Preface

Whenever people discovered that I had lived with Leon Trotsky for several years in Tijuana from about 1941 to 1953, I was asked many questions. Sometimes friends or neighbors who knew me well asked me about my experience as his bodyguard or as a player in the Mexican baseball leagues. At other times it was newspaper reporters, writers, or historians who wanted to know about Trotsky and his life. There was, for a while, great interest in the fact that Joseph McCarthy had called Trotsky to testify before his committee.

As with all celebrities, there had been rumors and stories about Trotsky, some true and some false. Some people were interested in the details of his private life and wanted to know if he really had had an affair with the comedienne Rachel Silberstein. Others wanted to know if that affair was why his wife Natalia Sedova left him after all of their years together. Some had heard about Dr. Bergman’s psychoanalysis of the world-famous revolutionary and wondered if Trotsky had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown. Some wanted to know about his secretary Mark Zborowski, known as Étienne, who several people alleged had murdered Trotsky’s son, the same Zborowski also worked with Margaret Mead, with whom he was rumored to have had an affair.

Others, with more political interests, wanted to know Trotsky’s view of World War II, or his thoughts on the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, or his attitude toward the Cold War. Some wanted to know about his political organization, the Fourth International. Of course everyone wanted to know if I thought that Trotsky died of natural causes, so remarkably on the same day as Joseph Stalin, or if he might have been murdered and, if so, who might have done it. And some wanted to know if I thought that Stalin might have been poisoned and who could have killed him. So, after spending years responding to such questions, I decided to answer all of them once and for all.

After working as a secretary and bodyguard for Trotsky for over a decade, I later became the president of the Machinists Union at a shipyard in San Diego, California, and then spent a few years as a TV repairman in Chula Vista. Then, in my forties, I went off to study fiction writing at the University of Iowa and subsequently became a novelist. Some of you may know my book simply titled Danny.

What I have written here is both a novelized memoir and a fictionalized biographical account of Trotsky’s years in Tijuana. While what follows is fiction, it is based on my intimate contact with Trotsky and those in his world; the events described here actually happened and many of the conversations here are practically verbatim. I am uniquely situated to write what is a true account of Trotsky in those years in Tijuana and I can state sincerely that this novel is also history and that this fiction is also truth.

Leon Trotsky was to me a father figure and, as the reader will discover, I felt the ambivalence toward him that most sons feel toward their fathers. As boys, we think of our fathers as strong and always right, and then later we discover that they can be weak and are sometimes wrong. When we mature, we still love them, but also see them as people like ourselves, as the fathers that we have in turn become.

I dedicate this book to my wife Rocío and to our children Juan and María who live in a brave, new world so different from the one I grew up in. It too seems to be a world with revolutionary possibilities, though not of the sort that we had dreamt of.

— Ralph Bucek, Chula Vista, California, 1961