The Bloody Assassination of Trotsky

Sound up to history and watch the world's best history documentaries. On subjects like How William Concord England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and

there's always something more to discover.

Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history.com/subscribe. [MUSIC] Nah, no more films for such a time. Besuch the road-keption-eleptness world in Freiburg with Euron Mehlitz, Dörona,

or in the channel, from the name of the world, all the years. Added to our interactive exhibition by the elite tour, Adiogheite and a classic, and the next Parvillon, the whole world of road-keption, the road-keption-eleptness world, only a set of fans. [MUSIC] Ah, the Hollander!

It's a campaign! Hey Thomas!

“Hey, could we, by the way, M. Shaun, you have to do the best in the internet and”

begin the TV, and from the TV. Yeah, Freiburg, come on, three! But check the picture of the hot shot. [MUSIC] We're home, and show all the games of FIFAVM 26-20 Live.

The best in the internet for the house, with Magenta TV, for 9-0 from 90-months. Just because of the telecom. [MUSIC] Starlin vs. Trotsky, whoever wins, we lose.

This is a battle for control of global revolution, for control of the Soviet Union. The winner becomes one of the most influential figures in modern history. The loser, well, winds up dead. His line wiped out.

We got Trotsky, a revolutionary, electrifying, a commander of men.

He helped orchestrate the Bolshevik revolution. He led the Red Army to victory in the brutal Russian civil war. He dreamed of spreading revolution across the world. But that brilliance, provoked jealousy, hatred, emnity. And he was unlucky enough to draw the rage of one Joseph Stalin.

He ended up exiled, hunted across continents. Trotsky's life became a deadly game of sex, betrayal, and survival. From the streets of Petrograd to the sun-soaked shores of Mexico, this story is one of ambition, ideology, fast, honey traps, and relentless danger. In this episode, we're going to follow every twist of that extraordinary journey.

From the revolutions of the early 20th century to the shocking events of his assassination, itself, spoiler alert. Sorry. For this, I'm joined by Josh Island.

He's just written a fantastic book, The Death of Trotsky.

The true story of the plot to kill Stalin's greatest enemy. Josh, thanks for coming on. This is a crazy story. I'm delighted to be here.

“I think it's one of the most amazing stories of the 20th century, because it is one”

of those stories where everyone knows us a few details about it. You know the Trotsky dies in Mexico. You know it's an ice axe. But you don't know why he is in Mexico. You don't know who's wielding the ice axe.

You know, we all know who killed Julius Caesar, we all know who killed JFK. But the thing I was fascinated by was how did Trotsky get to Mexico, and who's the man wielding the axe at that day in August 1940? Well, you're going to tell us right now. Let's get into it.

Brilliant. Josh, good to see you. I'm delighted to be here. Tell me about Trotsky, where is the mighty Russian Empire, where is he born? So he's kind of comes from the edges of the Russian Empire.

Well, number one, trust me, like Stalin. So there is a kind of weird, I mean, obviously they go on to develop this like fierce vicious rivalry. But you can see quite a lot of similarities, and they're both bright boys who come from the edges of what was once the Russian Empire.

So in Trotsky's case, he comes from what was is now Ukraine and Stalin is from Georgia, and both of them come from quite humble provincial families, both of them from illiterate families. So Trotsky's father was a farmer, and Stalin's was an alcoholic bootmaker. So there isn't any sign that they will go on to become the sorts of people that will, you

know, sort of grab the 20th century by the Swaffler and Acon sort of shake it.

“But I think there's two things about them, both them incredibly bright, both of them”

incredibly ambitious, but also when they're young, both of them get seized by, sort of, overwhelving passion for world revolution in a way that I don't think we can quite understand that there's a bit of force with which it is in the air. It's in the air, but I think there are some people for whom it hits more, it lands more more securely, and it drives them in it pushes them and it pushes them and pushes them.

But I guess it would do, because if they're hyper-intulsion, they're in a system, they're in the Russian Empire where people like them can't really offer a job. Yeah, they're going to change it. I mean, to Trotsky's Jewish, which I think the him wasn't particularly significant, he wasn't a believer, he was a believer in Communism, but, you know, he sort of shrugged off

his past when he became Trotsky rather than Leon Bronstain. But it was also something that marked him in the eyes of almost everyone he met when

There were quotas when he was young, for how many kids, Jewish kids could go to school, you know, and it would also become a semantic trait in the way that he was talked about later. He's in the Russian Empire, but he's Ukrainian, he's Jewish, and he's poor. So of course he wants to rip the system up.

Well, I think so, and I think there is just, I think the thing that we can't understand from our perspective in a kind of liberal democracy is the excitement of it all and the power and the importance of it. You know, it's just so distant from our sort of fairly lukewarm relationship with politics. Even now, when we sort of talk about things being overheated and being tribal, it still doesn't

even come close to the passion and the devotion they felt. I mean, lots of people have compared them to the early Christians, you know, with that, because it's not just the passion, but it's also this belief that the paradise is so close.

“All you need to do is it's pushed a little bit more to get paradise, but where marks them”

apart from Christians is that where the Christians believe in peace and generosity and forgiveness, the Bolsheviks were sort of addicted to ruthlessness and violence, because that's what they felt was necessary to achieve the thing that they had dreamed of. Just one more push, and we're going to bring about the biggest change in human rights.

I think that's the thing that always is, exactly, it's one more push, one more push, yeah.

And where does the communist, where does he start, does he get high school, does he go to university, where does it, not he's not all these kids that go to the universities and go to all liberal arts. No, it's early on, and it's beginning with, I think he's just a sort of, the thing about Trotsky is, he's so bright that he also is desperate for everyone to know how bright he is. So, he's admirable in many ways, but also I imagine it's insufferable.

But at some point, he meets a woman who is a communist, and to begin with, he's skeptical of what she's telling him, and then at some point, it just flips, and that is his, you know, a damaging moment, and he marries this woman, but more than that, he marries this faith. And so he is, so it's a heady combination, it's, you're in love, you're in love, you know, you're together, you're newly married, you're both, and also just did the excitement of the,

the thought of being a revolutionary, I mean, and that's the other thing that Trotsky realises is, when he's in his early 20s, he's not just that he's fired by this passion, but also that he has an incredible gift for speaking that he can, he can stand up in front of thousands of people and sway them, he can, he can persuade people, he can rise them to the pictures of Fury, and all of this comes to a head in 1905 when Russia experiences the first of its

revolutions in the 20th century, and suddenly Trotsky, this sort of tiny figure from the province,

he's like this dandy who's never worked a day in his life, who's never, he doesn't know

what it's like to work.

“So, like Conrad, I'm thinking Joseph Conrad's secret agent, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.”

