Published Reviews
Following a few excerpts from reviews, each published review is listed below together with the website. If published in a language other than English, a translation is provided before the original language. Some reviews have also been translated into other languages and links to those follow the original article.
Excerpts from Reviews
“Trotsky in Tijuana is a great read. It is fairly races along and it allows you to get a real grasp of the key political discussions of the time while understanding the human side of Trotsky, Natalia and their circle.” – Dave Kellaway
“…this is a skillfully written and politically engaging book—certainly among the best of the novels in English based on Trotsky’s life.” – Bill Keach,
“Yet La Botz arguably takes on a more difficult task than the novels by Kingsolver and Padura, since they are not focused on exploring Trotsky the human being.” – Paul LeBlanc
Review of Trotsky in Tijuana from The Institute for Anarchist Studies
“Trotsky in Tijuana”
by Javier Sethness Castro
July 21, 2022
Trotsky in Tijuana is an intriguing and well-written book of alternate (or counter-) history, in which La Botz imagines Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940) surviving his assassination in Mexico City by the Spanish Soviet agent Ramón Mercaderand. In La Botz’s vision, the famed Ukraine-born Jewish Marxist then continues to organize against social-democratic reformism and Stalin’s Communist International through his organization, the Fourth International. This book combines neo-Trotskyist critique of Stalinism with libertarian-socialist themes as an imaginative “second world” to our own, illuminating divisions on the Left among anarchists, Trots, and “tankies” (who support “anti-imperialist” dictators). Yet, as we shall see, despite the novel’s beauty and insights, Trotskyism appears to overpower anarchism in La Botz’s historical retelling.
In Trotsky in Tijuana, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova, Trotsky’s second wife, fatefully questions the man she knew as Frank Jacson’s choice to wear a heavy raincoat during a visit to their fortress-home in Coyoacán on August 20, 1940. However, in La Botz’s counternarrative, Sedova’s doubts do not go unheard. Historically, Mercader wore this same coat to cover up the ice ax he would use to fatally injure the exiled communist revolutionary, as the latter reviewed an essay with which his counterpart sought to distract him. Yet, in La Botz’s imagination, Ralph Bucek, a fictional US-American guard of the “Old Man,” enters his charge’s office and hits the Spaniard in the head with a baseball at the last moment, saving the day.
Rather than replay Trotsky’s murder—as John P. Davidson’s novel The Obedient Assassin (2014), Antonio Chavarrias’s film El Elegido (The Chosen, 2016), and the Russian TV miniseries on Trotsky (2017) do—La Botz’s book envisions the founder of the Red Army escaping this brush with death through exile to Baja California, where he continues to theorize about current events, especially World War II, and even find time for erotic love.
Not long after Trotsky, Sedova, and their retinue resettle in the so-called Cantú house in Tijuana, Trotsky’s own anarchistic secretary, Jan van Heijenoort, abandons Mexico for Europe, plotting a long-term mission to assassinate Stalin. La Botz imagines that Van’s plan dovetails with the “doctors’ plot” of 1953, when Soviet Jewish physicians had supposedly conspired with Western imperial powers to murder Stalin, his propagandist Andrei Zhdanov, and other party bosses. In retaliation for the discovery of this “plot,” Stalin ordered the arrests of hundreds of Soviet Jews and/or physicians, and planned to expand the Gulag to imprison more Jews, in a final homage to his “frenemy,” Adolf Hitler. Yet, just as a possible second Holocaust and nuclear war between the USSR and the West are threatened, La Botz’s depiction of Van’s assassination plot succeeds. The same day, the Soviet agent “Étienne” (Mark Zborowski)—who had murdered Trotsky and Sedova’s son, Lev Sedov, in Paris, and then boldly posed (in La Botz’s imagination) as Trotsky’s new secretary in Tijuana—kills Lev Davidovich by poisoning.[2]
While La Botz is sympathetic to his martyred subject, he is not uncritical toward the Bolshevik leader’s legacy. He surely does not shy away from depicting Trotsky’s narcissistic, delusional, and dogmatic tendencies. Rather, he insinuates the need for twenty-first-century updates to the brightest ideas of this “polymath,” who was “lost in time.” These ideas include class struggle, the united front, and the permanent revolution. Historically speaking, Trotsky adapted the last of these from the French anarchist Élisée Reclus, who asserted in 1899 that “[a]s long as iniquity endures, we, international anarcho-communists, will remain in a state of permanent revolution.”[3]
This dynamic only reinforces the anarchist hypothesis that Marxists aim to appropriate revolution for themselves and their bureaucratic franchises, rather than the liberation of the working classes and humanity—as Marx’s own expulsion of Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume from the First International in 1872, and Lenin and Trotsky’s crushing in 1921 of the Kronstadt Commune and of the peasant-anarchist Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, prove. While the mutiny by Red sailors at Kronstadt demanded that the Russian Revolution advance without the dead weight of the Communist Party, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army was cofounded by the Ukrainian peasant guerrilla Nestor Makhno, who also organized with the Nabat (Tocsin) anarchist confederation after the fall of Tsar Nicholas I in 1917. Despite the Makhnovists’ proclamation of free soviets and their actions that arguably saved the Revolution through their fierce resistance to the reactionary White armies during the Civil War (1918–21), just as the Kronstadt sailors had previously served the cause at key points, forces loyal to Red Army commander Trotsky crushed both groups.
Notably, La Botz does not acknowledge that Lev Davidovich Bronstein adopted the surname Trotsky in 1898, after his jailer in Odessa. Psychoanalytically, this choice suggests identification with the aggressor, which is consistent with sociopolitical authoritarianism.[4] Arguably in this sense, there is a direct line from Lev’s adoption of his prison warden’s name to his own atrocities in the Revolution. Indeed, Trotsky in Tijuana’s coverage of the Russian Revolution conveys its author’s neo-Trotskyism. For instance, throughout the novel, the totality of the revolution is reduced to the Bolsheviks’ October 1917 seizure of power, with little to no mention of the “people’s epic” from February 1917, which in fact began the earthquake. This elision amounts to a minimization of the role played, specifically, by the proletarian women who lit the spark in Petrograd that overthrew the Romanov Tsars. La Botz even suggests that “revolution” emanated from Lenin’s persona, as though this were his superpower. Likewise, in a 2015 column in New Politics, the author writes that in both “February and October 1917,” the “Bolshevik[s] led the Russian working class to overthrow the Czarist autocracy.” The only problem with this claim is that all of the Bolshevik leaders were in exile during February 1917.[5]
In reality, the book glosses over its subject’s wickedness, in a move that functions to boost Trotsky’s radical credentials. Although La Botz acknowledges that the Bolsheviks “incorporated […] Tsarist officers” into the Red Army early on, the mass murder of the insurgent Kronstadt sailors—overseen by Trotsky in March 1921—is not mentioned until the second half of the book. At that point, La Botz describes the war commissar as merely “support[ing] the decision” to suppress the mutineers, rather than supervising the ex-Tsarist officer Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s use of overwhelming force toward this end.[6] Neither Makhno nor the Makhnovshchina is mentioned at all.
In short, while La Botz’s historical counternarrative champions direct action and critiques bureaucratic authoritarianism, the author’s affection for the “Old Man” somewhat clouds the novel’s treatment of the period between 1917 and 1921. A more anarchist approach might have portrayed Lev Davidovich as haunted by the counterrevolutionary brutality he oversaw and carried out during that time. Although La Botz’s condemnation of Stalinism is most apt—especially in light of “tankie” support for Putin’s war crimes in Syria and Ukraine—and despite the author’s good-natured satire of the titular character, the story neither adequately questions the role of “revolutionary” authority nor proclaims that it is the workers and peasants, not the party, who drive revolutionary change.
