From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-With Trotsky in Norway
Transcribed for the Internet by Per I. Matheson
How did we come to be in Norway? I think it necessary to say a few words about that. For a certain period of time, the Norwegian Labor Party belonged to the Communist International. It then broke with the Comintern (and the Comintern was not completely to blame for the rupture) without, nevertheless, affiliating itself with the Second International, which was too opportunistic for its taste. When this party came to power in 1935, it still felt some links with its past. I hastened to ask Oslo for a visa, hoping to be able peacefully to pursue my literary work in this calm country.
After some hesitation and some squabbling among the leaders of the party, I was granted an entry visa. I gladly signed the agreement not to intervene in the internal life of the country, etc., having no intention whatsoever of becoming involved in Norwegian politics. From my very first contacts with the leaders of the Labor Party, I got a strong whiff of the stale odor of the musty conservatism denounced with such vigor in Ibsen’s plays. It is true that the central organ of the party, Arbeiderbladet, invoked Marx and Lenin, and not the Bible and Luther, but it remained permeated with the shallow, well-meaning mediocrity that inspired such unconquerable aversion in Marx and Lenin.
The “Socialist” government made every effort to be as much like its reactionary predecessors as it possibly could. The old bureaucracy, in its entirety, stayed on. Was that good or bad? I soon had occasion to become convinced, by experience, that the old bourgeois functionaries sometimes have a broader viewpoint and a more profound sense of dignity than Messrs. “Socialist” Ministers. With the exception of a semi-official visit from Martin Tranmael, the leader of the Norwegian Labor Party (who, during his stay in the United States, had – a youthful abberation! – once belonged to the IWW), and from Trygve Lie, the minister of justice, I had no personal relations with anyone in government circles. I had almost no contact with the radicals, in order to avoid even the appearance of mixing into local politics.
My wife and I lived in extreme isolation, without thinking of feeling sorry for ourselves. A very friendly relationship was established with the Knudsens, politics being, by tacit consent, excluded from our conversations. During the moments of respite my illness afforded, I worked on The Revolution Betrayed, trying to bring out clearly the causes of the victory of the Soviet bureaucracy over the party, the soviets, and the people, and to sketch perspectives for the subsequent development of the USSR. On August 5 [1936] I sent the first copies of the finished manuscript to the American and French translators. The very same day, with Konrad Knudsen and his wife, we left for the south of Norway, where we were to spend two weeks at the seashore. But the following morning, while still en route, we learned that a group of fascists had forced their way into the house to steal my archives. It was not a hard thing to do: the house was not guarded – even the closets and cupboards were kept unlocked. Norwegians are so accustomed to the peaceful rhythm of their lives that we had not been able to get our friends to take even the most elementary precautions.
The fascists arrived at midnight, displayed fake police badges, and sought to begin the “house search” right away. Our hosts daughter found this suspicious, did not lose her presence of mind, and stood with arms outspread in front of the door to my room, declaring that she would let no one enter. Five fascists, still inexperienced in this kind of thing, found themselves put out of countenance by the courage of a young girl. Meanwhile, her younger brother gave the alarm; neighbors appeared on the scene in their nightclothes. The frightened invaders fled, taking with them a few papers snatched at random from the nearest table. The next day, and without difficulty, the police established their identity.
It seemed that life would return to its usual calm. But, continuing our journey to the south, we noticed that an automobile with four fascists, led by the engineer N., their propaganda director, was following us. We succeeded in getting rid of our pursuers only at the end of the trip, by not letting their car onto the ferry that was to take us to the other side of the fjord. We spent ten very peaceful days in the solitary fisherman’s cottage built on the rocks of the tiny island.
The minister of justice, until fairly recently a member of the Communist International, did not in the least share the police chiefs liberalism. Prime Minister Nygaardsvold showed himself even less inclined toward indulgence, He burned with desire to show proof of his firmness – but by no means toward the fascists who had committed the Weksal raid. My attackers remained at liberty, under the protection of the democratic constitution.
On August 14 the Soviet press agency Tass announced the discovery of a Trotskyist-Zinovievist terrorist plot. Our host, Konrad Knudsen, was the first to hear this news on the radio. But there was no electricity on the island, the antennas were most primitive, and, to make matters worse, the radio was not working well that night. “... Trotskyist groups ... counter-revolutionary activity ...” was all that Knudsen could get.
“What does it mean?” he asked me.
“Some very nasty piece of work,” I replied, “but exactly what, I don’t know.”
Toward dawn, a journalist friend, who had taken notes of the Tass communique, arrived from Kristiansand, a small neighboring village. Prepared for anything though I was, I still could not believe my eyes – so outrageously unbelievable did the mixture of villainy, impudence, and stupidity in this document seem to me.
“Terrorism, well and good,” I repeated, stupefied, “that is still within the realm of comprehension. But the Gestapo! Are you quite sure that it said ‘Gestapo’?”
“Yes.”
“So, right after the fascist attack, the Stalinists accuse me of being an ally of the fascists?”
“There is no doubt about it.”
“All the same, there are limits to everything! A communique like this can only be the work of a drunken agent provocateur and an illiterate one, to boot!”
Then and there, I dictated to the journalist my first statement on the announced trial [Let Us Know the Facts, in Writings 35-36]. It was necessary to prepare for struggle – some terrible blow was in the offing. The Kremlin could not, without strong reasons, compromise itself with so odious a frame-up.
The trial took world opinion, and even the Communist International, by surprise. The Norwegian Communist Party, despite its hostility to me, had held a meeting on August 14 to protest the fascist attack at Weksal – only a few hours before Tass had allied me to the fascists. The French Stalinist organ, l’Humanité, later published a cable from Oslo saying that inasmuch as the fascists had paid me a “friendly visit,” the Norwegian government considered my nocturnal interview with them an interference in the political life of the country. These gentlemen of l’Humanité have long since lost all shame and are ready, in all circumstances, to do anything to justify their salaries.
Starting with my very first statement to the press, I demanded a complete and open inquiry into Moscow’s accusations. I addressed an open letter to Mr. Swen, to complete my testimony [Open latter to the Oslo Chief of Police, in Writings 35-36]. The Norwegian government knew very well, the letter said, when it afforded me asylum, that I was a revolutionist and one of the moving spirits in creating a new International. While I rigorously abstained from any interference in Norway’s internal affairs, I did not believe – and I still do not believe – that the Norwegian government was called on to control my literary activity in other countries – and even less so since nowhere had my books and articles been the object of legal proceedings. My correspondence was permeated with the same ideas as my books. These ideas are possibly not to the taste of the fascists and Stalinists – about that I can do nothing. In the last few days something new has developed that outdoes everything the reactionary press has written about me. Moscow accuses me, on the radio, of unheard-of crimes. If the tiniest part of these accusations were true, I would not in truth merit the hospitality either of the Norwegian people or of any other people. But I am ready to answer these accusations immediately, in front of any impartial commission of inquiry whatsoever, in front of any public tribunal whatsoever. And I undertake to prove that my accusers are the real criminals.
Most of the Norwegian newspapers published this letter. It should be noted that, from the very beginning, the Norwegian press adopted a most suspicious attitude toward the Moscow trial. Martin Tranmael and his colleagues had belonged to the Communist International recently enough to know just what the GPU and its methods are! Besides, the state of mind of the masses of workers, angered by the fascist attack, was completely favorable to me. The right-wing press had lost its head completely. The day before, it was maintaining that I was acting in secret agreement with Stalin to prepare a revolution in Spain, France, Belgium, and also, naturally, in Norway. Without renouncing this thesis, it then went to the defense of the Moscow bureaucracy against my terrorist attacks ...
We had returned to Weksal for the end of the Moscow trial. Dictionary in hand, I puzzled out the Tass reports in the Oslo papers. I felt as if I were in a madhouse. Journalists besieged us – the Norwegian wire service was still conscientiously publishing my rebuttals, which were spread throughout the world. At that moment two young friends, who had at an earlier date been my secretaries, arrived: Erwin Wolf from Czechoslovakia, and Jean van Heijenoort from France. – They were of tremendous help to us in those hectic and anxious days of waiting for two denouements, one of developments in Moscow and the other of developments in Oslo.
On August 26, while eight plainclothes policemen occupied the yard of our house, Police Chief Askvig and a functionary of the Central Passport Bureau in charge of the supervision of aliens called on us. These important visitors invited me to sign a document accepting new conditions for residing in Norway: I was to agree to write no more about current political matters and to give no interviews; I was to agree to have all my correspondence, incoming and outgoing, inspected by the police. Without making the slightest allusion to the Moscow trial, the official document mentioned, as an example of my misdeeds, only an article dealing with French politics that had appeared in an American weekly, the Nation, and my open letter to the chief of criminal police, Mr. Swen. Obviously, the Norwegian government was using the first pretexts that came to mind to mask the real cause of its change in attitude. Only later did I understand why they asked for my signature: the constitution of the country makes no provision for restricting an individual’s liberties without due process. The ingenious minister of justice had only to fill this gap in the basic law of the land by inviting me, of my own free will, to ask for chains and handcuffs. I categorically refused.
The minister immediately had me informed that henceforth journalists and intermediaries or third parties in general would not be permitted to see me, and that the government would soon assign me and my wife another residence, I made every effort, by mail, to get the minister to understand certain basic truths: that control of my literary activity was not within the jurisdiction of a Passport Bureau employee; that restraining my freedom to communicate with the press, at a time when I was the object of malicious charges, was tantamount to siding with my accusers. All this was very true – but the Soviet legation had more convincing arguments at its disposal!
The following morning, police agents conducted me to Oslo to be interrogated – still in the capacity of “witness” in the affair of the fascist raid. The examining magistrate was hardly interested in the facts. On the other hand, he interrogated me for two hours about my political activities, my connections, my visitors. Long debates ensued on the question of whether my articles criticized other governments. It goes without saying that I did not dispute the point. The magistrate concluded that this kind of behavior was not in accordance with the agreement I had made to avoid all actions hostile to other states. I replied that only in totalitarian states are governments and states considered one and the same. Democratic regimes do not consider criticism of a government as an attack against the state. Otherwise, what would remain of the parliamentary system? The only sensible interpretation of my original agreement was that I had promised not to engage in any illegal, clandestine activity whatsoever in Norway. But it could not possibly occur to me that, living in Norway, I would not be able to publish, in other countries, articles in no way contrary to the laws of those countries. The judge had other ideas on the subject or, at the very least, other instructions – not very clear to be sure, but (as we were to see) sufficient to cause my internment.
From the courthouse I was taken before the minister of justice, who was surrounded by his highest officials. Again I was invited to sign the document, very slightly modified, agreeing to police surveillance, which I had refused to sign the previous day.
“If you want to arrest me,” I demanded, “why do you want me to authorize you to do it?”
“But,” the minister replied, with an air of profundity, “between arrest and complete liberty there is an intermediate situation.”
“That can only be an equivocation – or a trap; I prefer to be arrested!”
