Gün Benderli’s Trotskyists (2)

Two young Trotskyists in Budapest: Lukas and Jean Benoit

PART 1 | PART 2

A still from Gün Benderli’s 2025 interview with the Nâzım Hikmet Foundation for Culture and Arts in Moscow.

In the first part, we examined Gün Benderli’s impressions of Bert, the American Trotskyist whom she met in Geneva in the summer of 1951. Bert was the first Trotskyist Benderli had ever met; yet this encounter also revealed how Stalinist political training had stifled and blunted both her own and her husband’s capacity for independent thought. Although they found Bert personally likeable, what he said was regarded by Benderli and her circle not as views worthy of discussion, but rather as “fabrications of class enemies.”

In her memoirs, Benderli also speaks of two other Trotskyists whom she met in Budapest more than twenty years after meeting Bert: Lukas, from Peru, and Jean Benoit, from France [*]. These later encounters were different from the first. For by then, as Benderli herself put it, she knew “far more, and far closer to the truth” about Trotsky than she had during her Geneva years. Moreover, as with Bert, Benderli remembers these two young Trotskyists with affection.

Let us give the floor to our author:

There would be two more Trotskyists in my life whom I loved dearly. I met both of them in Budapest in the 1970s. In fact, these young men were friends of my children, and I too grew very fond of them. One was Peruvian: Lukas; the other French: Jean Benoit. Lukas’s father was Peru’s ambassador in Budapest. Lukas and his sister had met my son and daughter somewhere, and they soon became very close.

They would often meet either at our home or at the ambassador’s residence; there were even nights when they stayed at ours, or my children stayed at theirs. Each time Lukas came to our house, he would hold forth to me about Trotsky. It was he who gave me the French edition of Trotsky’s famous book on the degeneration of the Soviet revolution. By then I knew far more about Trotsky than I had in Switzerland, and much of it was closer to the truth; on many points, I agreed with Lukas. (p. 149)

The book that Lukas gave Benderli in French translation was most likely Trotsky’s masterpiece The Revolution Betrayed - which we regard as the greatest Marxist work of the twentieth century. Benderli’s remark that “on many points I agreed with Lukas” is therefore significant. This does not mean that she had embraced Trotskyism. But it does mean that a “communist” schooled in Stalinist political training could, years later, acknowledge that Trotsky’s criticisms of the Soviet bureaucracy and the degeneration of the Stalinist regime contained a substantial element of truth. The defensive withdrawal that had characterised her attitude towards Bert in the early 1950s had, by the 1970s, given way in her encounter with Lukas to a more attentive, more open and more questioning stance.

Graffiti in Budapest in the early 1970s: “Russians, get out! Twenty-seven years is enough!”

Yet Benderli’s recollection of Lukas is not confined to this exchange of ideas. The fact that Lukas was the son of the Peruvian ambassador, that he formed a close friendship with the Benderli family, and that the children became close enough to spend nights at one another’s homes also attracted the attention of the police and intelligence apparatus in Hungary. What Benderli recounts is significant because it shows how, under Stalinist bureaucratic regimes, even everyday relationships could be placed under surveillance, suspicion and control:

During the four years of the Peruvian ambassador’s posting in Budapest, this warm and close relationship also left an unpleasant memory for both me and my son.

Embassies and consulates, I suppose, are monitored to some extent by the national security services everywhere in the world; but at that time in Hungary, I also witnessed how absurdly such monitoring could be carried out. Having noticed - or observed - the close relationship between our children, the Hungarian Foreigners’ Police one day summoned my son and asked him to report to them who came to the Peruvian ambassador’s residence and what went on there. When Can heard this, he was naturally both angry and frightened. At first he did not tell me. After thinking it over for a while, he must have decided that it would be better for me to know, and one day he told me. I was deeply angered by the attempt to use my son as an instrument in such a thing. Yet I knew that confronting the person who made such a proposal would backfire badly and could land one in serious trouble. Such proposals are made once and are not repeated. If no response comes from the person approached, it is treated as though the proposal had never been made. If you try to tell others about it, or attempt to lodge some sort of complaint, the first thing they will do is deny it and then smear you.

I told Can to take no notice, to behave as if nothing of the kind had happened, and to carry on as before. That is what he did. And they never bothered him again. (pp. 149-150)

Benderli was understandably angered by the attempt by the police and intelligence apparatus to make use of her son in such a scheme; yet, knowing the workings of the regime well enough, she judged that an open complaint might create an even greater danger. In these lines, the climate of fear and caution that permeated everyday life under the Stalinist bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe is laid bare. Even the friendships of children and young people could be turned into potential channels for gathering information.