Prophet Prolonged….?
Prophet Prolonged….?
By Dave Kellaway
Trotsky invites his young follower, Ramon Mercader, into his study to discuss an article. As the Old Man settled at the desk Mercader pulls out a sharpened ice pick ready to plunge it into Trotsky’s skull…but at that moment a young American guard rushes from the doorway and throws the assailant to the ground. It is August 211940 and Trotsky has survived another assassination attempt by a GPU agent acting on Stalin’s orders.
How many supporters of Trotsky’s ideas might have fantasised some such scenario and envisaged the positive consequences it may have had on the direction of the socialist movement. I remember leaders of the Trotskyist movement like Ernest Mandel suggest that his loss in 1940 had a material negative effect on the fortunes of the Fourth International (FI), the movement he founded in1938. If he had survived maybe the problems and divisions that bedevilled the FI might have been overcome.
This book uses this historically counter factual premise to build its story around an extension of Trotsky’s life for another 13 years. The big political questions of the war and post war period are addressed alongside the personal and human problems of Trotsky, Natalia, his partner, and his circle.
Although it is not a very common fictional/documentary literary genre it certainly replicates the what-iffery debates that everyone interested in politics – activists, journalists or TV pundits – engages in all the time. Once you accept that history is not inevitable or written in advance then things can always have turned out differently.
The many arguments we have had with reformists, Stalinists, ‘campists’ or other radicals always involve alternative outcomes even though political choices, tactics and strategy take place in objective circumstances we cannot ignore. A forthcoming book, by Daniel Bensaid, looks at a series of key historical dates in precisely this way.
Some of the best known counter-factual books or films examine what would have happened if Hitler had won the war: Fatherland by Robert Harris, the film It happened here by Kevin Brownlow and the more recent TV success, The Man in the High Castle. All of these are more than literary conceits but make political points about the social and class forces in play that are pertinent today. For example we see in the Harris book how the US ruling class were quite happy to make a deal with the fascists in a similar way that Trump is engaging with fascist militia today.
Over 80 bite-sized chapters, Dan La Botz constructs an alternative history where Trotsky continues to be helped by the progressive nationalist president of Mexico, Cardenas. He is assigned a military guard and a house in Tijuana, just across the border from San Diego. The author uses his local knowledge of both this region and of Mexico to create a detailed and colourful picture of the local context.
Several threads structure the book. One is the story of Ralph, the young guard who saves Trotsky from the ice pick written from the viewpoint of a rank and file activist. Another is the persepctive from Stalin’s dacha where he keeps alive his vendetta against Trotsky. A third and perhaps most successful one is a focus on Natalia and her relationship to Trotsky and his politics. To some degree La Botz rescues Natalia’s story from the shadows to which it is often relegated.
But it is the political debate and efforts of Trotsky to build his Fourth International which is the meat of the book. At times this can read a little like a political pamphlet or a party educational but it is written very accessibly way for those not steeped in the heritage of the Trotskyist movement.
Inevitably the book addressed the question about whether Trotsky’s survival would have dramatically improved the fate of the nascent Fourth International. It eventually concludes that it would not have made much of a difference. I am sure some will argue vehemently against this but there are lots of reasons to agree with the overall judgement.
Trotsky’s position on the absolute priority of declaring the foundation of the FI was linked to his analysis that thought the Second World War would lead to a similar economic and revolutionary crisis that followed the First World War. He thought that the resurgent masses would rise up in the West and sweep away the bureaucratic caste in Russia or the caste itself would be smashed by imperialism. The reinforcement of Stalinism and its increased prestige in the workers movement internationally because of its role in defeating Hitler was not really considered likely. Obviously planting the banner of the FI was more logical if you thought there would be a mass revolutionary upsurge and that the Stalinists would be completely discredited.
Harshness
Many observers have recognised Trotsky’s brilliance in political analysis and practical leadership in the civil war but also a certain arrogance, narcissism and lack of what today we call emotional intelligence or empathy. We follow the discussion with Victor Serge, who had a different analysis of the Soviet Union, or with the POUM, the Spanish left group, and you are struck by the harshness of Trotsky’s response, his tendency to accuse Serge or others of being petty bourgeois or intellectuals. Even his response to the Schatman split in the US Socialist Workers Party seems partly impelled by his distrust of these critics of the degenerated workers state theory because they were intellectuals against the more working class leadership of James Cannon.
Of course you can make the counter-factual argument to La Botz’s counter-factual novel by arguing that the masterly way that Trotsky analysed and accurately predicted the rise of fascism in Germany would have meant that post-war reality would have drawn him away from his catastrophist scenarios. Possibly, but the book picks up in several places how weak the revolutionary vanguard and its memory was in the post-war period.
Most of the revolutionary generation that Trotsky was part of had been physically eliminated either by the fascists or the Stalinists. Lack of implantation in the mass movements by the small FI groups meant it was easier for them to stick to the 1938 version of reality. For a shift in Trotsky’s position to have taken place you would have to have a people in the movement with the credibility and confidence to challenge his views. Most of the post-war leadership was relatively young and were not leaders from the mass movement.
We can also argue that those groups or currents that were opposed to declaring the FI in 1938 have not been particularly more effective at building an international network of revolutionaries. Many who broke with defence of the Soviet Union against imperialism did end up in the imperialist camp such as James Burnham. However this is a debate that is superseded to some degree today by at least the main FI current which no longer define their movement in the terms Trotsky did in this period as the actual existing world leadership of the proletariat. It actively seeks to build a network alongside currents coming from other traditions and includes the key dimensions of ecology and feminism.
The author skilfully uses both real and invented characters in the story. So Etienne, who was a GPU agent involved in killing Stalin’s opponents in France, is given a new lease of life as he infiltrates Trotsky’s household in Tijuana. His post GPU life was actually as an anthropologist called Zbromoski. Similarly Van Heinjenoort who was Trotsky’s secretary is reborn as the organiser of a plot to kill Stalin, when in fact ended up as respected academic. Stalin’s death is also described on the basis of a credible theory outline in a 2003 study ‘Stalin’s Last Crime,’ by Naumav and Brent.
On the other hand a psychiatrist is invented to embellish La Botz’s treatment of Trotsky’s personality and this works well to show how his strengths were allied to a certain coolness towards even his close associates. It is fun spotting the true bits and the fiction – Google helps here. I thought the way he ties up Stalin’s decision to finally send in another assassination team with McCarthy’s invitation to Trotsky to appear before his senate hearings is quite a neat and credible idea.
Trotsky in Tijuana is a great read. It is fairly races along and it allows you to get a real grasp of the key political discussions of the time while understanding the human side of Trotsky, Natalia and their circle. While critical, it is also respectful of their struggle to further human progress despite the terrible toll on their own family. All their children died before them and they lived continually under the threat of assassination.
Probably it is not the book for those Trotskyist sects that treat Trotsky like some sort of infallible guru with rent-a-quotes to fit every turn and manoeuvre of their leadership.
If you like this book do take a look, as the author himself recommends, at Leonardo Paduro’s masterpiece, The Man who loved Dogs, which deals with Trotsky’s assassination in great detail. Barbara Kingsolver’s magnificent The Lacuna is also quite brilliant.
