1932 | Trotsky in Galata Port

In 1929 Leon Trotsky lost the fight against Stalin for good. He is deported from the Soviet Union and finds his first exile on the island of Büyükada ("Big Island") off Istanbul. Until 1933 Trotsky lived and worked on this largest of the “Prince Islands” in front of the Turkish metropolis. In particular, he deals intensively with the emerging fascism and the development of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. Trotsky also published on the situation in Austria during this period. He is well informed, no wonder, he lived in Vienna between 1907 and 1914 and speaks excellent German.

Between 1929 and 1933, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky lived in exile on the Princes' Islands off Istanbul. An Austrian sympathizer Jan Frankel was his secretary.

The official decision to deport Trotsky was made by the GPU on January 18, 1929. Two days later, when he was asked to confirm in writing on an official document that he had been informed of the deportation order, Trotsky wrote: “The GPU's decision, which is criminal in nature and illegal in nature, is mine on January 20, 1929 has been announced. ”A long train journey from Central Asia to the port city of Odessa began. Then he and Sedova were put on the steamer Ilyich, which sailed into the Bosporus. Trotsky and Natalia arrived in Turkey on February 12, 1929. 

Before going ashore, Trotsky delivered the following message to President Kemal Ataturk to the police who had come aboard the ship:

Dear Sir, at the gate of Constantinople I have the honor to inform you that I have not come to the Turkish border by choice and that I only cross this border by obeying violence. I ask you, Mr President, to take my feelings for this. L. Trotsky [Leo Trotzki, Mein Leben, Frankfurt am Main 1974, S. 487 f.]

Thus began Trotsky's last period of exile, which would last eleven and a half years, until his assassination in Mexico in August 1940.

Two months passed after their arrival in Turkey before Trotsky and Natalia were transferred to the island of Prinkipo. They lived there except for about nine months, between March 1931 and January 1932, when they temporarily moved to the coastal town of Kadikoy. The four and a half years in Turkey, from his arrival in February 1929 to his departure for France in July 1933, were among the most important in Trotsky's life.

In the months after Hitler's victory, Trotsky waited to see whether any of the Comintern parties would criticize Stalin's policies. But on April 7, 1933, the Communist International unanimously approved the KPD's political line and declared that it "was completely correct until and at the moment of Hitler's overthrow". Trotsky concluded that a new course had to be taken. In an appeal of July 15, 1933 - the last major political declaration he wrote before leaving Prinkipo - Trotsky called for a break with the Comintern and the building of a new International. Two days later, after Trotsky and Natalia had finally received visas to enter France, they boarded a ship for Marseille. "For better or worse," remarked Trotsky in his diary, "the chapter 'Prinkipo' is now closed."

Pictured: Trotsky reading Militant in Prinkipo. The publication called The Militant was launched in November 1928 by James P. Cannon and other American Trotskyists gathered together in the Communist League of America (CLA). It declared its goal to be a fight "in the interest of the working people" against the capitalist system, imperialist wars, and the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, which according to the Trotskyists had betrayed and corrupted the October Revolution.

The ruins of this villa have been preserved to this day.

See: Leon Trotsky: Farewell to Prinkipo  Pages from a Diary | July 15, 1933

"So! Distinct and incontestable French visas have been affixed to our passports. In two days we depart from Turkey. When I arrived here with my wife and son — four and a half years ago — the light of "prosperity" was shining brightly in America. Today, those times seem prehistoric, almost legendary.

Prinkipo is an island of peace and forgetfulness. The life of the world reaches here after long delays and hushed down. But the crisis found its way here too. From year to year fewer people come from Stambul, and those who do come have less and less money. Of what use is the superabundance of fish when there is no demand for it?

...The chief fish here are barbonnel and rouget. The chief fisher of rouget is the old man Kochu. He knows his fish, and sometimes it seems as though the fish know him. When rouget abounds, Kochu deals a quick strategic blow to his possible rivals. Going out earlier than anybody else, he works the watery field not from one end to the other, but after the fashion of a chessboard, as a knight jumps, or in some even-more-fancy figure. No one knows except Kochu where the net has already passed and where it has not Having blocked off in this manner a large section of the sea, Kochu then fills in at leisure the unutilized squares. A great art! Kochu has succeeded in learning the sea because Kochu is old. But even Kochu's father worked until last year with another old fellow, a former barber. In a decrepit skiff they laid nets for lobsters, and they themselves, corroded to the bones with sea salt, resembled two aged lobsters. Both of them are now resting in the Prinkipo cemetery, which holds more people than the little village..."

