Sunday 22 November 2009

TROTSKY AND THE PHANTOM

HOTEL BRISTOL

IT WAS my brother James who brought the curious case of Trotsky and the phantom Hotel Bristol to my attention. The incident was, he said, a reminder that any fraudster or philanderer looking for an alibi should not instantly answer “the Bristol” when called to account over what hotel he or she was staying in, for although hotels called Bristol may seem to be everywhere, there are one or two places where they do not exist.

James had been in Mexico City on some junket, and even though he had treacherously failed to stay at the city’s Hotel Bristol (by all reports a moderately priced, 140-room, centrally located hotel in the Zona Rosa near the British and US embassies, used by Mexican businessmen but with a family-run air), he more than made up for it by bringing to my attention a Hotel Bristol that played a crucial role in the life of Leon Trotsky. James is not a great art connoisseur but he has always been interested in Freda Kahlo, and part of his visit was to see the artist’s famous Blue House in the rural suburb of Coyoacán, where she had lived with her husband Diego Rivera. It was Rivera who has helped to secure asylum in Mexico for Trotsky, who stayed in the house on his arrival in 1936 and briefly had an affair with Kahlo.

Lenin’s death in 1924 meant that either Trotsky or Josef Stalin, the other two instigators of the October Revolution, would become the Soviet leader. Stalin came to power and Trotsky, together with his wife Natalia and son Leon Sedova, was expelled from the party and sent into exile, first to Istanbul, then France and Norway, before being granted a safe haven in Mexico.

Although out of sight, Trotsky was never far from Stalin’s murderous mind, and the Soviet leader continued to discredit Trotsky and plot his assassination. He also systematically began ridding the Soviet Union of every leading communist in the Great Purge and Terror that culminated in the Moscow Trials, which began not long before the time of Trotsky’s arrival in Mexico. Stalin himself was the only surviving member of Lenin’s Politburo not arraigned at the trials. Close associates and members of his own family were killed, every important survivor of the October Revolution, every heroic militant and worthy party worker was done away with, and almost half of the 75,000 officers of the Red Army, which Trotsky had founded, were arrested or shot. The number of victims ran into millions.

Under torture and threats, thousands confessed to crimes that had never taken place. The trials shocked the world and split the communist party abroad, not least in Spain where civil war was getting under way. Trotsky became a hot potato no government wanted to touch. The Norwegians kept him under virtual house arrest and when Stalin applied economic pressure, threatening to renegue on the purchase of the Norwegian herring catch, they threw him out. No Western country would have him. But in Mexico, home of the 20th century’s first revolutionary government, Diego Rivera persuaded president Lazaro Cárdenas to take him in.

So on December 19, 1936, Leon and Natalia set sail on Ruth, a Norwegian tanker, for Mexico. Disarmed, guarded and forbidden from communicating with the rest of the world, the couple were at sea through the new year, arriving at the port of Tampico twenty-one days later, on January 9. Afraid for his life, Trotsky refused to step ashore until he had been met by his hosts. A small crowd was on the quayside to greet them and eventually he emerged, dressed in tweeds and plus fours with a white cap and carrying a briefcase and cane. The Mexican president was represented by General Beltrán, and Diego Rivera, sick with kidney trouble and furious that he was unable to attend, was represented by Frida Kahlo (their arrival is pictured above).

The party boarded the president’s train, the Hidalgo, and they all got on well. “Having escaped a sickening atmosphere and a state of exhausting uncertainty, we found everywhere nothing but kind concern and hospitality,” Trotsky wrote. Formality was broken with song, the presidential guard giving hearty renditions of heroic tunes from the Zapata revolution, Americans sang Joe Hill, and Frida Kahlo added Mexican folk ballads.

Two days later they arrived in Coyoacán, then a leafy village, today a pleasant corner of the world’s largest city. Rivera, recovered more or less to his robust self, was there to meet them, and he and Trotsky became instant comrades. Natalia, relieved at last to have found a place of rest, later recalled, “It was a low, blue house, with a patio filled with plants, cool rooms, collections of pre-columbian art and countless paintings.”