[The review above was also reprinted in International Viewpoint: https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article6874 ]
Fictionally Comprehending Trotsky
by Paul LeBlanc
Against the Current – againstthecurrent.org/atc212/fictionlly-comprehending-trotsky/
Trotsky in Tijuana
By Dan La Botz
St. Petersburg, FL: Serge Press, BookLocker.com, Inc, 2020, 470 pages,
$20 paperback, Kindle $4.99.
THIS IS A curious work coming from the author of a dozen left-wing volumes on history, politics and social struggles — where statements of fact reign supreme.
On the copyright page, the book announces itself as “a counterfactual historical novel,” with its premise that Leon Trotsky, in Mexican exile, was not killed by a Stalinist assassin in 1940. Instead he lives on for a dozen more years, moving from the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacán to the far-western town of Tijuana.
By page 90, I felt an involuntary elation: “Thank God! He wasn’t killed after all!”
Of course a counter-factual novel is a work of fiction, just a story. And to say that someone is “telling stories” is sometimes a colloquialism meaning the person is telling lies. Mark Twain has Huckleberry Finn say that Mr. Twain wrote “a true book with some stretchers” — and, here again, a “stretcher” is a lie.
Like any work of art, Trotsky in Tijuana is inflected with inventions — some plausible and others more dubious. Artists bend and shape realities in order to express their understanding of what most effectively communicates their vision. No one reading a novel should get bent out of shape when confronted with what seem to elements on the imagination or “stretchers.”
Even a book filled with reactionary distortions can get at vibrant elements of truth: for example, Dostoyevsky’s relentlessly anti-revolutionary novel The Possessed reveals, perhaps with some exaggeration, the malignant psychology that can overtake even idealists. The question is: To what extent can we find an informative and compelling vision in one or another work of fiction?
According to the disclaimer on the copyright page: “Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.” That, of course, is a “stretcher,” as the author himself confesses in his about-the-author composition at the end of the book: “This novel is an attempt to understand and come to grips with Leon Trotsky and his legacy.”
In the book’s preface another artistic fiction is told — one of the characters in the novel, “Ralph Bucek,” claims that he (not Dan La Botz) wrote the book. This fictional author tells us:
“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 we have in turn become.” (10)
This seems to me to capture a critical insight that unfolds in the novel. It remains here to consider several aspects of the novel’s attempt to use fiction and the imagination to express original and forceful insights — in regard to the actualities of history, as well as the quality of its artistry and its portrait of Trotsky.
As History
As history, Trotsky in Tijuana has some of its greatest strengths — although there are also some surprising weaknesses. The book is peppered with capably written mini-essays on the history of Tijuana, the Second World War, the Cold War, and various actual and interesting historical figures, including some associated with the revolutionary and socialist movements. There is an occasional error or an interpretive bias, but overall these aspects of the novel are nicely done.
On the other hand, given what the novel is about, a surprising weakness in its historical component involves what I find is missing: any serious sense of the U.S. Trotskyists and their movement (those close to Max Shachtman as well as those close to James P. Cannon). They were central to Trotsky’s life and concerns in this period, but the book’s references to them are incredibly sketchy, fragmentary, disjointed, peripheral.
The only actual character in the book from this milieu is a guard at Trotsky’s compound, the fictional author Ralph Bucek. In addition to Ralph, who are the other guards in Trotsky’s compound? They have neither personalities nor even names. I see this is an artistic deficiency, although I realize that this is not every reader’s concern.*
Yet I would further argue that it is an analytical barrier. The community described by others who were there as guards and secretaries — Joseph Hansen, Rae Spiegel (Raya Dunayevskaya), in an earlier period Sara Weber, and others — is absent from the novel, a failure of verisimilitude. This relates to the novel’s literary qualities: too many people are abstractions or cyphers or not there at all.
The community and interplay of actual human beings, the human and political collectivity of the movement of which Trotsky was a part — embedded in and profoundly connected to the larger social realities and struggles of his time — doesn’t come through here. The vibrant collectivity is missing.
As Literature
Trotsky has been a focal point of a growing number of fiction portrayals and in some ways it feels unfair to compare what the author has done with creations from those professional novelists whose lives have been dedicated to the literary craft.
For example, when Meghan Delahunt’s In the Casa Azul came out in 2001, it was aptly praised by Publisher’s Weekly as “a mesmerizing first novel” resembling “nothing less than one of [Diego] Rivera’s famous murals — human activity everywhere, each figure burning for attention.”
One cannot say the same for Trotsky in Tijuana, nor does it compare favorably with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna (2009), not to mention Leonardo Padura’s wondrous contribution to world literature El hombre que hamba a los perros (2009), translated in English as The Man Who Loved Dogs (2014).
Yet La Botz arguably takes on a more difficult task than the novels by Kingsolver and Padura, since they are not focused on exploring Trotsky the human being. Rather, they engage with him as a symbol of revolutionary hope in relation to the realities of their own countries. Their primary characters are people other than Trotsky — which considerably lightens their load in portraying the great Russian revolutionary.
Bernard Wolfe comes closer to what Dan is reaching for. Wolfe’s The Great Prince Died (1959) brings to mind the pretended author of Trotsky in Tijuana, who like Wolfe was a former Trotskyist and had been a guard at Trotsky’s Mexico compound.
Wolfe has a better feel for the way Trotsky talked and carried himself, but both novels are intent on providing a somber judgment about the meaning of Trotsky’s life. Yet Wolfe’s skill at characterization and dialogue are missing here. Trotsky in Tijuana is full of interesting characters (or ideas for characters) that never quite come alive. They seem moved along by the author, not their own inner dynamics. This might work if the novel were a satire — but it is not.
Of course, the book is not entirely without humor. Colonel de la Fuente, fictional aide to Mexico’s revolutionary-nationalist President Lázaro Cárdenas, shows Trotsky around Tijuana, and Dan has the Colonel delivering a lecture on the area’s history, making reference to the theory of uneven and combined development. “It’s a nice application of the theory,” Trotsky tells him “once again admiring de la Fuente’s mind.” (One imagines the chuckling author’s wink at us.)
There are also nice turns of phrase: when Trotsky engages with a new lover, fictional stand-up comedienne Rachel Silberstein, “they came out of their clothes as easily as bananas out of their skins.” Silberstein is one of the more interesting characters in the novel, but a lengthy account of her raunchy stand-up routine didn’t strike me as all that funny — although we are told the audience “roared with laughter and applauded loudly.”
Another potentially interesting creation is Dr. David Bergman, an associate of Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm before fleeing the Nazis to practice psychoanalysis in the United States. He is engaged by Trotsky’s life partner Natalia Sedova, who is hopeful that Trotsky — having suffered so many great personal blows and agonizing stresses — might benefit from therapy.
Unfortunately, this hardly goes anywhere. Bergman seems more a plot device than a person. There are multiple missed opportunities in this book for one who might want to understand Trotsky.
The are other characters who might have been fleshed out to more effectively create the milieu of the Trotsky family and those with whom he associated in Mexican exile. The story of Trotsky’s daughter Zinaida, whose mental breakdown and suicide in 1933 eventually resulted in her son Sieva becoming part of the Trotsky household, is minimized and set aside, as is the life of Sieva himself.
The great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who had once been so important in Trotsky’s life before the rupture of relations, are mostly absent — the significance of their journey from Trotskyism to Stalinism neither explored nor even mentioned. Also missing, but quite relevant to issues with which Dan seems concerned, was Trotsky’s friendship with Otto Rühle and Alice Rühle-Gerstel, left-communists and devotees of the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, who both committed suicide in 1943.
