Dan Snow's History Hit - The Bloody Assassination of Trotsky

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

This is the true story of the plot to kill Stalin's Greatest Enemy, and it involves an ice axe, a bloody study in Mexico City, and a betrayal years in the making.At its centre is Ramón Mercader, a Soviet-trained agent who infiltrated Leon Trotsky’s inner circle and killed him. But this was more than a simple murder - it was the result of Stalin’s ruthless drive to eliminate all rivals and consolidate power.With us is Josh Ireland, author of "The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin's Greatest Enemy". He explains the shadowy politics of Stalin's Kremlin, and how manipulation and conviction put Mercader on a path to Mexico City...Produced by James Hickmann and McKenna Fernandez, and edited by Matthew Wilson.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. Stalin versus 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 Bolshevite 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, enmity, 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, farce, 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 all 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's one of those stories where everyone knows a few details about it. You know that Trotsky dies in Mexico. You know it's an ice axe, but you don't know why he's New Mexico. You don't know who's wielding the ice act.

You know, we all know who killed Julius Caesar, or we all know who killed JFK. The thing I was fascinated by was how did Trotsky get to Mexico and who's the man wielding the axe 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 was he?

In the mighty Russian Empire, where was he born? So he kind of comes from the edges. of the Russian Empire. Another one, interesting. Like Stalin. Like Stalin. So there is a kind of weird, I mean, obviously they go on to develop this like fierce, vicious rival.

But you can see quite a lot of similarities. 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 there. a farmer

and Stalin's was a sort of alcoholic bootmaker. So there isn't any sign that they will go on to become the sorts of people that will sort of grab the 20th century by the scruff of their neck and sort of shake it. But I think there's two things about and both them incredibly bright,

both of them are incredibly ambitious, but also when they're young, both of them get seized by a sort of overwhelming passion for world revolution. Okay. in a way that I don't think we can quite understand the sort of force with the which it hits them.

It's in the air. It's in the air, but I think there are some people for whom it hits more, it lands more securely, and it drives them, and it pushes them, and it pushes them and pushes them. But I guess it would do, because if they're hyper-intelligent, they're in a system,

they're in a Russian empire where people like them cannot, really aren't going to go on. Yeah, they're frustrated. I mean, Tchutrotsky's Jewish, which I think for him wasn't particularly significant. He was a believer in communism, but, you know, he sort of shrugged off his passed 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 he was

younger. There were quotas when he was younger at school for how many kids, Jewish kids could go to the local school. And it would also become a sort of anti-semanic trope in the way that he was talked about later. So 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 also there is just, I think there is the thing that we, we can't understand from our perspective in a kind of liberal democracy is, is the excitement of it all and the power and the importance of it. You know, it's just, it's so distant from our sort of fairly lukewarm relationship

with politics. Even now, when we sort of talk about things being overheated and, 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 sort of early Christians, you know,

because it's not just the passion, but it's also this belief that paradise is so close. All you need to do is push a little bit more to get paradise. But what marks them apart from Christians is that whereas 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 of.

That's the thing. Yeah, exactly. It's just one more push, one more push, yeah. And where does it, so where does the common is, where does he start? Is he high school? Does he get to high school? To go to university? Where does it, not, he's not all these kids that goes to university and goes all liberalized, is he?

No, it's early on. And to begin 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 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 damascene moment. And he marries this woman, but he, but more than that, he marries this faith. And so he is, so it's a heady combination. You're in love. You're in love. You know, you're together. You're newly married. Your boat.

And also just the excitement of the thought of being a revolution. I mean, that's the other thing that Trotsky realizes is when he's in his early 20s is 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 is 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. It's so like Conrad. I'm thinking Joe's a Conrad's a secret agent. It's so glamorous but sordid to do with, anyways, is it fascinating? There is something very Conradian about all of these people because that,

you know, the sort of, that's the world that Conrad builds in the secret agent of sort of slightly shabby rooms and plotting and the sort of like the smell of sulfur. Yeah, and the sort of sordidness, but also that lives alongside idealism and excitement.

There's a sort of sordidness, but a bit of a romance to it, but it's a damp rooms. Yeah. Yeah. And so he suddenly becomes a central figure in this revolution, this first sort of sign that the rule of the Tsars, which has lasted for just over 500 years,

the Romanov family have ruled Russia. There have been one or two attempts to sort of unseat them, but they're never particularly serious. And then this is the first rumble of something. And in one sense, the revolution is a failure because the Romanovs, you know, at the end of it, the Romanovs are still in power. They give some sort of limited concessions.

