Visiting Trotsky's Grave in Coyoacán

I’m not a headstone-hunter, but in my life there are three graves I have gone out of my way to stand before: Thomas Jefferson’s, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, and now Leon Trotsky’s.

I believe I’ll leave it there.  I can’t think of anyone to add to this list who would improve it.

For Trotsky’s grave, of course, I came by far the furthest out of my way: he is buried where he was murdered, on August 20 1940, by an agent of Stalin who had infiltrated the household where he spent the last years of his wandering exile, in Coyoacán, Mexico.

The house has been preserved as a museum, and it was a short walk from the hostel where I’m staying, as is the house/museum of Frida Kahlo in the same neighborhood which had lines around the block and pink-and-white taxis continually pulling in and away on the pretty tree-shaded street.  Far fewer pilgrims go to the Trotsky House, which for one thing is on a sort of access road alongside the roaring main artery, a grey no-man’s land of niche shops, graffitied walls and barbed wire.  The museum appears as a solid red building set slightly back from the street, and I was the only person in view as I walked in and bought my ticket.

You don’t walk directly into the house, but first pass through a simple museum foyer of a few white rooms, featuring many photographs and a few artifacts from Trotsky’s life.  The emphasis is on his last years here in Coyoacán: a dapper leprechaun-like figure in tweeds and round eyeglasses, with his pointed beard white and a big shock of white hair brushed back from his brow.  He is seen together with his artistic friends (Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera among them) and his wife Natalia, and in typical domestic scenes, tending his garden, picnicking with Natalia.  I spent a lot of time here before proceeding to the house.

To those who don’t care about Trotsky, none of this would have much meaning, but it’s true that Trotsky shares with Jefferson a sympathetic, small-scale old age, a rarity among earth-shaking statesmen: puttering in the garden, tending to grandchildren, writing.

The difference with Trotsky, which makes his life invaluable and his name still dangerous, is that in this life he was a man on the run, Stalin’s number one enemy, exiled, chased around the world, sentenced to death in absentia, and finally assassinated in his home.  If a man be measured by the quality of his enemies then few shine brighter in history than Trotsky.  The biggest lie of the 20th Century, that Stalin’s Soviet Union was the ideal Communist society, as envisioned by Marx and intended by the Bolsheviks (and many still believe it) remains fatally undermined by the life, opposition, and fate of Trotsky.  To the extent that history lowers a damning judgement upon Soviet Communism, as it should, to that exact same extent rises again the figure of Trotsky, spokesman for an untried alternative and a better revolution still to come.

Trotsky’s house and gardens have been preserved within the compound, which is appropriate as they themselves were a compound, complete with guards and defensive fortifications.  (There were previous assassination attempts, involving machine guns, before the successful one.)  For all that, the old Mexican house with its small homey rooms is beautiful.  You approach it through a green high-growing garden, in the center of which is the simple obelisk of the gravestone featuring the name and the hammer-and-sickle icon.

                                                   

Inside, you can walk through the rooms (kept separate behind low plexiglass), including the study where Trotsky was murdered at his desk by Ramón Mercader with an ice axe. 

I found I was using my camera differently than at any point on my trip so far.  Gone was any concern for getting a “good” photograph.  Instead I just had the simple urge to document: to record that I was there, to preserve what I was seeing.

In the house one feels dramatically the double nature of Trotsky’s household in his last years.  The rooms are small and tidy, the beds low with woven blankets, the kitchen primitive but filled with colorful Mexican ceramic pots and crockery, a closet where some of Trotsky’s and Natalia’s simple clothes are hung.  At the same time, the house is bursting with books and periodicals in multiple languages, and the office contains desks, radio, typewriters and Dictaphone for a hard-working staff.  Trotsky’s home in exile was also the nerve center for the world anti-Stalin left; it was in these years that he testified before the Dewey Commission and founded the Fourth International to oppose not only Stalinism but Nazism. 

One feels something else here: that Trotsky was the last of the great INTELLECTUAL world leaders—like Jefferson again, someone as famous for his ideas, writings, encyclopedic knowledge and borderless curiosity as for his actions on the political stage.  Stalin, in contrast, was ignorance personified, and as for the world leaders today, I can’t name one who even puts up a pretense.  We lost a lot when we lost Trotsky.

It was hard to pull myself away from the old house and the green garden.  I admit that they do have a café on the grounds, which I didn’t patronize, but I don’t mind saying I bought a Red Star T-shirt at the ticket counter on the way out.

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P.S., For those interested in Trotsky’s ideas, the Fourth International that he founded is still active, and puts out a daily online newspaper with superb writing and analysis from the Trotskyist perspective, at www.wsws.org.

P.P.S., There will be another post soon in which I put in more information about myself and my trip!