In my view, the highpoint of the novel is the attention given to Trotsky’s companion Natalia Sedova, whose life as a revolutionary is described with great respect. We are told that her intellectual engagement contributed significantly to Trotsky’s own thinking. Her qualities certainly come through in Trotsky’s 1935 diary, and particularly in her splendid book co-authored in 1946-47 with Victor Serge, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky.
Many see her as inseparable from Trotsky, a faded person consigned to the background. In fact, Dan shows Natalia Sedova as very much a person in her own right. We know that she came close to leaving Trotsky over his 1938 affair with Frida Kahlo.
Natalia was central to his life and he worked hard to repair the terrible damage he had done to their relationship. Yet in the novel she finally leaves Trotsky in the late 1940s, over the fictional second love affair, in the process becoming his political opponent. Sedova might have been gratified by well-deserved recognition accorded her, though one can imagine indignation over the way Dan does it. Yet he sees it differently: “Natalia had awakened to her own life.” (364)
A Portrait of Trotsky
The Trotsky who emerges in this novel is “the dominant figure who took command of a living room, a mass meeting, or an army with equal ease.” He was, of course, “a great revolutionary and fighter for freedom and progress,” who may inspire “a new movement for socialism coming from below.” Yet there were terrible weaknesses entwined with the strengths.
Natalia considers the strengths and weaknesses: “His intellectual genius, and his arrogance. His ability to inspire, and his inability to form warm relations with others. His political insight, and at the same time his surprising blind spots. Now with age, the liabilities seemed to be greater than his assets.” (362)
In fact, Trotsky’s thinking is stuck in 1917 or 1923 or 1936 — with limited relevance to the here-and-now: “He is a hero lost in time.” But he is “attached to old formulas,” finding it “difficult to give them up.” By the late 1940s, we are told, his “old theory of permanent revolution explained none” of the new developments (including revolutions in China, Indochina, and Indonesia, not to mention the forced inclusion of Eastern Europe into Stalin’s Communist Bloc).
The mass of Trotsky’s old writings of the 1930s about the turbulent developments in France still had value — they could make “a good door-stop.” Natalia feels compelled to tell him: “You have clung to your old views and your followers in France and New York have made them into a dogma. They surround you and reinforce your views, and no one among them will challenge you.” (373)
In fact, the headquarters of the Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, “was located in his head,” and he scoffed at the idea of the Fourth International going on without him. Not only had Trotsky come to represent “a Bolshevism characterized by authoritarianism and intolerance,” but he had become “a megalomaniac” who was “at war with everyone.” He was increasingly a man alone, and obsessed: “I am the only one today who can lead the movement and arm a new generation. … Everything depends on me. The fate of the world …”
Obviously, the novel suggests, in the interest of freedom and progress and socialism from below, that one must reject the weaknesses in Trotsky that increasingly overwhelmed the strengths.
There is no doubt in my mind that some weaknesses identified in Trotsky in Tijuana were part of Trotsky’s makeup — although I do not think, for example, that he was a megalomaniac.
It seems to me that the strengths — in the person he was, in his political practice, and in his theoretical contributions — were in a different and far more positive political balance than Dan’s counterfactual novel allows.
The balance that Trotsky in Tijuana presents corresponds, it seems to me, to limitations of this novel as fully-realized literature. There is a failure to connect both Trotsky and his ideas to an essential quality in the movement of which he was part — its collectivity, the multi-dimensional reality of human beings interacting and in motion.
If we place anyone — if we place ourselves — in the actual context of our interactions with all the other human beings (each with our own complex mix of strengths and weaknesses) there is a different chemical balance than would otherwise exist if the others become abstractions or cyphers.
To the extent that we abstract ourselves from the vibrant humanity of others, the living collectivity of which we are a part, it becomes more difficult to comprehend who and what we actually are.
*For two very different assessments of the novel, see: https://newpol.org/counter-historical-revolutionary-dan-la-botzs-trotsky-in-tijuana/ and https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article6874
May-June 2021, ATC 212
Counter-historical Revolutionary: Dan La Botz’s “Trotsky in Tijuana”
Counter-historical Revolutionary: Dan La Botz’s “Trotsky in Tijuana”
Book Review
Trotsky in Tijuana (Booklocker—Serge Press, 2020, 471 pages. $20.99)
by Bill Keach
Dan La Botz, the author of some dozen non-fiction books on politics and history, has published this first novel eighty years after the murder of Leon Trotsky by an agent of Joseph Stalin in Mexico City on August 20, 1940. Trotsky was, after Lenin, the most important leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution: Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, chief organizer and head of the Red Army curing the civil war of 1918-1921, and from 1924 leader of the Left Opposition against Stalin’s rise to power. In consolidating his bureaucratic counter-revolution, Stalin succeeded, step by step, in marginalizing Trotsky and in 1928 forced him into exile. Trotsky continued his political work in Turkey, France, and Norway before finally being invited by the reformist Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to settle in the Coyoacán area of Mexico City.
It was there, a few months after a failed assassination attempt on May 24, 1940, that Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born agent of the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), attacked Trotsky in his home office and severely wounded him with a mountaineer’s ice axe. Trotsky died the following day at age 60 and was buried near the house where he lived. His mourners included large crowds of ordinary Mexican citizens.
A statement by the publisher on the copyright page of Trotsky in Tijuana states that “While this is a counterfactual historical novel inspired by the lives of real people, all of the characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real person, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.” La Botz provides a less confusing description in “A Note on Sources” that follows the final chapter: “In writing this counter-historical novel, I drew on many sources . . . to more accurately portray the period and my fictional characters” (p. 465). What this characterization implies is that “counter-historical” writing doesn’t exclude or avoid the “historical” (like, say, “fantasy”), but stands in dynamic relationship to it: the “counter-historical” depends on, even as it differs from and extends beyond, the “historical.” “Counter-historical” fiction inevitably calls attention to and provokes curiosity about the extent to which characters and events are either rooted in or independent of historical actuality.
The relationship between history and fiction that I’m describing here is built into the narrative organization of Trotsky in Tijuana. We begin in the summer of 1939: Stalin’s “show trials” of 1936 have resulted in the deaths of thousands of old Bolsheviks; Fascist Italy has annexed Ethiopia and Albania and signed a treaty of cooperation with Nazi German; Hitler’s Anschluss has incorporated Austria and the Czech Sudetenland into the Third Reich and is about to invade Poland, marking the formal beginning of World War II. Trotsky and his second wife, Natalia Sedova, along with their young son Lev Sedov, arrived in Mexico in January 1937. At first they lived with the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in La Casa Azul (The Blue House). But in April 1939, after Trotsky’s affair with Kahlo precipitated a break with Rivera, they moved a few blocks away to a residence in the same Coyoacán area of Mexico City. Trotsky’s work at the time was primarily focused on building the Fourth International, an organization of revolutionary socialists around the world dedicated to opposing Stalinism.
The first seven chapters of Trotsky in Tijuana, by offering various perspectives on this period right before Mercador’s violent assault on Trotsky in August 1940, work in the usual ways of historical fiction. This includes the introduction of fictional characters into a narrative that we clearly recognize as historical. The most consequential of these fictional characters (at least I think he’s mainly fictional) is Ralph Bucek, a young working-class guy from Chicago’s Southside who, inspired by hearing a speech by a leading American Trotskyist, travels to Mexico City and joins the small group dedicated to protecting Trotsky and his family.