And people like Trotsky and other revolutionaries are sent into exile in Siberia, like they know, the classic Russian story. But I'm sorry, he was a lead to, had he got himself to St. Petersburg? Was he addressing crowds now in the center of the empire? Yeah, right in the center of empire. He's suddenly there on a stage, you know, just talking. And he's, you know, he's a really striking figure. He's people sort of always remarked on his dandiness, dandishness. You know, he would wear beautiful white linen suits.

he had this sort of sweep of black hair that sort of swept back from his head, these tiny little pounds and hairs, and then these glittering eyes that were sort of hypnotic apparently. And this is a revolution of, not of social media, of radio, it's spoken word, so it's running, commanding the street with your voice. Yeah, exactly. And I think this is the root of his power, but later, I think his understanding of how you build power

and hold onto power is formed in this time. but it will also later prove to be quite an outmoded way of seizing and holding onto power. So he's in, so he's Siberia. Siberia. And then he decides, along with his wife, that he should escape Siberia. So he hops, he puts on her disguise and then finds his way, then hops onto a carriage and then finds his way out of Siberia. Well done him. That's not incredibly good.

Sort of bad for the wife and two children. Oh, she's not coming with him? They don't come with them. For the revolution, darling. Exactly, you can trust that 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 leaves this wife and two daughters who will barely see again for the rest of their lives. And then begins a sort of perigranation across Europe. And one very significant meeting he has during this period is with Lenin, who is the leader of the Social Democratic Party in Russia.

But he's not in Russia, though. They meet in London for the first time. So all of them are in exile, either in Siberia or sort of dotted around Europe. So over the next 10 years, Trotsky will be in Paris where he meets his second life partner. He refers to his wife, but they never marry. He's in Vienna. I mean, there's an extraordinary time. Endless smoke-filled rooms.

Yeah, they're poverty-stricken. They're printing newspapers. writing screams. They're pretty hopeless, because the Russian Empire actually seems to sort of bounce back, you know, there's industrialisation. Slowly, there are, you know,

there's a man called Stollipan who seems to be writing the foundations of the empire that, you know, I think, you know, and I think the thing they all had trying to reconcile is that they, they are Marxists, so they have absorbed everything

that Karl Marxists said, the sort of iron laws of the world. So they think revolution is going to happen and they think it's going to come from the working classes. And it's only a matter of time, time, but until it happens, they have to wait. And what they, what they do while they wait is really is,

is write articles, smoke, argue, read, think. I mean, Trotsky, so we'll get on to me, Trotsky meets his new partner. I think the odd thing about Trotsky is he's sort of, a matter like all interesting people, like a man of deep contrasts, you know, he's a man who believes in this sort of beautiful future where people are liberated to be creative and make beautiful art, but also thinks that if you're going to have a revolution, it has to be sort of drenched in blood.

He's a sort of person that doesn't think, it gets incredibly crossed when 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 does have an eye for women. I mean, this will become a sort of a feature later in his way. story. And then, so these guys are sort of living this Conradian existence in Europe, and then the First World War breaks out. And we do not have to get into the First War on this podcast so people can find other podcasts on this feed that will do that, but just shatters,

just smashes everything to bits. And suddenly everything's up for grass. It's a disaster for the Russian Empire. I mean, it's been badly led for decades by a weak, indecisive, incompetence are Nicholas II. And eventually, after sort of the death of military, millions, a wasteful death of millions, and the collapse of the economy. In 1917, there's a revolution. And it's not the revolution that Bolsheviks expected. And in fact, they're also surprised by that none of them are in Russia. Lenin is in Switzerland.

Trotsky is in the United States. And so all of them are desperate to get there. Lenin is famously taken 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 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 virus.

It's so virus-like. This is a battle-less we're going to drop into the empire. Just push it into the Russian Empire. And he arrives and gives a barnstorming speech in St. Petersburg. And it's, they're off. Well, they kind of are in the art. Because then quite quickly, Lenin has to go to Finland to avoid arrest. So there is this brief window of a liberal,

free, sort of near democracy in Russia. And it looks like maybe Russia is going to have a sort of different future that maybe it's going to resemble its neighbours like for a no, or not neighbours, it's continental neighbours. But what happens is that Trotsky arrives and so just 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 was about what the ideal revolutionary strategy should be, whether it should be a sort of small cadre of elite revolutionaries or a sort of wider, a wider attempt to engage the population. So anyway, Lenin and his followers within the party became a group called the Bolsheviks and they supported this idea of a tiny elite. Trotsky wasn't entirely in one party or the next, but he was broadly aligned with

the Mensheviks who were the sort of smaller group. But eventually, the excitement, the possibility, this suddenly this thing that, you know, that fate has handed them, they're 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. They'll take it. It's like there's been a sort of chasm, and then they can suddenly see into a different future. And so they begin plotting, they begin, and this is one of Trotty's other great guests.

He's an incredible organiser. He knows how to set up a coup. And we don't get off topic here, but this is one of those really, interesting albums of the impact a small group of very well-organized people can have. And determined, completely determined, completely ruthless. There was no gigantic popular movement in Russia for Bolshevism, for Communism, Bolshevism at the time. Yeah, people in Vadovostok weren't saying, I like that Lenin. I think we should give him a chance. No one knew who these people were. These were incredibly obscure figures. They were, I mean, it would be as if, you know, we woke up tomorrow in a Marxist sector.

had sort of had stormed into Downing Street and 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 the death of millions, but it's an incredible feat of all. It's astonishingly affected. It's the confidence,

but it's because they know it's this, 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, if you're bold enough, you can...