* * *

The other Trotskyist whom Benderli came to know in Budapest in the 1970s was the Frenchman Jean Benoit. Whereas in the Lukas anecdote political discussion and bureaucratic surveillance are intertwined, in the portrait of Jean Benoit a more personal, more sorrowful and tragic tone comes to the fore:

The other Trotskyist I came to know and love dearly was Jean Benoit. He too was young, yet mature for his age and an exceptional person. He came from an aristocratic French family. Having broken off relations with his family, he had begun living with his wife and a few friends in one of the suburbs of Paris. When, after finishing university, my son went to Paris to pursue a doctorate with our meagre resources, he received a great deal of help from Jean Benoit, although they had met only by chance. When Jean Benoit came to visit us in Budapest, we spoke at length on many subjects, including Trotsky and Trotskyism. When he spoke of Trotskyism, he was so sincere, so deeply convinced, and invested such hope in what he believed, that I took great care not to shake his convictions.

I shall always remember Jean Benoit with affection and sorrow. Shortly after he went to America, having been invited there as a research physicist, we learnt that he had taken his own life by shooting himself in the head. We do not know why. Perhaps one reason was that, one day, he had come to see the ideal to which he had devoted his whole life - and, with it, life itself - as meaningless. Men endure great disappointments in the political and ideological spheres far less easily than women, and are shaken by them far more deeply. I witnessed this during the great regime changes in the countries of the East. Perhaps this is because nature created woman as destined for motherhood, and for that reason endowed her with greater resilience. (p. 150)

The portrait of Jean Benoit reveals a different aspect of Benderli’s relationship with Trotskyists from what we see in the cases of Bert and Lukas. Here, what comes to the fore is not only the discussions about Trotsky, but also the fragility of a young man deeply and sincerely devoted to his ideals. Benderli’s remark that she took “great care not to shake” Jean Benoit’s convictions shows that she was now in an entirely different position vis-à-vis her Trotskyist interlocutors. The defensive and closed attitude she had displayed towards Bert had, in her encounter with Jean Benoit, given way to a considerate, compassionate and protective stance.

Nevertheless, Benderli’s reflections on Jean Benoit’s suicide must be read with caution. She suggests that this tragic death may have been connected to the political and ideological disappointments he had experienced; yet the text provides no concrete evidence to support such a claim. This possibility therefore remains at the level of conjecture. Moreover, her generalisation that men endure political disillusionment less easily than women is, from today’s perspective, problematic and open to debate. Still, these lines do not diminish the value of Benderli’s testimony; rather, they remind us that she too was speaking from within the horizons of her own time, her own world of experience, and the limits of her thinking.

* * *

Thus, Benderli’s Trotskyists - Bert, Lukas and Jean Benoit - do not remain merely figures of personal friendship. Taken together, these three encounters also trace the intellectual distance travelled by a TKP militant: from the youthful years in which Stalinist political training had left her entirely closed to Trotskyism, to a later, more mature period in which she acknowledged that there were elements in Trotsky’s criticisms that were “closer to the truth”. Yet this distance had its limits. Over time, Benderli came to see the distortions, repressive practices and bureaucratic decay of the Stalinist world more clearly, though not without certain ruptures. Nevertheless, she never considered adopting Trotskyism as a coherent political alternative.

In the final pages of her book, Benderli writes: “On that day [20 August 1968, the day on which the Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia - k.ü.], when I heard that dreadful news on the radio, I drew a line under the course I had chosen in the struggle I had undertaken to make all the children of the world happy.” [**] The expression she uses here is ambiguous. Although she may have “drawn a line under” that course inwardly, it appears that she continued for some time to be an active member of the TKP abroad. We do not know exactly when her practical ties with the party leadership were severed, or when they “went dormant”. At the same time, she continued to work for the Turkish service of Budapest Radio - which carried on broadcasting until the collapse of the Stalinist regime in Hungary - even though she had been sidelined by the TKP.

In Benderli’s narrative, these Trotskyists from different parts of the world occupy a special and meaningful place; yet Trotskyism itself never became a political way forward for her. Bert, Lukas and Jean Benoit remain in her memoirs as people remembered with affection, respect and, at times, sorrow. Through them, Benderli came to see more clearly some of Stalinism’s distortions, its repressive practices and some of its murderous crimes, and to make better sense of them than before. Yet these encounters did not lead her to grasp the historical and social roots of those crimes through the revolutionary Marxist perspective of Trotskyism. Benderli’s Trotskyists remain, in her political life, traces not of an alternative embraced, but of a truth belatedly recognised and yet never followed through to the end.

[*] Gün Benderli, Su Başında Durmuşuz, Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2022, pp. 149-150.

[**] Ibid., p. 399.

Concluded