DAVID TWERSKY
461
pages with the fall of France, Roosevelt's reelection and speculation
on the fate of the German/Soviet nonagression pact which Trotsky
had identified as Stalin's reward for betraying the Spanish republic.
About Spain, there was no longer any need to speculate.)
Ramon Mercador, the unlucky assassin, is shot while attempt–
ing to escape from prison, although it is hardly likely that he wanted
to escape: better the protective Mexican cell than the wrathful
"welcome home" from the employer he has failed. Thus, he is denied
the ignominious footnote in history he might otherwise have earned.
As he carried no identification, within a few months even his face is
forgotten. (In both real life and in this version, Mercador, of course,
was not the first assassin sent to Trotsky. Another went on to
become a professor of sociology in the United States, author of a suc–
cessful book romanticizing the Jewish
shtetl.)
The Soviet Embassy hotly denies any connection to the affair.
Although no one believes them, the worst they suffer is a joke, at
Stalin's expense, about the efficiency of socialism. Two months later,
Trotsky is back at his desk, posting missives, theories, analyses and
justifications to loyalists in different countries, especially the United
States . There, he is engaged in a difficult polemic with the dimin–
ishing band of his followers about the precise nature of the Soviet
Thermidor, an image many no longer find adequate.
With the end of the war, the Soviets are everywhere more pow–
erful, although the price exacted from the Soviet peoples (the old
soviet man?) remains terrible. Stalin, in any event, never shrunk
from inflicting the cost of his ambitions on others. The question
regarding Trotsky, it should be remembered, concerns what he,
Trotsky, would have done had he been in power. After all, he had
opposed the rightist moderate tendency of Bukharin. He and
Preobrazenski had demanded a swift industrialization at the expense
of the peasants, the "left" policy ultimately adopted with such a
vengeance by Stalin. He... . But he would have not have gone
that
far. Who was it who remarked that Stalin made all the other
Bolshevik leaders look liberal in comparison?
Stalin, meanwhile, like Sauron the Dark in
Lord of the Rings,
trains his third eye always on Trotsky, wary lest the founder of the
Red Army slip back and break his power. Too bad he's still alive.
Even if at present it remains too dangerous to try again to break that
damned Jewish skull, so hard it broke the pick, there's no need to
leave him be. Stalin, who never avoided practicing the bourgeois
arts of deception in defense of the revolution, who once bought the