Mavi Boncuk |

Politician Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), one of the leaders of the 1917 October Revolution and founder of the Red Army, applied for a visa to Germany and Britain when his country was expelled from the Soviet Union, but did not receive a positive response. 

In January 1928, Trotsky was exiled to the very remote Alma-Ata (now Almaty in Kazakhstan). Apparently that wasn't far away enough, so in February 1929, Trotsky was banished from the entire Soviet Union.

Over the next seven years, Trotsky lived in Turkey, France, and Norway. 

There upon, he came to Istanbul on February 12, 1929 on merchant marine ship Ilyich[#]. He first stayed at the Soviet Guest House in Beyoğlu, then again at the Tokatlıyan Hotel in Beyoğlu and then in a house in Bomonti. 

However, he was disturbed by the presence of White Russians living in Bomonti; He moved to Izzet Pasha Mansion in Buyukada in May 1929 and resided here for a long time. After the fire that broke out in Izzet Pasha Mansion on 1 March 1931, he moved to Yanaros Mansion on the same island. 

On April 6, he moved to Moda, to the mansion of lawyer Hasan Fehmi Bey. In early December 1932, he went to Copenhagen on board TSS Praha[*] to give a conference on the "15th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution" at the invitation of the Danish Social Democratic Students Union.[**]

In this historical photo taken by photojournalist Faik Şenol, Trotsky is seen with his second wife Natalia Ivanovna Sedova[1] and her clerk on the Galata Pier on her return from Copenhagen to Istanbul. Returning to Istanbul on Sunday, December 11, 1932, Trotsky's adventure in our city came to an end when he was removed from Soviet citizenship. Turkey residence permit renewed by Trotsky, left Istanbul by ferry on July 17, 1933, and lived up to his refuge in France and Norway and later he finally arrived in Mexico in 1936. the Mexican Revolution had broken out, and the government there offered him support (through the painter Diego Rivera, with whose wife, Frida Kahlo, Trotsky became obsessed, to the point at which Natalya took offence). 

From January 1937 to April 1939, the couple lived at Frida Kahlo's family home called “La Casa Azul” (The Blue House), which is located in the Coyoacán borough of Mexico City. However, by 1939, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky had a falling-out. Some stories state that it was over ideology and Diego's criticism of Trotsky's writing and others state that Trotsky had had an affair with Frida, or a combination of both. The Trotskys then moved to a house in the same borough in April 1939, not far from La Casa Azul | The Blue House.

He was killed in 1940 at his residence in the Avenida Londres in Coyoacán, near Mexico City, Mexico. The room in which Trotsky was killed remains exactly as it was at that moment, including the papers and the books in their exact positions.(Leon Trotsky Museum | Av. Río Churubusco 410, Del Carmen, Coyoacán, 04100 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico)

May 24: Trotsky's house is attacked by an armed band, led by the communist painter, David Alfaro Siqueiros. Trotsky is unharmed.

August 20: Ramon Mercader (Spanish communist and NKVD Naródnyy Komissariát Vnútrennikh Del agent), alias Jacson , who had gained the confidence of the Trotsky household, strikes Trotsky with an ice-axe; he dies the following day at 7.25am. At the time of his assassination, Trotsky was working on a biography and denunciation of Stalin.

Writing prolifically during his exile, Trotsky continued to criticize Stalin. Stalin, on the other hand, named Trotsky as the major conspirator in a fabricated plot to remove Stalin from power.

In the first of the treason trials (part of Stalin's Great Purge, 1936-1938), 16 of Stalin's rivals were charged with aiding Trotsky in this treasonous plot. All 16 were found guilty and executed. Stalin then sent out henchmen to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico.

[#] NH 95461 ILYICH (Russian merchant ship, 1895-1942)

This ship was built as the IMPERATOR NIKOLAI II for the R.O.P.I.T. firm, being renamed in 1915 N29 as a naval transport and under Soviet flag, VETSHE in 1917 and ILYICH in 1923. She capsized at Portland, Oregon, in June 1942.

[*]TSS Prague was a passenger and freight vessel built for the London and North Eastern Railway in 1929.

