situation of the tourist industry, which is a major employer. People have tried to cross the sea and get to France, with hundreds of youth drowned (see “Refugees Drown as Imperialists Step Up War on Libya,” WV No. 981, 27 May). Now there are concentrations of Tunisian youth in the streets of Paris and Marseilles desperately looking for housing and jobs and trying to avoid police roundups. The IMF and World Bank have started to draw circles around Tunisia, with promises of loans to supposedly bridge the currently dire situation. As always in such circumstances, and as cruelly experienced right now by Greek, Irish and Portuguese workers, these schemes amount to channeling more fresh money into bank coffers and imposing more drastic austerity measures on workers.
In the last 15 years, the social security and unemployment compensation systems, which were basic at best, have been partially dismantled, so that insecurity at all levels has increased. In this context, it is quite remarkable that the working class has managed to appear as a factor at all in Tunisia, although of course not as a class for itself—i.e., conscious of its role as the gravedigger of capitalism. The working class remains chained to its own bourgeoisie by the trade-union bureaucracy and the small left groups that have emerged out of it lately, particularly the former Communist Party, called Ettajdid, the ex-Maoist Workers Communist Party of Tunisia (PCOT) and the ex-Pabloite League of the Workers Left (see “For Permanent Revolution Across North Africa! Tunisia: Dictator Flees, Protests Continue,” WV No. 973, 4 February).
Tunisia is supposedly the most advanced country in the Arab world when it comes to the status of women. The wives of both the late Habib Bourguiba, the country’s first ruler after independence from France, and the ousted dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali played important political roles, which is unique. People came from all over North Africa and the Arabian peninsula because prostitution in Tunisia was not illegal. Prostitutes were said to fink on their customers for the files of the political police. Polygamy was illegal, unlike abortion and contraception.
But the reality is of course quite grim. Arranged marriages are frequent, at least in the bourgeoisie. They still have magic rituals called the tasfih to supposedly protect the virginity of pubescent girls, particularly in the more backward interior of the country but also in Tunis. Hymenoplasty (surgical restoration of the hymen to give the appearance of virginity) and the like seem to be common among the more petty-bourgeois layers. Sexual harassment at work is frequent.
However, it appears that the ICL has been the only organization that has been prominently raising the woman question. In Egypt, the left capitulates to the Muslim Brotherhood. In Tunisia, left groups are also into class-collaborationist alliances with the Islamists. They portray them as “good guy” Islamists like Turkey’s ruling bourgeois Justice and Development Party. But I believe that a more important part of the reason why the Tunisian left has been silent on the woman question is because they are at bottom left-Bourguibists, and it was Bourguiba who established the family code immediately after independence. They believe that Tunisia is truly a progressive country regarding the woman question. They believe, as Obama would say, that 90 percent of the road has been traveled already toward the final emancipation of women. Skillfully, the government has announced compulsory sexual parity in the lists for elections to the constituent assembly. Slates not complying with this rule would be automatically eliminated.
This brings me to the pervasiveness of bourgeois nationalism. From the meetings of the Tunisian left in Paris that we have attended to the mass rallies in downtown Tunis, the national anthem has been sung and the national flag waved. The opportunist left has built illusions in the army, even without the Egyptian mythology of defense of the fatherland against Zionist Israel. As we have said, the ideology of the reformist left used to be the class-collaborationist line of “two stages” toward socialism, which has always ended in bloody defeat for the working class. Now it is one stage, toward a “democratic republic,” i.e., bourgeois democracy full stop. As we wrote regarding North Africa and the Near East in the February WV article on Tunisia:
“What is essential is the forging of revolutionary workers parties like the Bolshevik Party that led the working class of Russia to power in the 1917 October Revolution—parties committed to the program of permanent revolution, addressing the burning needs of the masses and unalterably leading them to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat. This is the program of the International Communist League. For a socialist federation of North Africa!”