Yeah, it's hilarious, but sort of to do with, anyway, it's fascinating, okay, okay, okay. There is something very conradian about all of all of these people, because that's the world that Conrad builds in the secret agent of sort of, slightly shabby rooms in plotting and the sort of like the smell of sulfur and the sort of sortedness, but also that lives alongside idealism and excitement.

Yeah, sort of sortedness, but a bit of a romance to it, but it's a sight of the damned rooms. And so he suddenly becomes a central figure in this revolution, this first, the first sort of sign that the rule of the Zars, which is last, just over 500 years, the Brayman

family ruled Russia, there've been one or two attempts to sort of unseat them, but it never

particularly serious. And then this is the first rumble of something. And in one sense, the revolution is a failure because the Roman ones, at the end of it, the Roman ones are still in power, they give some sort of limit of concessions and people like Trotsky and other revolutionaries are sent into exile in Siberia, they have the classic

Russian story. But I'm sorry, he was a lead to, how do he got himself to some piece of book, was he addressing

“crowds now in the center of the empire, is that something?”

Yeah, right in the center of empire, he suddenly there, on a stage, you know, just talking and he's, you know, he's a really striking figure, he's, people have always remarked on his dandiness, dandishness, you know, he would wear beautiful white linen suits, he had this sort of sweep of hair, black hair that's sort of swept back from his head, these tiny little pounds, and then these glittering eyes that sort of hypnotic apparently.

And this is a revolution of, of social media, right, it's, it's spoken word, so it's, it's run, come on in the street with your voice, exactly. And I think this is, this is the root of his power, but later, I think his understanding of how you build power and, and hold on to power is formed in this, in this, in this time, but it will also later proved to be quite an outmoded way of, of seizing and holding

on to power. So he's in, so he's Siberia, and then he decides, along with his wife, that he should escape Siberia. So he hops, he, he puts on his disguise, and then finds his, then hops on to a carriage

That's not him, that's not him. Incredibly good, sort of bad for the wife and two children. What are you behind? Oh, that she's not coming with them. They don't come with them.

Oh. I mean, it's for the revolution. Exactly, you can just, this is, this is the first sign that these are people that could justify anything to themselves and to anyone else in the name of what they're doing. And so he, he leaves this wife and two daughters who will barely see again for the rest

of their lives. And then begins a sort of perigronation across Europe, and that one very significant meeting he has during this period is with Lenin, who is the leader of the social, the democratics party in Russia. But he was not in Russia.

He's what he's doing. They, they meet in London, so all of them are in exile either in Siberia or sort of dotted around Europe. So the next, over the next 10 years, Trotsky will be in Paris where he meets the second life partner.

And they, he refers to his wife, but they never marry him.

He's in Vienna. And this is an extraordinary time. And this smoke filled rooms. Yes, metal rooms. And then on the other hand, they're printing newspapers, they're writing screens, they're

pretty helpless. Because the Russian Empire actually seems to have sort of bounced back, you know, there's industrial associates. It's slowly, there are, you know, there are, there's a, a man called Stollipen who seems

“to be writing the foundations of the Empire that, you know, that, I think, you know, and”

I think that the thing they all had trying to reconcile is that they are Marxists, so they have absorbed everything that Karl Marxists had, this sort of iron laws of the world. I think revolution is going to happen, and they, they think it's going to come from the working classes, and it's only a matter of time, but they, but until it happens,

they have to wait. And what they, the, the, the, what they do while they wait is really is, is right article's smoke, argue, read, woman, I think, I mean, Trotsky, to, well, we'll, we'll get on to it. Trotsky, Trotsky meets his new partner.

I think the, the, I think about Trotsky is, he's sort of, I'm at like all interesting people, like a man of, of deep contrast, you know, he's, he's a man who believes in this sort of beautiful future where people liberate it to be creative and, and make beautiful art, but also thinks that, you know, if you're going to have a revolution, it has to be sort of drenched in blood.

Yeah. He's, he's sort of person that, you know, doesn't think, is, is, it gets incredibly cross-way people swear in front of children, or tell, like, rude stories in front of children

“or women, but at the same time, I think he, he does have an eye for, for the, for women,”

you know, I mean, I know, this will become a sort of a, a teacher later in his story. And then, so these guys are sort of living this conriding existence in Europe, and then

the first world war breaks out, and we, do not have to get into the first world war on

this world war, so people can find other podcasts on this feed that will do that, but just shatters, just smashes everything to bid it. Exactly. Suddenly everything's up for me. It's a disaster for the Russian Empire, and it's been badly led for decades by a week

indecisive incompetence are Nicholas II, and eventually after sort of the death of millions of wasteful death of millions and the collapse of the economy in 1917, there's a revolution here. And it's not the revolution that Bolsheviks expected, and in, in fact, they're also surprised by that none of them are in Russia.

And then in Switzerland, Trotsky is in the United States, and so all of them are desperate to get there. And then Lenin is famously taking in that in the train. Yeah, the German Empire, one of the most extraordinary own goals in history, the German Empire, put Lenin on a sealed train.

Yeah.

“I think he does actually stop to go to the loop.”

But anyway, and they whizz him through the German Empire and inject him, like a vibe. And there's a, it's so, it's so virus, like it's so, it's kind of, this is a battle list we're going to drop into the atmosphere, push it into the Russian Empire, and he arrives and gives a bar and stormy speech in some pizza burglary, so he's there off. Well, they kind of are in the art, because then, quite quickly, Lenin has to go to

Finland to avoid a rest. So there is, so there's this brief window of the liberal, free sort of near democracy in Russia. And it looks like maybe Russia's going to have a sort of different future, and then maybe it's going to resemble its neighbors, like, for our, no, or not neighbors. It's, it's continental neighbors.

But what happens is that Trotsky arrives, and so to Stalin, and the Bolsheviks, Trotsky has been on the edge of this movement for quite a long time. About 10 years previously, there's this vicious, vicious dispute over, the kind of detail

which now seems like, impossibly remote and tiny, but it's about what the ideal revolutionary

strategy should be, whether it should be as a small cadre of elite revolutionary sort of wider, the wider generation, the wider generation, the wider generation, to engage of population. So anyway, Lenin and his followers, within the party, became a group called the Bolsheviks, and they supported this idea very tiny elite.

Trotsky wasn't entirely in one part of the next, but he was broadly aligned with the metrics here with a sort of smaller group.

has handed them, they're able, all able to, even, at least temporarily to put aside these differences, because this is the moment. This is the thing they've been waiting for, it's not the revolution they expected, but it's a revolution. So like the, it's like, there's been a sort of causum, and then they can suddenly see into a

different future. And so they begin plotting, they begin, and this is one of Trotsky's other great

guess, he's an incredible organizer, he knows how to set up a coup.

And we don't get off topic, but this is one of those really interesting levels of the impact,

“but he's a small group of very well organized people, can we?”