The minister made this concession to me and gave the necessary orders on the spot. Police agents roughly shoved aside Erwin Wolf, who had until then accompanied me and who was getting ready to return with me. Four policemen, this time in uniform, brought me back to Weksal. In the courtyard I saw others pushing van Heijenoort, whom they held by the shoulders, out of the house. My wife, alarmed, came out. They kept me locked in the car while indoors they prepared our isolation from the Knudsen family. Police occupied the dining room and cut the telephone wire. We were thus prisoners. The mistress of the house brought us our meals under the surveillance of two policemen. The doors to our rooms were always kept ajar. On September 2 we were transferred to Sundby, a village in Storsand about twenty-two miles from Oslo, at the edge of a fjord. There we were to spend three months and twenty days under the surveillance of thirteen policemen. Our mail passed through the Central Passport Bureau – which couldn’t see any reason for hurrying. No one was admitted to see us. To justify this procedure, which is contrary to the Norwegian constitution, the government had to pass a special law. As for my wife, she was arrested without even any attempt at explanation.
It would seem that the Norwegian fascists had a victory to celebrate. In reality, it was not they who were the victors, The secret of my internment was simple. The government in Moscow had threatened Norwegian commerce with a boycott – and had immediately given concrete examples of the seriousness of this threat, Shipowners besieged the ministries:
“Do what you like, but give us Soviet business.”
The country’s merchant marine, fourth largest in the world, holds a decisive position in public affairs, and the shipowners make policy – regardless of who occupies the seats of government. Stalin used the monopoly in foreign commerce to prevent me from unmasking his frame-up. Norwegian financial circles came to his aid. The Socialist ministers justified themselves by saying: “All the same, we can’t sacrifice the country’s vital interests to Trotsky!” That was the reason for my arrest.
That monopoly capitalism has mercilessly battered democracy and its guarantees is beyond question. Doesn’t Martin Tranmael’s dreary sentence give us a glimpse of how the Socialists plan to make use of this much-abused democracy to transform society? Moreover, it must be added that in no other democratic country but “Socialist” Norway would it have been possible to flout the norms of legality with so much cynicism! We were interned on the twenty-eighth of August; a royal decree was promulgated on the thirty-first, giving the government the right to intern “undesirable” aliens. Even granting the legality of this decree – which was contested by many jurists – for three days we had been arbitrarily and forcible imprisoned. But this was only the beginning – and things were to go from bad to worse.
Beethoven was a great help to us, but the music was a rarity. Most often we had to listen to Goebbels, Hitler, or some orator in Moscow. Our small, low-ceilinged rooms were immediately filled with a muddy tide of lies. Moscow’s orators lied in diverse languages at diverse hours of the day and night – always on the same subject: They explained how and why I had organized the Kirov assassination. (I had paid no more attention to Kirov during his lifetime than I had to some general somewhere in China.) The orator, invariably devoid of knowledge and talent, went through an endless string of sentences, to which only the lie lent any cohesiveness.
“Allied with the Gestapo, Trotsky intends to bring about the defeat of democracy in France, a victory for Franco in Spain, the fall of socialism in the USSR, and, above all, the loss of our great leader, our man of genius, our beloved ...” The speaker’s voice was mournful and yet, at the same time, impudent. Obviously, this assembly-line liar was sneering at France, Spain, and socialism. He was thinking of his bread and butter. After a few minutes, listening to this became intolerably painful. Afterward, we asked ourselves several times a day with embarrassment: Can the human race possibly be so stupid? And just as often, my wife and I would repeat this sentence: “All the same, we cannot believe them to be so low.”
Nevertheless, I could not passively submit to such abominable accusations. What could I possibly do? I could try to bring suit against the Norwegian Stalinists and fascists who had slandered me in the press, in order to prove in court the falseness of Moscow’s accusations. But in response to my attempt, the government on October 29 promulgated another special law authorizing the minister of justice to deny any recourse to legal action to an “interned alien.” The minister was not slow to use his new right. The first illegality thus served to justify the second.
Why did the government adopt so scandalous a course? Still for the very same reason. Oslo’s tiny “Communist” sheet, which only the previous day was lavishing on the Socialist government proofs of its servility, now addressed the most outrageously arrogant threats to that government: Trotsky’s attack on “the prestige of the Soviet courts” would bring about the most unfortunate economic consequences for Norway! The prestige of the Soviet courts? But that could suffer only if I succeeded in proving before the Norwegian bar the falseness of Moscow’s accusations. That was exactly what the Kremlin was in mortal fear of.
I tried to prosecute my slanderers in other countries, in Czechoslovakia, in Switzerland. The result was not long in forthcoming: the minister of justice informed me on November 11, in a rude letter (Norwegian Socialist ministers seem to feel that rudeness is a symbol of power), that I was forbidden to attempt legal actions, anywhere. To protect my rights in another country, I would first have to “leave Norway.” These words contained a scarcely veiled threat of expulsion – of delivery to the GPU. And that is the interpretation I gave this document in a letter to my French attorney, Gerard Rosenthal. The Norwegian censor permitted the letter to pass, thus confirming its tenor. Alarmed, my friends began to knock at every door, in search of a visa for me. The result of their efforts was that the doors of far-off Mexico were opened to me. But we shall come back to that.
When I look back today on this period of internment, I must say that never, anywhere, in the course of my entire life – and I have lived through many things – was I persecuted with as much miserable cynicism as I was by the Norwegian “Socialist” government. For four months these ministers, dripping with democratic hypocrisy, gripped me in a stranglehold to prevent me from protesting the greatest crime history may ever know.
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Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
This personal account throws some unfamiliar light on Trotsky’s views and personality and the response of the Scandinavian Trotskyism to the Finnish War. It is also a fascinating account of early Norwegian Trotskyism with which most readers will be unfamiliar.
After I had finished my technical education in Trondheim, the third city in Norway, I took further studies in photogrammetry in Berlin, in the technical high school. My father had a big surveying office in Norway, and photogrammetry was the up and coming thing. In the autumn of 1932 I got involved in the German Communist movement because after the expulsions of 1928-29, Mot-Dag as an organisation was heavily involved with the Communist Opposition in Berlin. The organisation was called the Communist Party (Opposition) (KPO) which was the centre of an international organisation (IVKO – International Verein Kommunistische Opposition) under the leadership of Heinrich Brandler and Fenner Brockway. When I went there they were publishing a paper called Gegen den Strom (Against the Stream). I gave them a report about the dispute between Denmark and Norway over Greenland. I went on the editorial board in the autumn of 1932 as a representative from Mot-Dag. I also went to some lectures by Brandler and Thalheimer on general politics. Brandler and Thalheimer never slept two nights in the same place. They were always on the move. The meetings of the editorial board could no longer be held in the evening. We would meet in the business quarter in the day time, as that was the best camouflage. I do not know what they planned to do in the event of a Nazi takeover. They thought that the political future was obvious. There was great optimism in the autumn of 1932 because there was the new general election in November, and in this election Hitler lost two million votes. I had some discussions with a Liberal and he said ‘Now Hitler is finished!’ and I said: ‘You are wrong, because even now they have great influence in the trade union movement, and the leader of theirs in the Ruhr district has virtually taken over the trade union, which is much more important from a revolutionary point of view than losing two million votes’.
Then, just before Hitler came to power, I fell sick and went back to Norway at Christmas 1932. Hitler took over in January, a week or two after I left. As a Norwegian national I do not think I was in any danger, and I went back in 1936 without any difficulty.
It was in September or October or November that we had a transport strike. All the trams and buses stopped, and in Prussia there was a Labour government which sent troops against the strikers. The Nazis joined the strike, and as a result two Nazis were killed by soldiers or by the patriotic police. That made a very great impression on the workers in Norway.
Mot-Dag made attempts to get Jewish women out of Germany. A number of our people went to Germany and married them. In some cases it became a business racket, and some did it in return for paying off their student loans. These were not the political people.
When I arrived back in Norway in 1933, I did not get any technical employment, so I worked for Mot-Dag from 1933-34. After we were thrown out of the Comintern, Mot-Dag was independent (1929-36). The main theoretical work had been to get a translation of Karl Marx’s Capital published. This project was led by Falk. There were about a hundred, mainly intellectual, members in the organisation in those days, in different kinds of professions – lawyers, historians, and so on. Those people were able to make the first encyclopaedia based on Marxism and working class politics ever published outside Russia. The money was given by a big Labour weekly which was going well. The three main sources of income in those days were the publication of a big monthly paper, Mot-Dag, the translation of Capital and a series of pamphlets on the sexual question. These last were a tremendous success, which earned our organisation a lot of money. The translation of Capital sold quite nicely and we could make our political points in the discussions with the help of Karl Marx’s Capital and ‘Theory of Crises’. The encyclopaedia came out in six volumes. Only the first and second volumes of Capital had been translated by 1936 when Mot-Dag joined the Labour Party and Falk was thrown out.
In Mot-Dag I had a sub-editorial job and had to do the lay-out of the monthly paper and collect the manuscripts from people on time.
In 1934-35 I held small jobs on building sites in Oslo, and I was able to join the building workers’ union. In 1936 I got a job as a surveyor, working for the union of unskilled building workers in Oslo. That was the biggest trade union in Oslo with 6,000 members. We controlled all building work in Oslo and in many sites outside Oslo, such as those for hydroelectrical power stations, roads, and so on. All work had to be paid according to a certain price list. Ah work was piece work, which had to be measured, and the money was paid out under union control. I and between five and ten technicians had to survey all the different jobs that were on that list. My job was to see to it that every worker got his pay. By that system the job of foreman, the capitalists’ representative on the floor, was reduced to getting the necessary materials to the workers. I was the first person with a higher technical education who was attached to a local trade union as an employee. Before me there had been two lawyers on the highest level of the union. Trygve Lie[3] was the first who joined the trade union organisation. After him was Wiggo Hansteen [4], who was shot by the Germans in 1941. I had an interesting job dealing with the wage rates for different jobs, and I developed considerable standing in the union between 1936-40. That was more or less my background in politics and trade union matters, from which I discussed a number of different questions with Trotsky.
Falk was very impressed by Trotsky. He went to Copenhagen in 1932 to try to get Trotsky to speak to the Norwegian student organisation. Trotsky was suspicious of him because of his Stalinist past, and the Trotskyists kept the whole thing very quiet. Norway had a Liberal government in 1932, but the Liberal government refused a visa except for a short visit.
Later, in 1935, there was a great change in Norway as the Labour Party got the chance of taking over the government, though it was not the majority. The general election of 1935 gave them the majority, and some went into the government. At the same time Trotsky’s case came up. Trotsky was invited at the beginning of July. He was not at all keen to go. Three people took up the task of getting him to Norway. They were Waiter Held, Scheflo [6], who was the former leader of the Communist Party, and Falk, who was the leader of Mot-Dag. Held wrote to him asking him to come on 27 March 1935. The first plan was that he would come into the country as a tourist, would stay with Scheflo in the south of Norway, and from there should apply for an extension of his stay. Trotsky said that he would not use that method – he had to do it openly, and he insisted upon that. Nygaardsvold [7] was asked, and he said: ‘Cannot you wait until the Parliamentary recess in the summer?’ Then the situation got worse for Trotsky in France, so that he had to leave there. He said to me:’It seemed that I had a choice as between Madagascar and Oslo, and I think Norway is preferable. So he got a telegram from his son saying that it was to be Norway in April. He went to Paris and then he stayed in Chamonix and was only allowed to be there for 24 hours. It was a really difficult situation at the beginning of June, and from 1 June to 12 June there was a lot of work for Held in persuading the government to let him in. The Norwegian state bureaucracy put up every obstacle in Held’s way, but finally Trotsky was allowed in.
