Chapter II
TROTSKY LEAVES NEW YORK TO COMPLETE THE REVOLUTION
You will have a revolution, a terrible revolution. What
course it takes will depend much on what Mr. Rockefeller tells Mr. Hague to do.
Mr. Rockefeller is a symbol of the American ruling class and Mr. Hague is a
symbol of its political tools.
Leon Trotsky, in New York Times,
December 13, 1938.
(Hague was a New Jersey politician)
In 1916, the year preceding the Russian Revolution,
internationalist Leon Trotsky was expelled from France, officially because of
his participation in the Zimmerwald conference but also no doubt because of
inflammatory articles written for Nashe Slovo, a Russian-language
newspaper printed in Paris. In September 1916 Trotsky was politely escorted
across the Spanish border by French police. A few days later Madrid police
arrested the internationalist and lodged him in a "first-class cell"
at a charge of one-and-one-haft pesetas per day. Subsequently Trotsky was taken
to Cadiz, then to Barcelona finally to be placed on board the Spanish
Transatlantic Company steamer Monserrat. Trotsky and family crossed the
Atlantic Ocean and landed in New York on January 13, 1917.
Other Trotskyites also made their way westward across the
Atlantic. Indeed, one Trotskyite group acquired sufficient immediate influence in Mexico to write the Constitution of
Querétaro
for the revolutionary 1917 Carranza government, giving Mexico the dubious
distinction of being the first government in the world to adopt a Soviet-type
constitution.
How did Trotsky, who knew only German and Russian, survive in
capitalist America? According to his autobiography, My Life, "My
only profession in New York was that of a revolutionary socialist." In
other words, Trotsky wrote occasional articles for Novy Mir, the New York
Russian socialist journal. Yet we know that the Trotsky family apartment in New
York had a refrigerator and a telephone, and, according to Trotsky, that the
family occasionally traveled in a chauffeured limousine. This mode of living
puzzled the two young Trotsky boys. When they went into a tearoom, the boys
would anxiously demand of their mother, "Why doesn't the chauffeur come
in?"1 The stylish living standard is also at odds with Trotsky's reported
income. The only funds that Trotsky admits receiving in 1916 and 1917 are $310,
and, said Trotsky, "I distributed the $310 among five emigrants who were
returning to Russia." Yet Trotsky had paid for a first-class cell in Spain,
the Trotsky family had traveled across Europe to the United States, they had
acquired an excellent apartment in New York — paying rent three months in
advance — and
they had use of a chauffeured limousine. All this on the earnings of an
impoverished revolutionary for a few articles for the low-circulation
Russian-language newspaper Nashe Slovo in Paris and Novy Mir in
New York!
Joseph Nedava estimates Trotsky's 1917 income at $12.00 per
week, "supplemented by some lecture fees."2 Trotsky was in New York in
1917 for three months, from January to March, so that makes $144.00 in income
from Novy Mir and, say, another $100.00 in lecture fees, for a total of
$244.00. Of this $244.00 Trotsky was able to give away $310.00 to his friends,
pay for the New York apartment, provide for his family — and find the $10,000
that was taken from him in April 1917 by Canadian authorities in Halifax.
Trotsky claims that those who said he had other sources of income are
"slanderers" spreading "stupid calumnies" and
"lies," but unless Trotsky was playing the horses at the Jamaica
racetrack, it can't be done. Obviously Trotsky had an unreported source of
income.
What was that source? In The Road to Safety, author
Arthur Willert says Trotsky earned a living by working as an
electrician for Fox Film Studios. Other writers have cited other occupations,
but there is no evidence that Trotsky occupied himself for remuneration
otherwise than by writing and speaking.
Most investigation has centered on the verifiable fact that
when Trotsky left New York in 1917 for Petrograd, to organize the Bolshevik
phase of the revolution, he left with $10,000. In 1919 the U.S. Senate Overman
Committee investigated Bolshevik propaganda and German money in the United
States and incidentally touched on the source of Trotsky's $10,000. Examination
of Colonel Hurban, Washington attaché to the Czech legation, by the Overman
Committee yielded the following:
COL. HURBAN: Trotsky, perhaps, took money from Germany, but
Trotsky will deny it. Lenin would not deny it. Miliukov proved that he got
$10,000 from some Germans while he was in America. Miliukov had the proof, but
he denied it. Trotsky did, although Miliukov had the proof.
SENATOR OVERMAN: It was charged that Trotsky got $10,000 here.
