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Four Internationals. For 25 hours and 30 minutes Leon Trotsky hung on to life with the tenacity that had distinguished his career since he became a revolutionary at the age of 17. In the hospital he underwent two brain operations while his assassin was treated in a room across the hall. Natalie Sedova never left him. He lost consciousness soon after he was put to bed. If a man's past life passes before him at such times, some strange scenes appeared to Trotsky in his coma: the first trip of nine-year-old Lev Davidovich Bronstein from the farm in Kherson Province to school in Odessa; his first brush with Marxism in the seventh grade in Nikolayev; his conversion to the cause after the woman Vetrova burned herself to death in a prison cell; his first arrest in 1898; prison in Moscow, where he married Alexandra Lvovna; Siberia in 1900; escape to England in 1902, without Alexandra but with a passport forged in the name of Trotsky, which stuck; his meeting with Lenin in London. . . .
The First International had been formed in London in 1864, based on the famed Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. But it had already died of talk. The Second International (founded in Paris in 1889) for which Lenin and Trotsky worked was a loose association of national labor organizations and Socialist parties, of which the Russian parties had the most revolutionary vigor.
Through the mind of the man who lay dying in Mexico may have passed visions of stirring revolutionary days: the abortive Russian revolution of 1905, which got him exiled to Siberia again; his escape to Vienna, where he wrote for Pravda; Balkan war correspondence from Constantinople in 1913; more plotting in Zurich and Paris; expulsion from France in 1916; Spain and ten weeks in the U. S., where he played in My Official Wife with Clara Kimball Young, worked as a waiter in a restaurant on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue, edited a Bronx newspaper; his return to Russia after the March Revolution of 1917, where he joined Lenin, helped to stage the October Revolution, conducted the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations with Germany. Because it seemed a major point of proletarian protocol, he wired Lenin to ask whether he should wear a tailcoat to the peace celebration. Lenin answered: "If it will help to bring peace, go in a petticoat."
If images did flicker through Trotsky's injured brain last week, some of them must have been of those great days when War Commissar Leon Trotsky whipped the demoralized rabble of the crushed Imperial Army into a new Red Army, drove the Whites and their allies out of Russia; the proclaiming of the Third International when he hoped that world revolution was at hand. There were also mistakes to remember, particularly the mistake of failing to return to Moscow for Lenin's funeral, a failure which under mined his popularity with the people, made him vulnerable to Stalin's intrigue. There followed expulsion from the Polit buro, exile to Turkestan, to Turkey, to France, to Norway, finally to Mexico, where last week fate caught up with him.