The house had been built by Guillermo Khalo three years before the birth of his favourite daughter. The photographer had vacated the house he still lived in with Frida and Diego, as well as his other daughter, Cristina, for their special guests. He had no idea who Trotsky was and when told what he did for a living handed on the advice that if a man wanted to get on, he should stay out of politics. That first night Rivera, ever the man of drama and action, returned to his nearby home in San Angel to fetch a Thompson machine gun and join two other gun-toting Mexicans to stand guard at the house.

Meantime the Moscow Trials had continued to hog the world’s headlines. Throughout the trials, Trotsky’s name came up many times, accused with a whole bagful of heinous crimes against the Soviet Union – including being a member of British intelligence and an agent of Hitler and the Japanese Emperor – committed over a number of years. But it was not until the Zinovievite-Trotskyite trial in August that the case against Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov had been heard, and he had been found guilty on all counts.

In the United States, the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky attracted many left-wing figures. It was imperative, they believed, to show the world that these allegations were entirely false and that the trials were a charade. As a result, an independent Commission of Inquiry was set up, to be held at the Blue House in Coyoacán. Dr John Dewey, a respected Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York, then 78 years old and not in the greatest of physical health, was persuaded to take the chair. Taking the express train from New York, he joined Carleton Beals, an American journalist, Otto Rühle, a founder of the German Communist Workers Party and a former member of the Reichstag, Benjamin Stolberg, the American labour writer, and Suzanne La Follette, the American author and editor of The New Freeman, who acted as secretary. Albert Goldman, a Chicago lawyer, represented Trotsky and Albert M. Glotzer, a court reporter from Chicago, recorded the evidence during the week-long proceedings that began on April 10, 1937.

Sessions were held in the largest room in the Blue House, which for the duration was protected by brick and sandbag barricades six feet high. A long table was set up for Trotsky, Natalia and the commission, and forty seats were provided for journalists and guests. It was an excuse to dress up, a chance to catch the public eye. Rivera arrived in a broad-brimmed hat decorated with peacock feathers. Frida, in Indian costume and heavy ethnic jewellery, kept close to the accused. (Trotsky was not averse to flirtation, though he had little time for subtlety and generally went straight for the knee beneath the table. An attempt to ensnare Frida’s sister, Cristina, who lived next door, was more elaborate; for this, El Viejo – the Old Man, as Frida called him – arranged an emergency fire practice that would end with his escape into her house.)

The case that was produced against Trotsky in Moscow had rested on the evidence of a single week in November 1932 when Trotsky had been invited to give a lecture on the Russian Revolution to the Danish Social Democratic Student Organisation. An eight-day visa had allowed him to travel to Denmark from Istanbul. Evidence was given by three defendants in the trial, Eduard Holtzman, Konan Berman-Yurin and Fritz David, who claimed that they had visited Copenhagen to meet Trotsky and his son Sedov, and Trotsky had instructed them to commit various terrorist acts against leading figures in the Soviet Union.

In his opening statement at the Blue House, Albert Goldman brought up the crucial matter of the Hotel Bristol, stating:

“Our evidence will show that Leon Trotsky never met and never heard of Berman-Yurin or Fritz David, that the said Berman-Yurin and Fritz David never met Leon Trotsky at Copenhagen or anywhere else, and that Trotsky never had any correspondence with them. Holtzman, the most important of the three witnesses who claimed to have visited Trotsky in Copenhagen, testified that he met Trotsky’s son in the vestibule of the Hotel Bristol and that from there he was brought by Sedov to Trotsky’s apartment. We shall show by written and oral testimony that Trotsky’s son, at the time in question, was not in Copenhagen but in Berlin, and that Trotsky and his wife, Natalia, were able to see their son only in France, on the train returning from Denmark. We shall prove that Sedov made several efforts to reach Copenhagen, but without any success.”

The Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen was the key point in Trotsky’s defence, as it became clear on the third day of the hearing:

GOLDMAN: On the question of the Hotel Bristol, on page two of the official report of Court Proceedings, published by the People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, dealing with the question of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist centre, Holtzman testifies and says: “I agreed, but I told him that we could not go together, for reasons of secrecy. I arranged with Sedov to be in Copenhagen within two or three days, to put up at the Hotel Bristol and meet him there. I went to the hotel straight from the station, and in the lounge met Sedov.”

Now, he says here – and we want to call the Commissioners’ attention to that fact – in testifying as to what the arrangements were in Berlin, that he arranged with Sedov to meet him in Copenhagen at the Hotel Bristol. The inference would be that he knew in Berlin that there was a Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen, and made arrangements to meet there. Now, immediately after the trial and during the trial, when the statement, which the Commissioners can check up on, was made by him, a report came from the Social-Democratic Press in Denmark that there was no such hotel as the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen; that there was at one time a hotel by the name of Hotel Bristol, but that was burned down in 1917. The guide “Baedeker” of 1917 includes the name of Hotel Bristol. That was the report of the Social-Democratic Press of Denmark, which went the rounds throughout the world Press. About five or six months thereafter, the Communist Press issued a statement to the effect that whereas there was no Hotel Bristol, right next to Hotel Bristol Café…

DEWEY: Next to the Hotel Bristol?

GOLDMAN: Pardon me. Whereas there was no Hotel Bristol, there was a hotel by the name of Grand, and right next to the Grand Hotel there was a café called the Bristol Café. The photograph appears in a magazine Soviet Russia Today, of March, 1937. The magazine is the official organ of the Friends of the Soviet Union, if I am not mistaken. At any rate, the Commission can look through the magazine and satisfy itself that it is very, very hostile to Trotsky and exceedingly friendly to the Stalin Government in the Soviet Union. This photograph, which I now hand to the Commission, is a photograph allegedly showing that there is some connection with the name Bristol and the word “hotel”. I show you this photograph, a radio photograph especially cabled for by Soviet Russia Today and received from Nord Press of Denmark through the Radio Corporation of America on February 22nd. I show the photograph to the Commissioners and ask them to examine this photograph first. I also show the Commissioners a sketch purporting to show the exact location of the Grand Hotel and the Café Bristol. This sketch is from the magazine called Rundschau, a German magazine which is also very friendly…

TROTSKY: It is a publication of the Comintern and it is in German.

GOLDMAN: After Inprecorr ceased publication, the Rundschau took its place as the official organ of the Comintern.

TROTSKY: Rundschau is published in Switzerland.

GOLDMAN: This sketch allegedly shows the connection between the Grand Hotel and the Café Bristol, showing that the Bristol Café is supposed to be right next to the Grand Hotel, and, if I am not mistaken, with an entrance leading from the hotel, the Grand Hotel, directly into the Café Bristol.

TROTSKY: Not an entrance, if you permit me. It is a cross…

STOLBERG: It looks like a door there.

TROTSKY: I am not sure.

GOLDMAN: Let the Commissioners investigate for themselves. Mr Rühle reads German, and can tell the Commissioners exactly what this is supposed to identify.

LA FOLLETTE: This is Scandinavian.

STOLBERG: The story is in German.

(Attorney Goldman hands document to the Commission.)

GOLDMAN: The Commissioners will see that the photograph published in Soviet Russia Today has the word “Hotel”. The word “Grand” does not appear on the photograph. At least, I cannot make it out. Whether it is cut off, or whether actually the fact is that it is not there, I am unable to state from an observation of the photograph itself. The word “Bristol” appearing on the extreme right of the photograph appears in very clear letters, and the word “Konditori” appearing to the left of the word “Bristol” is hardly visible, although it is visible. I mention this fact to indicate that evidently the photograph was touched up for the purpose of indicating that there is such a hotel as Hotel Bristol. Will the Press take a look at that?