COL. HURBAN: I do not remember how much it was, but I know it was a question
between him and Miliukov.
SENATOR OVERMAN: Miliukov proved it, did he?
COL.
HURBAN: Yes, sir.
SENATOR OVERMAN: Do you know where he got it from?
COL. HURBAN: I remember it was $10,000; but it is no matter.
I will speak about their propaganda. The German Government knew Russia better
than anybody, and they knew that with the help of those people they could
destroy the Russian army.
(At 5:45 o'clock p.m. the subcommittee adjourned until tomorrow,
Wednesday, February 19, at 10:30 o'clock a.m.)3
It is quite remarkable that the committee adjourned abruptly
before the source of Trotsky's funds could be placed into the Senate
record. When questioning resumed the next day, Trotsky and his $10,000 were no
longer of interest to the Overman Committee. We shall later develop evidence
concerning the financing of German and revolutionary activities in the United
States by New York financial houses; the origins of Trotsky's $10,000 will then
come into focus.
An amount of $10,000 of German origin is also mentioned in
the official British telegram to Canadian naval authorities in Halifax, who
requested that Trotsky and party en route to the revolution be taken off the S.S. Kristianiafjord (see page 28). We
also learn from a British Directorate of Intelligence report4 that Gregory
Weinstein, who in 1919 was to become a prominent member of the Soviet Bureau in
New York, collected funds for Trotsky in New York. These funds originated in
Germany and were channeled through the Volks-zeitung, a German daily
newspaper in New York and subsidized by the German government.
While Trotsky's funds are officially reported as German,
Trotsky was actively engaged in American politics immediately prior to leaving
New York for Russia and the revolution. On March 5, 1917, American newspapers
headlined the increasing possibility of war with Germany; the same evening
Trotsky proposed a resolution at the meeting of the New York County Socialist
Party "pledging Socialists to encourage strikes and resist recruiting in
the event of war with Germany."5 Leon Trotsky was called by the New York
Times "an exiled Russian revolutionist." Louis C. Fraina, who
cosponsored the Trotsky resolution, later — under an alias — wrote an uncritical
book on the Morgan financial empire entitled House of Morgan.6
The
Trotsky-Fraina proposal was opposed by the Morris Hillquit faction, and the
Socialist Party subsequently voted opposition to the resolution.7
More than a week later, on March 16, at the time of the
deposition of the tsar, Leon Trotsky was interviewed in the offices of Novy
Mir.. The interview contained a prophetic statement on the Russian
revolution:
"... the committee which has taken the place of
the deposed Ministry in Russia did not represent the interests or the aims of
the revolutionists, that it would probably be shortlived and step down in
favor of men who would be more sure to carry forward the democratization of
Russia."8
The "men who would be more sure to carry forward the
democratization of Russia," that is, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks,
were then in exile abroad and needed first to return to Russia. The temporary
"committee" was therefore dubbed the Provisional Government, a title,
it should be noted, that was used from the start of the revolution in March and
not applied ex post facto by historians.
President
Woodrow Wilson was the fairy godmother who provided Trotsky with a passport to
return to Russia to "carry forward" the revolution. This American
passport was accompanied by a Russian entry permit and a British transit visa.
Jennings C. Wise, in Woodrow Wilson: Disciple of Revolution, makes the
pertinent comment, "Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson,
despite the efforts of the British police, made it possible for Leon Trotsky to
enter Russia with an American passport."
President Wilson facilitated Trotsky's passage to Russia at
the same time careful State Department bureaucrats, concerned about such
revolutionaries entering Russia, were unilaterally attempting to tighten up
passport procedures. The Stockholm legation cabled the State Department on June
13, 1917, just after Trotsky crossed the Finnish-Russian border,
"Legation confidentially informed Russian, English and French passport
offices at Russian frontier, Tornea, considerably worried by passage of
suspicious persons bearing American passports."9
To this cable the State Department replied, on the same day,
"Department
is exercising special care in issuance of passports for Russia"; the
department also authorized expenditures by the legation to establish a
passport-control office in Stockholm and to hire an "absolutely dependable
American citizen" for employment on control work.10 But the bird had flown
the coop. Menshevik Trotsky with Lenin's Bolsheviks were already in Russia
preparing to "carry forward" the revolution. The passport net erected
caught only more legitimate birds. For example, on June 26, 1917, Herman
Bernstein, a reputable New York newspaperman on his way to Petrograd to
represent the New York Herald, was held at the border and refused entry
to Russia. Somewhat tardily, in mid-August 1917 the Russian embassy in
Washington requested the State Department (and State agreed) to "prevent
the entry into Russia of criminals and anarchists... numbers of whom have
already gone to Russia."11
Consequently, by virtue of preferential treatment for
Trotsky, when the S.S. Kristianiafjord left New York on March 26, 1917,
Trotsky was aboard and holding a U.S. passport — and in company with other
Trotskyire revolutionaries, Wall Street financiers, American Communists, and
other interesting persons, few of whom had embarked for legitimate business.
