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The Assassination of Trotsky: Stalin's Ice Axe in Mexico
Leon Trotsky had once stood at the very summit of the Russian Revolution — the organiser of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, the founder and commander of the Red Army, the man many expected to succeed Lenin. Instead he lost the struggle for power to Joseph Stalin, and became the most hunted political exile on Earth. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, he wandered from Turkey to France to Norway before Mexico granted him asylum, and everywhere he went the long arm of Stalin's secret police followed. One by one, his collaborators, his secretaries, and his own children were killed or died in suspicious circumstances, until Trotsky, living behind the high walls and watchtowers of a fortress-like house in the Coyoacán district of Mexico City, was almost the last of his circle left alive. On 20 August 1940, a young man he believed to be a devoted follower came to show him an article. As Trotsky bent over his desk to read it, the visitor drew a mountaineer's ice axe from beneath his coat and drove it into the old revolutionary's skull. Trotsky died the next day. The killer was an agent of Stalin's NKVD, and the operation had been approved at the very top of the Soviet state. Unlike so many political murders shrouded in doubt, this one is documented down to its code name. This is the story of how Stalin finally killed Leon Trotsky.
The Holodomor
Between the winter of 1932 and the summer of 1933, between 3.5 million and 7.5 million people died of starvation and starvation-related illness in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the adjacent grain-producing regions of the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan. The deaths were not the result of crop failure. The 1932 Ukrainian harvest was below average but not catastrophically so; the deaths occurred because the Soviet state confiscated the harvest. Joseph Stalin's regime, working through Ukraine's Communist Party leadership under Lazar Kaganovich and Pavel Postyshev, imposed grain-procurement quotas that exceeded what the harvest could yield. When the quotas were not met, the state introduced 'blacklists' of villages — barred from receiving any goods, including food, until they delivered the quota. The state introduced an internal-passport system in late 1932 that prevented peasants from leaving their villages to find food elsewhere. Border guards turned back peasants attempting to cross into Russia or Belarus. The death toll, denied by the Soviet government for fifty-seven years, has since been documented through demographic analysis, opening of Soviet archives after 1991, and recovery of the photographic record — particularly the photographs of the Austrian engineer Alexander Wienerberger, who documented the famine in Kharkiv on a Leica camera he smuggled out of the USSR. The Ukrainian word *Holodomor* combines *holod* (hunger) and *moryty* (to kill, exterminate). The word was first used publicly by Ukrainian diaspora writers in the 1980s. The Ukrainian government formally recognized the events as genocide in 2006. As of 2024, the Holodomor has been recognized as genocide by approximately 34 countries and the European Parliament.
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