Now, I have an affidavit of B. J. Field and Esther Field, who are in New York and subject to be cross-examined by the full Commission after this preliminary Commission, or by another sub-commission, and in this affidavit B. J. Field and Esther Field make the following statement. Referring to the photo in Soviet Russia Today, they say:

“Directly next to the entrance to the hotel, and what appears as a big black splotch in the photo, is actually the location of the Café next to the Grand Hotel and it is not the Konditori Bristol! The Konditori Bristol is not next door, but actually several doors away, at quite a distance from the hotel, and was not a part of it in any way, and there was no door connecting the Konditori (‘candy store’ it would be called here) and the Grand Hotel! Although there was such an entrance to the café which is blackened out in the photo, and which was not the Bristol.”

In other words, between the Grand Hotel and the Konditori Bristol there was a café and between the hotel and the café there was an entrance, but there was no entrance at all connecting the hotel and the Bristol Konditori.

B. J. Field and Esther Field were actually in that café and they were also in the hotel, so they are speaking from personal knowledge. They say further:

“As a matter of fact, we bought some candy once at the Konditori Bristol, and we can state definitely that it had no vestibule, lobby, or lounge in common with the Grand Hotel or any hotel, and it could not have been mistaken for a hotel in any way, and entrance to the hotel could not be obtained through it. At the time of this trip to Copenhagen. we knew of no Danish Trotskyites and we do not believe” – Here I want to emphasise the statement that in the Communist Press the statement was made that the Café Bristol was the “hang out” for Danish Trotskyites – “At the time of this trip to Copenhagen, we knew of no Danish Trotskyites, and we do not believe that there were any.” One of the German comrades, in spite of the language barrier, was sent to the headquarters of the Copenhagen Stalinists to invite them to Trotsky’s lecture.

I think we have proved, on the basis of all the documents, first, that Sedov was never in Copenhagen, and second, there was no such hotel as Hotel Bristol where Holtzman claims that he allegedly met Sedov in Copenhagen.


THE PROOF seemed conclusive. The commission returned to New York for the full enquiry, which in December exonerated Trotsky and Sedov of all accusations.

Trotsky enjoyed a brief summer of love with Frida Kahlo, before falling out with Rivera and quitting the Blue House. He and Natalia afterwards set up home in a crumbling bourgeois folly in nearby Calle Vienna, which they fortified.

That summer, leaders of the Trotskyite POUM in Republican Spain were arrested. A photograph taken the previous year shows a woman in a siren-suit uniform, her right fist held high, on the streets of Barcelona at the head of a pro-Stalin PSUC militia. Her name is Caridad Mercader. Four years later her son Jaime Ramón Mercader del Rio Hernandez, who had gained the confidence in the Coyoacán household, dug an ice pick deep into Trotsky’s skull as he sat at his desk. Hospitalised, El Viejo was operated on, went into a coma and died the following night.

Mercader survived a beating from Trotsky’s guards, but it was some time before his real identity was known. Even then, he refused to speak. In fact he had been brought into the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, through his mother’s lover Leonid Eitingon. After a trial, he served twenty years in Mexico’s prisons. In 1956 Nikita Kruschev denounced the Moscow Trials and his predecessor’s regime of “suspicion, fear and terror” in a speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. Released from jail four years later, Mercador returned to the Eastern bloc where he was given the Order of Lenin and a place of honour in the KGB Museum. He died in Havana in 1978.

But what of Trotsky’s accusers, Eduard Holtzman, Konan Berman-Yurin and Fritz David, three of the sixteen defendants in the First Moscow Trial in 1936? They had not connived with Trotsky, so why did they say that they had, knowing that they themselves would be sentenced to death for their “confessions”?

James said that it was obvious that either they had been tortured, or their families had been threatened. They would die anyway, but because of their confessions they thought their families would be safe.

“If anyone ever threatened to harm Kate or the kids,” he said, “I’d probably do whatever they asked, too.”

I didn’t say anything. It seemed to me like another good reason for not having children.