Empire: World History - 397. Stalin: Killing Trotsky (Part 3)

Episode Date: September 20, 2026

Was it an ice axe or an ice pick? The murder of Trotsky in Mexico is infamous, but what does it say about Stalin’s willingness to seek out and destroy his rivals? Who was Leon Trotsky and why was he such a threat to Stalin by the end of his life? In Episode 3 of this series, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple are joined once again by Giles Milton, author of The Stalin Affair, to discuss the life and death of Trotsky. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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did he still want Trotsky dead? Well, hello, and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durhampool. Last time we left you with Lenin's Dying Testament, a letter about the men who should step into his job. And in that document, he talked about Stalin and he called him too crude for the job. and he asked comrades, he went further and said, find a way to remove him.

And this document also had something to say about the other man vying for the job. Lenin thought Trotsky might have been the most able man on the central committee, but he had a caveat, but, but, but Trotsky, he said, has an excessive self-confidence. Today we turned to Trotsky properly.

The rival Stalin feared and hated most and eventually had killed by an ice pick or was it an ice axe on the other side of the world? Anyway, we are joined today by the wonderful Giles Milton, friend of the show and author of the Stalin affair, the impossible alliance that won the war. With Giles, we're going to be discussing Stalin and Trotsky's infamous rivalry. Welcome, Giles. Welcome back.

Thank you very much for having me back. And it was an ice axe. We know definitely from the wound, the ghastly wound, the gash to Trotsky's head, which we will be coming to, I'm sure later in the episode, we know for sure that it was an ice axe. Something with a long flanged head rather than a kind of micro pick. If you get one of those in the back of your head, it doesn't go well for you. I wouldn't want either.

No, I wouldn't think an ice pick is that much fun either. But look, before we get to the end, because this is the Dahl Rumpel method, before we get to the end of the story, let's start at the beginning of the story. Giles, tell us about Trotsky the boy. He wasn't Trotsky. he was Lev Bronstein. And can I just say that I don't know if I mentioned it on the other podcast, but Lev Bronsstein also happens to be the name of Leon Britain,

a former Tory cabinet minister. Yeah, he changed, he was also Lev Bronstyne, and he changed his name to Leon Britain. So you've got two very different people. Trotsky, Leon Britain, but we're talking about Trotsky. So he's born on the 26th of October 1879. Where does he fit in the scheme of his family? Yeah, he's born in the Ukraine.

he is one of eight children, and they are a family. They're wealthy, prosperous farmers. I suppose we'd call them in English, we'd call them yeoman farmers. They own quite a lot of land. They've made quite a lot of money, but they are illiterate. The dad can't read and write and nor can't the mum, and they produce these eight children. You know, sometimes families are blessed with an extraordinary sort of opportunity. And Lev Bronsten is gifted. He's intellectually capable, far more so than any of other families. He goes off to primary school, high school and eventually goes to university as well. So this is a guy in the family with the brains. At University, Odessa University, he studies maths and science, but he soon gets drawn into revolutionary activities. These are far more exciting than, you know, doing arithmetic. And this is where

we see at a very early age, still a student, Trotsky becomes the revolutionary. Now, you know I'm a sucker for a sad story, for a sad child. And Robert Service has a wonderful book on Trotsky, and he has this observation that his mum wasn't exactly, you know, sort of apple pie and hugs, because as a toddler, he had, you know, fainting blackouts. It was a thing. It was a mark of his childhood. And it actually came from the mother's side of the family. And when he had this blackout, he wet himself on the floor.

And instead of like sweeping him up and going, my love, are you okay? Like anyone would. She just asked him straight out, aren't you ashamed of yourself? And he's sort of largely raised by a much kinder woman, a nanny called Muck. Asher, who, you know, sort of allows him to grow. And every time he climbs a tree, she's sort of having a heart attack because he might fall out and kill himself. But anyway, he gets through childhood.

There's another sort of legendary story. And, Giles, you could tell us whether this is true, that young Lev watched his dad mistreat a peasant. Is this historical? Yeah, I think, you know, his father was quite a brutal individual as many, you know, you might expect the patriarch of a farming family to be. He was also extraordinarily miserly, apparently. So, you know, the family were wealthy, but young Trotsky writes about his father coming to meet him at the station when he was coming back from his studies.