Yeah, and determined, completely determined, because the bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak. There was no gigantic popular movement in Russia for Bolshevism, for commonism, Bolshevism. Yes, people in that era, that diva stop went saying, "I like that Lenin, I think we should give him a chance." And the people now knew that these people were, they was these incredibly obscure figures.

They were, I mean, they were, it would be as if, you know, we woke up tomorrow in a Marxist sector sort of had stormed into Downey Street and said, "We're now in charge." And it's now knowing what we know, it's difficult to sort of applaud it, because what follows is death of millions, but it's an incredible feat of establishing the confidence, but it's because they know it's just that this is their one chance.

This is the one moment they will get when everything there is chaos, when nobody is

sure what to do next, when everybody in the country is unhappy, where if you are just

confident enough with your bold enough, you can sort of grab, sort of grab, so this is what they do. You're listening to Downey's History here, we'll be back after this break. Thomas? Can you tell me who you are?

You've got the best Internet and Magenta TV from the Telecom. Yeah, Freilay, come on, but in the meantime, let's finish it up here. We're back in the house, and all the games of FIFA VM 26 and 20 live. They're now the best Internet for the house, with Magenta TV for non-euro from a 90-month and no operative telecom.

So this is what they do. They form a government, they're the coups.

“And Trotsky's part of this, you've got Trotsky's absolutely essential.”

It's key organisers. You can't imagine that revolution. Really? I don't think so. And obviously this will be re-eventinated because for Star Wars, the idea that Trotsky could

ever have played a positive role. But you've peeled back the layers of propaganda. So we've got Lenin and Trotsky's, we're organising, getting everyone ready to storm this building on that day. Here we go.

Yeah. Some weapons, these people are reliable. Okay, fine. And what's sort of weird is it's quite a bloodless coup. Yeah.

There's a lot. I mean, they're instinctive, right, that actually this is a sort of house of cards that you just need to give a tiny push to in it. And suddenly everyone wakes up and this has happened. There is this group of in the eyes of many maniacs here in Trotsky, the country.

“To storm the, for my Imperial Palace and some people, they've got the key buildings.”

They move on to Moscow. And that's it. It's got the sort of surable cortex of the state. Exactly. That's a really good way of putting it.

And then it's only later that there is a sort of belated reaction to it. And this is sort of Trotsky's second great moment there, so Russia sends into it. And it's like a bizarrely brutal civil wars. The kind of thing, it's a kind of real prefigure prefiguring of the sort of bloodiness and the viciousness and the brutality that we'll follow in the rest later in the 20th century.

You know, it's the kind of war where people are being like prisoners are being skinned alive, where people are loyal to death, where there are massacres, and it's terrible. And it's vicious.

And for a while, it looks as if the counter-revolutionary forces who are known as the

white armies are like, are going to cease power again, the Bolsheviks are going to fall. And this is where Trotsky is appointed leader of the Red Army. Thanks, but I don't know. No military tricks, there's no military back for us, but he's, again, it's like putting a podcaster and charges.

Well, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. And incredibly good speaker, you know, I'm talented person, charismatic, but, you know, I very good at maths. That's satisfying. That's satisfying.

But, you know, wouldn't know how to load a rifle, I'm pretty sure. But takes to it with a plom, you know, he wears, he embraces the look, which is, you know, you wear cool. All long leather suits, you have this huge armoured train, which kind of careers around the country and you descend upon particular areas and you, you give out, you know, revolvers

to people who fought well, you shoot the people who, you know, take a single step backwards.

helps the Bolsheviks, eventually, and it takes years, you know, from, I think it's not

“until the mid, the early 20s that this war is finally won, that, finally, they, they”

have, they feel as if they have a handle on this huge country, because the, the problem they had is that Marxist theory says that there are sort of various stages and of a, of a, of a state's development, and it's only when the working class could have achieved what they described as political consciousness, that a revolution to take place. But Russia is this enormous country that's almost entirely populated by peasant farmers,

you know, they're not the working classes that, of Manchester, yeah, exactly, yeah, there is no, there was no proletariat really of one, but who's loyal to they can rely. So they, they kind of have to impose their will on this, this massive country. It's sort of a recon, conquer the Russian Empire, yeah exactly, yeah, that's really, yeah exactly. And so Troski's riding high, they've won the war, Lenin's in charge, he's maintaining

“relations with Lenin. Yeah, he's, I mean, they're always, there's always a sort of certain”

distance between the two. Troski will later try and, try and present a picture of how close an intimate they were, but you know, that they, they had spent most of the previous decade exchanging vicious letters and, you know, throwing insults at each other, you know, and they're both strong-willed, egotistical, ambitious figures who have, you know, very strong ideas about how the world should be organising. But Lenin's a good, good judgment to give

him the top job, but, yeah, Lenin, Lenin is, I mean, amidst a sort of cast of incredibly ruthless people, Lenin is very good at understanding what a situation needs, and who is best equipped to deal with that situation. But Lenin is also ailing, he's, he's been sick, he's had strokes, there's been a failed assassination attempt, which has left to be incredibly weak, so what Trotski and all the Bolsheviks know is that Lenin's time on his planet

is numbered, at some point there's going to be a succession struggle, and this is where the rivalry that has already existed, or it exists between Trotski and Stalin begins to become sharp and fierce, because they know that both of them are prime candidates to, well, Trotski certainly sees himself as a prime candidate and most of the world would agree with him, assume that he was the heir apparent, so what Trotski will do later is he will present

a vision of Stalin as, what he described him as a gray blur as a kind of mediocrity, a bureaucratic

mediocrity who, Stomach Accidently became powerful, who sort of stumbled into the top

job in the Soviet Union, which is half true, in so much as Stalin wasn't as charismatic, but Vladimir Putin weirdly, sort of. Yeah, I mean there are similarities, there is, I mean both have a kind of weird obsessive interest in Russian history and a kind of, so I think there is this very different, Stalin and Trotski are very different personalities, they have a kind of physical loathing for each other, because where Trotski is a kind of cosmopolitan who's

lived in Vienna, who knows about psychoanalysis, who, right, literary criticism, who hasn't interested in science and things like that, Stalin is, that is a big reader, but Andy is by most definition and intellectual, but he doesn't speak much, he kind of, he's this sort of strange short figure with Pac, you know, a limp and Pac-Mark cheeks, you know, Trotski would sort of sort of denigrate him as a course provincial, okay, he doesn't talk when he doesn't need to talk,

but he's always planning, he's always thinking, and this is kind of where they're understanding

about what power is in the 20th century, it's significant, because for Trotski it's being able to