This mixed bag of passengers has been described by Lincoln Steffens, the
American Communist:
The passenger list was long and mysterious. Trotsky was in
the steerage with a group of revolutionaries; there was a Japanese revolutionist
in my cabin. There were a lot of Dutch hurrying home from Java, the only
innocent people aboard. The rest were war messengers, two from Wall Street to
Germany....12
Notably, Lincoln Steffens was on board en route to Russia at
the specific invitation of Charles Richard Crane, a backer and a former chairman
of the Democratic Party's finance committee. Charles Crane, vice president of
the Crane Company, had organized the Westinghouse Company in Russia, was a
member of the Root mission to Russia, and had made no fewer than twenty-three
visits to Russia between 1890 and 1930. Richard Crane, his son, was confidential
assistant to then Secretary of State Robert Lansing. According to the former
ambassador to Germany William Dodd, Crane "did much to bring on the
Kerensky revolution which gave way to Communism."13 And so Steffens'
comments in his diary about conversations aboard the S.S. Kristianiafjord are
highly pertinent:" . . . all agree that the revolution is in its first
phase only, that it must grow. Crane and Russian radicals on the ship think we
shall be in Petrograd for the re-revolution.14
Crane returned to the United States when the Bolshevik
Revolution (that is, "the re-revolution") had been completed and,
although a private citizen, was given firsthand reports of the progress of the
Bolshevik Revolution as cables were received at the State Department. For
example, one memorandum, dated December 11, 1917, is entitled "Copy of report
on Maximalist uprising for Mr Crane." It originated with Maddin Summers,
U.S. consul general in Moscow, and the covering letter from Summers reads in
part:
I have the honor to enclose herewith a copy of same [above
report] with the request that it be sent for the confidential information of
Mr. Charles R. Crane. It is assumed that the Department will have no objection
to Mr. Crane seeing the report ....15
In brief, the unlikely and puzzling picture that emerges is
that Charles Crane, a friend and backer of Woodrow Wilson and a prominent
financier and politician, had a known role in the "first" revolution
and traveled to Russia in mid-1917 in company with the American Communist
Lincoln Steffens, who was in touch with both Woodrow Wilson and Trotsky. The
latter in turn was carrying a passport issued at the orders of Wilson and
$10,000 from supposed German sources. On his return to the U.S. after the
"re-revolution," Crane was granted access to official documents
concerning consolidation of the Bolshevik regime: This is a pattern of
interlocking — if puzzling — events that warrants further investigation and
suggests, though without at this point providing evidence, some link between the
financier Crane and the revolutionary Trotsky.
Documents on Trotsky's brief stay in Canadian custody are now
de-classified and available from the Canadian government archives. According to
these archives, Trotsky was removed by Canadian and British naval personnel from
the S.S. Kristianiafjord at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on April 3, 1917,
listed as a German prisoner of war, and interned at the Amherst, Nova Scotia,
internment station for German prisoners. Mrs. Trotsky, the two Trotsky boys, and
five other men described as "Russian Socialists" were also taken off
and interned. Their names are recorded by the Canadian files as: Nickita Muchin,
Leiba Fisheleff, Konstantin Romanchanco, Gregor Teheodnovski, Gerchon
Melintchansky and Leon Bronstein Trotsky (all spellings from original Canadian
documents).
Canadian Army form LB-l, under serial number 1098 (including
thumb prints), was completed for Trotsky, with a description as follows: "37
years old, a political exile, occupation journalist, born in Gromskty,
Chuson, Russia, Russian citizen." The form was signed by Leon Trotsky and
his full name given as Leon Bromstein (sic) Trotsky.
The Trotsky party was removed from the S.S. Kristianiafjord under
official instructions received by cablegram of March 29,
1917, London, presumably originating in the Admiralty with the naval control
officer, Halifax. The cablegram reported that the Trotsky party was on the "Christianiafjord"
(sic) and should be "taken off and retained pending instructions."