Perhaps the most important point made by this article concerning the Arab Spring, Arab Revolution, Arab 1848 or the other myriad expressions of the democratic revolutionary outcome in the Near and Middle East comes near the end of the article. There the speaker notes that socialists, communists, and even those who call themselves Trotskyists speak, at most, only of a democratic revolution, no extension now or in the future to a socialist revolution like in the old days. Yet only Leon Trotsky’s strategic concept of the theory of permanent revolution in the year 2011 points the way forward in this area. Christ, this is one time it is practically a no-brainer to evoke the solution of a socialist revolution and still the reformists want to parse the thing down to something that might have been revolutionary, barely revolutionary, in the real 1848.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 982
10 June 2011
Economic Crisis and the Tunisia Uprising
The following is based on a report given by a comrade of the Ligue Trotskyste de France to a recent gathering of International Communist League members in Europe.
The reason the various uprisings that have been shaking the Arab world have taken place now and not five, ten or 20 years ago has, in my opinion, economic origins. The devastation of the world depression has added to a situation that had caused steady deterioration in the living conditions for the working masses of North Africa in the last 15 years or so, as seen especially in the huge rise in food prices and the slashing back of government food subsidies. The worsening of their conditions was caused by the adoption of IMF-dictated structural measures beginning in the 1980s and then various agreements, mainly between the European Union (EU) and North African countries, in the second part of the 1990s. This development needs to be traced in part to the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union.
The bottom line of the agreements was based on the imperialists’ promise that the European capitalists would outsource part of their industry to the countries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia). In reality, the domestic markets of these Arab countries are too small to draw massive foreign investment. Furthermore, industrial production outsourced from the European Union for export back to Europe was moved in large part to the capitalist sector in the Chinese deformed workers state. There is some spare parts production for the auto and aerospace industry in Tunisia, but the bulk of the export-oriented industry is cheap textile production with little value added.
The aim of the agreements was to dismantle tariff barriers between both sides of the Mediterranean and to do away with whatever minimal labor legislation had been in place. In fact, this process started first in Tunisia, and this is the country where it went furthest. So it is not a coincidence that the uprisings started in Tunisia.
This “neoliberalism” has left a devastated economy in North Africa. Of course, there are variations depending in particular on the presence or not of an important oil industry. Algeria is a major producer of oil and gas with significant production potential. However, heavy industry in Algeria, which had been built in the 1970s, has been largely dismantled. Steel production was downsized and then sold to Mittal Steel, among others. In general, from Morocco to Syria between 12 and 15 percent of the population is employed in industry, including light industry. The one exception is Tunisia, where the figure is above 20 percent.
The question of the impact of outsourcing on the strength of the working class and the trade unions is very relevant to North Africa. Labor regulations have been largely dismantled. There is a growing number of workers employed informally, through labor contractors, etc., including in the so-called “formal sector.” The head of the Tunisian high school teachers union told Informations Ouvrières (21 April), newspaper of the Lambertist Parti Ouvrier Indépendant:
“The great majority of the mobilizations demand a solution to the fundamental problem, which is employment and was a central demand of the revolution. There are very few strikes which raise the question of wage increases, even though this problem is far from negligible in many companies which do not respect any regulations and laws and underpay their workers. Most mobilizations want to end two plagues: outsourcing and temporary work.”
Representative of the growth of the informal sector proper was Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor who set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid in December, sparking the revolt.
There are also demographic reasons, which have come to a head in this period. After independence in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an explosive population growth due to the improvement of health systems. From around 1974 on, mass emigration to Europe was cut off as the European countries tightened their borders. While the life expectancy of the working class increased, the mass influx of youth provoked an explosion of the population able to work and consequently an explosion in structural mass unemployment rates.
This has been aggravated for college-educated youth. The governments in the Maghreb, particularly Tunisia, made a major effort to educate their youth. In the years after independence, when the development of national capitalism was based on a strong state sector and a significant teaching and health apparatus, the natural employment perspectives for college-educated youth were centered on the civil service. This has been increasingly reversed in the last 15 years or so, particularly as a result of IMF- and EU-dictated measures to reduce the public sector. As a result, the unemployment rate increases with the level of education. Even before the recent uprisings, it was due to reach catastrophic proportions in the next two or three years. Some 70,000 additional college graduates are scheduled to enter the labor market this fall, a large part of whom will be unemployed.