“deliver a sort of sparkling, it's interesting, inspire people, and then that's how you get”

people to follow you, whereas what Stalin understands is that, you know, actually you require power by forming alliances, by sitting on the committee, by sitting on committees, by sort of stockpiling bureaucratic power so that you have the right to appoint editors and newspapers, or, you know, the mind-efficient functionaries in some city, for our outside mosque, like that's where real power lies, interesting, and also bit by being able to sort of negotiate, you know,

person of different personalities, different people's ambitions, because what Stalin also is incredibly good at is understanding where people's weakness is like, you know, he's one of the people that can read a human being instantly, and know what they want and what they need, but also how you can take advantage of them. So, Trotski's a believer, go out, you would give her a bathroom, you win over the Senate, you win over the Parliament, you win over the street, that's the job

to Stalin's using this sort of 20th century massive state bureaucracy and pulling levers. Yes,

most significant figure in Bolshevik Russia after Lenin, they said, if you'd ask that question in say 1922, they would have said Trotski, they wouldn't, because they wouldn't, they haven't seen what Stalin is doing, no one can see what Stalin is doing, at least of all Trotski, and if he does see, he doesn't rate it, he doesn't understand it. So, events begin to move quickly, so Stalin,

there's a Lenin's health deteriorates further and further it, and in 1924 he finally dies,

and this is one of the sort of key moments in sort of Trotski, Stalin rivalry, because he's sickly, he's often, he often falls victim to these mysterious illnesses that sort of seems to have flicked him when the moments of greatest stress, and so when Lenin dies, he's in the Caucasus recovering, and then there's a kind of myth about this, so some people, there was a very long time,

“I think there was a belief that Stalin deliberately told Trotski the incorrect day for Lenin's funeral,”

so then Trotski would be too late to arrive, but it seems now that Trotski actually didn't know what the right funeral was, the right day of the funeral was, but just didn't think it was important to attend. And this was kind of significant mostly because one of the kind of key plankin's Stalin's strategy was to identify himself incredibly closely with Lenin and Lenin's lengthy. Like Mark Antony, go and give the big speech of the series again, you present yourself, you present

yourself as the guardian of Lenin's, the person that is loved or at least respected across the empire, you set the, what was the empire, you present yourself as being the only person that could protect his legacy, and by contrast, you say the Trotski, you know, he's this strange person who spent too much time in Europe, he has strange ideas. Yeah, he doesn't turn up to the funeral, he wants to change things, but I'm going to keep things the same, you know, you don't trust him.

It's funny, on the end being in a weather it's high-pcountry, but I do more I think about history, I think, sometimes yes, Lenin's got to be lucky. I think other also you could have the resilience of a bull elephant. Yeah, I mean that's that's it. We underestimate you know, because the water's bad foods, and people are sick all the time, and also I didn't, you know, I couldn't be a leader, I wouldn't sleep at night, I'd come out and I, you know, these people have got to have

the ability to sort of barrel through. Well if it's actually in the second moment, it's sort of

small on the face of it, frail figure, but who works for no-one allowers, because I mean I wouldn't have lasted until sort of June 1940. Yeah, so Trotski, he's in trouble now, he's in trouble at this point.

“Yeah, so I think, I remember when I was at school, it sort of presented his contest between”

Storm and Trotski that somehow started in one, but actually, I think the more you look at it, the more you realise, it's like they're both starting playing a game, but by the time that, you know, the time the whistle's been blown, Starlin's already sort of bought the referee, he's actually changed the rules of the game, you know, he's got sort of 20 players on his team and Trotski only has one player on his team. It wasn't a contest, you know, he was so comprehensively

quickly, so really, seriously, I wasn't even, it wasn't a contest. Yeah, it was, and I think he was bewildered by the speed with which that happened. Yeah, he hasn't done all the hard work, he doesn't build a power base, you just, no, to live as one storming species. This is weird thing about, so Trotski, completely indifferent to other human beings, that there's one of his closest friends, right, to memoir later on, he says, I realised that after two decades of friendship,

he'd never asked me a single question about myself, he never, he was, he had no interest in me,

he, you know, barely knew what my name was, we're a Starlin, though we later kind of learned that he's one of the sort of great monsters of history, it was this sort of paradoxical thing of someone who understood how to, you know, he remembered people's birthday to like bought presents for my collection. So for the British Americans, he's incredibly incredibly clever at that sort of thing, you know, and, and obviously he would lend turn against them, but when he needs

people, he knows what he needs, he needs to do to give them, he needs what they, he knows what they want, he knows that you know, this person will want a promotion, this one person wants a nice

“flat in, you know, near the Kremlin, you know, that's what he, he's very good at that sort of stuff,”

right, and Trotski's nowhere, that's so fascinating, and when do we, when does Trotski find out that he's been talking about me, so he's currently, he has a job title, he's, he's still in charge of the army, or, no, he, he resigns from that, okay, and, and, and that, this is the thing, you know, Lenin, even offered him the chance to be his, you know, nominal second and command in the party, and he didn't take it, so he kind of, he takes a sort of succession of slightly less

important jobs, and then, it becomes a sort of, I kind of minister with that portfolio in there. So it's time to explain, keep some round for that. Well, I think the thing about Trotski and Stalin is Trotski's a really good analog for how confident Stalin feels at any given moment, so at the beginning, because Trotski is the much more famous figure,

far, far, far like near South Korea, or, you know, that he can't, he can't move against him, you know, publicly, he can start to chip away his reputation, which he does relentlessly, you know, if they start pumping up propaganda against him, you know, prior to start writing, starts writing vicious editorials about him, but he can't actually move against them, he can't do the thing that he will do to people later on, so without, without a second thought.

So he's very, very cautious about what he does, but it culminates in 1928 when Trotski is sent into internal exile in Kazakhstan, so he's actually really does move against them at that point.

“And that's pretty decisive, I think, I don't, whether Trotski understands it or not, there's no way”

back after that. Okay. And it's not like Trotski has supported, like he has a small group, he has a small group of supporters, but most of them, either very quickly understand the drift of the things, there is absolutely no value in continuing to argue for Trotski

and to keep believing him. And also, you get nothing back, you know, he never says thank you,

he never writes to you say, well done. And he can't give you, and he can't give you a secret, you know, if you're interested in becoming, if joining the Politburo or rising up in the party, he's not your person. Okay, so he's in Siberia, he's in Kazakhstan, he's in Kazakhstan for a, for a year, and then, and you know, that's the beginning that suddenly he realises that he gets fewer of your letters, you know, and the people he does, he also write into a writing to him from places

like Siberia, from the, you know, from the, from the, from the, from the, from the contrary, further than the Guilag, as it will become. And then in 1929, he is shipped out of Russia,

he goes to first to Istanbul, a small island of Prinkapau of Istanbul.