I met Trotsky some time after he arrived in Norway in the middle of June 1935. I was a political and personal friend of Waiter Held, who was Trotsky’s representative in Norway. In those days I was a regular reader of the German Trotskyist paper Unser Wort. I met Trotsky as soon as he had settled down in Hönefoss, which is a little town about an hour’s drive from Oslo. In those days I had a car at my disposal and on many occasions took Waiter Held over to see Trotsky.
I stayed with Trotsky for two periods of time, each lasting for a number of days. One was in September 1935, and one was at Christmas 1935 and early 1936. In between, and later, I went only on day trips to Hönefoss, and in 1936 I remember we mainly discussed the situation in the Norwegian trade unions. I tried to explain my two longer visits with Trotsky to Deutscher, but he got it wrong. Trotsky had a pleasant time in 1935. No-one bothered him except for some articles in the Agrarian Party papers, and even the Communists kept quiet in 1935 so that he had a good opportunity to do some work. However, in the summer of 1935 Trotsky had been sick. The leading Mot-Dag doctor, Karl Evang, saw to it that he was sent to hospital for investigations and tried to find out what was wrong. According to his report to Mot-Dag neither Socialist nor capitalist doctors could find out what was wrong with him. It could have been nervous strain, and he was discharged from hospital in August. I think he recovered well by September 1935. At the end of August, Konrad Knudsen, Trotsky’s host, asked me if I knew a place where Trotsky could have a peaceful rest out of reach of people. At that time we used a big house, in a lonely park in a forest in Andorsrud in Skoger as a resort for holidays. Once upon a time Andorsrud had been a large property which had gone broke. In 1935 it was owned by a bank, but the old woman who was the former owner of the house still lived there and kept it in good order, and we used to go there for weekends. So I was able to arrange it.
Sköger is 90 kilometres south-west of Oslo and about an hour and a half’s drive from Hönefoss. I had a car at my disposal in those days because I was in charge of an aeroplane firm’s section for photogrammetry for map-making. We met secretly in Drammen, midway between Skogen and Oslo. Trotsky arrived with Natalia, Konrad Knudsen and Jean van Heijenoort, who was his secretary then, together with my wife and I. I took this opportunity of taking the week off to get married, and the week we spent together with Trotsky was also my honeymoon. Waiter Held also married at this time. It was a very quiet and peaceful time and we had a lot of discussions in front of the fireplace in the evenings, or when we were walking. That was my main period with Trotsky. My wife spoke fluent French because she had been in France as an au pair; also she was a nurse, and Natalia, who spoke very good French, was then suffering with some stomach ailment, so they spent a lot of time together. My wife looked after Trotsky’s health, and she was astonished at the sort of pills he needed for digestion, and so on. I was not able to communicate very much with Natalia because she only spoke French. With Trotsky it was much easier, because I spoke German well, and he did too. It was only occasionally that I was able to communicate with Natalia, but for my wife it was the other way round. After that week I met Trotsky time and again. In December 1935 I was mobilised by Konrad Knudsen asking me to come to help because Trotsky had gone for a vacation in Knudsen’s hut in the wooded district east of Hönefoss, and there had been a very heavy snowfall and Trotsky had been snowed in. I immediately went there. In the neighbourhood there was a hotel. When I arrived Trotsky had been able to get out of the hut on his own. He and Natalia had succeeded in getting down to the valley without our help, so we only went to the hut to clear up and put it back in some order. (It was a difficult time with storms and heavy snow falls in December 1935. It would have been impossible for Piatakov to have visited Trotsky then, as Vyshinsky claimed during the second Moscow Trial.) I was able to ski to the hut and down to the valley, although the snow was knee deep. I spent Christmas Eve together with Trotsky. I remember that there were a number of people and some local kids, and Trotsky was pressurised to walk around the Christmas tree, but he refused to go along with this custom of walking around the tree.
He needed a new milieu in winter time, and he got it in the hut. He said later on that he was too old for the exercise of being snowed in and getting out. It seemed to me that the shock brought back his working abilities. He worked very hard during the spring of 1936. Konrad Knudsen told me that Trotsky used to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, get himself some tea or bread, and then work on his own until 8 o’clock in the morning, when he would go down for his usual breakfast meal. Then he would carry on working all day. There were times when his secretaries complained that even they could not stick to the eight hours work, either.
In 1936 I left my business job and went into the trade union movement and got a professional job there. I remember that I discussed the Norwegian trade union movement with Trotsky in 1936, but I was not really very much involved with him that year. He was busy in the spring of 1936 writing The Revolution Betrayed, and I have not now any remembrance of our being together during this period. When he was arrested in August 1936, he had been in the southern part of Norway together with Scheflo, who was a political friend of his and the leader of the Norwegian Communist Party from 1923 until he was expelled or left in 1928 (as were most of our friends from the Comintern).
The reason for Trotsky’s expulsion from Norway in 1936, as far as governmental opinions and facts are concerned, have now been published in a book in Norway, written by a Liberal researcher named Yngvar Ustvedt. He had the opportunity of going through the wartime files of documents of the Nazi organisation and the documents in the Norwegian Foreign Office. The book is more or less a compilation from these documents. The research for the book has been done rather hurriedly, and has been published under the title of The World Revolution from Hönefoss. This book gives the answers to most of the questions concerning the facts and the forces behind the official actions.
There are plenty of interviews and quotations from eyewitnesses. Documents exist giving the official accounts and explanations. The attacks on Trotsky were made as a combined operation by very different groups. It is very difficult to divide them because they were so interconnected. Many things happened at the same time. So many incidents happened on different planes.
As soon as the Revolution Betrayed was finished he went down to Scheflo and spent the whole summer there. He was immediately attacked by forces in Germany who acted with the help of gangs of Norwegian followers of Quisling. The German attack was followed by a Russian attack in connection with the first Moscow Trial in the middle of August. The Labour minority government which had given Trotsky asylum came under heavy attack from internal forces, the Liberals and reactionary politicians as well as Nazi-sympathising bureaucrats.
This was during the first Moscow Trial, and he defended himself vigorously, and gave press conferences, and so on. This was noticed in the Norwegian Parliament and because of Russian pressure he was interned. A certain Major Attlee, who was Prime Minister of Britain after the war, sent a private letter to Nygaardsvold. Attlee pointed out that this treatment of Trotsky was a very bad precedent for all refugees. I asked here where one could find a copy of this letter, but I have not been able to find out. It was a private letter. The security forces were called out and it was obvious that his life was in danger. Later two Nazis admitted in court that they had conspired to kill him. One of them tried to burgle his house, and the burglar said in a book that when he met Trotsky the latter spoke fluently in German and stated that the Nazi was helping Stalin and Stalin’s politics. That made an impression on the Nazi, who sat down, thought it over and decided he did not want to help Stalin. As a result the man was reprimanded by his Nazi superior, and accused of losing his Nazi ideology. Later when Trotsky went to Scheflo he was followed by a gang of Nazis, one of whom had a room at the hotel, and he had an automatic pistol pointed at him, so he immediately dashed round the corner. His life was really in danger. Although I could see that he was very angry at being interned and kept there, yet I think that this actually saved his life.
The Labour politicians feared they might lose their governmental position. They got panicky, and Trygve Lie resorted to brutality towards Trotsky. Trotsky was condemned to death in Moscow as an international terrorist on 24 August. On 25 August he was put under arrest by a decision of the Norwegian Labour government. So he was interned and placed under the surveillance of the state police and cut off from the world. He was deprived of the possibility of defending himself and of criticising the Trial. The state police were led by a man who committed suicide in 1945 shortly before he could have been arrested by the liberation movement. His name was Jonas Lie. During the war he was the leader of the Norwegian internal police fighting against the resistance movement, 1942-45. But in 1936 he and Trygve Lie collaborated, and had Trotsky interned in a place called Sundby in Hurum, between Oslo and Skoger. That was the first, up to now the only, concentration camp that there ever was in Norway, and it was established in September-October 1936. I was again mobilised in December 1936 by Waiter Held and Konrad Knudsen, who asked me to be prepared to be a bodyguard for Trotsky, who was going to go through France. His friends there had obtained a transit visa for him. I got in contact with a well-known French lawyer, Gerard Rosenthal, who had come to Norway. Shortly before Christmas we discussed how we were going to contact Trotsky and arrange the journey to France. We applied to Trygve Lie but only got an evasive answer. Just before Christmas it was announced that Trotsky had left Norway some weeks before, although they had still kept a police guard around the place to prevent the Communist Party and others from intervening. So he had been deported secretly on a Norwegian vessel under the control of Jonas Lie. He was sent to a Norwegian concentration camp in September, but he was not handed over to Russian justice, thanks mainly to that letter from Attlee to the Norwegian Labour government. Under police guard, he and Natalia were sent to Mexico on 8 January, where he regained his freedom. To avoid being attacked on the open sea, the vessel took detours on the way to Mexico. The ship had been ordered to maintain radio silence, but the Stalinists seem to have learned of the wavelength and code, and they sent a message: ‘New orders. Go to the Baltic’. The captain was clever enough not to reply and to carry on to Mexico. For Held, myself and the French lawyer Gerard Rosenthal, it was a bitter disappointment that Trotsky had left us. It was almost Christmas 1936. The idea that Mexico would regard it as an honour to give Trotsky unconditional asylum came from Aras, the Turkish foreign minister. The Russian Ambassador sent Trygve Lie flowers when Trotsky was sent to Mexico.
There is a problem about the real causes as to why Trotsky was first invited and then was expelled from Norway. It is rather a long story and to answer it would depend upon your point of view. Trotsky explained his view in a book published in Switzerland: Stalins Verbrechen (The Crimes of Stalin). I tried to investigate which forces in the labour movement were behind Trygve Lie in his work of expelling Trotsky. Soon after Trotsky was expelled I, together with Konrad Knudsen, went to meet the right wing leader of the Norwegian labour movement. The labour movement had been split in three in 1923, a right wing Social Democrat Party, a centrist party led by Tranmael [8], and a Communist Party round Scheflo. When I met the right wing leader, Magnus Nilssen [9], in 1937 I asked him if he felt like a victor now that Trotsky had been expelled from Norway. He got a bit touchy and said that I was quite wrong. It was not the right wing Social Democrats who stood behind Trygve Lie, it was their opponents. The people around Trygve Lie who pushed him were the people who, in the old days, had been ‘so unbelievably revolutionary’, as Nilssen expressed it. After later investigation I found that that he was correct. It was wavering centrists around Tranmael who were the driving forces behind Trygve Lie, and the best helpers of Stalin in his bloody work.
The basic reason for Trotsky’s expulsion was the pressure from Germany and Russia from the outside, and from the Norwegian Nazis from the inside. This sketch only gives a bare and incomplete picture about what happened to Trotsky in the second half of 1936. I intend to add a further report when I return to Norway and have studied the recently published book World Revolution from Hönefoss, and have looked into my own archives.