The reason given to the naval control officer at Halifax was that "these
are Russian Socialists leaving for purposes of starting revolution against
present Russian government for which Trotsky is reported to have 10,000 dollars
subscribed by Socialists and Germans."
On April 1, 1917, the naval control officer, Captain O. M.
Makins, sent a confidential memorandum to the general officer commanding at
Halifax, to the effect that he had "examined all Russian passengers"
aboard the S.S. Kristianiafjord and found six men in the second-class
section: "They are all avowed Socialists, and though professing a desire to
help the new Russian Govt., might well be in league with German Socialists in
America, and quite likely to be a great hindrance to the Govt. in Russia just at
present." Captain Makins added that he was going to remove the group, as
well as Trotsky's wife and two sons, in order to intern them at Halifax. A copy
of this report was forwarded from Halifax to the chief of the General Staff in
Ottawa on April 2, 1917.
The next document in the Canadian files is dated April 7,
from the chief of the General Staff, Ottawa, to the director of internment
operations, and acknowledges a previous letter (not in the files) about the
internment of Russian socialists at Amherst, Nova Scotia: ". . . in
this connection, have to inform you of the receipt of a long telegram yesterday
from the Russian Consul General, MONTREAL, protesting against the arrest of
these men as they were in possession of passports issued by the Russian Consul
General, NEW YORK, U.S.A."
The reply to this Montreal telegram was to the effect that
the men were interned "on suspicion of being German," and would
be released only upon definite proof of their nationality and loyalty to the
Allies. No telegrams from the Russian consul general in New York are in the
Canadian files, and it is known that this office was reluctant to issue Russian
passports to Russian political exiles. However, there is a telegram in
the files from a New York attorney, N. Aleinikoff, to R. M. Coulter, then
deputy postmaster general of Canada. The postmaster general's office in Canada
had no connection with either internment of prisoners of war or military
activities. Accordingly, this telegram was in the nature of a personal,
nonofficial intervention. It reads:
DR. R. M. COULTER, Postmaster Genl. OTTAWA Russian
political exiles returning to Russia detained Halifax interned Amherst camp.
Kindly investigate and advise cause of the detention and names of all
detained. Trust as champion of freedom you will intercede on their behalf.
Please wire collect. NICHOLAS ALEINIKOFF
On April 11, Coulter wired Aleinikoff, "Telegram
received. Writing you this afternoon. You should receive it tomorrow evening.
R. M. Coulter." This telegram was sent by the Canadian Pacific Railway
Telegraph but charged to the Canadian Post Office Department. Normally a private
business telegram would be charged to the recipient and this was not official
business. The follow-up Coulter letter to Aleinikoff is interesting because,
after confirming that the Trotsky party was held at Amherst, it states that they
were suspected of propaganda against the present Russian government and
"are supposed to be agents of Germany." Coulter then adds," .
. . they are not what they represent themselves to be"; the Trotsky
group is "...not detained by Canada, but by the Imperial
authorities." After assuring Aleinikoff that the detainees would be made
comfortable, Coulter adds that any information "in their favour"
would be transmitted to the military authorities. The general impression of the
letter is that while Coulter is sympathetic and fully aware of Trotsky's
pro-German links, he is unwilling to get involved. On April 11 Arthur Wolf of
134 East Broadway, New York, sent a telegram to Coulter. Though sent from New
York, this telegram, after being acknowledged, was also charged to the Canadian
Post Office Department.
Coulter's reactions, however, reflect more than the detached
sympathy evident in his letter to Aleinikoff. They must be considered in the
light of the fact that these letters in behalf of Trotsky came from two American
residents of New York City and involved a Canadian or Imperial military matter
of international importance. Further, Coulter, as deputy postmaster general, was
a Canadian government official of some standing. Ponder, for a moment, what
would happen to someone who similarly intervened in United States affairs! In
the Trotsky affair we have two American residents corresponding with a Canadian
deputy postmaster general in order to intervene in behalf of an interned Russian
revolutionary.
Coulter's subsequent action also suggests something more than
casual intervention. After Coulter acknowledged the Aleinikoff and Wolf
telegrams, he wrote to Major General Willoughby Gwatkin of the Department of
Militia and Defense in Ottawa — a man of significant influence in the Canadian
military — and attached copies of the Aleinikoff and Wolf telegrams:
These men have been hostile to Russia because of the way the
Jews have been treated, and are now strongly in favor of the present
Administration, so far as I know. Both are responsible men. Both are reputable
men, and I am sending their telegrams to you for what they may be worth, and so
that you may represent them to the English authorities if you deem it wise.