SOURCE

See also: Trotsky in Mavi Boncuk  Posting 1 | Posting 2 | Posting 3 

Cornucopia Article |  Trotsky on Prinkipo BY  NORMAN STONE (1941–2019)

"...In 1923, Lenin’s own testament was leaked, and, in it, he warned that Stalin was dangerous and should be replaced. Trotsky, after Lenin’s death, voted that the testament should not be made public: it was an effort to appease Stalin, and it failed. In 1927 he was expelled from his Kremlin residence, and, after a pathetic street demonstration by his supporters on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, he was exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan.

Eisenstein at the time was making his famous film on the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917. Orders went out that Trotsky was not to be shown. Some of his followers were hunted down and killed, but Trotsky himself was too big game: in the end, early in 1929, Stalin decided just to push him abroad. On a ship from Odessa, he arrived in Istanbul.

But why Turkey, now so firmly allied with the West? The fact was that she was, in 1929, on good terms with the Soviet Union. Khrushchev made an odd outburst at a meeting of the Central Committee in 1957. How mad it had been of those in charge of the Soviet Union to make an enemy of Turkey back in 1945; Turkey had been a useful associate, and in Izmir there had even been a square named after the Soviet Marshal Voroshilov. But Stalin had insisted on trying to take the Straits, and Turkey had joined Nato..."

TROÇKİ İSTANBUL’DA

"... http://lcivelekoglu.blogspot.com.tr/2013_02_01_archive.html

Yukarıda işaret edilen linkte, Troçki’nin Büyükada’da kaldığı İzzet Paşa Köşkünde çıkan yangından sonra, Moda Şifa sokakta taşındığı evin Dr. Mahmut Ata’ya ait olduğu belirtilmektedir. Ancak, bu bilginin Ömer Sami Coşar’a ait “Troçki İstanbul’da” adlı eserinde ise, Dr. Mahmut Ata’nın evinin karşı köşesindeki Av. Hasan Fehmi Bey’e ait köşk olduğundan söz edilmektedir.

Troçki, bu köşkte daha fazla kalmak istemiyordu, nihayet Büyükada’da, Yunan tebalı Yanaros’un köşkünü kiralamışlar ve taşınma hazırlıklarına başlamışlardı..."

[1] Natalia Ivanovna Sedova (Russian: Ната́лья Ива́новна Седо́ва; 5 April 1882 Romny, Russian Empire – 23 January 1962, Corbeil-Essonnes, Paris, France) is best known as the second wife of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary. She was also an active revolutionary and wrote on cultural matters pertaining to Marxism. Her father was a wealthy merchant.

Natalia met Leon Trotsky in late 1902, after his escape from Siberia. His first wife Aleksandra Sokolovskaya had remained behind, with their two daughters, and they were divorced soon thereafter. Natalia and Trotsky married in 1903. They had two children together, Lev Sedov (24 February 1906 – 16 February 1938) and Sergei Sedov (21 March 1908 – 29 October 1937), both of whom would predecease their parents. Trotsky later explained that after the 1917 revolution:

In order not to oblige my sons to change their name, I, for "citizenship" requirements, took on the name of my wife. However he never used the name "Sedov" either privately or publicly. Natalia Sedova sometimes signed her name "Sedova-Trotskaya." 

Trotsky and his first wife Aleksandra maintained a friendly relationship after their divorce. She disappeared in 1935 during the Great Purges and was murdered by Soviet forces three years later.

Lev Sedov was an active and leading member of the Bolshevik-Leninist movement that his father led and was almost certainly assassinated as a result of that. Her other son, Sergei Sedov, who was not politically active and remained in Russia, was almost certainly murdered by agents of the Soviet Union.

After her husband's assassination in 1940, Natalia Sedova remained in Mexico and maintained contact with many exiled revolutionaries. Her best-known work in these last years was a biography of Trotsky, which she co-authored with fellow Russian revolutionary Victor Serge. She was also close to the Spanish revolutionary Grandizo Munis who had led the tiny Spanish Sección Bolchevique-Leninista during the revolutionary events in the 1930s. Under his influence,^{[citation needed]} she came to adopt the position that the USSR was a state capitalist society and that the Fourth International founded by Trotsky no longer held to the revolutionary programme of Communism. Therefore, she broke from the FI in 1951.