Leon Trotsky in Norway
Transcribed for the Internet by Per I. Matheson
[References from original translation removed]
In “Socialist” Norway
December 1936
My wife and I spent about eighteen months, from June 1935 to September 1936, in Weksal, a village thirty-five miles from Oslo. We lived in the home of Konrad Knudsen, editor of a working class paper. This residence had been designated for us by the Norwegian government. Our life there was completely peaceful and well ordered – one might even say petty bourgeios. The household soon became used to us, and an almost silent but very friendly relationship was established between us and the people around us. Once a week we went to the cinema with the Knudsens to see two-year-old Hollywood productions. From time to time, mainly during the summer, we received visitors, mostly people who belonged to the left wing of the working class movement. The radio kept us abreast of what was going on in the world; we had begun to use this magical, and unbearable, invention three years earlier. We were especially amazed at hearing the official pronouncements of the Soviet bureaucrats. These individuals feel just as much at home over the airwaves as they do in their own offices. They give orders, threaten, and quarrel among themselves – neglecting the most elementary rules of prudence regarding state secrets. Without any doubt, enemy general staffs glean priceless information from the intemperate language of Soviet “chiefs” – big and small. All this goes on in a country where even being suspected of opposition carries the risk of immediately being accused of spionage!
The arrival of the mail was the high point of the day in Weksal. About one in the afternoon we impatiently looked for the disabled mailman who, by sled in winter and by bicycle in summer, brough us a heavy packet of papers and letters bearing stamps from every part of the world. Our unusual mail caused the police commissioner of Hønefoss (a neighboring village of 4,000 inhabitants) many a sleepless night. It had the same effect on the Socialist government in Oslo – something we were not to learn until later.How did we come to be in Norway? I think it necessary to say a few words about that. For a certain period of time, the Norwegian Labor Party belonged to the Communist International. It then broke with the Comintern (and the Comintern was not completely to blame for the rupture) without, nevertheless, affiliating itself with the Second International, which was too opportunistic for its taste. When this party came to power in 1935, it still felt some links with its past. I hastened to ask Oslo for a visa, hoping to be able peacefully to pursue my literary work in this calm country.
After some hesitation and some squabbling among the leaders of the party, I was granted an entry visa. I gladly signed the agreement not to intervene in the internal life of the country, etc., having no intention whatsoever of becoming involved in Norwegian politics. From my very first contacts with the leaders of the Labor Party, I got a strong whiff of the stale odor of the musty conservatism denounced with such vigor in Ibsen’s plays. It is true that the central organ of the party, Arbeiderbladet, invoked Marx and Lenin, and not the Bible and Luther, but it remained permeated with the shallow, well-meaning mediocrity that inspired such unconquerable aversion in Marx and Lenin.
The “Socialist” government made every effort to be as much like its reactionary predecessors as it possibly could. The old bureaucracy, in its entirety, stayed on. Was that good or bad? I soon had occasion to become convinced, by experience, that the old bourgeois functionaries sometimes have a broader viewpoint and a more profound sense of dignity than Messrs. “Socialist” Ministers. With the exception of a semi-official visit from Martin Tranmael, the leader of the Norwegian Labor Party (who, during his stay in the United States, had – a youthful abberation! – once belonged to the IWW), and from Trygve Lie, the minister of justice, I had no personal relations with anyone in government circles. I had almost no contact with the radicals, in order to avoid even the appearance of mixing into local politics.
My wife and I lived in extreme isolation, without thinking of feeling sorry for ourselves. A very friendly relationship was established with the Knudsens, politics being, by tacit consent, excluded from our conversations. During the moments of respite my illness afforded, I worked on The Revolution Betrayed, trying to bring out clearly the causes of the victory of the Soviet bureaucracy over the party, the soviets, and the people, and to sketch perspectives for the subsequent development of the USSR. On August 5 [1936] I sent the first copies of the finished manuscript to the American and French translators. The very same day, with Konrad Knudsen and his wife, we left for the south of Norway, where we were to spend two weeks at the seashore. But the following morning, while still en route, we learned that a group of fascists had forced their way into the house to steal my archives. It was not a hard thing to do: the house was not guarded – even the closets and cupboards were kept unlocked. Norwegians are so accustomed to the peaceful rhythm of their lives that we had not been able to get our friends to take even the most elementary precautions.
The fascists arrived at midnight, displayed fake police badges, and sought to begin the “house search” right away. Our hosts daughter found this suspicious, did not lose her presence of mind, and stood with arms outspread in front of the door to my room, declaring that she would let no one enter. Five fascists, still inexperienced in this kind of thing, found themselves put out of countenance by the courage of a young girl. Meanwhile, her younger brother gave the alarm; neighbors appeared on the scene in their nightclothes. The frightened invaders fled, taking with them a few papers snatched at random from the nearest table. The next day, and without difficulty, the police established their identity.
It seemed that life would return to its usual calm. But, continuing our journey to the south, we noticed that an automobile with four fascists, led by the engineer N., their propaganda director, was following us. We succeeded in getting rid of our pursuers only at the end of the trip, by not letting their car onto the ferry that was to take us to the other side of the fjord. We spent ten very peaceful days in the solitary fisherman’s cottage built on the rocks of the tiny island.
Elections to the Storting [parliament] were approaching, and the opposing candidates were looking for some sensational issue to enliven their not very original programs. The government newspapers (Norway has a population of only three million, but the Labor Party there publishes thirty-five dailies and a dozen weeklies) launched a rather moderate anti-fascist campaign. The right-wing press answered with an extremely violent campaign against me and against the government that had granted me an entry visa. The reactionary press collected political articles by me that had appeared in various countries, had them hastily trans lated, and ran them under sensational headlines. Suddenly I found myself in the very center of Norwegian politics.
The attack by the fascists had aroused the greatest indignation among the workers. “We must pour oil on the troubled waters,” observed the Social Democratic leaders, with an air of profundity. “But why?” “So that the fascists aren’t torn to shreds by the workers.” The experience of several European countries had taught these gentlemen nothing; they prefered to wait until the fascists tore them to shreds. I steered clear of polemicizing, even in private conversation, because any careless word might find its way into print. There was really nothing for me to do but shrug my shoulders and wait. For several days we continued to climb the rocks and to fish.
Far more threatening clouds were meanwhile gathering in the East. There they were preparing to let the world know that I was working with the Nazis to destroy the Soviets. The Weksal attack and the violent press campaign of the fascists came at an awkward time for Moscow. Confronted with these untimely events, would Moscow have to call a halt to its plans? On the contrary, it was possible for the events in Norway to speed up the setting of the stage for the Moscow trial.
Needless to say, the Soviet legation in Oslo was not idle. On August 13, the Oslo chief of criminal police, Mr. Swen, arrived by plane to call on us; he wished to interrogate me, as a witness, about the fascist raid. This hastily scheduled interrogation, by order of the minister of justice, boded no good. Swen showed me a letter (the contents of which were completely innocuous) that I had written to a friend in Paris and that had already been published in the Norwegian press. He asked me to account for my activities in Norway. This police functionary justified his questions by telling me that those who had attacked my home insisted on the criminal character of these activities. A fascist lawyer was even demanding my indictment by reason of “plots that could drag Norway into war with other states.” Mr. Swen’s conduct was most correct. He was obviously aware that the questions he had been ordered to ask me were uncalled for. At the close of my long deposition, Mr. Swen informed the press that he found nothing in my actions to be contrary to the laws or to the best interests of Norway. We could again feel that the “incident was closed.” But it had only just begun.The minister of justice, until fairly recently a member of the Communist International, did not in the least share the police chiefs liberalism. Prime Minister Nygaardsvold showed himself even less inclined toward indulgence, He burned with desire to show proof of his firmness – but by no means toward the fascists who had committed the Weksal raid. My attackers remained at liberty, under the protection of the democratic constitution.
On August 14 the Soviet press agency Tass announced the discovery of a Trotskyist-Zinovievist terrorist plot. Our host, Konrad Knudsen, was the first to hear this news on the radio. But there was no electricity on the island, the antennas were most primitive, and, to make matters worse, the radio was not working well that night. “... Trotskyist groups ... counter-revolutionary activity ...” was all that Knudsen could get.
“What does it mean?” he asked me.
“Some very nasty piece of work,” I replied, “but exactly what, I don’t know.”
Toward dawn, a journalist friend, who had taken notes of the Tass communique, arrived from Kristiansand, a small neighboring village. Prepared for anything though I was, I still could not believe my eyes – so outrageously unbelievable did the mixture of villainy, impudence, and stupidity in this document seem to me.
“Terrorism, well and good,” I repeated, stupefied, “that is still within the realm of comprehension. But the Gestapo! Are you quite sure that it said ‘Gestapo’?”
“Yes.”
“So, right after the fascist attack, the Stalinists accuse me of being an ally of the fascists?”
“There is no doubt about it.”
“All the same, there are limits to everything! A communique like this can only be the work of a drunken agent provocateur and an illiterate one, to boot!”
Then and there, I dictated to the journalist my first statement on the announced trial [Let Us Know the Facts, in Writings 35-36]. It was necessary to prepare for struggle – some terrible blow was in the offing. The Kremlin could not, without strong reasons, compromise itself with so odious a frame-up.
The trial took world opinion, and even the Communist International, by surprise. The Norwegian Communist Party, despite its hostility to me, had held a meeting on August 14 to protest the fascist attack at Weksal – only a few hours before Tass had allied me to the fascists. The French Stalinist organ, l’Humanité, later published a cable from Oslo saying that inasmuch as the fascists had paid me a “friendly visit,” the Norwegian government considered my nocturnal interview with them an interference in the political life of the country. These gentlemen of l’Humanité have long since lost all shame and are ready, in all circumstances, to do anything to justify their salaries.
Starting with my very first statement to the press, I demanded a complete and open inquiry into Moscow’s accusations. I addressed an open letter to Mr. Swen, to complete my testimony [Open latter to the Oslo Chief of Police, in Writings 35-36]. The Norwegian government knew very well, the letter said, when it afforded me asylum, that I was a revolutionist and one of the moving spirits in creating a new International. While I rigorously abstained from any interference in Norway’s internal affairs, I did not believe – and I still do not believe – that the Norwegian government was called on to control my literary activity in other countries – and even less so since nowhere had my books and articles been the object of legal proceedings. My correspondence was permeated with the same ideas as my books. These ideas are possibly not to the taste of the fascists and Stalinists – about that I can do nothing. In the last few days something new has developed that outdoes everything the reactionary press has written about me. Moscow accuses me, on the radio, of unheard-of crimes. If the tiniest part of these accusations were true, I would not in truth merit the hospitality either of the Norwegian people or of any other people. But I am ready to answer these accusations immediately, in front of any impartial commission of inquiry whatsoever, in front of any public tribunal whatsoever. And I undertake to prove that my accusers are the real criminals.