It's all up for grabs. It's all up for grabs. So this is what they do. You're listening down, knows history. We're going to be back after this break. So this is what they do. They form a government. You know, there's a coup.

And Trotsky's part of this. Trotsky's absolutely essential. A key organiser. You can't imagine that revolution without Trotsky, I don't think. Okay. And obviously, this will all be rewritten later because for Stalin, the idea that Trotsky could ever have played a positive role. But you've peeled back the layers of propaganda.

You've got to the truth. So we've got Lennon in charge. Trotsky's were organizing, getting everyone ready, right? We're going to storm this building on that day. Here we go. some weapons, these people are reliable. Okay, fine. And what's sort of weird is it's quite a bloodless coup.

Yeah, bizarre. I mean, their instinct is right, that actually this is a sort of house of cards that you just need to give a tiny push to. And suddenly everyone wakes up and this has happened. That there is this group of in the eyes of many maniacs who are in charge

of the country. They've stormed the former Imperial Palace in St. Petersburg. They've got the key buildings. They move on to Moscow. And And that's it. They've got the sort of cerebral cortex of the state. Exactly. That's a really good way of putting it. And then it's only later that there's a sort of belated reaction to it. And this is sort of Trotsky's a second great moment.

So Russia descends into an absurdly brutal civil war. It's the kind of thing. It's a kind of real prefiguring of the sort of bloodiness and the viciousness and the brutality that will follow later in the 20th century. You know, it's the kind of war where prisoners are being skinned alive, where people are being boiled 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 going to seize power again that the Bolshevitz is going to fall. And this is where Trotsky is appointed leader of the Red Army. Hang on, he's got no military experience. There's no military background. Again, it's like putting a podcaster in charge of... Well, hang on. Hang on, lads.

Wait a sec. This guy's available. An incredibly good speaker, you know, a talented, person, charismatic, but, you know, I don't... Very good at maths, though. That's fine. But, you know, wouldn't know how to load a rifle, I'm pretty sure. But takes to it with a plomb, you know, he wears, he kind of, he, he embraces the look,

which is, you know, you wear cool, long leather suits. You have this huge, um, armored 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've taken a single step backwards. And it's a kind of combination of this bravado and sheer force of will which helps the Bolsheviks eventually.

And it takes years. I think it's not until the early 20s that this war is finally won, that finally they feel as if they have a handle on this huge, huge country. Because the problem they had is that Marxist theory says that

there are sort of various stages and of a state's development and it's only when the working class could have achieved what they sort of describe as political consciousness that a revolution to take place. But Russia is this enormous country that's almost entirely populated by peasant farmers.

They're not the working classes that... Of Manchester. Exactly, yeah. There is no proletariat really whose loyalty they can rely. So they kind of have to impose their will on this this massive country. It's sort of reconquer the Russian Empire again. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's really, yeah, exactly. And so Trotsky's riding high. They've won the war. Lenin's in charge. He's close to, he's maintaining the relations with Lenin. Yeah, he's, I mean, they're always, there's always a sort of certain distance between the two. Trotsky will later try and, try and present a picture of how close and intimate they were.

But, you know, 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 organized. But Lenin has the good judgment to give him the top job. Yeah, 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, you know, Lenin is also ailing.

He's been sick. He's had strokes. There's been a failed assassination attempt, which has left to be incredibly weak. So what Trotsky and all the Bolsheviks know is that Lenin's time on this planet is numbered. At some point, there's going to be a succession struggle. And this is where the rivalry that has already existed, there already exists between Trotsky and Stalin begins to become sharpened and fiercer, because they know that both of them are priming. candidates to, well, Trotsky 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 Trotsky will do later is he will present a vision of Stalin as what he describes him as a grey blur, as a kind of mediocrity, a bureaucratic mediocrity who somehow accidentally 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 as... A little bit Vladimir Putin, weirdly, sort of...

Yeah, I mean, there are similarities. There was... 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 Trotsky have very different personalities. They have a kind of physical loathing for each other. Because so...

Whereas Trotsky is a kind of cosmopolitan who's lived in Vienna, you know, who knows about psychoanalysis, who writes literary christening. who has interests in science and things like that. Stalin is a big reader and is by most definition in intellectual, but he doesn't speak much. He kind of, he's this sort of strange, short figure with pop,

no, limp and pockmarked cheeks. You know, Trotsky would sort of denigrate him as a coarse 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 their understanding of what, what power is in the 20th century is significant. Because for Trotsky, it's being able to deliver a sort of sparkling.

Yes, interesting. Inspire people. And then that's how you get people to follow you. Whereas what Stalin understands is that, you know, actually you acquire power by forming alliances, by sitting on the committees. By sitting on committees by sort of stockpiling bureaucratic power so that you have the right to appoint.