Obviously Coulter knows —
or intimates that he knows — a great
deal about Aleinikoff and Wolf. His letter was in effect a character reference,
and aimed at the root of the internment problem — London. Gwatkin was well known
in London, and in fact was on loan to Canada from the War Office in London.17
Aleinikoff then sent a letter to Coulter to thank him
most heartily for the interest you have taken in the fate of
the Russian Political Exiles .... You know me, esteemed Dr. Coulter, and you
also know my devotion to the cause of Russian freedom .... Happily I know Mr.
Trotsky, Mr. Melnichahnsky, and Mr. Chudnowsky . . . intimately.
It might be noted as an aside that if Aleinikoff knew Trotsky
"intimately," then he would also probably be aware that Trotsky
had declared his intention to return to Russia to overthrow the Provisional
Government and institute the "re-revolution." On receipt of
Aleinikoff's letter, Coulter immediately (April 16) forwarded it to Major
General Gwatkin, adding that he became acquainted with Aleinikoff "in
connection with Departmental action on United States papers in the Russian
language" and that Aleinikoff was working "on the same lines as Mr.
Wolf . . . who was an escaped prisoner from Siberia."
Previously, on April 14, Gwatkin sent a memorandum to his
naval counterpart on the Canadian Military Interdepartmental Committee repeating
that the internees were Russian socialists with "10,000 dollars
subscribed by socialists and Germans." The concluding paragraph stated: "On
the other hand there are those who declare that an act of high-handed
injustice has been done." Then on April 16, Vice Admiral C. E. Kingsmill,
director of the Naval Service, took Gwatkin's intervention at face value. In a
letter to Captain Makins, the naval control officer at Halifax, he stated,
"The Militia authorities request that a decision as to their (that is, the six
Russians) disposal may be hastened." A copy of this instruction was relayed
to Gwatkin who in turn informed Deputy Postmaster General Coulter. Three days
later Gwatkin applied pressure. In a memorandum of April 20 to the naval
secretary, he wrote, "Can you say, please, whether or not the Naval Control
Office has given a decision?"
On the same day (April 20) Captain Makins wrote Admiral
Kingsmill explaining his reasons for removing Trotsky; he refused to be
pressured into making a decision, stating, "I will cable to the Admiralty
informing them that the Militia authorities are requesting an early decision as
to their disposal." However, the next day, April 21, Gwatkin wrote Coulter:
"Our friends the Russian socialists are to be released; and arrangements
are being made for their passage to Europe." The order to Makins for
Trotsky's release originated in the Admiralty, London. Coulter acknowledged the
information, "which will please our New York correspondents
immensely."
While we can, on the one hand, conclude that Coulter and
Gwatkin were intensely interested in the release of Trotsky, we do not, on the
other hand, know why. There was little in the career of either Deputy Postmaster
General Coulter or Major General Gwatkin that would explain an urge to release
the Menshevik Leon Trotsky.
Dr. Robert Miller Coulter was a medical doctor of Scottish
and Irish parents, a liberal, a Freemason, and an Odd Fellow. He was appointed
deputy postmaster general of Canada in 1897. His sole claim to fame derived from
being a delegate to the Universal Postal Union Convention in 1906 and a delegate
to New Zealand and Australia in 1908 for the "All Red" project. All
Red had nothing to do with Red revolutionaries; it was only a plan for all-red
or all-British fast steamships between Great Britain, Canada, and Australia.
Major General Willoughby Gwatkin stemmed from a long British
military tradition (Cambridge and then Staff College). A specialist in
mobilization, he served in Canada from 1905 to 1918. Given only the documents in
the Canadian files, we can but conclude that their intervention in behalf of
Trotsky is a mystery.
We can approach the Trotsky release case from another angle:
Canadian intelligence. Lieutenant Colonel John Bayne MacLean, a prominent
Canadian publisher and businessman, founder and president of MacLean Publishing
Company, Toronto, operated numerous Canadian trade journals, including the Financial Post. MacLean
also had a long-time association with Canadian Army Intelligence.18
In 1918 Colonel MacLean wrote for his own MacLean's magazine
an article entitled "Why Did We Let Trotsky Go? How Canada Lost an
Opportunity to Shorten the War."19 The article contained detailed and
unusual information about Leon Trotsky, although the last half of the piece
wanders off into space remarking about barely related matters. We have two clues
to the authenticity of the information. First, Colonel MacLean was a man of
integrity with excellent connections in Canadian government intelligence.