And his father would give the most minuscule tip to the porter carrying all the bags and everything. And even the young Trotsky at the time was really embarrassed and ashamed of his father thinking, come on, you could give this poor peasant a little bit more money. What sort of friends and neighbours think of him? Because we know that when Stalin was growing up, people were just. generally afraid of him because he was a thug who spoke with his fists rather than his mouth. What about Trotsky? I think they were a bit, a little bit sort of bemused by him. This is rough peasant country in the Ukraine. And suddenly this guy comes along who's rather elegant, rather a feat, extremely intelligent, enormously fastidious about how he looks.

And there are some fabulous photos of the young Trotsky with his hair, sort of wonderful hair. We'd say now it's called en bros. You know, he wears this hair swept upwards. And, you know, always looking very neat and tidy in his clothes and everything. So I think people couldn't quite make him out. What the hell of the Bronstein family produced? They've sort of produced this weird intellectual in his rather smart clothes. Yeah. I mean, just in case you haven't, you know, you're listening to us and you're not watching us on the YouTube because we're on the YouTube now, everyone. Come join us on that. He looks so much like Steve from Stranger Things. If you're a fan of Stranger Things, this is a man who could have worked in scoops, a hoy. Let me tell you that.

Anyway, that's just my tuppenswear. I do think his contemporaries thought he was perhaps a little bit of a weirdo. He was not always very pleasant as well. I think he had a habit of putting people down. Lenin's wife had a particular dislike of him, didn't he? She really didn't like him. This is going to be a long-running sort of element of their relationship. Yeah, I think you have a quote there, don't you really, about what she said.

Yes, we have a letter not from Len's wife, but to her from a guy called Alexander Bogdanov, who's another of these early revolutionaries. and he wrote, Trotsky came around to see me, I very much dislike him, he's totally uncongenial. And Nadia, I have to say, would have agreed with that wholeheartedly. But Lenin had one strength, and this certainly marks him out from Stalin. He was a brilliant public orator. If you put him in a room with a thousand people, he could whip them up into a crazy thing. I mean, he was really fantastic at speaking.

And there are pictures of him, aren't there, at the time, on top of sort of cars and trucks, speaking to the crowds very animatedly? Absolutely. He never used a script, by the way. It was all off the cuff. And he just had this way with words. And he just knew how to get a crowd going. And this was to really mark him out from Stalin. Stalin, who is hopeless public speaker, had a thick Georgian accent, hated speaking in public as well. So there's a real difference between the two as they become rivals for the leadership to take over from Lenin. You can understand why Stalin, who we now know as a man who bears a grudge and sometimes even for very small things, hates Lenin. There is another story, which I'd love you to tell us, before the revolution, that tells you

a lot about where Trotsky stood with Lenin. Can you tell us about Paris and the shoes? This is a lovely little anecdote. Lenin and Trotsky went off to Paris together, which gives an indication of, you know, they were pretty close friends, genuine friends at this point. Lenin bites a pair of shoes, very elegant, dainty shoes, puts them on, starts walking around, and they are absolute agony. They're squeezing his feet, you know. And so he takes them off, gives them to Trotsky. He says, I can't wear these shoes there for you. So Trotsky puts on, they're all rather comfortable. He thanks Lenin, starts walking around and their agony for him too. And Lenin takes great delight in tormenting as Trotsky's walking around in these incredibly

painful shoes. Some people have said that this is a sign of Lenin's sadism, perhaps, but I think it's also a sign of their friendship, their banter, that they were genuinely. knee pretty close to each other, far more than Lenin was ever close to Stalin. They were friends, friends to the point where they'd go off to Paris together. There's another little anecdote, which I think is absolutely wonderful, that at the time of the Civil War, so this is a desperate time in Russia, a young American British sculptress goes off to Moscow. These is one of the Westerners who's fired by the potential hopes and promises of the revolution. She's called Claire Sheridan, and she sculpts several of the main, the principal architects of the revolution. She

Lennon, Zajinsky, and she sculpts Trotsky. So she spends a lot of time on her own in the room with him, and they develop a very, very close friendship. Claire Sheridan is a great believer in free love. She persuades Trotsky, she rather finds him, rather dishy, persuades him to take off his shirt, admires his chest. Trotsky says, as she measures him with her calipers, he says, you're caressing me with your tools of steel. So, and all of this, they clearly, and they quite possibly have a sexual relationship, in fact. Now, this would just be a simple anecdote, wear it not, for one extraordinary fact, Claire Sheridan has a very famous first cousin. Her first cousin is Winston Churchill. So at the very time, Churchill is pouring British troops and munitions

into Russia to try and snuff out this new regime. Claire Sheridan, his first cousin, is there, not only sculpting Trotsky, but quite possibly sleeping with her as well. Sleeping with the enemy. Wow. And from that point on, she will be monitored by what becomes MI6, who monitor all her phone conversations, all her letters and everything, desperately worried that she's going to cause real problems for her cousin. Is there a suggestion, though, that Trotsky knows who's in power and knows how to rock boats?