Really, wow. Editors and newspapers or, you know, the, you know, the, you know, minor figments. functionaries in some city far outside Moscow. That's where real power lies. Interesting. And also by being able to sort of negotiate, you know, different personalities, different people's ambitions. Because what Stalin also is incredibly good at is understanding where people's weaknesses

lie. 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 that's so interesting. So Trotsky is a believer. You go out, you, Gilbert, you win over the Senate, you win over the Parliament, you win over the street. That's the job done. Stalin's using this sort of 20th century, massive state bureaucracy and pulling levers.

Yeah, so although, you know, if you were to ask someone in London or Paris or Washington, who is the most significant figure in Bolshevik, Russia after Lenin, if you'd ask that question in, say, 1922, they would have said Trotsky. Yeah. They wouldn't, because they wouldn't, they haven't seen what Stalin is doing. No one can see what Stalin is doing, least of all Trotsky. And if he does see, he doesn't rate it.

He doesn't understand it. This guy, yeah. So events begin to move quickly. So Stalin, so Lenin's health deteriorates further and further. And in 1924, he finally dies. And this is one of the sort of the key moments in the sort of Trotsky, Stalin rivalry, because he's sickly. He often falls victim to these mysterious illnesses that sort of seem to afflict him

when the moments of greater stress. He's, and so when Lenin dies, he's in the caucuses recovering. And then there's a kind of myth about this. So some people, there was, for a long time, I think there was a belief that Stalin deliberately told Trotsky the incorrect date for Lenin's funeral. So that Trotsky would be too late to arrive. But it seems now that Trotsky actually did 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 plank in Stalin's strategy was to identify himself incredibly closely with Lenin and Lenin's legacy. It's like Mark Anthony.

Go out and give the big speech after Caesar's. So 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 what was the empire. You present yourself as being the only person that could protect his legacy. And by contrast, you'd say the Trotsky, he's a strange person who spent too much time in Europe. He has strange ideas. He doesn't turn up to the funeral. He wants to change things.

But I'm going to keep things the same. You know, don't trust him. It's funny. On him being ill, whether it's hypochondriot, but I do, the more I think about history, I think, sometimes, yes, leaders got to be lucky. I think also you've got to have the resilience of a bull elephant. Yeah, I mean, that's what we underestimate, you know, because the water's bad, food's bad. And people are sick all the time. And also, I couldn't be a leader.

I wouldn't sleep at night. I'd come out in a house. These people have got to have the ability to sort of barrel through Christophe. Well, look at Churchill in the Second World War. They're sort of small, on the face of it, frail figure, but who works? A phenomenal hour. It doesn't ever stop. I mean, I wouldn't have lasted until June 1940.

So, okay, so Trotsky, he's in trouble now. He's in trouble at this point. Yeah, so I think, I remember when I was at school, it was sort of presented as a contest between Stalin and Trotsky that somehow Stalin won. But actually, I think the more you look at it, the more you realize it's like they've both started playing a game, but by the time the time the whistle's been blown,

Stalin'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 Trotsky only has one player on his team. It wasn't a contest. You know, he was so comprehensively, so quickly, so ruthlessly out. So it wasn't it? Even it wasn't it? There was no, yeah. It was, and I think he was bewildered by the speed with which that happened.

How funny. He hasn't done all the hard work. He doesn't build a power base. He just delivers the barnstorming speeches. There's this weird thing about, so Trotsky completely indifferent to other human beings. There's one of his closest friends, right, it's a memoir later on. He says, I realized that after two decades of friendship, he'd never asked me a single question about myself. He never, he had no interest in me.

He barely knew what my name was. Whereas Stalin, though we later kind of learn that he's one of the sort of great monsters of history, was this sort of paradoxical thing of someone who understood how to, you know, he remembered people's birthdays. He like bought presents for my... He charmed the pants off the British Americans during the war.

He's incredibly clever at that sort of thing. And obviously he will then turn against them. But when he needs people, he knows what he needs to do to give them. He knows what they, knows what they want. He knows that, you know, this person will want 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 Trotsky's nowhere. That's so fascinating. And when do we, when does Trotsky find out that he's been tightly outman? So he's,

currently he has a job title? Is he still in charge of the army or? No, he resigns from that. Okay. And I think, this is the thing, Lenin even offered him the chance to be his, you know, nominal second and commanding in the party. And he didn't take it. So he kind of, he takes a sort of a succession of slightly less important jobs. And then becomes a sort of a kind of minister without portfolio in the... So Stalin keeps them around for a bit. Well, I think the thing about Trotsky and Stalin

is Trotsky is a really good analog for how confident Stalin feels at any given moment. So at the beginning, because Trotsky is the much more famous figure, the person whose photo is still, you know, in party offices in, you know, far, far, far, like near South Korea or, you know, that he can't,

he can't move against him publicly. He can start to chip away his reputation, which he does relentlessly, you know, they start pumping up propaganda against him. You know, Pravda will start writing, starts writing vicious editorials about him. But he can't actually move against him. He can't do the thing that he will do to people later on

without a second thought. So he's very, very cautious about what he does. but it culminates in 1928 when Trotsky is sent into internal exile in Kazakhstan. So he really does move against him at that point. And that's pretty decided. I think whether Trotsky understands it or not, there's no way back after that. And it's not like Trotsky has to support it. Like he's, he has a small group of supporters.

