Trotsky (18 page)

The timing of this theft was deliberate: in Moscow the success of the operation was reported to Stalin that same day, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Not long afterward, Nikolai Yezhov, Yagoda’s successor as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, presented Stalin with select items from the haul: “I am sending you 103 letters taken from Trotsky’s archive in Paris.” Among this trove was Trotsky’s correspondence with Max Eastman for the years 1929 to 1933.

Zborowski regularly supplied Moscow with articles from the
Bulletin of the Opposition
before they appeared in print, and with copies of Trotsky’s letters and manuscripts, including portions of his book-length indictment of Stalin,
The Revolution Betrayed,
which turned up on Stalin’s desk before its publication in Paris in the summer of 1937. That August came Zborowski’s triumph, when Lyova went to the south of France and entrusted him with a small notebook containing the
addresses of Trotskyists living outside the Soviet Union. “As you know, we have dreamed about getting hold of it for a whole year,” an exultant Zborowski wrote to his superiors using his code name, “Tulip,” “but we never managed it before, because
SONNY
would never let it out of his hands. I enclose herewith a photo of these addresses.”

During Lyova’s absence from Paris, Zborowski stood in for him in negotiations to arrange a meeting with Ignace Reiss, the first of the GPU defectors. In making his break with the Kremlin, Reiss, the illegal resident in Belgium, had turned for help to the Dutchman Henk Sneevliet, a Communist member of parliament and trade union leader who had once been a close comrade of Trotsky’s. Sneevliet, working through Zborowski, invited Lyova to meet Reiss on September 6 in Reims, France—which is where the defector might have met his end had a GPU mobile squad not machine-gunned him to death a day earlier on a rural road outside Lausanne.

When he read the news, Trotsky was incensed at Sneevliet. A GPU defector who could have drawn back the curtain on the Moscow trials had been murdered in obscurity. Worldwide publicity, Trotsky argued, would have shielded Reiss from assassination. Instead, Sneevliet had acquiesced in Reiss’s plan to delay any public announcement until after his impassioned letter of resignation reached the Central Committee in Moscow. Reiss was unaware that the staff member at the Soviet embassy in Paris to whom he had entrusted the mailing of his letter had betrayed him, setting off a manhunt.

Trotsky saw deviousness, as well as ineptitude, in Sneevliet’s handling of the Reiss affair. Sneevliet had not only failed to inform Trotsky in a timely way about the defection; he even appeared reluctant to bring Lyova into direct contact with Reiss. Yet while Sneevliet does give the impression of being the controlling sort, he also had the feeling that Lyova’s comrades in Paris could not be trusted. And in the wake of Reiss’s murder, Sneevliet’s misgivings came to focus on Zborowski.

In October came another defection, that of Walter Krivitsky, the chief of Soviet military intelligence in Europe. Krivitsky, who was stationed in the Netherlands, was a childhood friend of Reiss’s. The two men had discussed their disillusionment with Moscow after the execution of the defendants in the first show trial in August 1936. They re
turned to the subject in the spring of 1937, as the terror began to ravage the ranks of the secret police and the military. Krivitsky resisted Reiss’s suggestion that they simultaneously break with Moscow, arguing that in spite of everything, the USSR still represented the best hope of the international proletariat.

Reiss’s murder helped Krivitsky overcome his doubts; in fact, his friendship with the dead defector left him little choice. He applied to the French government for political asylum, which brought with it police protection. Reiss’s widow, meanwhile, suspected that Krivitsky had had a hand in her husband’s death—or at least had failed to warn him of the danger. For his part, Krivitsky, in attempting to establish contact with her through the French Trotskyists, became convinced that they had been infiltrated by the GPU. During a tense meeting at the office of Trotsky’s Paris lawyer, Gérard Rosenthal, with Lyova, Sneevliet, and Reiss’s widow in attendance, Krivitsky warned: “There is a dangerous agent in your party.”

Krivitsky was wary of the Trotskyists for other reasons, as Lyova learned during a series of strenuous meetings with the reluctant defector in the final weeks of 1937. Trotsky and Lyova wanted Krivitsky to make a full and public break with the Kremlin, but he was torn about what to do next and eager to justify his past. Lyova lent him a sympathetic ear, thereby drawing the ire of Trotsky, who was impatient to seize the moment. After Lyova pressed Krivitsky to endorse the Fourth International, Krivitsky broke off their relations. Although Krivitsky had come to like and respect Lyova, he found little to admire about his milieu. Trotsky, the man, was a formidable figure, politically the equivalent of a government, he said later, whereas his followers were mere children.

