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Trotsky's Diary in Exile TROTSKY'S DIARY IN EXILE y mJ mS translated from the Russian by Elena Zarudnaya Trotsky's Diary in Exile TROTSKY'S DIARY IN EXILE 1935 translated from the Russian by Elena Zarudnaya FABER AND FABER 24 Russell Square London First published in England in mcmlix by Faber and Faber Limited 24 Russell Square, London, W.C.1 Printed in Great Britain by Western Printing Services Limited, Bristol All rights reserved © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College CONTENT S Leon Trotsky frontispiece (Photograph by Verger) Publisher's Foreword page 9 Preface by Max Shachtman 14 THE DIARY 21 February 21 March 41 April 60 May 99 June II6 July September THE TE STAM ENT 139 NOTE S IND EX 7 PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD Four decades after the Russian Revolution, three decades after he lost power and homeland, two decades after his grisly murder, and while he is still but a Judas figure in his native Russia, Leon Trotsky continues to command interest. Whether the interest stems from his personality, his role in history, or the drama of his life, he is to many today a veritable Hero of Our Time. It is all the more striking how little is known about Trotsky's life after his banishment from Russia in 1929. One may, perhaps, be able to recall that his first asylum was Turkey, that he was unable to leave there until France admitted him in 1933 for two years, that Norway then received him for a brief and harassed year and a half, and that only during the last four years or less in Mexico did he find a bearable ifdistant refuge. One may remem­ ber, too, that as an exiled revolutionary of world- wide fame Trotsky organized the small but active Fourth International and wrote extensively, notably My Life and the widely read History of the Russian Revolution. Yet such recollections are bound to be hazy. Not least among the reasons is that up to now the recon­ struction of Trotsky's dozen post- Soviet years has been limited to a brief work in French by Victor Serge, and the two volumes issued on the eve of World War II by John Dewey's Commis­ sion of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials: The Case of Leon Trotsky and Not Guilty" Thispaucity adds value to what is in any event a singular docu­ ment-a previously unpublished diary of the exile period. The present volume contains the complete text of the only extant document of this sort by Trotsky. It is the diary he kept in France and Norway in 1935, from February 7 to September 8. Also made public for the first time in this volume is Trotsky's brief 9 but hardly less remarkable Testament. It consists of three testa­ mentary statements-political, personal, and legal-which he wrote in Mexico in the spring of 1940, half a year before his death. What is the background of the Diary of 1935 and its central themes? Trotsky turned to a genre he did not otherwise find congenial for a reason extremely interesting to the historian. Unperceived until now, this was Trotsky's recognition, in the mid-1930's, of profound changes in his life. The Diary coincides with the cul­ minating phase of this crisis, which had begun two years earlier in 1933. The crisis was in part political, in part personal. The Diary reflects both of these aspects more fully than anything else Trotsky ever published. It does so through a plethora of unre­ lated and often miscellaneous entries, big and small, political and non-political, some augmented by, or even in the form of, news­ paper clippings. Although much of the Diary gives the impression of being written with future publication in mind, the author makes no attempt to relate his separate entries to each other, or to indicate each time why he is commenting on a given topic. It is important, however, to keep in mind that some aspects of Trotsky's life are clearly reflected in the Diary, others are only dimly glimpsed, and some do not appear at all. On the political level, Trotsky had been deeply shaken in 1933 by Hitler's rise to power and the failure of the German parties of the left to resist. During the following year, 1934, his fore­ bodings about the future were intensified by two events: in France, the now-forgotten right-wing upheaval of February 6, and in the U. S. S.R., the assassination of Kirov. Together, these developments in Germany, France, and Russia forced an end to a major phase in Trotsky's thinking. Now the perspective shifted from the hope of influencing Communism from within the Third International, and hence returning to the U. S. S.R. before too long, to the idea of a separate Fourth International to counter­ act the prophesied triumphs of fascism and Stalin over an en­ feebled Europe. 