But most of them either very quickly understand the drift of things. There is absolutely no value in continuing to. argue for Trotsky and to keep believing him. And also, you get nothing back. 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 anything. If you're interested in joining the Politburo or, you know, 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 year. And then, you know, that's, that's the beginning, that suddenly he realizes that he gets fewer and fewer letters, you know, and the people he does, who also write into him,

writing to him from places like Siberia or from the, from the gulag, as it will become. And then in 1929, he is shipped out of Russia. He goes to first to Istanbul, a small island called Prinkapo of Istanbul. Allegedly for what purpose is he just sort of...

Well, this is exile. 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 that the sort of the train leaves for Istanbul, Stalin begins to regret that he's let Trotsky escape.

Because he's done two things. He's let Trotsky escape, but Trotsky's also taking his archive with him. At 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. And 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 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're listening to Down Snow's history. We'll be back after this break.

And does Trotsky go into opposition? I mean, does he start organizing and writing. He does, almost instantly. I mean, he's in a weird position in that because his belief in the revolution and the necessity of the revolution and the importance of the revolution remains. completely undimmed, you know, he still thinks this is the great experiment, the greatest experiment in mankind's history. So he has to sort of tow this awkward line where he has to be incredibly, 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 as this sort of the greatest, 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. 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 as time goes by and has dissent within the Soviet Union shrinks and shrinks and shrinks 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. That Trotsky is one of the only 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, that he has an authority. And I think that is one of the things that Stalin can't bear and sends him into a fury that he will know. He reads everything that. This is the weird thing.

He reads everything that Trotsky writes. He's probably one of the only people in the Soviet Union that actually does hear Trotsky speeches or read his articles because the censorship is so sort of fierce by this point. So Trotsky famous scenes out of Mexico. Just get him to Mexico for us. So he has brief periods of exile in first France.

He leaves Istanbul for France, and then Norway. And he's never a happy, he's no one's idea of a good guest. People are 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 Cardena. 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, incredible painter who sort of has synthesized like 18th century artists like Goya

with, you know, Aztec heart and also infused it with his sort of political passion. And part of his political passion is Fetroski. So he helps, secure Trotsky, a visa for Trotsky. So Trotsky and his wife get on it.

This is his French wife. This is the second wife. He's not French. She's also Russian. She's Russian. Another passionate revolutionist called Natalia Sidova. All right.

So we're in Mexico. We're in Mexico. With Trotsky. He's living in a house sort of comfortably with Diego. To begin with, they live in this sort of

idyllic home called the Blue House, which was Frida Carlos. Frieda Carlo, who is married to Diego Rivera. It's her childhood home. And it's this kind of oasis with sort of butterflies and beautiful tropical plants. And to begin with, you know, the sort of trauma and terror of what's happening in Russia,

which by this point the terror is in full swing. Late 30s. So Stalin is relentlessly mercilessly, mercilessly just eliminating every single one of his enemies. And also anyone who is even close to being an enemy. And specifically, the people he is eliminating a Trotsky. So if anyone has ever sort of shared a, shared a, like a glass of tea with Trotsky, they're dead. If they've ever been on a train with Trotsky, if they've ever been seen 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 sees it sort of have turned on him and have recanted and have started. His former allies who are now standing up in pulpits, slagging him off. So they're kind of, on the one hand, they feel very distant from that. And it's this a weird time where Trotsky begins an affair with Frida Carlo. So this is, you know, Trotsky, the upright family man, also a man who like sort of touching people's knees under the table. And Frida Carlo, you know, one of the most seductive, fascinating figures of the 20th century,

who seems to have initiated the affair as a way of. of taking revenge on her own husband, Diego Rivera, who had been sleeping with her sister. Criky. So it's a very sort of febrile atmosphere. And the affair lasts for a while. You know, they're sort of, it's kind of high farce, really, that they're exchanging notes.

You know, they're talking in English, so no one else can understand what they're saying. And then it doesn't last because it can't last. No. 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 fulsome ally of Trotsky. But he's, you know, you can't rely on, you can't rely on muralists if you're trying to build a revenue.

Two reasonably unreliable people, I mentioned. Well, there's the 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 once shot a driver for being late. Don't 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 they fall out.

