Out of the Shadows

A half-forgotten figure emerged from Communism's shadows last week to carry on a half-forgotten fight. She was Leon Trotsky's widow, 69.

"Take good care of her," were Trotsky's dying words to his friends. "She has been with me for a long time." Natalia Sedova, daughter of a bourgeois Ukrainian family, was a student in Paris when, in 1902, she met the bookish, intolerant young intellectual who spent his time playing chess in smoky cafes, dreaming violent dreams of world revolution. For the next 38 years, she followed Leon Trotsky around the world--Spain, Switzerland, Finland, the U.S., Norway, Germany, Turkey, Russia --into exile and to the gates of many a prison.

In 1917, when the Russian Revolution broke out, they were living in an $18-a-month apartment in Manhattan. Within a few months, the itinerant revolutionary was Red Russia's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, then organizer of the Red army and Lenin's No. 1 man, incorruptible, sarcastic, ruthless. Ten years later, having lost in the struggle for power with Joseph Stalin, Trotsky and his wife were chased out of Russia. They finally found refuge in Mexico where, in 1940, a Stalinist agent drove a pickax into the brain of Leon Trotsky.

By then "Trotskyite" was a dirty word among orthodox Communists, but small bands of followers in many countries, grandly calling themselves the "Fourth International," remained faithful to Trotsky, claiming that he alone had preached the old Marxian gospel. One of the largest of the Trotskyite groups: the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. Natalia appointed herself guardian of the true word and, like a medium, held forth on what Trotsky would say on various issues were he alive.

Last week Natalia Trotsky issued a bitter condemnation: the Socialist Workers Party, she said, had broken faith with the prophet. Wrote she to the party paper, the Militant of New York City: her husband would not have approved "supporting the armies of Stalinism in the war which is being endured by the anguished Korean people. I cannot and will not follow you in this."

Replied the official Trotskyites: "It is American imperialism--not 'armies of Stalinism'--that is waging in Korea the most destructive colonial war of modern times . . ."

In the Mexico City suburb where she lives in a high-walled, green-gated house, Natalia Trotsky was silent.

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