Houghton Releases Trotsky Collection

More than 30 experts on Leon Trotsky gathered at Houghton Library yesterday to pore over the Russian revolutionary's 17,500 letters and papers which the library released yesterday.

The experts sat, wide-eyed and reverent, in the Houghton reading room, sifting through the papers, stored for more than 40 years to protect Trotsky's friends from Stalinist reprisal.

Unafriad But Realistic

"They portray Trotsky as a man living very much in the present and future, unafraid but realistic," Rodney Dennis, manuscript curator at the library, said yesterday.

The papers offer no new insights on a "broad, political, conceptual plane but on a day to day basis they show Trotsky as a man," Jean van Heijenoort, Trotsky's former bodyguard and chief aide said yesterday.

Pen Pals

The letters, all written while Trotsky worked on his goal of a Fourth Communist International from his Mexico exile, "show like no other collection of papers can what he, and what the worldwide Trotskyite movement were like during the exile years," Dennis said.

"The picture is a bit different from the published writings," van Heijenoort said. "The letters show the ways his mind worked," he added.

Scholars packed the library reading room yesterday morning to leaf through the three volume catalogue and get a first glance at the papers. "There were 35 people in the reading room at 11 a.m., 30 of them studying Trotsky and 5 working on the rest of Western civilization," Dennis said.

Three teams of researchers, including one from Grenoble university and another representing a Trotskyite publisher interested in publishing a set of the leader's collected works began the arduous task of evaluating the entire collection.

Tag-Team

"I've never seen people working in teams before. They assure us they intend to stay, some for several months," Dennis said.

The collection includes letters from several American groups, among them the Communist League for Struggle and the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky.

Publish and Perish

Although Harvard purchased the documents for a total price of about $14,000 in the years between 1939 and 1952, Dennis said they stayed in storage until this year because "to publish names of Trotsky's friends would have been risky, both because of the Stalinists and the Nazis.

"There hasn't been a word yet from the Russians. Obviously they're interested, but there's not been a whisper. Perhaps we'll hear in a few months," Dennis said.

Library researcher Patrick Miehe catalogued the collection, now open to any scholar.

The Trotsky collection is stored in the library stacks in more than 172 black leather cases. Many of the papers, all but those from the period of Stalin's exile, had already been made available to scholars.

"I never remember interest at this level before," Dennis said, adding "letters and phone calls have been coming in for months."

The Trotsky collection is among the library's largest