Well, this is exiled. This is it. You know, Stalin's sort of growing in confidence, but still

“doesn't quite feel as if he can assassinate him. Although, I think what people say is that the second,”

but second, that the sort of the train leaves for Istanbul, Stalin begins to regret that he's led Trotsky, let's go, because he's done two things, he's led Trotsky, but Trotsky is also taking his archive with him. The back of his mind, Stalin is absolutely terrified that somewhere in that archive will be some nugget of information which might bring him down. So, this is the sort of beginning of his obsession with both killing Trotsky and also destroying his archive, because he, as I said earlier,

I think Trotsky is a good way of understanding how confident or not Stalin feels at any given moment in power. Although we sort of now know him as being the sort of all conquering leader, right through

the 20s into the 30s, his hold on the power was still quite provisional. He was the most important

“figure within the Soviet Union, but he's still trying to consolidate power. He's still is conscious”

that the mechanisms exist and the personalities exist, who could shove him out any moment. So, he's cautious, I mean, in a way that he always is. You'll list it down to no history here, we'll be back after this bring. Does Trotsky go into opposition? I mean, does he start? He does begin in writing. He does almost instantly, I mean, he's in a weird position in that, because he's belief in

the revolution and the necessity of the revolution and the importance of the revolution remains completely undimbed. He still thinks this is the great experiment, the greatest experiment in mankind's history. He has the sort of toadest awkward line where he has to be, he wants to be supportive of the Russian revolution, which is still under attack from most of the West, at least rhetorically. You know, it's still seen is this the great, one of the great threats in Europe.

But at the same time, he has to denigrate Stalin and what Stalin is doing and present him as being a failure. You know, he describes him as being the grave digger of the revolution. So he has to try and sort of nuance his messages, but this is the other thing that Stalin, especially his time goes by and has descent within the Soviet Union, Trinks and Trinks and Trinks and to the point where there is almost no one else presenting any other perspective other than the story that Stalin wants to be told.

Trotsky is one of the only pick people that is saying something different, and he's also this person who has this lingering aura because of the role he played in 1917. He has an authority.

he will need. He reads everything. He reads everything, he reads everything that Trotsky writes.

“He's probably one of the only people in the Soviet Union that actually does it here. Trotsky”

speeches or read his articles, because the censorship is so sort of fierce by this point. So Trotsky famous here in San Francisco just give him San Francisco for us. So he has brief periods of exile in first France after he leaves Istanbul for France, where and then Norway.

And he's never a happy, he's no one's idea of a good guest. People always terrified he's there

to ferment revolution. So no government really wants him to stay if they can avoid it. But one government that is reasonably friendly towards him is the revolutionary or socialist government of Cardenas in Mexico, which is enacting huge land reforms. And one of the figures who's quite close to the government is Diego Rivera, sort of the leading muralist in the country, which in Mexico is a huge deal. He's an amazing, credible painter who sort of has synthesized

18th century artists like Goya with, you know, Aztec har and and also infused it with his

“political passion. And part of his political passion is for Trotsky. So he helps secure Trotsky”

a visa for Trotsky. So Trotsky in his wife, get on a bet. This is his French wife.

This is the second wife. He's not French, she's she's also Russian, he's Russian.

And now there's another passionate revolution in called Natalia Sidover. All right, so we're in Mexico. We're in Mexico with Trotsky. He's living in a, how it's sort of come to be with, we're here to begin with, they live in this sort of a delic home called the Blue House, which was Frieda Carlos. Frieda Carlos, who is married to Diego Rivera, it's her childhood home. And it's this kind of a wasis with sort of butterflies and beautiful

tropical plants. And it, to begin with, you know, the, the, the, the sort of trauma and terror of what's happening in Russia, which by this point, the terror is in full swing. Like 1330. So Stalin is is relentlessly mercilessly just eliminating every single one of his enemies.

And, and, and also anyone who isn't even close to being an enemy. And specifically, the people

he is eliminating a Trotsky. So if, if anyone is ever sort of, she had a, she had a, she had a, she had a, she had a, like a glass of tea with Trotsky. They, if they've ever been on a train with Trotsky, for them, if there's been scenes, but he's speaking with him. So Trotsky is kind of churned up by the knowledge of what's happening in his own country. You know, he's haunted by ghosts of the people that have either been murdered already, or even worse as far as he's, he's, he's, he's

there sort of have turned on him and have recounted and have started his former allies in the now standing up in pulpits, slacking him off. So they kind of, on the one hand, they feel very distant from that. And if this is a weird time where Trotsky begins in a fair with Frida Carle. So this is, you know, Trotsky, the upright family man, also a man who likes sort of touching people's knees under the table. And Frida Carle, you know, one of the most seductive fascinating figures of the

20th century who seems to have initiated the affair as a way of taking revenge on her own husband, Diego Rivera, who had been sleeping with her sister. Crarchy. So it's a, it's a very sort of fibril atmosphere. And the affair lasts for a while that you know, they're sort of, it's kind of, it's kind of high-fast, really, that they're exchanging notes, you know, they're talking English, they know when else can understand what they're saying, they're, and then it doesn't, it doesn't

last because it can't last. They leave the blue house for another home, partly because, probably because, I imagine it was quite tense, but also because Rivera began as quite a sort of full smelly of Trotsky, but he's, you know, you can't rely on him, you can't rely on muralists if you're trying to build a rabbit. Two reasonably unreliable people. Well, there's a thing like Trotsky is incredibly right. He's punctilious, you know, he's famously the only person

that ever turned up on time in the Soviet Union. He allegedly wants shot a driver for being like,

“oh, they think that's true, but I think it gives a good sense of who he was in his personality,”

you know, he likes order, he needs order, and people like Rivera exist in chaos. Right, so, so they fall out and Trotsky moves to the, the house he would die in, and it's chief attraction is it has, it's a kind of compound, you know, like the kind of thing you might seem like Afghanistan or something, you know, it says, there's high walls around it. So you worried about being a citizen? I think he knows from the moment he leaves Russia,

that at some point they're going to catch up and Stalin has been, has spent the last 10 years trying to organize his assassination. So part of the frustration that feeds, that drives the terror, is Stalin's rage, that the thing he wants to be done, haven't been. I mean, it's a kind of medieval

And because he's paranoid, he assumes that it's not in competence, that it's a plot.

