WHAT I FOUND IN MY BASEMENT!

There is serendipity in life. It can bring us moments of joy that break through the tedium of life and even the despair of the moment.

Like everyone I know, I live two lives these days. I walk around with an internalized sense of dread. The political reality brought to us by Donald Trump has come upon us like a tsunami bulldozing over the horizon, darkening the landscape and leaving destruction in its wake. It has brought with it feelings of foreboding and fear. But, at the same time, I get on with life, attending to smaller personal concerns. Indeed, I often turn to the personal realm in order to temporarily escape the larger, impending realities. This is a time to manage emotions, lest I be overwhelmed with dread, even depression.

This essay is a personal one about an incident that has briefly captured my attention and has temporarily enabled me to escape the encroaching negative landscape.

I suspect many of us have read stories of how someone was rummaging around the attic and found a copy of the Declaration of Independence on the back of a painting or a rare photograph of a notable taken in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Over the last year, with the active support of my partner, I have been renovating my small home in New Jersey. The kitchen has been modernized, and my large bathroom on the main floor has been redone and divided into two, creating a lovely little sunroom with six windows facing out to my backyard and the forest beyond.

Fixing up the basement is the next project. Beyond the habitable space is a storage area, replete with at least a dozen cardboard boxes, some of which have remained unopened for decades. What they contained was a mystery. So, the first chore was to unpack, explore their contents, and make decisions as to what to keep and what to discard.

Nothing at first was startling. There were old dishes, many of which we chose to keep, and many towels, linens, and assorted tchotchkes we chose not to. We then came upon a box that contained items owned by a late aunt, my mother's older sister. In it were photos of my aunt and of a home she owned on New York's Fire Island.

In the box. I also found several sheets of paper, folded over twice. They were turning brown and clearly old and fragile. I handled them with care. Once I opened them, they contained three pages of writing banged out on a manual typewriter. The pages included two documents. At the bottom of each was written the name of the author, the date, and the place. The first read:

“Leon Trotsky

March 8, 1937

Coyoacan”

The second, also by Trotsky, was dated “March 13, 1937”

Needless to say, I was amazed. The documents raised several questions, the most prominent relating to their authenticity. The first document that extended about four-fifths down the first page was clearly a press release. The second and longer statement continued the content of the first. They were written in impeccable English (how fluid was Trotsky's English?) and exhibited a polemical style that was very much Trotsky's.

The documents were composed in the aftermath of the infamous Moscow Trials, show trials in which Stalin, in his initiative to consolidate power ensured the condemnation and execution of leaders of the Bolshevik revolution. Trotsky was the foremost of the condemned, causing him to flee, first to France, then Turkey and Norway, until finally settling outside of Mexico City.

The documents included information that was current to the day. It cites the Moscow Trials, the Spanish Revolution, and a review of the Moscow Trials that was emerging in New York. This latter reference was of particular interest to me. Trotsky's missives were penned when the commission, headed by the American philosopher, John Dewey, was being formed.

The “Dewey Commission", as it became known, organized the work of significant notables, some of whom made the trip to Coyoacan, Mexico, where Trotsky resided, to take a deposition over several days to determine Trotsky's guilt or innocence. The commission was comprised of such well-known figures as John Dos Passos, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Thomas, Franz Boaz, and Sidney Hook, among others. Several of those on the commission, headed by Dewey, who was then 78 years old, met with Trotsky at his home in Mexico over a period of several days. After taking depositions from Trotsky, the commission found him innocent of the charges lodged against him and concluded that the Moscow Trials were a frame-up.

The focus of the press release and the associated document was Trotsky's attack on the French novelist Andre Malraux. Trotsky takes Malraux, who in earlier years had been a supporter of his, to task for coming to New York to lend his support to Stalin and the Trials' prosecutor. Trotsky is also irked by Malraux's contention that the Moscow Trials were merely a personal affront to Trotsky while shortchanging their political significance.

As Trotsky notes in his press release:

“New York is now the center of the movement for review of the Moscow Trials, which is, be it said in passing, the only way of preventing new judicial assassinations. It is unnecessary to explain how much this movement alarms the organizers of the Moscow amalgams. They are ready to resort to any measures to arrest this movement. Malraux's trip is one of these measures.”

These events may seem obscure and remote, if not arcane, to the contemporary reader. Yet, in their day, they provided substance for heated arguments among activists on the left. Among these activists was my uncle Benny, a die-hard Trotskyist all his life and a participant in the storied debates centered around City College in the 1930s. In his younger years, famed social critic Irving Howe was a friend of Bennys. My uncle was an argumentative and irascible character, but a literate man, and his acquisition of these papers would have totally conformed with his interests. His involvement in communist politics plausibly explains how documents composed by the man around whom my uncle framed his political ideology eventually found their way into my basement.

But other questions remained. Were these documents actually written by Leon Trotsky? The condition and age of the paper would seem to indicate so. But if he did write them, did he himself compose them on his typewriter, or were they dictated to a secretary? And then there is the question of the impeccable English in which they are composed. Trotsky lived in New York in the early months of 1917, residing in the Bronx. Yet his English was minimal, suggesting that the documents I had in hand were not original but translations.

To my disappointment, this fact has been verified. I initially did an online search for Trotsky's archives, which are voluminous. I was unable to open the relevant documents, but I did locate an index that noted a document dated March 8, 1937, which I assumed was the original of the one I have in hand.

My next step was to contact the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, where I had long taught. The Institute is dedicated to Russian and Eastern European studies. I engaged in an email correspondence with a chief archivist at Harriman who expressed great interest and shared my enthusiasm when I informed her of my find. I told her that I would be interested in having the documents authenticated and would be happy to donate them to Columbia. I scanned the papers and sent the copies to her.

She got back to me in a few days to let me know that she had presented them to a Russian historian now residing in the United States. Alas, he confirmed, against my hopes, that what I had in my possession were not original but were written in Russian and then translated into English to provide access to a larger audience.

His assessment confirmed my suppositions but left me disappointed nevertheless. My surprising discovery sent me on an intellectual adventure that allowed me a brief respite from the political morass in which we are ensnared. Without an archival home, I see little choice but to place my historical find in a file cabinet or a desk drawer, perhaps to be found anew by a descendant at some unknown future time.