Second, government records since released by Canada, Great Britain, and the
United States confirm MacLean's statement to a significant degree. Some MacLean
statements remain to be confirmed, but information available in the early 1970s
is not necessarily inconsistent with Colonel MacLean's article.
MacLean's opening argument is that "some Canadian
politicians or officials were chiefly responsible for the prolongation of the
war [World War I], for the great loss of life, the wounds and sufferings of the
winter of 1917 and the great drives of 1918."
Further, states MacLean, these persons were (in 1919)doing
everything possible to prevent Parliament and the Canadian people from getting
the related facts. Official reports, including those of Sir Douglas Haig,
demonstrate that but for the Russian break in 1917 the war would have been over
a year earlier, and that "the man chiefly responsible for the defection of
Russia was Trotsky... acting under German instructions."
Who was Trotsky? According to MacLean, Trotsky was not
Russian, but German. Odd as this assertion may appear it does coincide with
other scraps of intelligence information: to wit, that Trotsky spoke better
German than Russian, and that he was the Russian executive of the German
"Black Bond." According to MacLean, Trotsky in August 1914 had been
"ostentatiously" expelled from Berlin;20 he finally arrived in the
United States where he organized Russian revolutionaries, as well as
revolutionaries in Western Canada, who "were largely Germans and Austrians
traveling as Russians." MacLean continues:
Originally the British found through Russian associates that
Kerensky,21 Lenin and some lesser leaders were practically in German pay as
early as 1915 and they uncovered in 1916 the connections with Trotsky then
living in New York. From that time he was closely watched by... the Bomb Squad.
In the early part of 1916 a German official sailed for New York. British
Intelligence officials accompanied him. He was held up at Halifax; but on their
instruction he was passed on with profuse apologies for the necessary delay.
After much manoeuvering he arrived in a dirty little newspaper office in the
slums and there found Trotsky, to whom he bore important instructions. From June
1916, until they passed him on [to] the British, the N.Y. Bomb Squad never lost
touch with Trotsky. They discovered that his real name was Braunstein and that
he was a German, not a Russian.22
Such German activity in neutral countries is confirmed in a
State Department report (316-9-764-9) describing organization of Russian
refugees for revolutionary purposes.
Continuing, MacLean states that Trotsky and four associates
sailed on the "S.S. Christiania" (sic), and on April 3 reported
to "Captain Making" (sic) and were taken off the ship at
Halifax under the direction of Lieutenant Jones. (Actually a party of nine,
including six men, were taken off the S.S. Kristianiafjord. The name of
the naval control officer at Halifax was Captain O. M. Makins, R.N. The name of
the officer who removed the Trotsky party from the ship is not in the Canadian
government documents; Trotsky said it was "Machen.") Again, according
to MacLean, Trotsky's money came "from German sources in New York."
Also:
generally the explanation given is that the release was done
at the request of Kerensky but months before this British officers and one
Canadian serving in Russia, who could speak the Russian language, reported to
London and Washington that Kerensky was in German service.23
Trotsky was released "at the request of the British
Embassy at Washington . . . [which] acted on the request of the U.S. State
Department, who were acting for someone else." Canadian officials
"were instructed to inform the press that Trotsky was an American
citizen travelling on an American passport; that his release was specially
demanded by the Washington State Department." Moreover, writes MacLean, in
Ottawa "Trotsky had, and continues to have, strong underground influence.
There his power was so great that orders were issued that he must be given every
consideration."
The theme of MacLean's reporting is, quite evidently, that
Trotsky had intimate relations with, and probably worked for, the German General
Staff. While such relations have been established regarding Lenin — to the extent
that Lenin was subsidized and his return to Russia facilitated by the Germans —
it appears certain that Trotsky was similarly aided. The $10,000
Trotsky fund in New York was from German sources, and a recently declassified
document in the U.S. State Department files reads as follows:
March 9, 1918 to: American Consul, Vladivostok from Polk,
Acting Secretary of State, Washington D.C.
For your confidential information and prompt attention:
Following is substance of message of January twelfth from Von Schanz of German
Imperial Bank to Trotsky, quote Consent imperial bank to appropriation from
credit general staff of five million roubles for sending assistant chief naval
commissioner Kudrisheff to Far East.