“So he was one leader after the other of the secret services. Yes, it's like being a defense”

against the archauch teacher or Hogwarts. Yeah, exactly, they know, why they fall, they're all for because they're not doing, they're not working hard enough to kill trucks. So they're the various attempts in Europe to bump him up, none of them come really that close, but what they have done is they've penetrated the trucks gifts, what remains of the Trotsky's organization is a riddled with spies, you know, there's the person who, in Paris is, is Trotsky's son's best friend,

who's also everything. Everything, every letter that Trotsky sends is read by the NKB, every letter he receives. They know where they're going, what they're doing. There's nothing, they can't really move without being watched or being monitored. So the net's getting tighter and tighter, and Trotsky knows he's going to be killed, and the people around him seem much more

“anxious about this than Trotsky does, that I think Trotsky, he's sort of torn between a”

sense of fatalism in which he thinks what's going to happen is going to happen. I'm one person he's pat, they're stunning in his, this man who controls an MP, but it is effectively an empire of millions of people, I can't outrun him forever, but I think what keeps Trotsky going is the thing we've talked about earlier, that passion, that desire for revolution, because although he is in exile, although he's hardly any followers left, hardly any money, he's can barely leave the house

without, because they're so afraid that he, an assassin will be waiting for him, you know, he gets in a car, he has to bend down and hide behind the two seats, he still believes that

his time might come again, he has been a revolutionary in exile before twice, and he's come back

both times, so I think there's part of him that believes that stuff happens, you know, and when the second one war begins, this is what he thinks stuff is happening, but at all this time, the sort of wheels are turning and the terrorist, the terrorist is still sort of consuming millions of 1000s and thousands of Russian lives, but after cycling through sort of various different people who the NKBD want to head up, the operation against Trotsky, they sort of finally find two very

competent, slightly chilling figures, the most significant and the name is a man called Linnid fighting on, who is the link between Stalin and the man that will eventually kill Trotsky. And so he will recruit an actual assassin, really? Yeah, so he is in charge of organizing the attack on Stalin on Trotsky, and it's a fairly multi-led effort, and there are parts of it that begin in ways that don't seem particularly

“significant, and one of the most important ones for this story is a meeting in Russia”

in Spain between fighting on, and a family called the Meccadas. So, fighting on is out there to help the Republic during the Spanish civil war, which Stalin is using as a sort of proving ground for some of the methods that they will, the methods of repression that will be employed later on. He doesn't, you know, Stalin is not a man who lets us sort of war go to waste, and the Meccadas are fascinating family, they're bourgeois, semi-arastocratic,

from Barcelona, and their family business falls apart, so they're sort of thrown into poverty. She begins teaching, and very quickly gets, I guess we would call radicalised.

She's always been this sort of reckless, thrill-seeking personality, and very quickly she

becomes both a communist and a heroin addict, so the marriage doesn't last very long. She leaves, takes with her the children who will brought up to sort of imbib her philosophy, and then when the civil war comes around, her eldest son Ramal, who says tall, handsome, charismatic figure, starts fighting, he's part of communist brigade, and we can't precisely locate the moment when the NKBD recruited him, but there's this extraordinary moment where his younger brother's watching,

and it's his cold, snowy day, somewhere in the hills of Russia, and he sees his mother and his brother talking, and then every time anyone comes closer to them, they edge away, edge away as if they

got this incredible secret, and then he said, from that moment on, I understood my brother was

working for, they couldn't, they'll still be ethical. And so that's the, that's when Ramal unwilling, unwittingly, becomes the sort of, he can't embroiled in this bigger thing, and the Russian, the NKBD do, what the KGB would later do after the war, and also the FSB, you know, the future iterations of the Russians, secret services would do, so they recruit people,

but they just think, well, this person speaks Spanish, that could be useful.

To all strapping, laughs. So yeah, he's, and he's, he's, he's, he's, you know, he can, apparently he can step a rifle in the dark, he's got a photographic memory, he's a great, he can speak several languages, he's, he's very strong, he's very athletic, he's, he's a good liar, I mean why not, you know, you don't know what he could be useful for. Interesting. The thing that they decide to use him for is to seduce the young American trot skits, called Sylvia Agaloff, who's traveling from

New York to Paris to observe a sort of trot skits meeting, called the fourth international, actually the NKVD have got it wrong, they think she's a much more significant figure than she is,

“they think, I think they've got her confused with the one of their sister, the roof, who was actually”

trot skits, trot skits, secretary. So the family is, you know, instead of adjacent to trot skits, but she is not really part of it, but their, their plan is that Ramon will seduce her, become her girlfriend or her husband, and then see what happens then really. I mean it's, it's a real pun, they don't know what's going to happen, and he didn't, and I don't, it's unclear quite what how much they told him and what he's supposed to do and what he's brief is, so he has to assume a different

personality. He emerges in the Ritzbar in, you know, in the summer of 1938 where Sylvia is with one of her friends, who is also who is an NKVD agent and has been persuaded to bring her to this bar for a chance meeting with this man who approaches them, who introduces himself as a Jack Moana and he's this Belgian, he presents himself as being not the committed, fanatical communist that he is, but as a sort of necklace, Belgian playboy, sports reporter, who has no interest in politics,

who just likes girls and fast cars and nice suits, and Sylvia's, you know, she's well-traveled,

“she's in, she's an intellectual, but she's, I think quite naive, has led in a weird way quite”

sheltered existence, she's sort of swept away by this figure. Wow. And so swept away that, in a matter of how many times there are sort of funny little hints that something strange as

a foot, she never really questions it, and even as they get closer and closer to Trotsky,

so they move to Mexico where Jack claims to be working for an import export business, they all just trick in the book like the most suspicious job you could have to have. Well, but yeah, being a journalist, it's an important issue, too, absolutely, in the final all jobs. They move to Mexico City where Trotsky already is, and Sylvia completely unaware of what is being what's happening makes contact with the Trotsky, it's just out there because she diced them.

No, I know the Trotsky, they're exactly, they think fondly of her, and so she begins to visit the compound, and what Raman does, which is very, very clever, he doesn't force himself on the Trotsky's, he doesn't seem to keen or too interested, what he does is he has this beautiful car and he'll drop Sylvia off and, well, Sylvia's inside chatting to Trotsky or Trotsky's wife or another family who live there, he'll just chat to the guards, or he'll give them cigarettes,

or he'll offer to do them little favors, and all the time what he's doing is he's getting closer and closer, and he's earning their trust, and he's observing what's happening. Because at the moment, all he's there is to, it's the gather intended, and he's just a spy at this age, he's there to see, are there any doors that anyone leaves or locked, you know, like, are there any guards that get drunk when they're space beyond watch?

“And the other thing you need to know is that his mother is still there, his mother's”

is extraordinary figure in this age. She's like, you can't have this story without this mad woman, you know, this force of nature who has embroiled her son and in this bigger plot, and who may well be having an affair with Leonardo Datinglund, the NKVD agent who is, on one hand, like a friendly charming, you know, kind human being who loves the dance and and chat, but is also capable of, you know, of shooting anyone in cold blood if necessary.

So the plot begins to thicken and they're getting closer and closer to Trotsky, you know, Ramon has his beginning to get the respect and also the trust of the people around Trotsky. And then he at some stage, presumably they made a side to make him an active, yes, as I said, rather than just a intelligence gathering.

So this is, so we're in to 1940 now, Ramon's closer and closer to family, he's met Trotsky for the first time.

