"You shall leave everything you love most dearly: this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste of others' bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes descending and ascending others' stairs."
Paradiso, Canto XVII, lines 55–60, Mandelbaum translation.
Trotsky (1879-1940) reads a newspaper while sitting at his desk at his Turkish home in 1931. The Istanbul home[1]of Leon Trotsky, the top Bolshevik politician who lost to Stalin in the struggle for control of the Soviet Union, has been listed for sale on a Turkish property website.
The three-story, five-bedroom home, situated on the scenic Buyukada Island close to the city, is notable for being the site where Trotsky lived for four and-a-half years, and his first port of call after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Despite the history behind the home, it has not been restored, and visitors are frequently surprised by its poor condition.
Mavi Boncuk |
Portrait of Natalia Trotsky (Sedova), taken in Mexico during 1932.In 1917, Leon Trotsky burst upon the international stage as the brain behind the Russian Revolution. He presided over the complete transformation of his country, not merely a change of government but a total restructuring of society on every level. To many, he was the heroic St. George, slaying the dragon of capitalist repression. To others, he was the ruthless and Satanic purveyor of bloody rebellion, the cold, detached theorist gone mad with power. In truth, he fitted neither of these images. He was a writer, a thinker, a nation-builder—albeit a reluctant one—with deep roots in his Russia’s agricultural heartland. Trotsky’s dream was for a world free from injustice, inequality, and war, and in this he was absolutely single-minded. To him, the ideas of Karl Marx showed the way, and for one brief moment he set the machinery in motion to achieve that end…. He lived to see his work betrayed and his ideals perverted by those who seized power after him. He would be ejected from the government he helped to establish and hounded into exile and death.
Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union in February 1929[2]. Although it is customary to think of Mexico as Trotsky's chief sanctuary, Mustafa Kemal was as willing as Lazaro Cardenas to protect him and for many of the same reasons. As a radical nationalist, Kemal was anxious to establish Turkey's reputation as a modern secular republic that respected democratic rights, even extending them to one of the world's most controversial figures. Back in 1929, when Trotsky arrived - courtesy of the uneasy hospitality of Ataturk, a fervent anti-communist - on Turkish shores, the future seemed uncertain. Trotsky's first stop in Istanbul was the Russian consulate, which provided living quarters for him despite the fact that he was no longer welcome in the Soviet Union. Within a month or so he moved to a first-class hotel in nearby Beyoglu, which is one of the most cosmopolitan and affluent neighborhoods in Istanbul.
The ruined Sivastopol Köşkü (Trotsky House) stands in its wild garden at the foot of Hamlacı Sokağı, which leads down to the north shore from Çankaya Caddesi. Leon Trotsky moved there on March 8,1929 lived here until 1933, after being exiled from Russia, and it was here that he wrote his autobiography and his History of the Russian Revolution.
“One of the unforeseen, though not accidental, stops in my life has proved to be Constantinople,” he wrote in the prologue of his 1930 autobiography. “Here I am camping… and patiently waiting for what is to follow, he added, admitting that a revolutionary’s life was impossible without a certain amount of “fatalism.” His first station in exile was at Büyükada – off the coast of Istanbul in the Sea of Marmara – where he stayed for the next four years. There were many former White Army officers in Istanbul, which put Trotsky's life in danger. But a number of Trotsky's European supporters volunteered to serve as bodyguards and assured his safety. The White Army was loyal to the czarist regime in Russia and fought against the communist Red Army in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1921.
Trotsky in Prinkipo 1928“In one way or another, the Constantinople interval has proved the most appropriate moment for me to look back before circumstances allow me to move forward,” he continued.
While on the island, Trotsky seemed to warm to his surroundings. A biographer described his daily routine of rising before dawn and pacing the corridors, deep in thought. Despite his paranoia, which resulted in an incident where he pulled out his pistol on a visiting doctor - and workaholic nature, he found the time on Büyükada to take up fishing, a hobby that a neighbor recalled him made him “happy like a child.”
Trotsky left Büyükada on 17 July 1933, never to return. And although isolated - apart from his wife, staff and a volunteer squad of bodyguards - the revolutionary wrote in a diary entry made on the day he left the island: ""It has been four and one-half years. I have the strange feeling of having my feet firmly planted on Büyükada.”
The fatalism he had written of in 1929 at Büyükada proved to be apt. Trotsky was never to return to the island, and continued his permanent exile in France, Norway, and lastly, Mexico, where he enjoyed an extramarital affair with prominent artist Frida Kahlo.
Leon Trotsky, with staff in Mexico, Summer 1938. Left to right: Joe Hansen, English Secretary; Leon Trotsky; Jean Van Heijenoort, French and German Secretary; Natalia Trotsky (Sedova); Raya Dunayevskaya (Rae Spiegel), Russian Secretary.
In 1940, Stalin - who by this time had wiped out nearly all of his old compatriots - sent an assassin to do away with his old nemesis. After several unsuccessful attempts, a Spanish communist and Soviet agent, Ramon Mercader, who worked to gain Trotsky’s trust, walked into his study and struck him on the head with an ice axe. Trotsky, aged 60, died the next day.
[1] Çankaya 57, a twin house built by an Armenian tradesman for his daughters in 1907-1908 where Leon Trotsky is said to have lived briefly when he was exile on the island, and which was more recently used as a location for a Turkish soap opera; and the Trotsky House or Yanaros Mansion, built in 1850s by Nikola Demades, where Trotsky lived between 1932 and 1933.
[2] How can one harmonize the heroic Trotsky ... with the ruthless Trotsky of the civil war? Perhaps Isaac Deutscher made the most thoughtful effort. In his biography of Trotsky, he emphasized the growing cleavage after the 1917 Revolution between “the power and the dream”—and the deepening contradiction felt by the Bolsheviks who had created a machine of power to make the dream a reality. “They could not dispense with power if they were to strive for the fulfillment of their ideals; but now their power came to oppress and overshadow their ideals,” Deutscher wrote, adding: “Nobody had in 1920–21 gone farther than Trotsky in demanding that every interest and aspiration should be wholly subordinated to the ‘iron dictatorship.’ Yet he was the first of the Bolshevik chiefs to turn against the machine of that dictatorship when it began to devour the dream. "Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1959), 78.
See Mavi Boncuk Article | Parvus Connection: Alexander Parvus (1867 – 1924) Alexander Parvus, left Russia at 19 for Switzerland, where he met Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lenin. He actually originated the notion of "permanent revolution," churned out scores of theoretical articles about politics and revolution, traveled on false passports to Russia and was eventually arrested with Trotsky in 1905. Exiled to Siberia, he escaped.
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