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Last week the President of Mexico General Lazaro Cardenas, sent a luxurious special railway car, El Hidalgo ("The Nobleman"), to fetch Comrade Trotsky from the seacoast to the 7,000-ft. high plateau on which stands Mexico City, Lest anyone do the Great Exile a mischief El Hidalgo stopped some miles outside the capital and Mr. & Mrs. Trotsky, with six Mexican detectives permanently assigned to them, alighted to finish their journey by motor car.* This whisked them to the spacious suburban residence of fat and smoldering Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera, an ardent Trotskyist, friend of President Cardenas, and casher-in on the John D. Rockefellers (Father & Son) who in art "know what they like."
Communist Paradoxes. In Moscow the official Soviet Foreign Office spokesman told correspondents amiably and without heat that the Stalin Regime has "no objection to Mexico's granting asylum to Trotsky," adding perfunctorily, "so long as Trotsky is not permitted to use Mexico as a base for plotting against the Soviet Union."
Considering that Stalin claims to believe that Trotsky successfully fomented the assassination of the Dictator's "Dear Friend Sergei" Kirov (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934 et seq.), and then hatched a conspiracy which had the death of Stalin as its objective (TIME, Aug. 24 et seq.), it was curious last week that official Moscow and the Party and press in Russia were indifferent to the honors President Cardenas was paying to Mexico's guest. Tremendous was the hullabaloo raised meanwhile by the Mexican Communist Party which is avowedly Stalinist. Its General Secretary,† blatant Comrade Hernan Laborde, massed his Reds in Mexico City's St. Domingo Square and roared: "Down with Trotsky who is living in the home of the Capitalist Painter Rivera! . . . We demand the expulsion of Trotsky from Mexico. . . . Trotsky, the rotten bourgeois-stalking horse, has already broken his promise to refrain from politics in Mexico and has insulted the Soviet Government!"
So the Great Exile had, but the Soviet Government and its extremely obedient and vocal Russian Press gave no sign of having minded the following remarks by the Great Exile last week in Mexico city: "Soviet bureaucracy is sabotaging the Spanish Revolution in order not to frighten the French bourgeoisie! It does this first by preventing the proletariat in Spain from seizing power, secondly it does not give Spain the support it could give if Russia really intended to help the proletariat. Soviet bureaucracy is aiding Spain only just enough to save its face with the workers of the world!"
In Manhattan last week was 24-year-old Jean van Heijenoort, the French private secretary of truly international Trotsky, who generally keeps two or three polylingual secretaries busy handling his correspondence with Trotskyists in all parts of the world. After conferring with Trotsky Reds in Manhattan, Private Secretary van Heijenoort took plane to Mexico City. Already there was the first pilgrimage of U. S. Reds to the feet of the Great Exile. None has a name which makes news in the U. S. Press but in zeal and enthusiasm they were tops,* particularly one Max Schachtman who aspires to write the definitive biography of the Master.