1929 Exiled from the USSR, Trotsky settles on the island Prinkipo | Buyukada , near Istanbul. Issued first number of the Byulletin Oppositsii (Bulletin of the Opposition).
1930 Publishes Moya zhizn (My Life) and Permanentnaya revolyutsiya (Permanent revolution).
1931 -33 Publishes lstoriya Russkoi revolyutsii (History of the Russian Revolution).
1932 Publishes Stalinskaya shkola falsifikatsii (The Stalin school of falsification).

[2] The Fieldites were a small leftist sect that split from the Communist League of America in 1934 and known officially as the Organizing Committee for a Revolutionary Workers Party and then the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party. The name comes from the name of its leader B. J. Field. Born Max Gould in 1903, B. J. Field had been a successful Columbia educated petroleum analyst on Wall Street before the crash of 1929. Afterwards he became a Trotskyist and led informal discussion groups at his home with the other members.

In Prinkipo (Turkey). From left to right: Jan Frankel, Lyova Trotsky, Natalia Trotsky, Jiří Kopp and Trotsky,

"...Trotsky organised the Büyükada house for his writing, taking over almost the whole of the second floor as an office and creating an enormous table out of bricks and planks. The library filled out (though it caught fire from a defective stove) and there were many, many visitors – including Georges Siménon, then a young Belgian journalist. He found Trotsky reading Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, then regarded as a classic left-wing anti-war book: Céline ended up as a ranting anti-Semitic propagandist on the Vichy radio. There was a little court of devoted admirers – the Frenchman Alfred Rosmer; a Belgian, Jean van Heijenoort, who lectured brilliantly on Gödel and mathematical logic; a German, Otto Schüssler, who proposed to Trotsky the tactic that Trotskyists later used to effect in unsuspecting moderate socialist parties, “entrism” or, as it is now called, “entryism” – the infiltration of disguised Trotskyists for revolutionary purposes..." 

Cornucopia Article |  Trotsky on Prinkipo 

According to a Danish daily the people that accompanied Trotsky from Turkey to Denmark in November 1932 were, apart from his wife Natalia, his secretary Jan Frankel, two people named Pierre Frank and Otto Schussler, and also two private detectives set out to guard Trotsky – Robert van Buren and Gerard Rosenthal (Berlingske Tidende, November 24, 1932, p. 1). According to the affidavits presented to the Dewey Commission the Fields went to Paris from Marseilles together with Trotsky’s secretary Jan Frankel and some other Trotsky followers (The Case of Leon Trotsky 1937, p. 135). This seems to contradict the claim in Berlingske Tidende that Frankel followed Trotsky the whole way from Turkey to Copenhagen. According to the affidavits presented to the Dewey Commission, Trotsky and his party arrived in Copenhagen in the evening of November 23 and stayed in a villa, belonging to a danseuse who had gone abroad, located at Dalgas Boulevard 16 (The Case of Leon Trotsky 1937, pp. 154 and 519).

[**] An American couple, Esther and B. J. Field[2]. Both of them were close to Trotsky. When Jean Van Heijenoort arrived in Prinkipo to assume his duties as Trotsky’s secretary in October 1932, he found both of the Fields present. Trotsky would discuss economics with B. J. Field while Esther Field painted Trotsky’s portrait. Van Heijenoort described B. J. Field as one of only a small number of persons with whom Trotsky ever “contemplated a literary collaboration.”  The Fields had accompanied Trotsky on the ship that brought him from Turkey to Marseilles before he continued the journey to Copenhagen in November 1932.It took Mr FOR THE CURIOUS | Trotsky Ice Axe 1928, Austria | Spy Museum, Washington DC 

Ramón Mercader hid this shortened ice climbing axe under his suit jacket, suspended by string. Look closely: a rust mark from his bloody fingerprint is still visible on the blade.

The Mexican Police Department kept the axe as evidence, later putting it on exhibit. When its museum director retired in the 1960s, he received the axe as a retirement gift. For 40 years, his daughter slept with it under her bed.

It took Keith Melton[*], an espionage historian for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, nearly four decades to find it - as well as to figure out why Ramon Mercader, the assassin sent by then Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin, used the axe to kill Trotsky. (Mercader shortened the handle to fit under his coat.)

Mr Melton, who combed the world to amass the collection of ingenious and macabre tools of the black arts of spying that fill the museum, had his eye on finding the weapon since the 1970s. 

[*] H. Keith Melton is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, is an intelligence historian and a specialist in clandestine technology and espionage tradecraft. Melton is the author of many spy books. He also is a founding member of the Board of Directors for the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C