By John J. Miller
Thursday, August 25, 2022
Mexico City
You can still see the bullet holes in the walls of
Leon Trotsky’s house in Mexico, from the night when assassins came for him.
They opened fire around 4 a.m., waking the exiled communist from a sleep
induced by a sedative. “The explosions were too close, right here within the
room, next to me and overhead,” wrote Trotsky about the events of May 24, 1940.
“Clearly what we had always expected was now happening: we were under
attack.”
He and his wife, Natalia, rolled off their bed, hit the
floor, and played dead. When the gunfire ceased, a stranger entered their room.
Biographer Bertrand M. Patenaude describes the harrowing moment: “The intruder
seemed to be inspecting the Trotskys’ bedroom for signs of life. Although there
were none, he raised a handgun and fired a round of bullets into the beds, then
disappeared.” Somehow, he missed his target. “It was a sheer miracle that we
escaped with our lives,” said Natalia.
Their luck ran out three months later. Joseph Stalin, the
leader of the Soviet Union, still wanted to kill his great rival. His minions
in Mexico switched tactics. Instead of trying to overpower guards in an
organized raid, they dispatched a lone-wolf assailant. Ramón Mercader
penetrated Trotsky’s compound on August 20 and drove an ice axe into the skull
of the Russian revolutionary, who died the next day. It’s a strange story of
murder, martyrdom, adultery, art, and radical politics.
The scene of the violence is now a Ford’s Theatre of
communism — part historical crime scene and part left-wing memorial, in a
sleepy section of Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighborhood, about six miles south of
downtown. A yellow house contains colorful serape rugs, bookcases with volumes
by Marx and Lenin, and the Ediphones that Trotsky used for recording his rants
onto wax cylinders. Outside is a garden, where Trotsky grew cacti and raised
rabbits in hutches. It’s a tranquil place, except for the fact that it’s
surrounded by high walls, a watchtower, and bunk rooms for sentries. Trotsky’s
home was in fact an ad hoc fortress whose purpose was to protect its main
occupant. A reminder of its ultimate failure comes in the form of Trotsky’s
gravesite: an upright concrete slab that flaunts a hammer and sickle, marking
the location of his ashes. On a pole above it hangs a red flag, which on the
day of my visit this summer drooped limply.
Tickets to the Museo Casa de León Trotsky cost 40 pesos
(about $2). An exhibit space includes photographs of the “Old Man,” as he was
sometimes called, and relics such as the round glasses that combined with his
pointy beard and billowing hair to give him a distinctive look. (The lethal ice
axe is in the collection of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.)
There’s also a café and a gift shop, where tourists can buy T-shirts with
images of a bespectacled Trotsky for 140 pesos, and black hats with red stars
for 180 pesos. A rack of books, all in Spanish, includes works by Trotsky as
well as a hagiography of Hugo Chávez, the late socialist leader of
Venezuela.
What Trotsky would make of all this is anyone’s guess.
Born in 1879 in present-day Ukraine, he became a key ally of Vladimir Lenin
during the Russian Revolution of 1917. He delivered stem-winders, led the Red
Army, and helped establish the Soviet Union as an authoritarian state. When
Lenin died in 1924, Trotsky hoped to succeed him but lost a power struggle to
Stalin, who first isolated Trotsky and then expelled him in 1929. From abroad,
Trotsky remained a dedicated communist but also became a fierce critic of
Stalin and a general annoyance to the governments that hosted him. By 1936, he
needed to find a new home — and when he arrived in Mexico early the next year,
it was because no other country would have him.
Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas offered asylum to
Trotsky at the behest of Diego Rivera, who may be the greatest artist in
Mexican history. Rivera had become famous for decorating public spaces in a
series of nationalist projects that drew inspiration from the Mesoamerican
past, added European influences, and forged a new mestizo aesthetic that had
strong political dimensions but also honored the dignity of peasant life and
factory workers. As his reputation grew in the 1930s, he took commissions from
wealthy Americans, including Edsel Ford, who paid for a major work in a
courtyard that is now the centerpiece of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
As Rivera finished in Detroit, the Rockefeller family
hired him to create a big fresco in the lobby of Rockefeller Center in New York
City. Man at the Crossroads was supposed to depict the
struggle between capitalism and socialism, but Rivera failed to control his
left-wing enthusiasms, and controversy erupted when he inserted a favorable
portrait of Lenin. Nelson Rockefeller canceled the project. It was destroyed in
1934.
Today, there are two ways to see Man at the
Crossroads. The first is to study the black-and-white photographs that
survive from its brief existence at Rockefeller Center. The second is to visit
the Palacio de Bellas Artes, which is one of Mexico City’s architectural
highlights as well as the place where Rivera re-created the work shortly after
the destruction of the original. Renamed “Man, Controller of the Universe,”
this replica includes the notorious picture of Lenin. It also adds an image of Trotsky,
in what is perhaps the most famous artistic rendering of him.