This message suggests some liaison between Trotsky and the
Germans in January 1918, a time when Trotsky was proposing an alliance with the
West. The State Department does not give the provenance of the telegram, only
that it originated with the War College Staff. The State Department did treat
the message as authentic and acted on the basis of assumed authenticity. It is
consistent with the general theme of Colonel MacLean's article.
Consequently, we can derive the following sequence of events:
Trotsky traveled from New York to Petrograd on a passport supplied by the
intervention of Woodrow Wilson, and with the declared intention to "carry
forward" the revolution. The British government was the immediate source of
Trotsky's release from Canadian custody in April 1917, but there may well have
been "pressures." Lincoln Steffens, an American Communist, acted as a
link between Wilson and Charles R. Crane and between Crane and Trotsky. Further,
while Crane had no official position, his son Richard was confidential assistant
to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, and Crane senior was provided with prompt
and detailed reports on the progress of the Bolshevik Revolution. Moreover, Ambassador William Dodd (U.S.
ambassador to Germany in the Hitler era) said that Crane had an active role in
the Kerensky phase of the revolution; the Steffens letters confirm that Crane
saw the Kerensky phase as only one step in a continuing revolution.
The interesting point, however, is not so much the
communication among dissimilar persons like Crane, Steffens, Trotsky, and
Woodrow Wilson as the existence of at least a measure of agreement on the
procedure to be followed — that is, the Provisional Government was seen as
"provisional," and the "re-revolution" was to follow.
On the other side of the coin, interpretation of Trotsky's
intentions should be cautious: he was adept at double games. Official
documentation clearly demonstrates contradictory actions. For example, the
Division of Far Eastern Affairs in the U.S. State Department received on March
23, 1918, two reports stemming from Trotsky; one is inconsistent with the other.
One report, dated March 20 and from Moscow, originated in the Russian newspaper Russkoe
Slovo. The report cited an interview with Trotsky in which he stated that
any alliance with the United States was impossible:
The Russia of the Soviet cannot align itself... with capitalistic
America for this would be a betrayal It is possible that Americans seek such an rapprochement
with us, driven by its antagonism towards
Japan, but in any case there can be no question of an alliance by us of
any nature with a bourgeoisie nation.24
The other report, also originating in Moscow, is a message
dated March 17, 1918, three days earlier, and from Ambassador Francis:
"Trotsky requests five American officers as inspectors of army being
organized for defense also requests railroad operating men and
equipment."25
This request to the U.S. is of course inconsistent with
rejection of an "alliance."
Before we leave Trotsky some mention should be made of the
Stalinist show trials of the 1930s and, in particular, the 1938 accusations and
trial of the "Anti-Soviet bloc of rightists and Trotskyites." These
forced parodies of the judicial process, almost unanimously rejected in the
West, may throw light on Trotsky's intentions.
The crux of the Stalinist accusation was that Trotskyites
were paid agents of international capitalism. K. G. Rakovsky, one
of the 1938 defendants, said, or was induced to say, "We were the
vanguard of foreign aggression, of international fascism, and not only in the
USSR but also in Spain, China, throughout the world." The summation of the
"court" contains the statement, "There is not a single man in the
world who brought so much sorrow and misfortune to people as Trotsky. He is the
vilest agent of fascism .... "26
Now while this may be no more than verbal insults routinely
traded among the international Communists of the 1930s and 40s, it is also
notable that the threads behind the self-accusation are consistent with the
evidence in this chapter. And further, as we shall see later, Trotsky was able
to generate support among international capitalists, who, incidentally, were
also supporters of Mussolini and Hitler.27
So long as we see all international revolutionaries and all
international capitalists as implacable enemies of one another, then we miss a
crucial point — that there has indeed been some operational cooperation between
international capitalists, including fascists. And there is no a priori reason
why we should reject Trotsky as a part of this alliance.
This tentative, limited reassessment will be brought into
sharp focus when we review the story o£ Michael Gruzenberg, the chief Bolshevik
agent in Scandinavia who under the alias of Alexander Gumberg was also a
confidential adviser to the Chase National Bank in New York and later to Floyd
Odium of Atlas Corporation. This dual role was known to and accepted by both the
Soviets and his American employers. The Gruzenberg story is a case history of
international revolution allied with international capitalism.