Most of the Norwegian newspapers published this letter. It should be noted that, from the very beginning, the Norwegian press adopted a most suspicious attitude toward the Moscow trial. Martin Tranmael and his colleagues had belonged to the Communist International recently enough to know just what the GPU and its methods are! Besides, the state of mind of the masses of workers, angered by the fascist attack, was completely favorable to me. The right-wing press had lost its head completely. The day before, it was maintaining that I was acting in secret agreement with Stalin to prepare a revolution in Spain, France, Belgium, and also, naturally, in Norway. Without renouncing this thesis, it then went to the defense of the Moscow bureaucracy against my terrorist attacks ...
We had returned to Weksal for the end of the Moscow trial. Dictionary in hand, I puzzled out the Tass reports in the Oslo papers. I felt as if I were in a madhouse. Journalists besieged us – the Norwegian wire service was still conscientiously publishing my rebuttals, which were spread throughout the world. At that moment two young friends, who had at an earlier date been my secretaries, arrived: Erwin Wolf from Czechoslovakia, and Jean van Heijenoort from France. – They were of tremendous help to us in those hectic and anxious days of waiting for two denouements, one of developments in Moscow and the other of developments in Oslo.
If the accused were not put to death, no one would take the accusations seriously. I was convinced that it would all end with executions. Nevertheless, I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard the Paris announcer report, with trembling voice, that Stalin had had all the accused, among whom were four members of the Old Bolshevik Central Committee, shot. It was not the ferocity of the massacre that stunned me; no matter how cruel it may be, this epoch of wars and revolutions is our epoch – our fatherland, in point of time. I was stunned by the cold-blooded premeditation of the frame-up, by the moral gangsterism of the clique in power, by this attempt to deceive world opinion on such a massive scale-over the entire earth, in our generation and for generations to come.
“Cain-Dzhugashvili [Stalin] has reached the very peak of his destiny,” I said to my wife when the first minute of stupefaction had passed. The international press reacted with obvious distrust to the Moscow trial. The professional Friends of the Soviet Union were silent, disoriented. Not without difficulty, Moscow activated the complicated network of “friendly” organizations under its complete or partial control. Little by little, the international slander machine went into operation; it did not suffer any lack of grease. The principal mechanism of transmission was furnished, naturally enough, by the apparatus of the Communist International. The Norwegian Communist paper, which only the day before had seen itself obliged to defend me against the fascists, suddenly changed its tune. It now demanded my expulsion, and, above all, it demanded that my mouth be closed. The functions of the Comintern press itself are well known. It uses the time remaining to it after executing the minor tasks of Soviet diplomacy for doing the GPU’s filthiest jobs. The wires hummed between Moscow and Oslo. The very first thing to be done was to prevent me from laying bare the frame-up. These efforts were not in vain. A sudden turn became apparent in leading Norwegian circles, a turn that the Labor Party did not become aware of right away, and later did not understand. We would soon know the hidden causes for the change.On August 26, while eight plainclothes policemen occupied the yard of our house, Police Chief Askvig and a functionary of the Central Passport Bureau in charge of the supervision of aliens called on us. These important visitors invited me to sign a document accepting new conditions for residing in Norway: I was to agree to write no more about current political matters and to give no interviews; I was to agree to have all my correspondence, incoming and outgoing, inspected by the police. Without making the slightest allusion to the Moscow trial, the official document mentioned, as an example of my misdeeds, only an article dealing with French politics that had appeared in an American weekly, the Nation, and my open letter to the chief of criminal police, Mr. Swen. Obviously, the Norwegian government was using the first pretexts that came to mind to mask the real cause of its change in attitude. Only later did I understand why they asked for my signature: the constitution of the country makes no provision for restricting an individual’s liberties without due process. The ingenious minister of justice had only to fill this gap in the basic law of the land by inviting me, of my own free will, to ask for chains and handcuffs. I categorically refused.
The minister immediately had me informed that henceforth journalists and intermediaries or third parties in general would not be permitted to see me, and that the government would soon assign me and my wife another residence, I made every effort, by mail, to get the minister to understand certain basic truths: that control of my literary activity was not within the jurisdiction of a Passport Bureau employee; that restraining my freedom to communicate with the press, at a time when I was the object of malicious charges, was tantamount to siding with my accusers. All this was very true – but the Soviet legation had more convincing arguments at its disposal!
The following morning, police agents conducted me to Oslo to be interrogated – still in the capacity of “witness” in the affair of the fascist raid. The examining magistrate was hardly interested in the facts. On the other hand, he interrogated me for two hours about my political activities, my connections, my visitors. Long debates ensued on the question of whether my articles criticized other governments. It goes without saying that I did not dispute the point. The magistrate concluded that this kind of behavior was not in accordance with the agreement I had made to avoid all actions hostile to other states. I replied that only in totalitarian states are governments and states considered one and the same. Democratic regimes do not consider criticism of a government as an attack against the state. Otherwise, what would remain of the parliamentary system? The only sensible interpretation of my original agreement was that I had promised not to engage in any illegal, clandestine activity whatsoever in Norway. But it could not possibly occur to me that, living in Norway, I would not be able to publish, in other countries, articles in no way contrary to the laws of those countries. The judge had other ideas on the subject or, at the very least, other instructions – not very clear to be sure, but (as we were to see) sufficient to cause my internment.
From the courthouse I was taken before the minister of justice, who was surrounded by his highest officials. Again I was invited to sign the document, very slightly modified, agreeing to police surveillance, which I had refused to sign the previous day.
“If you want to arrest me,” I demanded, “why do you want me to authorize you to do it?”
“But,” the minister replied, with an air of profundity, “between arrest and complete liberty there is an intermediate situation.”
“That can only be an equivocation – or a trap; I prefer to be arrested!”
The minister made this concession to me and gave the necessary orders on the spot. Police agents roughly shoved aside Erwin Wolf, who had until then accompanied me and who was getting ready to return with me. Four policemen, this time in uniform, brought me back to Weksal. In the courtyard I saw others pushing van Heijenoort, whom they held by the shoulders, out of the house. My wife, alarmed, came out. They kept me locked in the car while indoors they prepared our isolation from the Knudsen family. Police occupied the dining room and cut the telephone wire. We were thus prisoners. The mistress of the house brought us our meals under the surveillance of two policemen. The doors to our rooms were always kept ajar. On September 2 we were transferred to Sundby, a village in Storsand about twenty-two miles from Oslo, at the edge of a fjord. There we were to spend three months and twenty days under the surveillance of thirteen policemen. Our mail passed through the Central Passport Bureau – which couldn’t see any reason for hurrying. No one was admitted to see us. To justify this procedure, which is contrary to the Norwegian constitution, the government had to pass a special law. As for my wife, she was arrested without even any attempt at explanation.
It would seem that the Norwegian fascists had a victory to celebrate. In reality, it was not they who were the victors, The secret of my internment was simple. The government in Moscow had threatened Norwegian commerce with a boycott – and had immediately given concrete examples of the seriousness of this threat, Shipowners besieged the ministries:
“Do what you like, but give us Soviet business.”
The country’s merchant marine, fourth largest in the world, holds a decisive position in public affairs, and the shipowners make policy – regardless of who occupies the seats of government. Stalin used the monopoly in foreign commerce to prevent me from unmasking his frame-up. Norwegian financial circles came to his aid. The Socialist ministers justified themselves by saying: “All the same, we can’t sacrifice the country’s vital interests to Trotsky!” That was the reason for my arrest.
On August 17, that is, after the sensational revelations of the fascists, after the Moscow charges, Martin Tranmael wrote in Arbeiderbladet that “Trotsky is being strictly held, during his stay in our country, to the conditions that were imposed on him on his arrival.” Now Tranmael, in his capacity as editor-in-chief of that paper, was more familiar than anyone else with my literary activity – especially with the articles that were in a few days to furnish material for the report of the Passport Bureau. But no sooner had this report been approved by the government (which had ordered it at Moscow’s command), than Tranmael realized that Trotsky was the big culprit in all this. Why hadn’t he renounced his ideas, or at least refrained from expressing them? He could then have peacefully enjoyed the benefits of Norwegian democracy.
Perhaps a brief historical digression would not be amiss here. On December 16, 1928, a special detail of the GPU arrived in Alma Ata from Moscow to demand that I agree to abstain from all political activity, and they threatened me with coercive measures if I declined. I wrote the Central Committee:
“To demand that I renounce all political activity is to demand that I abandon the struggle for the cause of the international proletariat, a struggle I have supported ceaselessly for thirty-two years – that is, from the very beginning of my conscious life ... The historic power of the Opposition comes from the fact that despite its seeming weakness at this time, its fingers are on the pulse of the world historical process; it clearly sees the dynamics of social forces; it foresees the future and consciously prepares for it. To renounce political activity would be to renounce preparing for the future ... In our written message to the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, we, the Opposition, foresaw the very ultimatum addressed to me today: ‘Only a completely demoralized bureaucracy could demand that revolutionists abandon political activity. And only contemptible renegades could agree to such a demand.’ I have no reason to change these words.”
In answer to this statement, the Political Bureau decided to banish me, and sent me to Turkey. I thus paid with exile for my refusal to renounce political activity. The Norwegian government now demanded that I pay for my exile by abandoning all political activity. No, Messrs. Democrats, I cannot agree to that.
In the letter to the Central Committee that I have cited, I expressed the conviction that the GPU was preparing to imprison me. I was mistaken. The Political Bureau settled for banishment. But what Stalin had not dared to do in 1928, the Norwegian “Socialists” did in 1936. They imprisoned me for having refused to halt the political activity that is the very essence of my life – that gives my life its meaning. The official organ of the government justified itself by saying that those days were past when great exiles such as Marx, Engels, and Lenin could write what they pleased against the governments of countries that gave them asylum. “Today there are quite different relationships that Norway has to take into consideration.”That monopoly capitalism has mercilessly battered democracy and its guarantees is beyond question. Doesn’t Martin Tranmael’s dreary sentence give us a glimpse of how the Socialists plan to make use of this much-abused democracy to transform society? Moreover, it must be added that in no other democratic country but “Socialist” Norway would it have been possible to flout the norms of legality with so much cynicism! We were interned on the twenty-eighth of August; a royal decree was promulgated on the thirty-first, giving the government the right to intern “undesirable” aliens. Even granting the legality of this decree – which was contested by many jurists – for three days we had been arbitrarily and forcible imprisoned. But this was only the beginning – and things were to go from bad to worse.
The first few days of internment seemed like a rest cure to us, after the nervous tension of the Moscow trial week. It was good to be alone, without news, without telegrams, without mail, without telephone calls. But from the day we received the first newspapers, internment became torture. The role that the lie plays in the life of society is truly disconcerting! The simplest facts are the most often distorted. I do not refer to insignificant distortions resulting from social contradictions, from minor antagonisms and psychological quirks. Infinitely more formidable are the lies spread by the powerful machinery of the government, which can reach everyone, everywhere. We had already seen this in operation during the war – when totalitarian regimes were as yet non-existent. In those days, the lie itself retained an element of dilettantism and timidity. We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute lie, the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the monopolies of press and radio to imprison social consciousness.
