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.
State & Intelligence Operations
1940