Colonel MacLean's observations that Trotsky had "strong
underground influence" and that his "power was so great that orders
were issued that he must be given every consideration" are not at all
inconsistent with the Coulter-Gwatkin intervention in Trotsky's behalf; or, for
that matter, with those later occurrences, the Stalinist accusations in the
Trotskyite show trials of the 1930s. Nor are they inconsistent with the
Gruzenberg case. On the other hand, the only known direct link between Trotsky and international banking
is through his cousin Abram Givatovzo, who was a private banker in Kiev before
the Russian Revolution and in Stockholm after the revolution. While Givatovzo
professed antibolshevism, he was in fact acting in behalf of the Soviets in 1918
in currency transactions.28
Is it possible an international web (:an be spun from these
events? First there's Trotsky, a Russian internationalist revolutionary with
German connections who sparks assistance from two supposed supporters of Prince
Lvov's government in Russia (Aleinikoff and Wolf, Russians resident in New
York). These two ignite the action of a liberal Canadian deputy postmaster
general, who in turn intercedes with a prominent British Army major general on
the Canadian military staff. These are all verifiable links.
In brief, allegiances may not always be what they are called,
or appear. We can, however, surmise that Trotsky, Aleinikoff, Wolf,
Coulter, and Gwatkin in acting for a common limited objective also had some
common higher goal than national allegiance or political label. To emphasize,
there is no absolute proof that this is so. It is, at the moment, only a logical
supposition from the facts. A loyalty higher than that forged by a common
immediate goal need have been no more than that of friendship, although that
strains the imagination when we ponder such a polyglot combination. It may also
have been promoted by other motives. The picture is yet incomplete.
Footnotes:
1Leon
Trotsky, My Life (New York: Scribner's, 1930), chap. 22.
2Joseph
Nedava, Trotsky and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1972), p. 163.
3United
States, Senate, Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik
Propaganda (Subcommittee on the Judiciary), 65th Cong., 1919.
4Special
Report No. 5, The Russian Soviet Bureau in the United States, July 14,
1919, Scotland House, London S.W.I. Copy in U.S. State Dept. Decimal File,
316-23-1145.
5New
York Times, March 5, 1917.
6Lewis
Corey, House of Morgan: A Social Biography of the Masters of Money (New
York: G. W. Watt, 1930).
7Morris
Hillquit. (formerly Hillkowitz) had been defense attorney for Johann Most, alter
the assassination of President McKinley, and in 1917 was a leader of the New
York Socialist Party. In the 1920s Hillquit established himself in the New York
banking world by becoming a director of, and attorney for, the International
Union Bank. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hillquit helped draw up the
NRA codes for the garment industry.
8New
York Times, March 16, 1917.
9U.S.
State Dept. Decimal File, 316-85-1002.
12Lincoln
Steffens, Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), p. 764.
Steffens was the "go-between" for Crane and Woodrow Wilson.
13William
Edward Dodd, Ambassador Dodd's Diary, 1933-1938 (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1941), pp. 42-43.
14Lincoln
Steffens, The Letters of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1941), p. 396.
15U.S.
State Dept. Decimal File, 861.00/1026.
16This
section is based on Canadian government records.
17Gwatkin's
memoramada in the Canadian government files are not signed, but initialed with a
cryptic mark or symbol. The mark has been identified as Gwatkin's because one
Gwatkin letter (that o[ April 21) with that cryptic mark was acknowledged.
18H.J.
Morgan, Canadian Men and Women of the Times, 1912, 2 vols. (Toronto: W.
Briggs, 1898-1912).
19June
1919, pp. 66a-666. Toronto Public Library has a copy; the issue of MacLean's in
which Colonel MacLean's article appeared is not easy to find and a frill summary
is provided below.
20See
also Trotsky, My Life, p. 236.
22According
to his own account, Trotsky did not arrive in the U.S. until January 1917.
Trotsky's real name was Bronstein; he invented the name "Trotsky."
"Bronstein" is German and "Trotsky" is Polish rather than
Russian. His first name is usually given as "Leon"; however, Trotsky's
first book, which was published in Geneva, has the initial "N," not "L."
23See
Appendix 3; this document was obtained in 1971 from the British Foreign Office
but apparently was known to MacLean.
24U.S.
State Dept. Decimal File, 861.00/1351.
25U.S.
State Dept. Decimal File, 861.00/1341.
26Report
of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rightists and
Trotskyites" Heard Before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of
the USSR (Moscow: People's Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, 1938), p.
293.
27See
p. 174. Thomas Lamont of the Morgans was an early supporter of Mussolini.
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