And Trotsky moves to the house he would die in. And its chief attraction is it has, it's a kind of compound. You know, like the kind of thing you might see in Afghanistan or something. So there's high walls around it. So he's worried about being assassinate? I think he knows from the moment he leaves Russia that at some point they're going to catch up. And Stalin has spent the last 10 years trying to organise his assassin. So part of the frustration that feeds, that drives the terror is Stalin's rage, the thing he wants to be done.

It's a kind of medieval king's irrational, why hasn't this? Why are we not following my orders? Why are you not doing this? And because he's paranoid, he assumes that it's not incompetence, that it's a plot. So one leader after another of the secret services is assassinate. It's like being a defence against dark archteacher at Hogwarts. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

They fall. They're awful because they're not doing, they're not working hard enough to kill Trotsky. So there are various attempts in Europe to bump him off. None of them come really that close. But what they have done is they've penetrated the Trotskyist. What remains are the Trotskyist organization is riddled with spies. You know, there's the person who in Paris is Trotsky's son's best friend who is also feed. Everything, every letter that Trotsky sends is read by the NKBD,

every letter he receives. They know where they're going, what they're doing. there's nothing, you know, 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. But I think Trotsky, he's sort of torn between a sort of sense of fatalism in which he thinks what's going to happen is going to happen. I'm one person.

He's perhaps, no, Stalin is this man who controls an empire, well, 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 has hardly any followers left, hardly any money,

he can barely leave the house because they're so afraid that an assassin will be waiting for him. If he gets in a car, he has to bend down and hide behind the seats. He still believes that his time might come again. He has been a revolutionary in exile before twice.

Yeah. 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 terror is still sort of consuming millions, well, thousands 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 of them is a man called Leonard Eiting on,

who is the link between Stalin and the man that will eventually kill Trotsky. And so he, he'll recruit an actual assassin, money. Yeah, well, so that he is in charge of organizing the attack on Stalin, on Trotsky. and it's a fairly multi-layered 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 Spain between Ittingon

and a family called the Mechardaz. So Ittingon 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's not a man who lets a sort of war go to waste. And the Mercadars are this 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 radicalized. 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 all brought up to sort of imbibe her philosophy. And then when the civil war comes around, her eldest son, Raman, who's this tall, handsome, charismatic figure, starts fighting.

He's parts 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 a cold, snowy day, somewhere in the hills of Russia and he sees his mother and his brother talking. And every time anyone comes closer to them, they edge away. Edge away is as if they've got this incredible secret. And then he said from that moment on, I understood my brother was working for Los

they call them Los Sovieticors. And so that's when Raman unwittingly becomes the sort of, he comes embroiled in this bigger thing. And the Russian, the NKMB do what the KGB would later do after the war and also the FSB, you know, the future iterations of the Russian secret services would do. They recruit people who they think are useful. They don't know what they're going to, they want them to do. But they just think, well, this person speaks Spanish, that could be useful. Yeah.

Tall scrapping lad. Yeah, he's, you know, he can, apparently he can strip a rifle in the dark. He's got a photographic memory. He's a great, he can speak several languages. He's very strong, he's very athletic, he's... So just keep him on the books. 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 a young American trotskist called Sylvia Agalov, who's traveling from New York. to Paris to observe a sort of Trotskis meeting called the Fourth International. Actually, the NKiridi 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 her sister, Ruth, who was actually Trotsky's secretary. Oh my goodness, okay. And so the family is, you know, is sort of adjacent to Trotsky,

but she is not really part of it. But 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 a real punt. They don't know what's going to happen. And it's unclear quite how much they told him and what he's supposed to do and what his brief is.

So he has to assume a different personality. He emerges in the Ritz Bar, 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 Jacques Mourner

and he's this Belgian he presents himself as being not the committed fanatical communist that he is but as a sort of feckless Belgian playboy a sports reporter who has no interest in politics who just likes you know girls and fast cars and nice suits

and Sylvia's you know she's well travelled she's in she's an intellectual but she's I think quite naive has led in a weird way quite a sheltered existence and she's sort of swept away by this figure. Wow. And so swept away that,

no matter how many times there are sort of funny little hints that something strange is a foot, she never really questions it. And even as they get closer and closer to Trotsky, so they moved to Mexico where Jacques claims to be working for an import, export, business. The oldest trick in the book,

like the most suspicious job you could have to have. Well, but yeah, Being a journalist to import export two absolutely indefinable jobs. They moved to Mexico City where Trotsky already is and Sylvia completely unaware of what is

happening, makes contact with the Trotskyists out there because she knows them. I know the Trotsky. They think fondly of her. And so she begins to visit the compound and what Raman does which is very, very clever is he doesn't force himself

on the Trotsky's. He doesn't seem too keen or too interested. What he does is he has this beautiful car and he'll drop Silvia off and well, Silby is 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 favours. 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 gather intelligent. He's just a spy.

stage. You know, he's, he's there to see, are there any doors that anyone leaves unlocked, you know, like, are there any guards that get drunk when they're supposed to be on watch? And the other thing you need to know is that his mother is still there. His mother's this extraordinary figure in this name. She's like, you can't have this story without this mad woman, you know, this force of nature who has embroiled her son in this bigger plot. And who may well be having an affair with Leonard Diting, the NKBD agent who is, on one hand, like a friendly, charming, you know, kind human being who loves to dance and chat, but is also capable of, you know, of shooting anyone in cold blood if necessary.