The rupture may have saved Krivitsky’s life. That autumn, Lyova assigned Zborowski to be the defector’s contact and escort. The two men ended up taking walks together, probably conversing in their native Polish, and “Tulip” undoubtedly supplied his GPU handlers with information about the traitor’s movements. On one occasion they wandered into Père Lachaise cemetery, where Krivitsky noticed some dubious-looking characters off in the distance and for a moment was convinced that the shooting was about to begin. Why their fraternization did not
precipitate Krivitsky’s murder is a mystery, perhaps best explained by Zborowski’s instinct for self-preservation.

Lyova’s death in February 1938 may have been a victory for the GPU, but for Zborowski it meant the loss of his chief defender. He used his position as “Sonny’s” successor to deflect suspicion away from himself. The principal target of his intrigues was Sneevliet, who, Étienne now dutifully reported to Trotsky, had been spreading the story that Reiss’s murder had resulted from Lyova’s negligence. Predictably, Trotsky became outraged at the “slanderer” Sneevliet for besmirching his dead son’s reputation.

Zborowski worked assiduously to create the impression in Coyoacán that he was Trotsky’s most devoted comrade. The two men never met, and the obsequious manner that sometimes irritated Lyova did not come across in Zborowski’s letters to Trotsky. The
Bulletin
now began to appear more regularly than it had for a long time. “You are doing a great service in publishing the
Bulletin
so punctually and with such care,” Trotsky commended Étienne. “This is to your credit.”

Zborowski’s facility in Russian made him irreplaceable in Paris, which is why his superiors were wrong to suppose that Lyova’s death opened up the possibility “to get to the
OLD MAN”
by transplanting “Tulip” to Mexico. Zborowski was instructed to offer his services in Coyoacán, but although he claimed that his letter to Van broaching this idea had gone unanswered, no such letter exists and it is unlikely that one was ever sent. Zborowski and his family lived in a comfortable apartment building in Paris, courtesy of the GPU, and in his spare time he was able to pursue his studies in ethnology. It is hard to imagine him going to much trouble to exchange all this for an uncertain future in Mexico alongside the ultimate outlaw.

Then came the Klement murder in July 1938. About two weeks later Trotsky received a letter purporting to be from the victim, writing as a disillusioned follower. An obvious provocation, the text accused Trotsky of collaborating with the Gestapo and of behaving in a Bonapartist manner, and it declared the bankruptcy of the nascent Fourth International. Somehow, Klement’s death helped confirm Sneevliet in his suspicion that Zborowski was a GPU informant, a charge that he began to make openly that autumn. So did Victor Serge, like Sneevliet
once a close confederate of Trotsky’s who had lately become an irritant. Krivitsky and Reiss’s widow, meanwhile, voiced suspicions about Serge, detecting the hand of the GPU in his release from Soviet exile two years earlier.

Thousands of miles away in his Mexican redoubt, Trotsky tried to weigh the significance of these conflicting indictments. When Zborowski appealed to him for advice on how to clear his name, Trotsky proposed that he challenge Sneevliet and Serge to bring their charges before an authoritative commission. “The sooner, the more decisively, the firmer, the better,” he wrote without any pretense of neutrality, advocating an “energetic initiative…to press the accusers to the wall.”

Here matters stood in the final days of 1938, when a letter arrived at the Blue House that demolished Trotsky’s presumptions. The three-page letter, dated December 27 and sent from New York, was typed in Russian on a Latin-script typewriter and signed “Your Friend.” The writer, who claimed to be a Russian émigré to the United States by the name of Stein, said he was a relative of Genrikh Liushkov, a GPU commissar who had defected to Japan. Stein declared that he had recently returned from visiting Liushkov, who wished to warn Trotsky that a “dangerous provocateur” lurked among his followers in Paris. Liushkov, said Stein, could remember only the spy’s first name, Mark. This Mark had been close to Lyova and now published the
Bulletin of the Opposition.
He was further identified as a Jew from Poland, between thirty-two and thirty-five years old, who wrote well in Russian, wore glasses, and had a wife and young child. Trotsky understood that the person in question was Mark Zborowski.