Ralph is not just an important character in the novel, however: he is also represented as the author of the Preface, dated “Chula Vista, California, 1961.” After sketching out the main events of his life and his relationship with Trotsky, he says in this Preface: “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.” What La Botz has done here, we might say, is to create a fictional author who claims a fictional authenticity for a narrative that is actually a complex blend of fiction and history. Readers will no doubt have different responses to this opening move, which is in some respects at odds with what La Botz himself says in his “Note on Sources.” He might have made Ralph the narrator of the novel itself, but that would have produced a book very different from the one we have. Instead, after a Preface in which he identifies himself as the author, Ralph becomes a third-person character in a novel with an unidentified omniscient narrator.
The crucial turn in Trotsky in Tijuana from “historical” to “counter-historical” fiction comes in Chapter 8, where Mercador’s historical assassination of Trotsky’s is transformed into an attempted assassination and escape. I won’t reveal exactly how this happens; I’ll just say that the details are surprising in many ways and that Ralph plays a key role in Trotsky’s fictional survival. The last two paragraphs in this chapter dramatically foreground the shift into counter-historical discourse. All the verbs are conditional–“would have happened,” “would have been taken,” “would have run,” “would have made,” “would have meant,” “would have been left,” “would have evolved”—until the final sentence: “But remarkably, Trotsky survived” (p. 46).
The next chapter takes its title from words spoken by Natalia Sedova: “We shall have a little more time . . .” On August 21, 1940, the date of Trotsky’s actual death, President Cárdenas visits the counter-historical Trotskys and insists that conditions have become too dangerous in Mexico City. He has arranged for Trotsky, his family, and his guards to move to the small Baja California town of Tijuana, just across the border from San Diego some 15 miles to the north. We are told that the population of Tijuana at this time was around 15,000 (today it’s the sixth largest city in Mexico, with a post-NAFTA population well over 1.5 million). In 1940 Tijuana was already economically dependent on bars, nightclubs, and brothels that catered mainly to US navy and marine personnel stationed in and around San Diego.
Imagining Leon Trotsky as a resident of this particular Mexican town is the source of much that’s entertaining as well as historically and politically challenging in this novel. We learn from a final note “About the Author” that from the age of 11 La Botz himself lived, studied, and worked in the area of California just north of Tijuana. His cultural attachment to and political understanding of this area, on both sides of the border, enables him to create a rich and unexpected counter-historical environment for the novel’s “what if” conjectures about Trotsky’s life and work.
La Botz imagines Trotsky continuing his political work with tireless concentration and determination. Every day he reads newspaper in Russian, German, English, French, and Spanish as well as a constantly replenished library of books and articles; he maintains a vast correspondence with comrades around the world dedicated to the Fourth International project; he generates his own written interventions by using a Dictaphone to produce texts that will then be revised and edited for distribution or publication. Trotsky’s discipline and concentration are represented as astonishing—and inseparable from limitations in his personal relationships. He loves Natalia and Lev and feels affection for those who work with and for him. But the project of preparing and providing leadership for an international socialist revolution is always the priority.
Trotsky’s most significant contribution during the 1930s was his analysis of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere around the world. Especially important in this respect was his updating of a “united front” strategy, first articulated in 1922, that would enable revolutionary organizations of the working class to build resistance alongside non-revolutionary anti-fascist forces without dissolving or surrendering their own independence. As the early stages of World War II developed, Trotsky came to assert two additional and more problematic positions. One was that the war would produce a near-total collapse of the global capitalist system. The other was that in the wake of this collapse, the working class would rise up in opposition to both fascism and capitalist war and begin the process of carrying out an international revolutionary transformation of society. The Hitler-Stalin pact of August 23,1939 showed that Stalin’s vision of “socialism in one country” was a corrupt lie. Trotsky continued to believe that the Soviet Union was a “degenerated” workers’ state—a workers’ state “with bureaucratic distortions.” He insisted that Stalin’s dictatorship would be swept away in a global wave of working-class self-emancipation.
Trotsky in Tijuana isn’t exclusively devoted to Trotsky’s political work. More personal psychological concerns also make their way into the novel, particularly in a sequence beginning with Chapter 27, “Natalia Seeks Help for Trotsky.” Concerned that political isolation and frustration were causing Trotsky to become seriously depressed–and knowing that Trotsky was an admirer of Freud and, when he lived in Vienna in 1913-14, had begun psychoanalysis with Freud’s follower Alfred Adler–Natalia contacts an Austrian psychotherapist named David Bergman, now based in Los Angeles, and arranges for him to visit Trotsky in Tijuana. They have serious extended discussions—but Trotsky is adamantly unwilling to undergo treatment.
These discussions are arranged through a mutual friend named Morrie Gold, a flamboyant nightclub promoter who also introduces the Trotskys to one of the novel’s most remarkable characters, a brilliant and extraordinary Jewish “comedienne”(as the novel refers to her) named Rachel Silberstein. Trotsky falls in love with Rachel and eventually has an affair with her, which precipitates a serious crisis in his relationship with Natalia. I have no clear idea of how to judge the historical or counter-historical significance of this part of the novel, but it makes for fascinating, and ultimately very painful, reading.
La Botz’s novel shows Trotsky spending much of his time and energy trying to resolve factional disagreements within the international Trotskyist movement—disagreements that partly arose from Trotsky’s own exaggerated sense of terminal capitalist crisis and of the imminent strength and unity of the international working class. He also shows Trotsky stubbornly and proudly refusing to listen seriously to revolutionary socialists who disagreed with him and recurrently insisting on his own unique leadership. The central questions posed by Trotsky in Tijuana have to do not just with the character and direction of Trotsky’s influence at the time of his actual death in 1940, but with whether or not that influence would have changed had he lived another 13 years—that is, as long as Stalin himself.
My own speculation is that Trotsky’s position would have been significantly affected by the unimaginable number of workers killed during the Nazi holocaust, by the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Allied bombings of cities in Europe and Asia—and by the strength and influence of the U.S. economy following World War II. Reading La Botz’s novel has prompted me to rethink the effects of that war on the fate of revolutionary socialism in the latter half of the 20th century.
The clearest indication of the novel’s underlying political perspective may perhaps be seen in Chapters 53 and 54, where Victor Serge, the Belgium-born former-Bolshevik, novelist, poet, and historian visit the Trotskys. An anarchist in his early years, Serge remained loyal to the 1917 Revolution and joined Trotsky and the Left Opposition after Lenin’s death. But he was always in some respects at odds with Leninist centralism and severe party discipline. La Botz writes: “While he became a Bolshevik, [Serge] remained a libertarian at heart” (p. 308). During his imagined visit to Tijuana in Chapter 54, Serge argues that Trotsky’s vision of an imminent international working-class revolution following World War II is “a utopian ideal for the future” (p. 318), not a realistic analysis for socialist advance in the present. In addition, Serge believes that, “Lenin’s democratic centralist model before the revolution was lost” (p. 322) in the course of the civil war and in the failure of Marxist revolutions to succeed in other countries. The only immediately feasible project for the mid-1940s, in Serge’s view, is “the laying of a humanistic foundation for a future democratic socialist movement” (p. 324). Trotsky furiously accuses Serge of having abandoned the revolutionary cause and turns his back on his former comrade. “And so in dusty Tijuana,” the chapter concludes, “two of the Russian Revolution’s great figures, the last two Bolsheviks, its leading theoretician and man of action and its great intellectual-artist, parted. They would never meet again” (p. 324).
