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February 9, 2003
EXCERPTS: Retrospectively speaking
This is a page from the diary of Leon Trotsky, the Soviet Foreign and War Minister in 1917-24, as captured in this work of fiction by Meaghan Delahunt
The Avenida Viena: July 1940
Life ... is not an easy matter ... you cannot live through it without falling into prostration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness...
I wrote these lines in 1934. Before the deaths of all my children and all my old comrades. I return to them often.
Sometimes, I confess, it is difficult to continue. I cannot sleep. The nights stretch out, the only release is chemical, to be found in the yellow bullets of nembutal, the sleeping pills slaking the mind’s activity, slowing me enough for a few hours’ rest. There is so much to be done and each day is a reprieve and I say as much to Natalia, but her mouth turns down sadly, because it is not over.
War. Nine months have passed since we sat, faces close to the short-wave radio, listening to the first news of the German torpedoes and the sinking of a British submarine. I write it loud, this war, a clarion for the world, the horror of it and the opportunities it presents. In the spring of 1939, I wrote in the Bulletin of the Opposition:
Having destroyed the Party and decapitated the Army, Stalin is now openly advancing his candidature as Hitler’s chief agent.
How this came to pass. How Stalin bought an uneasy peace with Hitler, a truce which cannot hold. The world proletariat abandoned to Fascism while Soviet Russia protects itself — the logic of Socialism in one country. And I will pay for this prescience, this I know. With Europe at war, will the waiting be over? How long will the Kremlin allow me here, with my pamphlets and accusations speeding to them from across the globe, from a room suffused with light and the shadows of jacaranda?
And it amuses me that the view from my window now, constrained, smaller, still seems to be the view of the sun and the light and the freedom, yes, the freedom of the house before.
The Casa Azul. The house before: the patio, the two courtyards and outbuildings formed a perfect blue rectangle out along the Avenida Londres and the Aveninda Berlin. The windows facing the streets blocked in with adobe bricks. The blue rectangle that enclosed me for a time and made me feel safe. The blue embrace.
It stays with me, the memory of her, and the view from that room in her house. At night sometimes, when I cannot sleep, I think of Frida, although two years have passed and we have not spoken, and Natalia, dear, sweet Natalia, keeps watch over me, more vigilant than any bodyguard.
Frida. I would like, sometimes, to catch a glimpse of her again, those colours swirling towards me, her brow arching in amusement, those lips turning upwards and outwards. That generosity of body and movement and personality. I would like to be able to watch her again, the slide of heavy rings on to her fingers, the attachment of flowers to her hair, the threading of ribbon through braids, those hands at work. To watch her preparing for a bath, with her bad foot concealed behind the other one, the skin fuzzed and deeply hued, perfect.
I daydream. I am not without guilt. Wondering if Natalia can see into me or through me. The self I present, as transparent as a glass prison — the glimpse of my other self caged with longing behind it.
Natalia has a way of looking at me, fierce, determined, loyal. In May, during the attack, with rounds of machine-gun fire branding the night, she pushed me to the ground up against the wall behind our bed and shielded me with her body, offering herself up for me. And in that moment I knew that I could never repay such love, felt diminished before it.
And still I fantasize about this other woman, now my enemy.
It is common to be obsessed with the enemy.
I hang my head at such betrayal of Natalia.
After all these years, I can work well through the day only if I know Natalia is near. I hear her opening the sash on the window to let air circulate more freely. She is everything to me. And yet a longing persists, irrationally, at the end of my days. For I know that these days must end.
I wrote to Frida in Paris, telling her of the break with Diego, remonstrating with her. Predicting the moral death of Diego without any affiliation to the Fourth International. The break with Diego. We shall say the break was about politics. Diego declared his support for Almazan, the bourgeois candidate in the elections — a politician backed by American oil interests. How could I condone such a candidate? Diego, always inconsistent. Such an extreme individualist. We fought on this issue. We broke apart, like a vessel too fragile for heat. Was our friendship really so fragile?
We shall say the break was about politics.
Frida, as always in these matters, supported Diego.
She never replied to my letter.
My friend, the enemy. In politics, those who are not with us are against us.
I returned the pen she gave me, inscribed with my name. She sent it back.
I write with it still. I work on my biography of Stalin using that pen, the pen from my enemy, inscribed with my name.
I sit here marking the page with that pen, thinking of the last time I saw her.
Frida’s skirts sweep the streets in rainbow-coloured arcs of dust. As she walks, the crowds fall back, and on this day, the ‘Day of the Dead’, Frida limps graciously towards me along the skulled streets, past the miniature coffins. I look up to see her coloured-swirling towards me, and in that instant, my past falls away: Lenin’s domed head, all my hopes for the International. For a moment I forget the Georgian with the moustache, the man of steel, who dogs my dreams and forces me into exile. In that instant with the young woman limping towards me on a dusty Mexican street, I can pretend that this is all there is and has ever been. And I turn away to adjust my round-rimmed spectacles, to adjust myself to the wonder of her.
It is my last trip to the market with Frida.
And on that morning, according to local custom, we had exchanged sugar-coated skulls. Frida’s husband Diego, then my benefactor, had rushed into the Casa Azul to give me a present. Diego and Frida, how they looked then — the elephant and the dove. Diego flushed and excited, his huge body heaving with exertion like an overstuffed schoolboy. I was not amused. For Diego, laughing, had presented me with a chocolate skull on which was inscribed in pink icing: STALIN.
Everyday I write about my enemy. And everyday, like buzzards around a corpse in the desert, my enemies hover with accusations and slander. Some say the terror began much earlier, that the signs were there from the start. Such accusations invariably turn on one episode: Kronstadt.
But let me say, quite clearly: There was no Kronstadt.
Let me say: I am that which my enemy is not.
I never said a revolution could be made without bloodshed. It is not a school for humanitarianism.
In the midst of civil war we were fighting to stay alive. Fourteen capitalist armies encircled us. White Guards and Socialist Revolutionaries and Anarchists put up their claims. We had two choices — crush or be crushed.
So, let me say quite clearly: There was to Kronstadt. There was no terror in 1921.
I appealed to the sailors of the Kronstadt garrison. They had the advantages: a fortress, an arsenal, the Baltic Fleet. Meanwhile, in Petrograd, we had starving workers, striking workers. A descent into chaos.
A revolution is not bolstered through chaos.
SOVIETS WITHOUT BOLSHEVIKS.
Such demands! How quickly they turned, the soldiers and sailors of Kronstadt: the legalisation of parties; the end of rationing; freedom for small traders; release of all political prisoners.
Impossible demands at an impossible time. What were they thinking?
I did not hesitate. I appealed to them and they did not listen.
Kronstadt shook me. Undeniably. But from the vantage point of years, there is nothing I would change. I would again give the order to fire and attack, sliding across the icy Gulf of Finland before the ice thawed and the fleet could overwhelm us. I would do it all again. For it bought us time and time was what we needed.
That day in 1921 there were two assaults on the Kronstadt garrison. By the second assault, we were not fighting our own men. We were fighting the class enemy masquerading as our own.
In politics he who is not with us stands against us.
That day, there was no Kronstadt. There was merely a fight for hope against people who had lost hope. These were political decisions for our own survival.
Let me say quite clearly: I am that which my enemy is not.
Excerpted with permission from
In the Casa Azul: A novel of revolution and betrayal (c)2002
By Meaghan Delahunt
St Martin’s Press, New York
ISBN 0-312-29106-X
308pp. $23.95
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