We were, it is true, deprived of the radio during the first weeks of our detention. We were placed under the supervision of the director of the Central Passport Bureau, Mr. Konstad, whom the liberal press called, out of politeness, a semi-fascist. In addition to his capricious arbitrariness, he had an extremely provoking way of doing things. Intent on consistency in police methods, Mr. Konstad felt that the radio was incompatible with a regimen for internees. Nevertheless, the liberal tendency within the government won out, and we received a radio.Beethoven was a great help to us, but the music was a rarity. Most often we had to listen to Goebbels, Hitler, or some orator in Moscow. Our small, low-ceilinged rooms were immediately filled with a muddy tide of lies. Moscow’s orators lied in diverse languages at diverse hours of the day and night – always on the same subject: They explained how and why I had organized the Kirov assassination. (I had paid no more attention to Kirov during his lifetime than I had to some general somewhere in China.) The orator, invariably devoid of knowledge and talent, went through an endless string of sentences, to which only the lie lent any cohesiveness.
“Allied with the Gestapo, Trotsky intends to bring about the defeat of democracy in France, a victory for Franco in Spain, the fall of socialism in the USSR, and, above all, the loss of our great leader, our man of genius, our beloved ...” The speaker’s voice was mournful and yet, at the same time, impudent. Obviously, this assembly-line liar was sneering at France, Spain, and socialism. He was thinking of his bread and butter. After a few minutes, listening to this became intolerably painful. Afterward, we asked ourselves several times a day with embarrassment: Can the human race possibly be so stupid? And just as often, my wife and I would repeat this sentence: “All the same, we cannot believe them to be so low.”
Stalin was not at all concerned with plausibility. In this respect, he had assimilated in full the psychological techniques of fascism, which consist of smothering criticism under a massive blanket of repeated lies. Should we refute, lay bare, the lies? There was no lack of material to do this. In our papers, in our memoirs, my wife and I had huge quantities of data for unmasking the lies. Day and night, at every instant, we remembered facts, hundreds of facts, thousands of facts, each one of which annihilated some accusation or some “voluntary confession.” At Weksal, before our internment, I had for three days dictated, in Russian, a pamphlet on the Moscow trial. Now I no longer had any secretarial help; I had to write everything by hand. That, however, was not the main difficulty. As I was making notes of my refutations, carefully verifying the sources I was citing, the facts, the dates, inwardly murmuring hundreds of times, “But isn’t it shameful to answer such infamous charges?” – printing presses all over the world were rolling at top speed, spreading new and apocalyptic lies through millions of newspapers, and Moscow’s announcers were poisoning the airwaves.
What would be the fate of my pamphlet? Would it be allowed out of the country? The ambiguity of our position was especially difficult. The president of the council and the minister of justice visibly leaned toward complete imprisonment. The other ministers feared that public opinion would be against this. All the questions I asked in order to ascertain what rights I had remained unanswered. Had I at least known that all literary work was forbidden me, including all work of self-defense, I would have, for the moment, laid down my arms and read Hegel – there he sat, right on the shelf. But the government was not forbidding me anything – not in clear and distinct terms. It limited itself to confiscating the manuscripts I was sending to my lawyer, my son, my friends. After bitterly laboring to prepare a document, I had to wait impatiently for an answer from the addressee. A week would elapse, sometimes two. Then a petty police officer would arrive, along about noon, to deliver a paper signed “Konstad,” bearing the news that such and such letters and such and such documents would not be forwarded. No explanation – nothing but a signature. But what a signature! It is worth reproducing here, in all its original grandeur:
![[signature shown]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uxSb0u1p-96JEVYQjiW0sa5dnC7s5574qVKgllSerWnFFN0n0Y7brlmHq2HIciN54IWmnpWuctJtmCeA1Fy9DYWHwsqYBVQVdqOb38qieIjiJZa0jD0Mu2Rg=s0-d) |
One didn’t have to be a graphologist to see in what hands the government had placed our destiny!
Mr. Konstad, however, exercised control only over our spiritual lives – radio, correspondence, newspapers. Our persons were in the care of two highly placed police functionaries, Messrs. Askvig and Jonas Lie. The Norwegian writer Helge Krog, whose judgement can be relied on, calls them both fascists. They comported themselves better than Konstad. But the political aspect of all this is not at all changed by that fact. The fascists attempt a raid on my home. Stalin accuses me of an alliance with the fascists. To prevent me from refuting his lies, he obtains my imprisonment from his democratic allies. And the result is that they lock us up, my wife and me, under the supervision of three fascist functionaries. No chess player, in his wildest fantasy, could dream up a better deployment of the pieces.Nevertheless, I could not passively submit to such abominable accusations. What could I possibly do? I could try to bring suit against the Norwegian Stalinists and fascists who had slandered me in the press, in order to prove in court the falseness of Moscow’s accusations. But in response to my attempt, the government on October 29 promulgated another special law authorizing the minister of justice to deny any recourse to legal action to an “interned alien.” The minister was not slow to use his new right. The first illegality thus served to justify the second.
Why did the government adopt so scandalous a course? Still for the very same reason. Oslo’s tiny “Communist” sheet, which only the previous day was lavishing on the Socialist government proofs of its servility, now addressed the most outrageously arrogant threats to that government: Trotsky’s attack on “the prestige of the Soviet courts” would bring about the most unfortunate economic consequences for Norway! The prestige of the Soviet courts? But that could suffer only if I succeeded in proving before the Norwegian bar the falseness of Moscow’s accusations. That was exactly what the Kremlin was in mortal fear of.
I tried to prosecute my slanderers in other countries, in Czechoslovakia, in Switzerland. The result was not long in forthcoming: the minister of justice informed me on November 11, in a rude letter (Norwegian Socialist ministers seem to feel that rudeness is a symbol of power), that I was forbidden to attempt legal actions, anywhere. To protect my rights in another country, I would first have to “leave Norway.” These words contained a scarcely veiled threat of expulsion – of delivery to the GPU. And that is the interpretation I gave this document in a letter to my French attorney, Gerard Rosenthal. The Norwegian censor permitted the letter to pass, thus confirming its tenor. Alarmed, my friends began to knock at every door, in search of a visa for me. The result of their efforts was that the doors of far-off Mexico were opened to me. But we shall come back to that.
The autumn was foggy and rainy. It would he difficult to describe the atmosphere at Sundby: a wooden house, half of which was occupied by slow-moving, heavy policemen who smoked pipes, played cards, and at noon brought us newspapers overflowing with slander, or messages from Konstad with his inevitable signature. What would happen next? As early as September 15, I had tried to alert public opinion, through the press, that after the political debacle of the first trial, Stalin would be forced to stage a second. I predicted that this time the GPU would try to move the base of operations of the plot to Oslo. I tried in this way to bar that road to Stalin, to prevent him from setting the stage for a second production, perhaps to save the accused. In vain! My message was confiscated. I wrote, in the form of a letter to my son, an answer to the sycophantic pamphlet of the British lawyer Pritt. But since “His Majesty’s Counselor” was zealously defending the GPU, the Norwegian government felt obliged to defend Mr. Pritt, and my work was impounded. I wrote to the International Federation of Trade Unions, reminding them, among other things, of the tragic fate of the former leader of the Soviet trade unions, Tomsky, and demanding forceful action on their part. The minister of justice confiscated that letter.
Each day the noose tightened. Soon they deprived us of our outdoor walks. No visitor was admitted. The censors held on to our letters, even our telegrams, for a week and more. In interviews with the press, some of the ministers scurrilously attacked those whom they thus imprisoned. Helge Krog, the writer, notes that the government appeared increasingly antagonistic toward me, and he adds: “It is not unusual for people to become hostile to those they have wronged, to those toward whom they have feelings of guilt ...”When I look back today on this period of internment, I must say that never, anywhere, in the course of my entire life – and I have lived through many things – was I persecuted with as much miserable cynicism as I was by the Norwegian “Socialist” government. For four months these ministers, dripping with democratic hypocrisy, gripped me in a stranglehold to prevent me from protesting the greatest crime history may ever know.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
With Trotsky in Norway
By Nils Dahl
From Revolutionary History, Vol.2 No.2, Summer 1989. Used with permission.
The following memoir, which is published here for the first time, is by Nils Dahl, who celebrated his eightieth birthday earlier this year.
Comrade Dahl is an activist, who was for a time Trotsky’s bodyguard in Norway, and he has previously made available to us all his material on the sad fate of Walter Held – for which see Revolutionary History, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988, pp.9-11, and Vol.1 No.4, Winter 1988-89, pp.39-43.This personal account throws some unfamiliar light on Trotsky’s views and personality and the response of the Scandinavian Trotskyism to the Finnish War. It is also a fascinating account of early Norwegian Trotskyism with which most readers will be unfamiliar.
My Background, My Meetings with Trotsky and Our Discussions
I first became acquainted with the labour movement and with politics generally because I came from a family that had been deeply involved in politics since 1814, when Norway was liberated from Denmark by Marshal Bernadotte, a former French revolutionary. My father’s brother was a parliamentary member for the Conservative Party between 1920 and 1927, and their grandfather was in Eidsvoll in 1814.[1] During the war of 1814 he was the host of Bernadotte as the mayor of a city called Halden which was close to the Swedish border. The town was taken over by Bernadotte and used as his military headquarters during this war. When I was a student in 1927 there was a very violent political discussion and an economic crisis, especially in the countryside. In 1928-29 I did my compulsory military service as a reserve officer, and in 1929 I went into a political student organisation called Mot-Dag, led by a man called Erling Falk. Mot-Dag means ‘Towards Daybreak’. Falk had come back from the USA in 1920 where he had been involved with the ‘Wobblies’. [2] Being an accountant, he knew very well how big business was organised, and he organised Mot-Dag, mainly a students’ organisation, using the same organisational methods as big business. It was a very effective organisation. He played a leading role in the events of 1923, when the Norwegian Labour Party broke with the Comintern, and he was responsible for making the declaration which was carried in the Labour Party by two votes. There was a violent row between him and Radek. Radek said that the Norwegian Labour Party had to choose between Falk and the Comintern. Later Falk was manoeuvred out of the Labour Party (in 1924) and took his organisation with him. He was slung out because of the antimilitarist, pacifist position that he held. In 1926 he applied for membership of the Communist Party and this was refused by the Communist Party Central Committee in Norway, but the Russians had a commissar in Norway and Falk went along to see this commissar and got his support. So Mot-Dag was co-opted into the Communist Party by the vote of this Russian commissar, in spite of the antagonism of the Norwegian Communist Party. That is a rather surprising story, even in the Stalinist movement.