Trotsky in Tijuana is divided into four parts: “Saved,” “War,” “Post-War,” “Love and Death.” Within and across these divisions are chapters that focus, alternatingly, on Trotsky and on Stalin—and on the characters that the novel depicts as their future assassins. In Chapter 15 we are introduced to a member of Trotsky’s original Mexico City “team” named Jan van Heijenoort, called “Van,” a Dutch immigrant who had grown up in France, became a dedicated Trotskyist, and now insists that nothing short of the assassination of Stalin can restore the possibility of socialist revolution. Trotsky angrily disagrees, shouting “We will not resort to terrorism and assassination” (p. 83). The fictional Van is determined and finally carries out his plan in Chapters 77-78, poisoning Stalin with a large dose of the anti-coagulant warfarin secretly added to a bottle of wine. (Historically, though there were rumors that Stalin had been poisoned by his second-in-command Lavrentiy Beria, the medical conclusion was death primarily due to a massive brain hemorrhage.)
Van’s counterpart and rival is Mark Zborowsky, who calls himself Étienne. He had worked with Trotsky’s and Natalia’s deceased son Lyova in France during the 1930s; in 1942 he presents himself as an admirer of Trotsky’s political positions and is invited to become Trotsky’s “Russian secretary.” He makes a brief and, as it turns out, sinister appearance near the end of the confrontation between Trotsky and Serge in Chapter 54. Étienne is really an agent of the GPU, Stalin’s intelligence and secret police service. He bides his time until finally, on March 5, 1953, he fatally poisons Trotsky by putting ricin powder in his orange juice. (The “real” Mark Zborowsky was an anthropologist and an NKVD mole in Paris and in the US. He served a four-year prison sentence in New York in 1962 for spying. Upon release he resumed his academic career and died in 1990 at age 82).
For readers who may feel that by historicizing La Botz’s “counter-historical” novel I’m spoiling the plot, I can only restate my view that fiction of this kind inevitably provokes us to think about the history that’s being “countered” or re-imagined. So what are the consequences for our historical understanding of Trotsky and Stalin of having them both die at the hands of assassins on the actual day of Stalin’s death? This climactic move in Trotsky in Tijuana underscores the degree to which they represented antithetical political visions of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. But I find myself resisting the political implications of making their deaths so starkly symmetrical. One of the seven quotations that follow the title-page of this novel is from Sketches for an Autobiography (1960) by A.J. Muste (1885-1967), a Dutch-born American clergyman and activist in the labor, pacifist, and antiwar movements: “Trotsky controlled his followers about as autocratically as Stalin controlled his, though of course Trotsky did not have at his command the crude disciplinary instrument which Stalin had in such abundance.” I find this seriously misleading. We can acknowledge Trotsky’s misjudgments and resistance to being challenged without seeing his influence as in any sense whatsoever the equivalent of Stalin’s genocidal oppression.
Trotsky in Tijuana recognizes the importance of Trotsky’s revolutionary vision and leadership in the years before he was exiled from Russia. And it shows that the force of his commitment to the transformative power of the working class continued into the 1930s, especially in the fight against fascism. But both the historical and the counter-historical agenda of the novel emphasize the limitations and misjudgments of the last 4-5 years of his life. That being said, this is a skillfully written and politically engaging book—certainly among the best of the novels in English based on Trotsky’s life. (For an informative review of four such novels published fairly recently, see Paul Le Blanc, “Trotsky—truth and fiction,” International Socialist Review # 75, January 2011). Tony Cliff’s 4-volume biography of Trotsky (London: Booksmarks, 1989-1993) should, I believe, have been included in La Botz’s “Note on Sources.” Readers interested in an overview of Trotsky in Tijuana considerably fuller than that provided in the “Note on Sources” should read “On the 80th Anniversary of Trotsky’s Assassination—What If He Had Lived?” (New Politics, August 20, 2020).Bill Keach is a member of the Tempest Collective, Boston DSA, and Boston Revolutionary Socialists. His edition of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution was published by Haymarket Books in 2005.
What would have happened if Trotsky had not been assassinated?
http://www.internationalen.se/2020/10/vad-hade-hant-om-trotskij-inte-blivit-mordad/ Google Translation Below
By Per Lander
Imagine if Trotsky had not been assassinated in 1940 but could live and work politically for another decade. That is the premise of the author Dan La Botz ‘alternative-historical and at the same time very realistic novel. Per Leander has read it.
As is well known, the Russian exile revolutionary Lev Trotsky was killed with an ice pick by a Stalinist who had infiltrated the family’s home in Mexico City. But what would have happened if Trotsky had not been assassinated in August 1940? That is the premise of a new novel by the American socialist and author Dan La Botz, which allows the fictional bodyguard Ralph Bucek to intervene at the last minute to wrestle the perpetrator with the ice pick, and thus save Trotsky’s life.
Trotsky himself said that the last years of his life were the most important: “More important than 1917, more important than the Civil War or any other period. (…) It exists now no one but me can arm a new generation with these revolutionary experiences. I need at least another five years of undisturbed work to ensure that my political legacy is not lost, ”as he himself wrote a couple of years before he was assassinated.
Dan La Botz gives Trotsky another decade to live, so he can experience and react to World War II, the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, the Soviet Union’s conquest of Eastern Europe, the Chinese Revolution, the Korean War and the outbreak of the Cold War. After surviving the assassination attempt, the Mexican president decides that Trotsky should be moved to the smaller coastal city of Tijuana on the border with San Diego in the United States, where there is less risk of assassination, even though the threat continues to hang over him.
The fictional American Trotskyist Ralph Bucek becomes a kind of main character or common thread throughout the story. But the novel is dominated by real historical figures such as Trotsky himself, his wife Natalia Sedova, his secretary Jean van Heijenoort, the American Trotskyist leader James P Cannon, the Russian anarchist Victor Serge. And Stalin, of course, who without any sympathy from the author, is still portrayed as a living person with his own worldview and understandable motives.
Trotsky is becoming increasingly isolated in Tijuana, not least after the United States enters the war on the same side as the Soviet Union, which means that Trotsky’s critical articles and books about Stalin can no longer be published in the United States. Trotsky and his followers obviously support the Soviet Union as a “degenerate workers’ state” in the fight against Nazi Germany, but to Trotsky’s disappointment, the war does not result in the long-awaited world revolution and neither the fall of capitalism nor Stalinism. On the contrary, Stalin seems stronger than ever after the war. And how should the Trotskyists relate to the new Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, not to mention the revolution in China?
To Trotsky’s despair, his followers in the Fourth International after the war no longer seem to listen to and are increasingly preoccupied with their internal battles. He also has problems with marriage and his health, and reluctantly goes into psychotherapy with a former student of Sigmund Freud. Finally, he sees an opportunity to assert himself when he is invited by the anti-communist senator Joseph McCarthy to come to the United States and testify before his committee against anti-American activities. Trotsky agrees with the hope of being able to use McCarthy’s trials as his own political tribune, despite James Cannon’s sharp advice not to become a useful idiot to the demagogue McCarthy.
It may sound as if the book is a satire, but it is written very seriously and always has a realistic tone that leans more towards the tragic than the comic. Dan La Botz is well versed in Trotsky’s political theories and stays as far as I can judge within the limits of reasonableness for how he would act and try to analyze the world events he never actually experienced, although the author of course also takes the liberty to fantasize a bit .
The book also provides proper historical background information so that even the uninitiated can keep up with the reasoning and find the plot both exciting and interesting. We also get to pay a brief visit to 1940s Stockholm, where the old telephone tower casts its shadow over the Swedish capital as a relic of the rapid development of technology, while plans are drawn up for a new murder plot.