Since January, the situation in Tunisia has been made worse by the return of 20,000 Tunisians who had jobs in Libya and by foreign refugees from Libya, and has been aggravated as well by the catastrophic situation of the tourist industry, which is a major employer. People have tried to cross the sea and get to France, with hundreds of youth drowned (see “Refugees Drown as Imperialists Step Up War on Libya,” WV No. 981, 27 May). Now there are concentrations of Tunisian youth in the streets of Paris and Marseilles desperately looking for housing and jobs and trying to avoid police roundups. The IMF and World Bank have started to draw circles around Tunisia, with promises of loans to supposedly bridge the currently dire situation. As always in such circumstances, and as cruelly experienced right now by Greek, Irish and Portuguese workers, these schemes amount to channeling more fresh money into bank coffers and imposing more drastic austerity measures on workers.
In the last 15 years, the social security and unemployment compensation systems, which were basic at best, have been partially dismantled, so that insecurity at all levels has increased. In this context, it is quite remarkable that the working class has managed to appear as a factor at all in Tunisia, although of course not as a class for itself—i.e., conscious of its role as the gravedigger of capitalism. The working class remains chained to its own bourgeoisie by the trade-union bureaucracy and the small left groups that have emerged out of it lately, particularly the former Communist Party, called Ettajdid, the ex-Maoist Workers Communist Party of Tunisia (PCOT) and the ex-Pabloite League of the Workers Left (see “For Permanent Revolution Across North Africa! Tunisia: Dictator Flees, Protests Continue,” WV No. 973, 4 February).
Tunisia is supposedly the most advanced country in the Arab world when it comes to the status of women. The wives of both the late Habib Bourguiba, the country’s first ruler after independence from France, and the ousted dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali played important political roles, which is unique. People came from all over North Africa and the Arabian peninsula because prostitution in Tunisia was not illegal. Prostitutes were said to fink on their customers for the files of the political police. Polygamy was illegal, unlike abortion and contraception.
But the reality is of course quite grim. Arranged marriages are frequent, at least in the bourgeoisie. They still have magic rituals called the tasfih to supposedly protect the virginity of pubescent girls, particularly in the more backward interior of the country but also in Tunis. Hymenoplasty (surgical restoration of the hymen to give the appearance of virginity) and the like seem to be common among the more petty-bourgeois layers. Sexual harassment at work is frequent.
However, it appears that the ICL has been the only organization that has been prominently raising the woman question. In Egypt, the left capitulates to the Muslim Brotherhood. In Tunisia, left groups are also into class-collaborationist alliances with the Islamists. They portray them as “good guy” Islamists like Turkey’s ruling bourgeois Justice and Development Party. But I believe that a more important part of the reason why the Tunisian left has been silent on the woman question is because they are at bottom left-Bourguibists, and it was Bourguiba who established the family code immediately after independence. They believe that Tunisia is truly a progressive country regarding the woman question. They believe, as Obama would say, that 90 percent of the road has been traveled already toward the final emancipation of women. Skillfully, the government has announced compulsory sexual parity in the lists for elections to the constituent assembly. Slates not complying with this rule would be automatically eliminated.
This brings me to the pervasiveness of bourgeois nationalism. From the meetings of the Tunisian left in Paris that we have attended to the mass rallies in downtown Tunis, the national anthem has been sung and the national flag waved. The opportunist left has built illusions in the army, even without the Egyptian mythology of defense of the fatherland against Zionist Israel. As we have said, the ideology of the reformist left used to be the class-collaborationist line of “two stages” toward socialism, which has always ended in bloody defeat for the working class. Now it is one stage, toward a “democratic republic,” i.e., bourgeois democracy full stop. As we wrote regarding North Africa and the Near East in the February WV article on Tunisia:
“What is essential is the forging of revolutionary workers parties like the Bolshevik Party that led the working class of Russia to power in the 1917 October Revolution—parties committed to the program of permanent revolution, addressing the burning needs of the masses and unalterably leading them to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat. This is the program of the International Communist League. For a socialist federation of North Africa!”
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