He does things like, you know, he'll, he'll take Trotsky's grandson, he's the last surviving member of Trotsky's family, you know, for days out, he'll take Trotsky's wife on shopping traps. They, they, no one particularly respects him or is interested in him because he's this,

Novia, boyfriend, you know, they all think he's a bit of an idiot, but a nice idea. And then in May of 1940, the NKV decided to strike and what they do is, um, there's another spy within Trotsky's household, one of his guards, who had a naive young American college boy, and they, he's persuaded to open the door to the compound. And when he does so, as sort of force of about 20 men led by another Mexican muralist, there's quite a lot of muralists

who were all drunk, who were all overexcited, none of whom were particularly trained, but they're wearing Mexican army uniforms, they're all pretending to be Mexican army, and they're Russian. Trotsky's asleep, he has to, he can't sleep without sleeping pills, so he's, you know, knocked out, they smash in and his wife Natalia instantly realizes something terrible or something shocking is happening. Um, and so she grabs Trotsky and they dive under the bed

“and it's kind of chaos everywhere, there's bullets. I think they will find late, late to 200”

bullets are fired in the household. Even though the walls are kind of sort of shot, you know, it may turn into sort of lace by the number of shells that being fired, but miraculously they kind of sweep in, they sweep out. No one's, Trotsky's grand-sign has a sort of small scratch on his ankle where, um, where I think they're a bullet ricocheted in court, but they're kind of idiots. They've,

well, they're basically given the job to people who shouldn't have been given the job.

And it's also a threat to whoever delivers that means to Stalin. And Stalin obviously, in Kremlin, be upset. And this is, this is the other sort of, the other sort of strand that runs across the story. So the terror seems to be in Russia, it seems to be directed almost indiscriminately, except the people that it really goes for, the people in the secret services, the spies, the agents, you know, they're wiped out. They're, they're, they're so many wiped out across Europe that basically

“it ceases to function for a while. But what that means is that anyone who has a job, anyone who's”

given a job knows that the price of failure is death. And they also know that the trap, because Stalin's clever, he knows that if, if you give these people who are, the only people that are allowed to leave the Soviet Union, who have access to networks, that, and money, that if you, if they feel threatened, they might try and escape. So what he does is he issues a directive, which says that if any of these agents, the facts or leave their entire family will be liquidator. So he has this

sort of bargaining power. They all, so they all live in this constant, no, this terror is just, it's just trip, no, it's not tricking down, it's sort of coursing down from the top. Everybody, everybody in the ties of the Union must have spent the 30s existing in a type of permanent terror, waiting for a knock on the door or the phone call. And the people charged with short-skis assassination, I know different, they know that if they fail, they'll be poisoned or they'll just have the

sort of bullet in the back of the head or, you know, one of the terrible accidents that are such

“a sort of regular feature of all our window, one of our window. So I think on turns to Ramon and”

says, so this is the second sort of, there are two significant meetings in their, and there are two

encounters in their life. You know, there's this first time when Ramon is his first recruited and there's the second time when he goes to him and says, I need you to do this thing. I need you, you are the person that will have. So he's worried about him. I think he's now worried about him giving. Yeah, I mean, they're all worried. I think they're all terrified. I think on knows that the first person on against the wall is going to be him. So I mean, he's my other person. And there is a close

friendship between the two men, which will persist for decades afterwards. So there is a genuine attachment, a genuine sentimental connection between them, which may or may not be to do with the fact that, you know, he's effectively his stepdad. Okay, might not be. Sure, it's just a completely place. And so they come up with a plan. And the first, there are a couple of terrible plans. I think they initially think about bombing the compound. And then they try and think about poison

but then they realise that no one knows how to make poison. And there's always, like with all these

things, there's always like a note of ground fast, of like there are only one step away from a kind of eling style comedy. And then the plan that eventually settled on has sort of two attractive features as far as they're concerned. What the idea is that Ramon will find a way of getting himself alone in Trotski's study. And then we'll kill him, not with a pistol, but with either a knife, or the weapon that they decide to choose, which is an ice axe. And the appeal of the ice axe

is that it's, it's not a subtle weapon. It's not a surgical weapon that if anyone is killed with an ice axe that, you know, it will create carnage on their head. And incredibly visceral symbol of the price you pay for a standing up style in. And I think there had actually been an

And also weird thing you learn about Mexico, quite a lot of mountains, quite a lot of mountaineering.

“So a lot of ice axe, you know, a lot of ice axe, quite easy to get hold of an ice axe.”

Well, he seems to have had the ice axe for quite a long time. And then at some point they file, they shorten it so that it can be easily hidden underneath his big coat. And the other thing that has happened in this during this time is that Ramon disappears to America for a bit. Effectively, he says, to, to deal with some, some problems that have over a very risen in the, this mysterious import export. And this, this. And when he returns, something is significant

it's changed about him. One thing is that this person who haven't been interested at all in politics is suddenly a passionate trust skits who sort of throwing himself into these all the sort of

strange arcane arguments that the trust skits have. And the second is that his personality seems to be

changed. So that before he was this confident, sunny, helpful person. And now he seems quite withdrawn.

“His skin seems to have acquired this greenish pala. He's nervous. He sort of trembles. He,”

well, sometimes, you know, he won't notice when someone else is talking to him. And people are, again, have registered this change. They notice that something is a bit different about it, but they don't understand what it means. And you know, their business is persuading people. So Trotsky knows that he's a bit unreliable. He's a bit strange. But Trotsky, his, his whole thing is that I'm one of the great communicators of the 20th century. I can, I can take people with me. I don't care if he might be an

KVD spy, I reckon I can persuade him. So there's a couple of flickers of suspicion. And Sylvia has had her own moments of suspicion, which Ramon has been able to assuage. And then one day in August, Ramon arrives at Trotsky's house. He drives up in his car. And he crashes, he dents his car.

There's something odd, something off. You know, he's never done this before. He's a good

guy. So he's this flash man. He takes it. So what, there was something strange. But the guards on the gate that day, they welcomed him in. I mean, because by this point, he's trusted. They all know him. You know, the, the, the, the, the, the compound is like a fortress. You know, there's electric gates. There's turrets. It's designed to keep people out. It's designed to keep an army out. But it's not designed to keep out someone who is so cleverly sort of worked

his way into, right, into the middle of it. And he, and the other, it's strange thing that people know just about him is it's Mexico. It's a hot, it's a hot country. It's, it's August. It's a hot day. But for some reason, he's got a big raincoat on and a hat. And there's a bit of cloud in the sky. But nothing, you know, it's behaving really weirdly. He's nervous. He's crashed his car. But huge raincoat on and they just wave him in. And then there's this tragic moment where Trotsky,

that morning could woken up. He says he wakes, he woke up. And for the first time for months, he said he felt confident and he felt happy and he felt free of anxiety. And there's a moment when he, you know, he, he, he, he works relentlessly. He has, you know, this very rigid work schedule and his wife can see him in his office, working and, and she, she thinks everything's going to be okay. This is, this is good. You know, he's happy. I'm happy. What could possibly

go wrong? And then, you know, there's grandma arrives and he's still strange. He says, I've got this article. I want Trotsky to read. Can he, can I, can I take it through to him? And Trotsky comes out. He's wearing, you know, his, this classic blue work is outfit. And he sees grandma, apparently he looks quite cross to be interrupted. But because he's polite, because he wants to encourage him. He says, yeah, I'll look at your article. So they go through, they go through into Trotsky's

“study. And just as they go through Trotsky thinks, I think he's going to kill me. But then he's”

sort of chubs it away because he thinks that a lot. You know, things happen a lot. People come in a lot. What whew is this man? He's, he's, this, this, this foolish bell. He's a exile revolutionist.