Dan La Botz finally lets the two archenemies Trotsky and Stalin die on the same day, March 5, 1953, which is Stalin’s real day of death. If this sounds like an incredible coincidence, keep in mind that the two American revolutionaries and the founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams actually died on the same day, July 4, 1826, which is the American National Day, by the way. Jefferson and Adams were also political rivals and bitter enemies, but towards the end of their lives came to reconcile with each other and become friends again. The question is whether Trotsky and Stalin can also be reconciled in the end.
Vad hade hänt om Trotskij inte blivit mördad?
http://www.internationalen.se/2020/10/vad-hade-hant-om-trotskij-inte-blivit-mordad/ Original article in Swedish
PER LEANDER 10 OKTOBER, 2020
Tänk om Trotskij inte hade blivit mördad 1940 utan kunnat leva och verka politiskt i ytterligare ett decennium. Det är premissen i författaren Dan La Botz alternativhistoriska och samtidigt väldigt realistiska roman. Per Leander har läst den.
Den ryske exilrevolutionären Lev Trotskij blev som bekant ihjälslagen med en ishacka av en Stalinagent som hade infiltrerat familjens hem i Mexiko City. Men vad skulle ha hänt om Trotskij inte hade blivit mördad i augusti 1940? Det är premissen i en ny roman av den amerikanske socialisten och författaren Dan La Botz, som låter den fiktive livvakten Ralph Bucek ingripa i sista stund för att brotta ner gärningsmannen med ishackan, och därmed rädda livet på Trotskij.
Trotskij menade själv att de sista åren i hans liv var de viktigaste: ”Viktigare än 1917, viktigare än inbördeskriget eller någon annan period. (…) Det finns nu ingen annan än jag som kan beväpna en ny generation med dessa revolutionära erfarenheter. Jag behöver minst fem år till av ostört arbete för att försäkra att mitt politiska arv inte går förlorat”, som han skrev själv ett par år innan han blev mördad.
Dan La Botz ger Trotskij ytterligare ett decennium att leva, så att han får uppleva och reagera på andra världskriget, förintelsen och atombomben, Sovjetunionens erövring av Östeuropa, den kinesiska revolutionen, Koreakriget och kalla krigets utbrott. Efter att ha överlevt mordförsöket beslutar Mexikos president att Trotskij ska flyttas till den mindre kuststaden Tijuana på gränsen till San Diego i USA, där det är mindre risk för attentat, även om hotbilden fortsätter att hänga över honom.
Den fiktiva amerikanske trotskisten Ralph Bucek blir en sorts huvudperson eller röd tråd genom berättelsen. Men romanen domineras av verkliga historiska personer som Trotskij själv, hans fru Natalia Sedova, hans sekreterare Jean van Heijenoort, den amerikanska trotskistledaren James P Cannon, den ryske anarkisten Victor Serge. Och Stalin så klart, som utan några sympatier från författaren ändå framställs som en levande person med en egen världsbild och begripliga motiv.
Trotskij blir allt mer isolerad i Tijuana, inte minst efter att USA går in i kriget på samma sida som Sovjetunionen, vilket innebär att Trotskijs kritiska artiklar och böcker om Stalin inte längre går att publicera i USA. Trotskij och hans anhängare stödjer självklart Sovjetunionen som en ”degenererad arbetarstat” i kampen mot Nazityskland, men till Trotskijs besvikelse resulterar kriget inte i den efterlängtade världsrevolutionen och varken kapitalismens eller stalinismen fall. Tvärtom verkar Stalin starkare än någonsin efter kriget. Och hur ska trotskisterna förhålla sig till de nya sovjetiska satellitstaterna i Östeuropa, för att inte tala om revolutionen i Kina?
Till Trotskijs förtvivlan verkar hans anhängare i Fjärde Internationalen efter kriget inte längre lyssna på < och är allt mer upptagna med sina interna strider. Han får även problem med äktenskapet och sin hälsa, och går motvilligt i psykoterapi hos en tidigare student till Sigmund Freud. Till sist ser han en chans att hävda sig när han blir inbjuden av den antikommunistiske senatorn Joseph McCarthy att komma till USA och vittna inför dennes kommitté mot antiamerikansk verksamhet. Trotskij tackar ja med hopp om att kunna använda McCarthys rättegångar som sin egen politiska tribun, trots James Cannons skarpa avrådan om att inte bli en nyttig idiot åt demagogen McCarthy.
Det låter kanske här som om boken skulle vara en satir, men det är skrivet på största allvar och håller hela tiden en realistisk ton som lutar mer åt det tragiska än det komiska hållet. Dan La Botz är väl påläst i Trotskijs politiska teorier och håller sig så vitt jag kan bedöma inom rimlighetens ramar för hur denne skulle agera och försöka analysera de världshändelser han i verkligheten aldrig fick uppleva, även om författaren så klart också tar sig friheten att fantisera lite.
Boken ger också ordentligt med historisk bakgrundsinformation för att även den oinsatte ska kunna hänga med i resonemanget och finna handlingen både spännande och intressant. Vi får också göra ett kort besök i 1940-talets Stockholm, där det gamla telefontornet kastar sin skugga över den svenska huvudstaden som en relik över teknikens snabba utveckling, medan planerna dras upp för en ny mordkomplott.
Dan La Botz låter till sist de två ärkefienderna Trotskij och Stalin dö på samma dag den 5 mars 1953, vilket är Stalins verkliga dödsdag. Om det låter som ett otroligt sammanträffande ska man hålla i minnet att de två amerikanska revolutionärerna och grundlagsfäderna Thomas Jefferson och John Adams faktiskt dog på samma dag, den 4 juli 1826, vilket för övrigt är den amerikanska nationaldagen. Jefferson och Adams var också politiska rivaler och bittra fiender, men kom mot slutet av sina liv att försonas med varandra och bli vänner igen. Frågan är om Trotskij och Stalin också kan försonas på slutet.
Urdu translation of Swedish review above.