Mot-Dag did educational work among the students, scientists and literary people. When Stalin set up the Lenin school a few Mot-Dag members went there as teachers and students. Three of them, Uhle, Erle and Falk were greatly influenced by Stalinism. Because of this, as long as Erling Falk dominated the organisation, it was not a danger to the Stalinists. His health started to go in 1933-34 and he was expelled from his own organisation in 1936. I had only just joined the Communist Party in 1929, when I was expelled as an oppositionist in Trondheim. That was my first experience of expulsion. After the expulsion Mot-Dag expanded and took over the student organisation at Oslo University, and partly in the Technical High School in Trondheim.After I had finished my technical education in Trondheim, the third city in Norway, I took further studies in photogrammetry in Berlin, in the technical high school. My father had a big surveying office in Norway, and photogrammetry was the up and coming thing. In the autumn of 1932 I got involved in the German Communist movement because after the expulsions of 1928-29, Mot-Dag as an organisation was heavily involved with the Communist Opposition in Berlin. The organisation was called the Communist Party (Opposition) (KPO) which was the centre of an international organisation (IVKO – International Verein Kommunistische Opposition) under the leadership of Heinrich Brandler and Fenner Brockway. When I went there they were publishing a paper called Gegen den Strom (Against the Stream). I gave them a report about the dispute between Denmark and Norway over Greenland. I went on the editorial board in the autumn of 1932 as a representative from Mot-Dag. I also went to some lectures by Brandler and Thalheimer on general politics. Brandler and Thalheimer never slept two nights in the same place. They were always on the move. The meetings of the editorial board could no longer be held in the evening. We would meet in the business quarter in the day time, as that was the best camouflage. I do not know what they planned to do in the event of a Nazi takeover. They thought that the political future was obvious. There was great optimism in the autumn of 1932 because there was the new general election in November, and in this election Hitler lost two million votes. I had some discussions with a Liberal and he said ‘Now Hitler is finished!’ and I said: ‘You are wrong, because even now they have great influence in the trade union movement, and the leader of theirs in the Ruhr district has virtually taken over the trade union, which is much more important from a revolutionary point of view than losing two million votes’.
Then, just before Hitler came to power, I fell sick and went back to Norway at Christmas 1932. Hitler took over in January, a week or two after I left. As a Norwegian national I do not think I was in any danger, and I went back in 1936 without any difficulty.
Dangerous
Earlier the situation was really dangerous. I lived in the working class Altmoabit district, the eastern part of Berlin, and once I was nearly killed because I wore a brown cap that was regarded as Nazi. I have never seen such a situation before, where people were sleeping in the streets, and people were throwing themselves in front of railways and trams, and so on. You could not walk in the streets without women hanging on to you. The only way to get rid of them was to say ‘Kein gelt’, ‘No money’. The housing situation was curious, since young people did not have the money to hire the usual flats, so they lived in cellars and attics whilst the rest of the house stood empty. That was one of the things that Hitler did when he came to power – he got the rents down, so people could live, and he earned a lot of sympathy because of this. In Berlin it was a left-wing Nazi who was in charge, Gregor Strasser, and he was only less radical in words than a Trotskyist. He had three main slogans: ‘Get the fat bureaucrats!’, ‘Get the Bolsheviks!’ and if anybody asked him the practical difficulty of carrying out some policy or other, ‘The Führer will manage that!’It was in September or October or November that we had a transport strike. All the trams and buses stopped, and in Prussia there was a Labour government which sent troops against the strikers. The Nazis joined the strike, and as a result two Nazis were killed by soldiers or by the patriotic police. That made a very great impression on the workers in Norway.
Mot-Dag made attempts to get Jewish women out of Germany. A number of our people went to Germany and married them. In some cases it became a business racket, and some did it in return for paying off their student loans. These were not the political people.
When I arrived back in Norway in 1933, I did not get any technical employment, so I worked for Mot-Dag from 1933-34. After we were thrown out of the Comintern, Mot-Dag was independent (1929-36). The main theoretical work had been to get a translation of Karl Marx’s Capital published. This project was led by Falk. There were about a hundred, mainly intellectual, members in the organisation in those days, in different kinds of professions – lawyers, historians, and so on. Those people were able to make the first encyclopaedia based on Marxism and working class politics ever published outside Russia. The money was given by a big Labour weekly which was going well. The three main sources of income in those days were the publication of a big monthly paper, Mot-Dag, the translation of Capital and a series of pamphlets on the sexual question. These last were a tremendous success, which earned our organisation a lot of money. The translation of Capital sold quite nicely and we could make our political points in the discussions with the help of Karl Marx’s Capital and ‘Theory of Crises’. The encyclopaedia came out in six volumes. Only the first and second volumes of Capital had been translated by 1936 when Mot-Dag joined the Labour Party and Falk was thrown out.
In Mot-Dag I had a sub-editorial job and had to do the lay-out of the monthly paper and collect the manuscripts from people on time.
In 1934-35 I held small jobs on building sites in Oslo, and I was able to join the building workers’ union. In 1936 I got a job as a surveyor, working for the union of unskilled building workers in Oslo. That was the biggest trade union in Oslo with 6,000 members. We controlled all building work in Oslo and in many sites outside Oslo, such as those for hydroelectrical power stations, roads, and so on. All work had to be paid according to a certain price list. Ah work was piece work, which had to be measured, and the money was paid out under union control. I and between five and ten technicians had to survey all the different jobs that were on that list. My job was to see to it that every worker got his pay. By that system the job of foreman, the capitalists’ representative on the floor, was reduced to getting the necessary materials to the workers. I was the first person with a higher technical education who was attached to a local trade union as an employee. Before me there had been two lawyers on the highest level of the union. Trygve Lie[3] was the first who joined the trade union organisation. After him was Wiggo Hansteen [4], who was shot by the Germans in 1941. I had an interesting job dealing with the wage rates for different jobs, and I developed considerable standing in the union between 1936-40. That was more or less my background in politics and trade union matters, from which I discussed a number of different questions with Trotsky.
The Arrival of Trotsky in Norway
In 1929 someone in Berlin had written to the leader of the Norwegian Labour Party asking for asylum for Trotsky in Norway, and the Labour Party Group took it up and put forward a motion in Parliament that he should be allowed to live there. The Liberals were bitterly against it, but the whole Labour Party voted unanimously to accept him in Norway. That was the background, so everybody knew that the Labour Party was committed on that. Falk managed to reverse the Liberal Party’s previous decision against accepting Trotsky, though Trotsky was not told of this. A Stalinist faction took over the student group and was against inviting him. One of their Committee was Gerhardsen. [5]Falk was very impressed by Trotsky. He went to Copenhagen in 1932 to try to get Trotsky to speak to the Norwegian student organisation. Trotsky was suspicious of him because of his Stalinist past, and the Trotskyists kept the whole thing very quiet. Norway had a Liberal government in 1932, but the Liberal government refused a visa except for a short visit.
Later, in 1935, there was a great change in Norway as the Labour Party got the chance of taking over the government, though it was not the majority. The general election of 1935 gave them the majority, and some went into the government. At the same time Trotsky’s case came up. Trotsky was invited at the beginning of July. He was not at all keen to go. Three people took up the task of getting him to Norway. They were Waiter Held, Scheflo [6], who was the former leader of the Communist Party, and Falk, who was the leader of Mot-Dag. Held wrote to him asking him to come on 27 March 1935. The first plan was that he would come into the country as a tourist, would stay with Scheflo in the south of Norway, and from there should apply for an extension of his stay. Trotsky said that he would not use that method – he had to do it openly, and he insisted upon that. Nygaardsvold [7] was asked, and he said: ‘Cannot you wait until the Parliamentary recess in the summer?’ Then the situation got worse for Trotsky in France, so that he had to leave there. He said to me:’It seemed that I had a choice as between Madagascar and Oslo, and I think Norway is preferable. So he got a telegram from his son saying that it was to be Norway in April. He went to Paris and then he stayed in Chamonix and was only allowed to be there for 24 hours. It was a really difficult situation at the beginning of June, and from 1 June to 12 June there was a lot of work for Held in persuading the government to let him in. The Norwegian state bureaucracy put up every obstacle in Held’s way, but finally Trotsky was allowed in.
I met Trotsky some time after he arrived in Norway in the middle of June 1935. I was a political and personal friend of Waiter Held, who was Trotsky’s representative in Norway. In those days I was a regular reader of the German Trotskyist paper Unser Wort. I met Trotsky as soon as he had settled down in Hönefoss, which is a little town about an hour’s drive from Oslo. In those days I had a car at my disposal and on many occasions took Waiter Held over to see Trotsky.
I stayed with Trotsky for two periods of time, each lasting for a number of days. One was in September 1935, and one was at Christmas 1935 and early 1936. In between, and later, I went only on day trips to Hönefoss, and in 1936 I remember we mainly discussed the situation in the Norwegian trade unions. I tried to explain my two longer visits with Trotsky to Deutscher, but he got it wrong. Trotsky had a pleasant time in 1935. No-one bothered him except for some articles in the Agrarian Party papers, and even the Communists kept quiet in 1935 so that he had a good opportunity to do some work. However, in the summer of 1935 Trotsky had been sick. The leading Mot-Dag doctor, Karl Evang, saw to it that he was sent to hospital for investigations and tried to find out what was wrong. According to his report to Mot-Dag neither Socialist nor capitalist doctors could find out what was wrong with him. It could have been nervous strain, and he was discharged from hospital in August. I think he recovered well by September 1935. At the end of August, Konrad Knudsen, Trotsky’s host, asked me if I knew a place where Trotsky could have a peaceful rest out of reach of people. At that time we used a big house, in a lonely park in a forest in Andorsrud in Skoger as a resort for holidays. Once upon a time Andorsrud had been a large property which had gone broke. In 1935 it was owned by a bank, but the old woman who was the former owner of the house still lived there and kept it in good order, and we used to go there for weekends. So I was able to arrange it.
Sköger is 90 kilometres south-west of Oslo and about an hour and a half’s drive from Hönefoss. I had a car at my disposal in those days because I was in charge of an aeroplane firm’s section for photogrammetry for map-making. We met secretly in Drammen, midway between Skogen and Oslo. Trotsky arrived with Natalia, Konrad Knudsen and Jean van Heijenoort, who was his secretary then, together with my wife and I. I took this opportunity of taking the week off to get married, and the week we spent together with Trotsky was also my honeymoon. Waiter Held also married at this time. It was a very quiet and peaceful time and we had a lot of discussions in front of the fireplace in the evenings, or when we were walking. That was my main period with Trotsky. My wife spoke fluent French because she had been in France as an au pair; also she was a nurse, and Natalia, who spoke very good French, was then suffering with some stomach ailment, so they spent a lot of time together. My wife looked after Trotsky’s health, and she was astonished at the sort of pills he needed for digestion, and so on. I was not able to communicate very much with Natalia because she only spoke French. With Trotsky it was much easier, because I spoke German well, and he did too. It was only occasionally that I was able to communicate with Natalia, but for my wife it was the other way round. After that week I met Trotsky time and again. In December 1935 I was mobilised by Konrad Knudsen asking me to come to help because Trotsky had gone for a vacation in Knudsen’s hut in the wooded district east of Hönefoss, and there had been a very heavy snowfall and Trotsky had been snowed in. I immediately went there. In the neighbourhood there was a hotel. When I arrived Trotsky had been able to get out of the hut on his own. He and Natalia had succeeded in getting down to the valley without our help, so we only went to the hut to clear up and put it back in some order. (It was a difficult time with storms and heavy snow falls in December 1935. It would have been impossible for Piatakov to have visited Trotsky then, as Vyshinsky claimed during the second Moscow Trial.) I was able to ski to the hut and down to the valley, although the snow was knee deep. I spent Christmas Eve together with Trotsky. I remember that there were a number of people and some local kids, and Trotsky was pressurised to walk around the Christmas tree, but he refused to go along with this custom of walking around the tree.