I can imagine this, this is sort of messy. Yeah, this always people. So they get in,

Ramon takes his coat off. Balances on the table. Trotsky sits down. He hands him the typewritten sheet. And it's, you know, it's garbage. It's an idiotic, squeed really. So what, though, so Trot, Ramon has three things in the four things. In fact, in his gray coat, his, his, his raincoat. He has the ice axe. He has a long dagger. He has a pistol fully loaded correctly. And he has this slightly fattuous document, which reports to give his reasons for

what he's about to do. So this is all part of the sort of NKVD plot, which is, again, like, so consistent with the way that, you know, the FSB act now is that you, you, you try and introduce confusion and deniability. So what he says is that I was a passionate Trotskyist. But now I've seen

this all down. And he, Trotsky starts reading. And then there's a moment when Ramon sort of stands

above him and think, then he realizes everything's going really well. Now, as my moment, he raises his hand, grabs the ice axe and slams it towards Trotsky. And what happens is that Trotsky moves his head just a millimeter, maybe a fraction of a millimeter. But that's enough to deflect the actual force of the blow. So he should have killed him with one blow. But what he actually does is he sort of plunges it into Trotsky's skull. It was just a deep, horrible vicious,

“seven inch, I think a seven inch wound inside inside. But it's not enough to kill him. So Trotsky stands”

to Trotsky's screens. And Ramon will, until the day he dies, he says he, he cannot get the precise quality and intensity of the screen of his head. And then it's Trotsky stands up and starts grabbing everything he can from his desk, tossing it at Ramon. And he's bleeding his glasses as shattered his, you know, he's got blood all over him. But both of them are covered in blood by this point. And Ramon tries to escape Trotsky follows him and then Ramon gets, it doesn't get very far when Trotsky's

guards suddenly realize they hear the screen too. They realize something terrible as happened. They realize that they fail to do the thing that they're there for. So they rushed down, starts to sort of try and be, I mean, effectively be Ramon to death. And as they're doing so Trotsky who sort of claps and heap beings sort of nest by Natalia says, leave him, leave him, we need to find out who sent him. And Ramon, who has remained reasonably cool,

has this weird flash where he sort of lets on something different. He says they're saying the NKV decent, the NKV decent, he said no, no, no. But then he says, fairly automatically, they have my mother, they have my mother, they will let her go. And then he comes up again and they just, I mean, he's, he's being sort of, they're just taking out all of their frustration and rage out on him. And then he's taken away into prison, no, into custody. And Trotsky goes to hospital

where he lingers for another day. I mean, it lands ghastly, they jump on him and attempt to try and really are. It's one of the things where you're so pleased to be in the 21st century or 21st

“medicine where they don't think cutting off a big chunk of your skulls, the best way of”

and he's caught, but he's conscious, he's very able to do it. He's conscious briefly and then

he's sort of subsides into basically a coma. And then, you know, there's a front note, very

true of sad sort of code. And as Natalia, his wife, who's loyal, the doors him, who's watches him, you know, his breathing becomes slowly, he's more shallow. Then, then finally, he sort of slips away. And that's it. Why happens through stress? He's arrested and, you know, his trial begins quite, quite briskly. And so he is, there is kind of a couple of strange extra moments. So one moment is that they part of the Mexican justice system is they, they recreate the attack,

so that he comes back in and he has to go through again and get apparently looks terrified about what's happening. But not as terrified as he is when he's forced to confront Sylvia Agaloff, who is completely bereft, who's completely destroyed by the knowledge that of what she has on wetting me down. And she starts to attack him, has to be driven down. It's girlfriend's wife. Yes, we've got from wife. And so she, and she is also sort of swept up by the

police quite quickly, who assume that she is in on it. And then she eventually is cleared and ends up

“as a sort of, I think she lives in obscurity as a primary school teacher for the rest of her life.”

Where his grandma spends 20 years in prison. In prison, which is now sort of fascinatingly is the archive. This is the central archives in Mexico. So when I went out to do the research, the book, you're also in the prison, where grandma spent 20 years. And he holds for us to

his alibi. He never, ever gives any hint that he's anything other than Jacques Monar, a Belgian.

He won't speak Spanish. Or he, as it were, pretends to slowly learn Spanish. Because it's Mexican justice system and it's different to us. He marries a woman in prison. And the other thing element is that although the NKVD and later the KGB officially keep their distance, they make sure he lives comfortably. He has the best lawyers you can get in Mexico. He lives has a good cell. And after that he returns, he comes to the Soviet Union. Again, the first time he's ever been.

So this is weird thing. He's given his life for this country. He's given 20 years of his life. He's killed a person. But he's never been there. He's not even a member of the NKVD,

the Soviet Union is actually like the grim boring, repressive reality of, so I think he arrives

“when it's the beginning of the Brezhnev Liberation, you know what? It's beginning to decay,”

it's still malicious, it's still, you know, everyone is, there's no, you still, there's still very, very fierce limits, what you can't say, where you can't go, but you know, there's no

the optimism and the excitement and the passion that's animated the early years of the Soviet

Union is disappeared, it's ossified. And he wants to leave after a while, again, he gets to Cuba

“and there he dies of an astonishingly painful bone cancer, which a lot of people think was actually brought”

on by a poisoned watch that the NKVD, so they get everyone in the end. And he's buried as a hero, but yeah, it's a very sort of Russian end to a Spanish story. It joined up to fight for the, you know, you've got the fight for the Republican, the Spanish Civil War, and you end up like that, you post creepers. Well, what story? Thank you so much. Oh, no, really enjoyed being on. Thank you.

“And the book is out now? Oh, no, right now, yeah. What's the cult? It's called The Death of Trotsky.”

Going to go at folks. Thank you very much. Brilliant. Thanks very much for watching folks. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And while you hear, why not check out some of these videos that are appearing around me? We're covering the whole of human history. We're not messing about. See you next time. Our interactive exhibition by the Elitness Tour, Medaudio Guide and a classic, and the next part of the world, the Red Kitchen, the Red Kitchen, the Red Kitchen,

the Leitness World, the New Island, the Sikling and Found. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? So I'm looking to see how it's best history documentaries. On top of it, it's like how William Concord England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries,

plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover.

Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history.com/subscribe.