According to Liushkov, Zborowski had kept Moscow informed about Lyova’s every move, read Trotsky’s letters, and was responsible for the theft of his archives in Paris. Mark presented himself as a Polish Communist, but Liushkov expressed skepticism about this and claimed that a background check would reveal that Mark had once belonged to the Union for Repatriation of Russians Abroad, a Paris-based organization run by former czarist officers, in which he had operated as a GPU provocateur. Mark met regularly with personnel from the Soviet embassy in Paris, according to Liushkov, who indicated that this could easily be verified by having him followed. “What surprises me more
than anything,” Stein injected reproachfully, “is the credulity of your comrades.”

Nor was this all. Liushkov believed that Trotsky himself was to be Mark’s next target. The GPU, he said, planned to send an assassin to Mexico, either through Mark or from Spain through Spanish agents posing as Trotskyists. Stein advised Trotsky to be extremely cautious. “The main thing, Lev Davidovich, is to protect yourself. Don’t trust a single individual sent to you by this provocateur, neither man or woman.”

Here was a warning that demanded to be taken seriously. On New Year’s Day, Trotsky sent an “extremely confidential, extremely important, and extremely urgent” communication to Jan Frankel in New York, summarizing the contents of the letter and suggesting two possible sources: either a legitimate warning from a timid friend or a GPU provocation. In fact, the Stein letter was the cunning contrivance of an improbable well-wisher. He was Alexander Orlov, until recently one of Moscow’s top spymasters.

At one time the illegal GPU resident in London, Orlov helped recruit and supervise Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess, the three original members of the infamous Cambridge spy ring, which passed top secret information to Moscow into the early years of the Cold War. At the outbreak of the Spanish civil war he was sent to Madrid to be the GPU’s station chief. Officially a mere political attaché, Orlov was the top Soviet official in Spain. It was Orlov who carried out the purge of the POUM and the anarchists in the name of liquidating Trotskyism. When Andrés Nin disappeared from a prison near Madrid in June 1937, he was said to have escaped, but in fact he was abducted, tortured, and murdered by a mobile squad supervised personally by Orlov.

Orlov and his staff in Spain warily monitored Moscow’s ongoing purge of the secret police and understood that fellow agents abroad were being ordered home and executed. The fatal summons for Orlov arrived in Madrid on July 9, 1938. Feigning compliance, he slipped across the border to France, collected his wife and daughter in Paris, and sailed to Canada.

Orlov determined that his best hope for survival was to blackmail
Stalin. From Canada he arranged to have a letter addressed to GPU chief Yezhov delivered to the Soviet embassy in Paris. In it he listed all the secrets he could reveal if his life were endangered or in the event of his death. The damage would include the exposure of numerous undercover agents such as the Cambridge spies, the truth about the fate of Nin, and the full story of “Tulip,” in which connection he named Sneevliet and Reiss. A separate item on the list read: “All about the
OLD MAN
and
SON.”

Orlov figured that Moscow would see the wisdom of leaving him alone. Shortly afterward, he moved to New York, where he made an arrangement with the U.S. immigration authorities that allowed him to reside in the country in obscurity under an assumed name. Of course, Orlov could never be certain that Moscow would allow him to live at all, which necessitated a life of caution and deception. Above all, Moscow must not be given the impression that he had failed to uphold his end of their tacit bargain.

Orlov should simply have disappeared, but he must have had a troubled conscience or some other kind of itch because he decided to take a risk and warn Trotsky. As Orlov was aware, the first GPU man to do this—Yakov Blumkin, in his face-to-face meeting with Trotsky in Turkey in 1929—was exposed and executed. Orlov had to assume that his letter to Trotsky would end up in the hands of the GPU, and so he had to concoct it in a way that concealed his identity. By posing as a relative of the defector Liushkov, he was able to convey highly secret information while eluding detection.

Orlov’s “Stein” letter was intended to reveal just enough about Zborowski to have him unmasked. He asked Trotsky to acknowledge receipt of the letter by placing an ad in the
Socialist Appeal,
the Trotskyist weekly printed in New York. Trotsky published the ad, which requested that Stein appear at the office of the Socialist Workers Party and ask to speak to “Martin,” the pseudonym for James Cannon. Trotsky needed confirmation that the letter was legitimate, but Orlov was no fool and it would have been foolhardy for him to accept such an invitation.