Stalin also managed to flush Trotsky out of Norway. As a condition of his asylum, Trotsky was under a gag order. But while he had been away from Oslo for that fishing holiday, the house where he lived had been set upon by fascist thugs led by Major Vidkun Quisling, and in Moscow Trotsky was being convicted in absentia of political terror. He now acceded to the insistent requests for interviews. “Trotsky declares that the Moscow charges are invented and fabricated,” the headlines screamed in the Norwegian press. Litvinov demanded that Norway rescind Trotsky’s asylum; the Soviets hinted that they would cease importing Norwegian herring. The Norwegian Labor government caved, placing Trotsky under house arrest. The government in Mexico offered him asylum, and he arrived there by ship on January 9, 1937. Trotsky was given use of a villa known as the Blue House, designed by the painter Diego Rivera as an inspirational refuge amid wildflowers and squawking parrots.336 The quasimodernist, quasirustic compound, tended by servants, was located on Avenida Londres in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacán.337 Here, the NKVD’s efforts to assassinate Trotsky resumed.
On January 8, Stalin had received Lion Feuchtwanger in the Little Corner. The dictator used these conversations with foreign sympathizers as mental calisthenics.338 The German writer opened with a question about the glaring absence of criticism of the regime by Soviet intellectuals. Stalin did not deny it. “Up to 1933, few writers believed the peasant question could be solved on the basis of collective farms,” he said. “There is no more of that criticism. Facts persuade. The wager of Soviet power on collectivization was won. . . . The problem of the mutual relations between the working class and the peasantry was the most important and has furnished the most worries to revolutionaries in all countries. The problem looked insoluble: the peasantry, reactionary, linked with private property, dragged backwards; the working class went forward. This contradiction undermined revolutions more than once. That’s how the revolution in France [Paris Commune] perished in 1871.”339
Feuchtwanger, telling Stalin he came across as modest, inquired of the adulation, “Is this not an extra burden on you?” Stalin: “I am in complete agreement with you. It’s unpleasant when they exaggerate to hyperbolic scale.” Attributing great strides to one individual, he explained, “is, of course, wrong—what can one person do?—[but] they see in me a unifying concept, and create foolish raptures around me.” Beyond the masses, Stalin explained in this unscripted moment that Soviet functionaries “are afraid if they do not have a bust of Stalin, then either the newspaper or their superior will curse them, or a visitor will take notice. This is careerism, a form of bureaucrat ‘self-defense’: in order not to be touched, they must install a bust of Stalin. Every party that is victorious attracts alien elements, careerists. They try to defend themselves by mimicry: they install busts, they write slogans in which they do not believe.”340
The conversation turned to the public trial of “Trotskyites,” and Stalin tried to convey that domestic oppositionists and foreign imperialist powers had to be working together: after all, they wanted the same outcome. “They are for the USSR’s defeat in war against Hitler and the Japanese,” he said, promising that a pending new trial would reveal how oppositionists were connected to the Gestapo and negotiating with Hess, the deputy Führer. “For the power they would obtain in the downfall of the USSR in a war,” he averred, the opposition had planned to “make concessions to capitalism: concede territory to Germany (Ukraine or a part thereof), to Japan (the Soviet Far East or a part thereof); open a wide path for German capital in the European part of the USSR, for Japanese capital in the Asian part . . . disband the greater part of the collective farms and allow ‘private initiative,’ as they express it, [and] reduce the state control over industry.”
Feuchtwanger inquired whether the Soviet Union would publish the additional trial materials besides the confessions. Stalin: “What materials?” Feuchtwanger: “The results of the preliminary investigation. Everything that proves their guilt aside from confessions.” Stalin: “Kirov was killed; this is a fact. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky were not there. But people implicated them for the crime, as inspirers of it. All of them are experienced conspirators—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. They do not leave behind such documents. When people caught them out in the confrontations [with witnesses], they had to admit their guilt.” Stalin continued: “They say that people testify because they are promised their freedom. This is nonsense. These are all experienced people; they fully understand what it means to testify against oneself.” At the same time, Stalin circumscribed the danger, noting that of the approximately 17,000 party members who had voted for the opposition platform in 1927, “there were 8,000 to 10,000 of them left.”341
Stalin, under questioning, justified the new constitution’s emphasis on democracy. “We do not just have democracy carried over from bourgeois countries,” he told Feuchtwanger. “We have an unusual democracy, we have an addition: the word ‘socialist’ democracy.” Stalin allowed that capitalism’s lesser form of democracy was more progressive than fascism, and that the global popular front against fascism “is a struggle for democracy.”342 Still, he went on to note that in October 1917, many people in Russia had been afraid of the pending seizure of power, in 1918 of the Brest-Litovsk peace, in 1928–32 of collectivization, and now they were scared of fascism. “Fascism,” Stalin stated, “is poppycock. It is a temporary phenomenon.”343
NOISY NEW TRIAL
Determinations of who was an “enemy” were being made locally. Officials strained to protect their own people, while still demonstrating zeal. But Stalin began to go after provincial party bosses who had never been in any opposition. On January 2, 1937, Sheboldayev, party boss of the Azov–Black Sea region, was dismissed amid accusations of “Trotskyite wreckers in the party organization.” On January 13, the Kiev provincial party committee was deemed “littered with an exceedingly great number of Trotskyites,” and three days later Postyshev was replaced as Kiev province secretary by Sergei Kudryavtsev, while the Kharkov provincial party boss was replaced by Nikolai Gikalo. Both would press the destruction of sitting party officials.344 Meanwhile, Stalin had Bukharin summoned to a confrontation with Radek and Pyatakov, who were delivered from prison. Bukharin told his wife that Radek had denounced him as a spy and terrorist with whom he had plotted Stalin’s murder, and that Pyatakov resembled a “skeleton with its teeth knocked out.”345