[2] BBC Radio, “Christopher Hitchens on Trotsky,” BBC Radio, August 8, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD54qnI_Mhc, accessed May 20, 2016.
[3] This famous quote is derived from a letter in which Trotsky says: “Burnham doesn’t recognize dialectics but dialectics does not permit him to escape from its net.”Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism,” 273.
[11] He summarized his opinion of Stalin this way: “It was as the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.” Trotsky, My Life, 501.
[22] In another example, in early 1918, needing a new Russian diplomat to represent the Bolshevik government as consul in New York, he chose John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, knowing that this would only irritate the Americans, since Reed had recently been indicted for violating the Espionage Act. New York Times, January 31, 1918.
[23] On this debate, see Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism.
[24] Interview with Esteban Volkov in the Guardian, February 13, 2003, and “The Fight of the Trotsky Family—Interview with Esteban Volkov, Marxism.com, August 21, 2006, http://www.marxist.com/trotsky-assassination-esteban-volkov210806.htm, accesed May 20, 2016
[29] Winners included lawyer Louis Waldman, Forward editor Baruch Vladeck, and Algernon Lee and Jacob Panken, who served with Trotsky on the Socialist Party Resolutions Committee.
[30]New York Evening Post, November 7, 1917, quoted in New York Call, November 8, 1917.
[34] Revolutionary Age, March 29, 1919, 3, quoted in Draper, 154. Fraina laid out the approach more fully in a coauthored article, “The Left Wing Manifesto,” a practical blueprint for harnessing unrest—from labor strikes to general strikes to conquest of power—for political purposes. See Revolutionary Age, July 5, 1919. The latter article became the basis for prosecutions under New York’s criminal anarchy statute, resulting in the landmark Supreme Court decision in New York v. Gitlow, 268 U.S. 652 (1925), establishing principles of modern First Amendment law.
[35] John Reed put it this way over dinner with Socialist assemblyman Louis Waldman:“Louis, stop wasting your time running for the Assembly and stupid things like that. By the time you finish your course there’ll be no more lawyers. . . . The masses are revolutionary and are about to rise!” Waldman, 72.
[37] Benjamin Gitlow, a young Socialist assemblyman from the Bronx, remembered attending the meeting and watching as another left-winger sitting near Hillquit jumped out of his seat after one of the expulsions. “You are Right Wing enemies of the revolution!” the man shouted at Hillquit, pointing his finger. “Go ahead with your dirty work! Expel us from the party! We will soon meet you in bloody battle at the barricades!” Gitlow, 30. See also New York Communist, June 7, 1919.
[38] The raids also targeted a similar, smaller group called the Union of Russian Workers.
[39] The New York Call, the Socialist Party’s organ in New York City, briefly went out of business in 1923 and then reemerged as a biweekly called the New Leader. A voice of liberal anti-communism throughout the twentieth century, it featured writers as diverse as US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Democrat of New York), civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., journalist Irving Kristol, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, and novelists James Baldwin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
[40] See Wohlforth’s article on Trotskyism in Buhle et al., 829.
[52]New York World, November 9, 1917. Notably, in November 1917 Trotsky himself ordered files of Russian prosecutors investigating the affair to be confiscated so that Lenin and the rest could not be accused of treason. See Volkogonov, Lenin, 121, and report to Trotsky from F. Zalkind and E. Polivanov, November 16, 1917, reproduced therein.
[57] Hearing on “Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda,” Committee on Judiciary, United States Senate, 65th Congress, 1919, quoted in Sutton, 23.
[58] On Parvus’s role, see generally Spence, “Hidden Agendas.”
[60] Conspiracy theories connecting Schiff to Trotsky became so prevalent after 1920 that even friendly accounts of Trotsky’s New York visit included him. See, for instance,Kopp.
[61] See for instance RG 165, MID, files 10110-126/920 et seq. and 9140-6073 et seq. See generally Bendersky, chapter 2.
[62] “Memorandum for Colonel Masteller from M. Churchill,” November 30, 1918, inRG165, MID, 10110-920.
[63] RG 165, MID, “Bolshevism and Judaism,” November 30, 1918, 10110-920, 1 and 4. This remarkable document even gives shout-outs to Morris Hillquit and Mayer London as “leaders of the Bolshevist movement in this country.”1
[64] RG 165, MID, “Bolshevism and Judaism,” November 30, 1918, 10110-920, 1 and 4.
[65] See, for instance, Former Russian commissar, 25.
[68] See, for instance, New York Times, March 18, 1917, and New York Evening Post, March 19, 1917, both containing a letter from Schiff specifying his presence in West Virginia.
[69] As late as October 1915, he had offered to drop his objections and help raise $200 million for the Russian war effort on the condition that Russia grant Jewish subjects full civil rights, but Russia refused. Roberts, Jewish Bankers, 19.
[70] See generally Roberts; Cohen, Schiff, chapter 7.
[72] Spence, “The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant,” 209–10.
[73] See, for instance, Spence, “Hidden Agendas”: “In my original article [Spence, “Interrupted Journey,”], I speculated that Wiseman’s peculiar behavior towards Trotsky was driven by his desire to enlist the exile in a secret scheme to ‘guide the storm’ in revolutionary Russia and, above all, to keep Russia in the war. The more recent information, I believe, supports this theory.”
[74] Around this time many British officials worried about the flood of Russian radicals returning home. “We have reliable information that the Germans are organizing from every neutral country parties of Russian refugees, largely Jewish socialists,” he would write in a confidential briefing for his superiors in London. “These parties are sent to Petrograd where they are organized by German agents posing as advanced Socialists.” “Russia,” May 15, 1917, Wiseman papers, Folder 255.
[75] “Russia,” May 15, 1917. Wiseman papers, Folder 255. Wiseman had already engaged Columbia University professor Richard Gottheil to solicit statements of support from prominent American Jews to circulate in Russia. These Jews included Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and even Jacob Schiff. See Fowler, 109.
[76] “Intelligence & Propaganda Work in Russia, July to December 1917,” January 19, 1918, in Wiseman papers, File 10/261.
[77] Kalpaschnikoff would be cleared of the charges and released in 1919.
[78] Even after Brest-Litovsk, British officials suggested seeking Trotsky’s support for British military intervention in Siberia to reopen an anti-German eastern front. Woodrow Wilson blocked the idea, convinced that Trotsky was a paid agent of Germany. The Allies, including about thirteen thousand Americans, intervened regardless. See Fowler, 176–77.
[80] Also along these lines, in a 1919 article titled “Why Did We Let Trotsky Go?”Canadian lieutenant colonel J. B. MacLean accused his own government of losing a chance to shorten the war and blamed it for weakness and incompetence.
[82] Willert, 29. An anonymous witness before the 1919 Overman Committee seemed to back up this story with a joke: “I remember it struck me as comical” that Kerensky asked the American government to provide Trotsky a passport “because he thought he could be able to help him out. And he did help him out.” See “Bolshevik Propaganda: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary,”1919.
[84] Also, by early 1918 President Wilson was convinced that Trotsky was a German agent, based at least partly on the Sisson papers, a set of Russian-language documents hand-carried from Petrograd by US official Edgar Sisson, connecting German influence to top Bolshevik figures. Several of these documents were later shown to be forgeries. Fowler, 178.