10 In the Diary, this abstract political level of Trotsky's crisis in exile is interwoven with his general character: the revolutionary intellectual in politics, the 'outsider ' with his ideologies. His particular variety of politics dominates the Diary, be the entries about the novels he has just read, life in Norway or France, or individuals in the news. The reader will find echoes of Trotsky's lifelong polemics on current events, his once well-known com­ mentaries on literature and human relations, above all his absorp­ tion in ideology. Here, as elsewhere, Trotsky indicates no ideo­ logical doubts or even soul-searching. His own verities remain unchanged: the proletariat, socialism, world revolution, Marx and Lenin, History. A related political theme is the Russian Revolution, the decade that followed, and especially Trotsky's recollections of Lenin. In its running commentary on current events, the Diary condemns mercilessly all movements and leaders between the advancing fascism and Stalin, while voicing a qualified hopefulness about the gathering of new forces behind the author's own position. Along with politics, much that is personal appears in the Diary, as it did throughout Trotsky's crisis in the mid-1930'S. On the personal level, the upheaval began with the suicide in Berlin, a few weeks before Hitler came to power, of his older daughter, Zinaida. A year later, in the spring of 1934, occurred his own near-incarceration in France. Early in 1935, soon after the Diary opens, the author first heard that all members of his family surviving in Russia were being arrested. Having aged rapidly in 1933 and then regained vigour during the lively, gregarious initial year in France, Trotsky in 1935 once again lapsed into his famous sporadic fever which the doctors termed fievre cryptogene. Hence one of the Diary'S personal themes is the story of Trotsky's last year in France, in the tiny Alpine village of Domene, near Grenoble. Under strictest orders of the govern­ ment, he lived there incognito, for the first time without secre­ taries and the always beloved visitors. He was alone with his wife, who now undertook housekeeping and cared for him although ailing herself. The resulting isolation, petty hardships, and II intense gratitude to his wife are movingly apparent in the Diary. Another personal theme is the author's age (fifty-five at the time), and the possibility that he might be nearing the end of his life before his own work could be completed. Still more personal and poignant are the entries relating to Trotsky's family in Russia. Here the torment of not knowing the actual situation gradually gives way to the torment of suspecting and then learning the worst-the note ending the considerably longer French portion of the Diary. Those involved included Trotsky's first wife, Aleksandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya; the young children of his daughter Nina (also deceased), living with Sokolovskaya; Nina's exiled husband, Man Nevelson; the husband of Zinaida (' Zinushka '), Platon Volkov. Most of all, the concern was for the Trotskys' younger son, Sergey (' Seryozha '). After Zinaida's suicide in 1933, only her son Vsevolod (' Sevuskha') and Trotsky'S own older son, Leon (' Lyova ') Sedov, remained outside Russia. As suggestive as the Diary's central themes are its omissions. One of them concerns the author's major activities while keeping the Diary. On a few occasions these are mentioned, but only in passing. In fact, however, much of his time and still remarkable energy was devoted to political work and writing; promulgating the Fourth International and his new concept of ' bonapartism '; the Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition, written largely by himself; essays later collected in Wh ither France?; the first part of an extensive biography, The Young Lenin. Even in the isolated small town near Grenoble, and then outside Oslo, these activities were considerable and central to Trotsky's life. The reader must allow for this omission, as he must for the fact that many entries appear to have been made at the close of long, wearing days, or soon after emotional stress. If all this exaggerates Trotsky's departure at this time from both his well-known personal aloofness and political involve­ ment, something similar may explain the Diary's second major omission: many other personal topics. It abounds with sharply etched scenes of France, which all his life was rivalled in Trotsky'S affection only by Russia, and the Norway he had never known. 12 It includes passing references to French and Norwegian figures as well as to his wife, but it makes no mention of the author's own childhood, his parents, his Jewishness, personal friends in Russia and abroad, the leaders in various countries of the Fourth International, his relations with followers.
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