He needed a new milieu in winter time, and he got it in the hut. He said later on that he was too old for the exercise of being snowed in and getting out. It seemed to me that the shock brought back his working abilities. He worked very hard during the spring of 1936. Konrad Knudsen told me that Trotsky used to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, get himself some tea or bread, and then work on his own until 8 o’clock in the morning, when he would go down for his usual breakfast meal. Then he would carry on working all day. There were times when his secretaries complained that even they could not stick to the eight hours work, either.
In 1936 I left my business job and went into the trade union movement and got a professional job there. I remember that I discussed the Norwegian trade union movement with Trotsky in 1936, but I was not really very much involved with him that year. He was busy in the spring of 1936 writing The Revolution Betrayed, and I have not now any remembrance of our being together during this period. When he was arrested in August 1936, he had been in the southern part of Norway together with Scheflo, who was a political friend of his and the leader of the Norwegian Communist Party from 1923 until he was expelled or left in 1928 (as were most of our friends from the Comintern).
Forces and Facts Behind the Internment and Expulsion of Trotsky
In 1935 there had been a lot of difficulty before the Norwegian Labour government, as a minority government, dared to give him a visa. Obviously they regretted it in 1936, and left the dirty work to Trygve Lie. He had Trotsky cut off from the outside world so he could not comment on the Moscow Trials. The pressure on Trotsky’s friends in 1936 was very strong. Indeed, in the first Moscow Trial Stalin threatened the Norwegian Trotskyists around Scheflo with elimination. Falk fell ill in 1936 and was never again what he had been before. He died in 1940. Scheflo was ill too, and had to resign as editor in Kristiansand. When Norway was occupied he was too ill to be brought to Sweden. He died in hospital in 1943.The reason for Trotsky’s expulsion from Norway in 1936, as far as governmental opinions and facts are concerned, have now been published in a book in Norway, written by a Liberal researcher named Yngvar Ustvedt. He had the opportunity of going through the wartime files of documents of the Nazi organisation and the documents in the Norwegian Foreign Office. The book is more or less a compilation from these documents. The research for the book has been done rather hurriedly, and has been published under the title of The World Revolution from Hönefoss. This book gives the answers to most of the questions concerning the facts and the forces behind the official actions.
There are plenty of interviews and quotations from eyewitnesses. Documents exist giving the official accounts and explanations. The attacks on Trotsky were made as a combined operation by very different groups. It is very difficult to divide them because they were so interconnected. Many things happened at the same time. So many incidents happened on different planes.
As soon as the Revolution Betrayed was finished he went down to Scheflo and spent the whole summer there. He was immediately attacked by forces in Germany who acted with the help of gangs of Norwegian followers of Quisling. The German attack was followed by a Russian attack in connection with the first Moscow Trial in the middle of August. The Labour minority government which had given Trotsky asylum came under heavy attack from internal forces, the Liberals and reactionary politicians as well as Nazi-sympathising bureaucrats.
This was during the first Moscow Trial, and he defended himself vigorously, and gave press conferences, and so on. This was noticed in the Norwegian Parliament and because of Russian pressure he was interned. A certain Major Attlee, who was Prime Minister of Britain after the war, sent a private letter to Nygaardsvold. Attlee pointed out that this treatment of Trotsky was a very bad precedent for all refugees. I asked here where one could find a copy of this letter, but I have not been able to find out. It was a private letter. The security forces were called out and it was obvious that his life was in danger. Later two Nazis admitted in court that they had conspired to kill him. One of them tried to burgle his house, and the burglar said in a book that when he met Trotsky the latter spoke fluently in German and stated that the Nazi was helping Stalin and Stalin’s politics. That made an impression on the Nazi, who sat down, thought it over and decided he did not want to help Stalin. As a result the man was reprimanded by his Nazi superior, and accused of losing his Nazi ideology. Later when Trotsky went to Scheflo he was followed by a gang of Nazis, one of whom had a room at the hotel, and he had an automatic pistol pointed at him, so he immediately dashed round the corner. His life was really in danger. Although I could see that he was very angry at being interned and kept there, yet I think that this actually saved his life.
The Labour politicians feared they might lose their governmental position. They got panicky, and Trygve Lie resorted to brutality towards Trotsky. Trotsky was condemned to death in Moscow as an international terrorist on 24 August. On 25 August he was put under arrest by a decision of the Norwegian Labour government. So he was interned and placed under the surveillance of the state police and cut off from the world. He was deprived of the possibility of defending himself and of criticising the Trial. The state police were led by a man who committed suicide in 1945 shortly before he could have been arrested by the liberation movement. His name was Jonas Lie. During the war he was the leader of the Norwegian internal police fighting against the resistance movement, 1942-45. But in 1936 he and Trygve Lie collaborated, and had Trotsky interned in a place called Sundby in Hurum, between Oslo and Skoger. That was the first, up to now the only, concentration camp that there ever was in Norway, and it was established in September-October 1936. I was again mobilised in December 1936 by Waiter Held and Konrad Knudsen, who asked me to be prepared to be a bodyguard for Trotsky, who was going to go through France. His friends there had obtained a transit visa for him. I got in contact with a well-known French lawyer, Gerard Rosenthal, who had come to Norway. Shortly before Christmas we discussed how we were going to contact Trotsky and arrange the journey to France. We applied to Trygve Lie but only got an evasive answer. Just before Christmas it was announced that Trotsky had left Norway some weeks before, although they had still kept a police guard around the place to prevent the Communist Party and others from intervening. So he had been deported secretly on a Norwegian vessel under the control of Jonas Lie. He was sent to a Norwegian concentration camp in September, but he was not handed over to Russian justice, thanks mainly to that letter from Attlee to the Norwegian Labour government. Under police guard, he and Natalia were sent to Mexico on 8 January, where he regained his freedom. To avoid being attacked on the open sea, the vessel took detours on the way to Mexico. The ship had been ordered to maintain radio silence, but the Stalinists seem to have learned of the wavelength and code, and they sent a message: ‘New orders. Go to the Baltic’. The captain was clever enough not to reply and to carry on to Mexico. For Held, myself and the French lawyer Gerard Rosenthal, it was a bitter disappointment that Trotsky had left us. It was almost Christmas 1936. The idea that Mexico would regard it as an honour to give Trotsky unconditional asylum came from Aras, the Turkish foreign minister. The Russian Ambassador sent Trygve Lie flowers when Trotsky was sent to Mexico.
There is a problem about the real causes as to why Trotsky was first invited and then was expelled from Norway. It is rather a long story and to answer it would depend upon your point of view. Trotsky explained his view in a book published in Switzerland: Stalins Verbrechen (The Crimes of Stalin). I tried to investigate which forces in the labour movement were behind Trygve Lie in his work of expelling Trotsky. Soon after Trotsky was expelled I, together with Konrad Knudsen, went to meet the right wing leader of the Norwegian labour movement. The labour movement had been split in three in 1923, a right wing Social Democrat Party, a centrist party led by Tranmael [8], and a Communist Party round Scheflo. When I met the right wing leader, Magnus Nilssen [9], in 1937 I asked him if he felt like a victor now that Trotsky had been expelled from Norway. He got a bit touchy and said that I was quite wrong. It was not the right wing Social Democrats who stood behind Trygve Lie, it was their opponents. The people around Trygve Lie who pushed him were the people who, in the old days, had been ‘so unbelievably revolutionary’, as Nilssen expressed it. After later investigation I found that that he was correct. It was wavering centrists around Tranmael who were the driving forces behind Trygve Lie, and the best helpers of Stalin in his bloody work.
The basic reason for Trotsky’s expulsion was the pressure from Germany and Russia from the outside, and from the Norwegian Nazis from the inside. This sketch only gives a bare and incomplete picture about what happened to Trotsky in the second half of 1936. I intend to add a further report when I return to Norway and have studied the recently published book World Revolution from Hönefoss, and have looked into my own archives.
Notes
1. The Norwegian Constitution was adopted in Eidsvoll in Eastern Norway, 80 km north of Oslo, on 17 May 1814. The ‘Men of Eidsvoll’ play a role in the Norwegian national mythology analogous to the signatories to the proclamation of Irish in dependence of 1916 in Irish history. See K.T. Derry, A History of Modern Norway, 1973, Chapter 1 for the details of this period.
2. Erling Falk (1887-1940) had earlier combined a career as a cost accountant in Chicago with the ‘Wobblies’, the nickname of the IWW – International Workers of the World.
3. Trygve Lie (1896-1968). Legal adviser to the Trade Union Federation, 1922-35; an active chairman of the Workers’ Sports Association, 1931-35; Minister of Justice 1935-39; Minister of Trade and Supply 1939-40; Minister of Foreign Affairs November 1940-February 1946. General Secretary of the United Nations 1946-53; County Governor of Oslo 1955-63; Minister of Industry 1963, and of Trade 1963-65. An illuminating portrait of Lie appears in Isaac Deutscher, Marxism, War and Revolution, London, 1984, pp.169-177.
4. Wiggo Hansteen (1900-41). Previously in Mot-Dag but in 1941 a CP member who nevertheless opposed the CP line which supported Hitler’s New Order up to July 1941. After the invasion of Russia there was a strike by 15,000 engineers in Oslo against the removal of their free milk supply at their place of work. Hansteen had opposed the action as tactically rash, but he and a young shop steward, Wickstrom, were shot.
5. Einar Gerhardsen (1897- ). The son of an Oslo road worker who, to start with, himself worked on the roads. He had been a strong supporter of Trannael and a class war prisoner for agitation among soldiers, who was released by the first Labour Government in 1928 that had only lasted a fortnight. In 1941 he was the secretary of the Labour Party. Prime Minister 1945-51, Leader of the Labour Party in the Storting 1951-55, Prime Minister 1955-63 and Prime Minister 1963-65. He was something of an elder statesman by the ’seventies.
6. Olav Scheflo (1883-1942). A carter’s son who had been to sea; an early associate of Tranmael in Trondheim; editor of Social Demokraten 1918-21; the main leader of the Norwegian Communist Party 1921-28.
7. Nygaardsvold (1879-1952). A husmann’s son employed in a sawmill at twelve, and as a forest and railway construction worker in Canada and the USA, 1902-07; member of the Storting, 1916-49; Minister of Agriculture 1928; Premier 1935-45 – five years of this in the London government-in exile. After the war he was held partly responsible for the inadequate defence preparations.
8. Martin Trannael (1869-1967). Journeyman painter in the USA 1900-02 and 1903-05. Secretary of the Norwegian Labour Party 1918 and editor of its principal newspaper 1921-49. An agitator of great power who led the Labour Party into and out of the Third International, but wished for no public office. He played a part in the patriotic resistance in Stockholm during the war. According to Dahl it was his influence that prevented the deportation of Held in the period before the war.
9. Magnus Nilssen (1871-1947). A journeyman goldsmith who later started his own business. Labour Party Secretary 1901; Member of the Storting, 1906-21 and 1927-45; Minister of Labour 1938; Vice President of the Storting 1935-40.
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