Trotsky Letters

Plots and tenderness

Just four months before an agent of Joseph Stalin's secret police shattered his skull with an alpine axe in 1940, Bolshevik Revolutionary Leader Leon Trotsky sold his confidential correspondence to Harvard for $10,000. Last week the university's Houghton Library unveiled it. Included were Trotsky's own copies of 17,500 letters written by him and to him from 1927 to 1940, and kept under wraps ever since at Trotsky's own insistence, in order to protect his correspondents from Stalin's possible retribution.

Trotsky's letters disclose a new and fascinating personal dimension of the revolutionary genius who, as Lenin's right-hand man, led the Bolshevik armed forces in the October 1917 revolution. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky lost a struggle for power to Stalin; this ended in Trotsky's banishment and Stalin's Great Purge of supposed "Trotskyites" in the late 1930s. The consequences of that savage quarrel run like a sanguinary thread throughout the Trotsky correspondence.

As the letters show, the exiled Trotsky was as indefatigable in his attempts to overthrow Stalin as Stalin was tireless in his efforts to kill Trotsky, his family and his followers. A large number of Trotsky's letters are devoted to the organizing of his own revolutionary groups outside the U.S.S.R.--even as Stalin was organizing a special unit of his far-reaching secret police, the GPU, to hunt down Trotsky's supporters, family and Trotsky himself. By 1938 his first wife and two sons had already been exterminated.

In one chilling letter sent to his second wife in 1937, Trotsky described an early attempt to assassinate him. He wrote that the wife of a pro-Stalinist official named Vishniak, who "hated the official line and showed sympathy to me personally," had warned him that Stalin wanted to finish him off "accidentally." The accident actually took place on the anniversary of the October revolution in 1927 when shots aimed at Trotsky's car missed their target and killed a militiaman.

In many respects, Trotsky underestimated Stalin, whom he dismissed as a "gray, colorless mediocrity." In the early 1930s, his letters show, Trotsky believed he would soon be restored to power in Moscow. Trotsky's secretary in the years of exile, Frenchman Jean van Heijenoort, who catalogued the letters at Harvard, told TIME Correspondent Marlin Levin that only Hitler's rise and the destruction of the German Communist Party in 1933 shattered Trotsky's hopes.

Though Trotsky has usually been regarded as a steely, unsentimental figure, the many letters to his wife Natalya reveal that he also possessed a tender side. During a brief separation from her in 1933, the 53-year-old Trotsky wrote: "What a torment it is for me not to have an old picture of yours, a picture of us together when we were young. Your image, dearest Natalya, as you were when you were young, flickers and vanishes." The aging but indomitable revolutionary added: "Obviously all these years of persecution have had a great effect on my nervous system and my memory. It seems that my brain has become thrifty, economical; it pushes out the past in order to cope with new tasks."

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