So the plot begins to thinking. They're getting closer and closer to Trotsky. You know, Ramon has, is beginning to get the respect and also the trust of the people around Trotsky. And then he, at some stage, presumably they decide to make him an active... Yeah. Sassin rather than just a intelligence gatherer. So this is, so this is, we're into 1940 now. Ramon's closer and closer to the family. He's met Trotsky for the first time.

He does things like, you know, 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 trips. No one particularly respects him or is interested in him. Because he's this weird, strange guy. You know, he's Sylvia's. in a Nouveau boyfriend they all think he's a bit of an idiot

but a nice idiot and then in May of 1940 the NKV decided to strike and what they do is there's another spy within Trotsky's household, one of his guards

a naive young American college boy and he is persuaded to open the door to the compound and when he does so a sort of force of about 20 men led by another Mexican muralist. There's quite a lot of muralists

who are all drunk, who are all over-excited. None of whom are particularly trained, but they're wearing Mexican army uniforms. They're all pretending to be Mexican army. And they rush in. Trotsky's asleep. He can't sleep without sleeping pills,

so he's knocked out. They smash in, and his wife, Natalia, instantly realizes something terrible, something shocking is happening. And so she grabs Trotsky, and they dive under the bed. And there's kind of chaos everywhere.

There's bullets. I think they will find later 200 bullets have fired in the household and the walls are kind of sort of shot you know, made, turning into sort of lace by the number of shells that being fired. But miraculously, they kind of sweep in, they sweep out.

Trotsky's grandson has a sort of small scratch on his ankle where where I think they were a bullet ricocheted and caught him. But they're kind of idiots. They've basically given the job to people who shouldn't have been given the job. Cricy. Thoughts and prayers for ever delivering. Exactly.

For Stalin. Crikey. Stalin, obviously, incredibly upset. And this is 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. I mean, there's 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 they're trapped, because Stalin's clever. He knows that if you give these people who are the only people that are allowed to leave the Soviet Union who have access to networks

and money, 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 defect or leave, their entire family will be liquidated. So he has this sort of bargaining power. They all live in this

constant, no, this terror is just is just trick, no, it's not trickling down, it's sort of coursing down from the top. Everybody everybody in the entire Soviet Union must have spent the 30s existing in a state of permanent terror waiting for a knock on the door or the phone

call. And the people charged with Schwarzkis' assassination are no different. They know that if they fail, they'll be poisoned or they'll just have the sort of bullet in the at the head or, you know, one of those terrible accidents that are such a sort of regular feature fall out of window. Fall out of window. So, Etingon turns to Ramon and says, so this is the second

sort of, there are two significant meetings in their, and there were two encounters in their life. You know, there's this first time when Ramon is, is 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 So he's worried about him. Eiting is now worried about him getting killed. Yeah, I mean, they're all worried. I think they're all terrified. But Etingon knows that the first person

against the war is going to be him. Okay. So, I mean, he's my other asset. 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 or might not be. Sure. It's just complicated. 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.

Then they try and think about poison, but then they realize that no one knows how to make poison. And there's always, like, with all these things, there's always like a note of grandfass. Of like they're only one step away from a kind of Ealing style comedy. And then the plan that eventually settle on has sort of two attractive features as far as they're concerned. What the idea is, is that,

Ramon will find a way of getting himself alone in Trotsky'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 an incredibly visceral symbol of the price you pay for standing up for Stalin. And I think there had actually been an NKVD assassination a year or two before using ice picks. There is some sort of precedent for it. And also, a weird thing you learn about Mexico, quite a lot of mountains, quite a lot of mountaineering.

So a lot of ice axe around. A lot of ice axe, quite easy to get hold of an ice axe. 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's happened during this time is that Ramon disappears to America for a bit, effectively, he says, to deal with some problems that have arisen in this mysterious import export business. this. And when he returns, something as significant, it's changed about him. One thing is that this person who hadn't been interested at all in politics is suddenly a passionate Trotskyist, who's sort of throwing himself into these, all the sort of strange arcane arguments that Trotskits 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 sort of greenish pallor. He's nervous. He sort of trembles. he will sometimes he won't notice when someone else is talking to him and people 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 whole thing is that I am one of the great communicators of the 20th century I can take people with me you know I don't care if he might be an NKVD 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 Raman has been able to assuage. And then one day in August, Raman 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 guy. He's this flashed man. He takes, to what, there is something strange. But the guard's on the gate that day, they welcome in. him in because by this point he's trusted. They all know him.

You know, 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 has so cleverly sort of worked his way right into the middle of it. And the other strange thing that people notice about him is it's Mexico. It's a hot country.