So Rivera immortalized Trotsky in art and then secured
his asylum in Mexico — and Trotsky thanked his friend by having an affair with
his wife, Frida Kahlo, also an artist. In recent decades, feminists have turned
Kahlo into a hipster icon. A painting of hers sold last year at Sotheby’s for
nearly $35 million. She had talent, but whereas Rivera often included politics
in his art, Kahlo allowed her work to become agitprop. One of her self-portraits,
for example, shows the head of Karl Marx and a white dove floating above her.
It’s called “Marxism Will Heal the Sick.” It could be a poster in Havana or
Pyongyang.
When the affair started, Trotsky and his wife were living
with Rivera and Kahlo. The Old Man was nearly twice the age of his paramour; he
was 57 and she was 29. Each member of the love triangle was a serial
philanderer. Only Trotsky’s long-suffering wife, Natalia, was innocent. Trotsky
and Kahlo carried on for several months, and then they seem to have called off
their liaison. Rivera and Kahlo divorced, but their relationship already had
been tumultuous and the couple soon remarried. Meanwhile, the Trotskys moved
into what would be their final home together.
At the Palacio de Bellas Artes, near Rivera’s Man,
Controller of the Universe, are several big and garish murals by David
Siqueiros. If Rivera is Mexico’s greatest muralist, Siqueiros is its
second-greatest — a distant second, perhaps, but second nonetheless, and his
work may be seen all over Mexico City. It’s celebrated outside Mexico, too, and
one of his self-portraits hangs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C., alongside works by 20th-century masters Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
Siqueiros also tried to murder Trotsky. He was one of the
hitmen on the unsuccessful raid of Trotsky’s compound. Whereas Rivera was a
leftist who associated with communists and sympathized with the political ideas
of Trotsky, Siqueiros was a full-on Stalinist who was happy to take his orders
from Moscow. Working with the NKVD — the forerunner of the KGB — he helped
organize the attack. Those bullet holes still visible on the wall of Trotsky’s
study may have come from a weapon he fired.
He also got away with his crime, or mostly got away with
it. Police arrested Siqueiros, held him for six months, and put him on trial,
where he spoke in his own defense. Just as Stalin liked to blame Trotsky for
every problem in the Soviet Union in the 1930s — a practice that George Orwell
satirized in his portrayals of Napoleon and Snowball in Animal Farm,
and of Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984 — Siqueiros
claimed that the goal of his raid was “to help expose the treason of a
political center of espionage and provocation.” The artist was acquitted of
attempted homicide but convicted of trespassing and breaking and entering.
Released on bail, he left the country for two and a half years. Siqueiros
returned to Mexico in 1943 and went back to work as an artist, producing his
murals in the Palacio de Bellas Artes and beyond. In 1966, toward the end of
his life, the government of Mexico gave him its National Art Prize. In 1967,
the Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize, an honor he shares with
Fidel Castro and Angela Davis.
An irony of the period is that none of Mexico’s great
muralists — neither Rivera, nor Siqueiros, nor José Clemente Orozco, who is
often counted as the third member of their triumvirate — produced what may be
their country’s most compelling political image, which happens to be a blurry
photograph. It was taken on November 23, 1927, and it shows Miguel Pro, a
Jesuit priest who served his faith in defiance of a ruthlessly secular
government’s crackdown on churches and religious liberty, in a conflict called
the “Cristero War.” People outside Mexico tend not to know much about Mexican
history, and especially not this aspect of it, but readers of The Power
and the Glory, the novel by Graham Greene, at least will have gotten a
glimpse of the anti-Catholic oppression that had become both outrageous and
routine.
Police had arrested Padre Pro in connection with an
attempted assassination of a former Mexican president who had persecuted
Catholics. The priest knew the conspirators, but he seems not to have joined
their plotting. Yet he was immediately condemned to death without a trial. A
photographer captured Pro’s last moments, most notably in a stunning image from
when Pro faced a firing squad without a blindfold and stretched out his arms,
in imitation of Christ on the cross. The priest’s final act was to forgive his
enemies and shout “Viva Cristo Rey!” The Mexican-born archbishop of Los
Angeles, José H. Gomez, has written that Pro “may be the only martyr in the
history of the church whose execution was photographed.”
The man who ordered the photography was the then
president, Plutarco Elías Calles, who wanted the pictures of Pro’s death to
frighten Catholics into submission. His plan backfired. At least 20,000 people
came out for Pro’s funeral, and the priest’s martyrdom inspired Catholics both
in and out of Mexico. My first encounter with his name and story came years ago
at a church in Royal Oak, Mich., where he is portrayed in a golden bas-relief,
installed back when he was still a cause célèbre. In 1988, Pope John Paul II
beatified him, putting Pro on a path to sainthood. His remains were moved from
a cemetery in Mexico City to the nearby Parroquia de la Sagrada Familia, a
parish church that now houses his shrine, which is beside a chapel dedicated to
Our Lady of Guadalupe. About seven miles to its north is the Hill of Tepeyac,
site of the Marian apparitions of 1531, where today a big basilica displays
Juan Diego’s tilma with the famous image. It’s behind bulletproof glass.
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