اگر ٹراٹسکی کی وفات 1940ء میں نہ ہوتی
سب کو معلوم ہے کہ جلا وطن روسی انقلابی میکسیکو سٹی میں ایک سٹالنسٹ ایجنٹ کے ہاتھوں ہلاک ہو گئے جس نے گھر تک رسائی حاصل کر لی تھی اور ایک تیز دھار آلے سے ٹراٹسکی کو ہلاک کر دیا۔
اگر ٹراٹسکی اگست 1940ء میں ہلاک نہ ہوتے تو کیا ہوتا؟
امریکی مصنف اور سوشلسٹ ڈان لا بوٹز کا ناول اس مفروضے کی بنیاد پر تحریر کیا گیا ہے کہ 1940ء میں ٹراٹسکی ہلاک نہیں ہوئے تھے بلکہ ناول کا ایک کردار رالف بیسک، جو ٹراٹسکی کا محافظ تھا، آخری لمحے حملہ آور کو روک کرٹراٹسکی کی جان بچا لیتا ہے۔
ٹراٹسکی کا اپنا خیال تھا کہ ان کی زندگی کے آخری سال اہم ترین تھے۔ وفات سے دو ڈھائی سال قبل ٹراٹسکی نے خود لکھا: ”1917ء سے بھی اہم، خانہ جنگی کے دور سے بھی اہم، کسی بھی دوسرے دور سے زیادہ اہم…میرے علاوہ اب کوئی نہیں بچا جو نئی نسل کو انقلابی تجربات کے اسباق سے لیس کر سکے۔ مجھے لگ بھگ پانچ مزید سال درکار ہیں تاکہ میں اس بات کو یقینی بنا سکوں کہ میری سیاسی وراثت رائیگاں نہ جائے“۔
ڈان لابوٹز اپنے ناول میں ٹراٹسکی کو پوری ایک دہائی عطا کر دیتے ہیں تا کہ وہ دوسری عالمی جنگ، جرمنی میں یہودیوں کے قتل عام، ہیروشیما پر ایٹم بم کے حملے، مشرقی یورپ پر سوویت غلبے، انقلاب چین، جنگ ِکوریا اور سرد جنگ کا آغاز نہ صرف دیکھ سکیں بلکہ ان پر اپنا رد عمل بھی پیش کر سکیں۔
ناول کے مطابق قاتلانہ حملے میں ٹراٹسکی کے زندہ بچ جانے کے بعد میکسیکو کے صدر نے حفاظت کے پیش نظر فیصلہ کیا کہ ٹراٹسکی کو چھوٹے سے ساحلی قصبے تیوآنا بھیج دیا جائے جو امریکی شہر سان ڈیاگو کی سرحد کے پاس ہے۔ خیال یہ ہے کہ اگر ٹراٹسکی کی زندگی کو خطرات لاحق رہے تو بھی تیوآنا میں ٹراٹسکی کی جان کو کم خطرہ لاحق ہے۔
اس ناول کا اہم ترین کردار امریکی ٹراٹسکی اسٹ اور ناول میں ٹراٹسکی کا محافظ رالف بیوسک ہے البتہ تاریخ کے حقیقی کردار بھی ناول میں جا بجا ملتے ہیں۔ ان کرداروں میں ظاہر ہے ٹراٹسکی کے اپنے علاوہ ٹراٹسکی کی اہلیہ نتالیہ سیدوا، ٹراٹسکی کا سیکرٹری ژاں وان ہینورٹ، امریکی ٹراٹسکی اسٹ رہنما جیمز پی کینن اور روسی انارکسٹ وکٹر سرج شامل ہیں۔ ظاہر ہے سٹالن کا کردار بھی ہے جس کے ساتھ مصنف کو کوئی ہمدردی نہیں۔ ناول میں سٹالن کا اپنا نقطہ نظر ہے اور اپنے مقاصد ہیں۔
جب امریکہ سوویت یونین کا اتحادی بن کر دوسری عالمی جنگ میں شریک ہو جاتا ہے تو تیوآنا میں مقیم ٹراٹسکی کی تنہائی اور بھی بڑھ جاتی ہے۔ اس کا نتیجہ یہ نکلتا ہے کہ سٹالن بارے ٹراٹسکی کی تنقیدی تحریریں اب امریکہ سے بھی شائع نہیں ہو سکتیں۔ امریکی ٹراٹسکی اسٹ اور ٹراٹسکی خود ظاہر ہے نازی جرمنی کے خلاف ”زوال پذیر مزدور ریاست“ کی حمایت کرتے ہیں مگر ٹراٹسکی کے لئے یہ بات انتہائی مایوس کن ہے کہ دوسری جنگ کے بعد کوئی عالمی انقلاب نہیں آتا۔ نہ سٹالنزم کا خاتمہ ہوتا ہے نہ سرمایہ داری کا۔ الٹا سٹالنزم دوسری عالمی جنگ کے بعد مزید مضبوط ہو جاتا ہے۔
مشرقی یورپ میں قائم ہونے والی سوویت سیٹلائٹ ریاستوں یا انقلاب چین کے بارے میں کیا موقف اپنایا جائے؟ ٹراٹسکی اسٹ تحریک کے لئے یہ اہم سوال تھے۔
ٹراٹسکی کو اس بات پر شدید پریشانی کا سامنا کرنا پڑتا ہے کہ ان کے حامی، جو چوتھی انٹرنیشنل کی شکل میں منظم ہیں، ان کی بات پر کان نہیں دھر رہے۔ فورتھ انٹرنیشنل اندرونی خلفشار کا شکار ہے۔ ٹراٹسکی کی شادی بھی مشکلات کا شکار ہے۔ صحت کے مسائل اس کے علاوہ ہیں۔ اپنی مرضی کے خلاف ٹراٹسکی کو سائیکو تھراپی کے لئے ایک ایسے ماہر نفسیات کے پاس جانا پڑتا ہے جو کبھی سگمنڈ فرائڈ کا شاگرد تھا۔
آخر میں ٹراٹسکی کو ایک موقع ملتا ہے: کمیونسٹ دشمن امریکی سینیٹر جوزف میکارتھی ٹراٹسکی کو امریکہ آنے کی دعوت دیتا ہے تاکہ وہ امریکہ مخالف سرگرمیوں بارے قائم کمیٹی کے سامنے اپنا بیان ریکارڈ کرا سکیں۔
ٹراٹسکی یہ دعوت اس نیت سے قبول کر لیتے ہیں کہ وہ اس پلیٹ فارم کو اپنا سیاسی پیغام پھیلانے کے لئے استعمال کریں گے۔ جیمز پی کینن ٹراٹسکی کو سختی سے منع کرتے ہیں کہ وہ دعوت نامہ قبول مت کریں کیونکہ اس کمیٹی میں پیش ہونے کا مطلب ہے کہ وہ میکارتھی کے ہاتھوں استعمال ہونے والا ایک فائدہ مند احمق ثابت ہوں گے۔
اس موقع پر لگتا ہے کہ یہ ناول شائد ایک مزاحیہ ناول ہے مگر ناول نگار نے اسے انتہائی سنجیدگی سے لکھا ہے اور ناول پر المئے کا رنگ مزاح کی نسبت کہیں گہرا ہے۔
ڈان لا بوٹز ٹراٹسکی اسٹ نظریات سے بخوبی واقف ہیں۔ انہیں اچھی طرح معلوم ہو گا کہ اگر ٹراٹسکی زندہ رہتے اور ان عالمی واقعات کا تجزیہ کر پاتے جو ان کی وفات کے لگ بھگ دس سال بعد رونما ہوتے رہے توڈان لا بوٹز کو اچھی طرح معلوم ہے کہ ان کا کیا موقف ہے چاہے بطور ناول نگار ان کے پاس یہ آزادی حاصل ہے کہ وہ ناول میں اپنی مرضی سے کہانی کو کوئی بھی موڑ دے دیں۔
ناول میں زبردست تاریخی معلومات بھی موجود ہیں۔ اگر کوئی قاری متعلقہ تاریخ سے نہیں بھی واقف تو بھی وہ ناول کے سنسی خیز اور دلچسپ واقعات سے لطف اندوز ہو سکتا ہے۔
آخر میں ناول کے دونوں حریف، ٹراٹسکی اور سٹالن، ایک ہی دن، یعنی 5 مارچ 1953ء کو وفات پا جاتے ہیں۔ سٹالن کا یوم وفات واقعی یہی ہے۔ اگر یہ بہت عجیب اتفاق لگے تو یاد رہے تھامس جیفرسن اور جان ایڈمز بھی ایک ہی دن فوت ہوئے تھے۔ یہ دونوں انقلابی امریکی آئین کے آئین ساز مانے جاتے ہیں۔ دونوں 4 جولائی 1862ء کو فوت ہوئے اور ہاں 4 جولائی امریکہ کا قومی دن بھی ہے۔ جیفرسن اور ایڈمز بھی ایک دوسرے کے سیاسی مخالف اور سخت حریف تھے مگر زندگی کے آخری سالوں میں دوست بن گئے۔ سوال یہ ہے کہ کیا ٹراٹسکی اور سٹالن بھی دوست بن سکتے تھے؟
یہ مضمون پہلی بارسویڈش میگزین ’انٹرناشنالن‘میں شائع ہوا۔ سویڈش سے ترجمہ: فاروق سلہریا