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. So he's behaving really weirdly, he's nervous, he's crashed his car,

got a huge rain cut on, and they just wave him in. And then there's this tragic moment where Trotsky, that morning had woken up. He says he woke up, and for the first time, for months,

he said he felt confident and he felt happy, and he felt, and he felt free of anxiety, you know, and there's a moment when he, he works relentlessly. He has, you know,

this very rigid work schedule and his wife concede, him in his office working and she she thinks everything's going to be okay this is this is good you know he's happy i'm happy um what 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 worker's outfit and he sees rammont apparently he looks quite cross to be interrupted but because he's plight because he wants to encourage him.

He says, yeah, I'll look at your article. So 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 sort of shubs it away because he thinks that a lot. You know, things happen a lot. People come in a lot.

Who is this man? He's just this foolish Belgian. These exiled revolutionies there. I can imagine it's a sort of messy. Yeah, there's 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 it's garbage, it's an idiotic screed really so what the so Ramon has three things in the four things in fact

in his great coat his raincoat he has the ice axe he has a long dagger he has a pistol fully loaded and he has this slightly factuous document which purports 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 try and introduce confusion and deniability. So what he says is that I was a passionate Trotskyist, but now I've seen the true depth of the squalor of his thinking and I need to take revenge on him. So he puts 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 thinks himself, everything's going really well. Now is 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, Trotsky screams, and Ramon will, until the day he dies, he says he cannot get the precise quality

and intensity of the scream out of his head. And then Trotsky stands up and starts grabbing everything he can from his desk, tossing it at Ramon, and then he's bleeding his. His glasses are shattered. His, you know, he has 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 doesn't get very far when Trotsky's guards, who suddenly realize they hear the scream too. They realize something terrible has happened. They realize that they failed to do the thing that they're there for. So they rush down, start to sort of try and beat, I mean, effectively beat Ramon to death.

and as they're doing so Trotsky who sort of claps in a heap being sort of nursed 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 NKVD sent you the NKVD sent you he said no no no but then he says fairly agamatically they have my mother they have my mother

they won't let her go and then he clams up again and they just, I mean, 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, into custody. And Trotsky goes to hospital where he lingers for another day. I mean, it sounds ghastly, they, they japan him in an attempt to try and... It's one of the things where you're so pleased to be in the 21st century with 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 able to talk about it. He's conscious briefly and then he sort of subsides into basically a coma. And then, you know, there's a very sad sort of coda as Natalia, his wife, who is loyal, adores him, as watches him, you know, his breathing become slowly, more shallow. Then finally he sort of slips away. And that's it. What happens to the assassin? He's arrested.

And, you know, his trial begins quite briskly. and so he is he there is there is kind of a couple of strange extra moments so one moment is that they part of um the the mexican justice system is they they recreate the attack so that he comes back in and he has to go through it again and apparently looks terrified about what's happening but not as terrified as he is when he's forced to confront sylvia agalov who is completely bereft was completely destroyed by the knowledge of what she has unwittingly done. And she starts to attack him

and has to be dragged off him. His girlfriend, his wife. Yeah, his girlfriend and wife. And so she is also sort of swept up by the police quite quickly who assumed 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. Whereas Ramon spends 20 years in prison. In a prison which is now sort of fascinatingly the archive, the central archives in Mexico. So when I went out to do the research of the book, you're also in the prison where Ramon spent 20 years. And he holds fast to his alibi.

He never ever gives any hint that he's anything other than Jacques Monard, a Belgian. He won't speak Spanish or he, as it were, pretends to slowly learn Spanish rather. Because it's Mexican justice system and it's slightly different to us, he marries a woman in prison. And the other thing, element is, 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 sell.

And after that, he returns, he comes to the Soviet Union, again, the first time he's ever been. So this is a weird thing in that, you know, 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. Yeah. He's not even a member of the NKVD officially until he arrives there.

And like so many fellow travelers, like when he actually encounters what, you know, Soviet, your Soviet Union is actually like the sort of grim, boring, repressive reality of, so I think he arrives when it's the beginning of the Breznan regime, you know, when it's beginning to decay, but it's still malicious. It's still, you know, everyone is, there's a, no, you still, they're still, there's still very, very fierce limits to what you can and can't say, where you can and can't go, but, you know, there's no,

the optimism and the excitement and the passion that has sort of animated the early years of the Soviet Union has disappeared is ossified. And he wants to leave. After a while, and 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 NKBD gave him. So, I mean, 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. Whew. You join up to fight for the, you know, you fight for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War,

and you end up like that. Jeepers, creepers. Well, what a story. Thank you so much. Oh, no, I've really enjoyed being on. Thank you. And the book is out now? Out now, right now, yeah.

What's it called? It's called The Death of Trotsky. Going to get it, folks. Thank you very much. Brilliant. Thanks very much for watching, folks. don't forget to like and subscribe. And while you're here,

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