And that's why he himself is drawn to her, or is this just one of those things that happened? It's quite possible, but it's also possible. Trotsky, a bit of a womanizer, as many of these Bolshevik revolutionaries were, saw his opportunity, good-looking woman in his studio. Oh, well, if she wants me to take my clothes off, why not? She wants to caress me with her calipers, I'm up. Exactly. It sounds like a carry-on film, doesn't it? Anyway, we discussed how surprisingly perhaps Stalin is sort of oddly absent in Petrograd in 1917 at the key moment in October when the Bolsheviks are actually seizing power. Now, in contrast to that, Trotsky genuinely is everywhere. Trotsky is at the heart of everything.

He runs the Petrograd Soviet, which is one of the key engines of the revolution. He chairs the military revolutionary committee in Petrograd. He orchestrates the men, the militias, who are going to attack and seize the Winter Palace. So he's really at the heart of it. And Trotsky being Trotsky, he makes sure that everyone knows he's at the heart of it. And while he's doing that, what a great opportunity to put Stalin down and saying, where the hell were you? You weren't doing anything.

And this becomes the sort of story of the revolution is that Trotsky does everything and Stalin does nothing. It's totally unfair, actually. I mean, I'm not one to defend Stalin for many things, but Stalin was actually in Petrograd. He was a writing for Pravda. He was producing all the propaganda that was to be so important for the success of the revolution. So he was there.

Of course he was there at the heart of things. But Trotsky used this opportunity to promote himself. It's also interesting because the idea that Trotsky is the man of action and Stalin is the man of words. Because in a sense, you'd imagine that Trotsky is, Trotsky, the intellectual, would be the one doing that. And the Stalin, the thug, would be out on the streets. But it's the opposite.

Well, but the thing is about Trotsky is that he was also incredibly courageous. I mean, there is this one scene in 1917, which sums up, you know, the courage of the man from the civil war. You know, tell us about the facing off against a mob of furious sailors, jars, because that tells us a lot about the man. Yes, this is the naval rebellion or mutually in Kronstadt, where there are thousands of sailors who are sick of not having a big deprived of a voice, of not being paid. They're really angry and they gather as a demonstration. And Trotsky goes out and he confronts them head on. He gives a, delivers a speech, he shouts them down, harangues them. And this is quite a brave thing to do. You know, these guys could have come out and killed him. These guys are joining the revolution

or they're opposing the revolution? Well, that's a very good question. What side are they going to fall on? A lot of them would have supported the revolution. But now, they're realizing they've been left completely without a voice as they were under the old Tsarist regime. So Trotsky comes out, harangues them. There's a postscript to this story which is rather less glorious for Trotsky is that he then, when they continue to be truculent, he sends in the troops and brutally murders huge numbers of them. So this shows that, you know, Trotsky, the intellectual, the dilettante, if you like, can also be just as brutal as Lenin and Stalin when he has to be. How interesting, because we often think of him as the victim and gentler than Stalin in the sense that he was the one that got the ice pick run the other way around.

But you think had he got to power, who'd have been every bit as much of a brute as Stalin was? I think they were all brutes. All of the leading Bolshevik revolutionaries came from the same stable in terms of violence and using violence to keep control. Just going back to one thing which was quite interesting about Totsky's role during the actual revolution itself, Stalin himself wrote at the time. he wrote that Chotsky had played the leading vital role in the revolution. And when Stalin later came to publish his sort of collected works, that particular document was removed by him. He wanted it expunged from the records.

He wanted no tracer that he'd ever said this. So you can see this extraordinary sort of rivalry between the two of them, playing out in paperwork as well. Who did what, who was where, when, and, you know, who actually made this revolution successful. And there's this crucial moment three years later in the Soviet Polish War of 1920 when the two have a confrontation. Tell us about that, Charles. Yes, the Poles are hoping to regain lands that they've lost in the Great War. They go to war with the new Soviet Union. They do very well at first, but then gradually the Soviet forces. I have to say under the brilliant command of Trotsky and his Red Army, remember Trotsky has built the Red Army from scratch into an incredible fighting force. and by 1920 they're pushing the way across Poland and they are at the gates of Warsaw.

They're almost there about to take the Polish capital, but they need more troops. Where can those troops come from? Well, Stalin has got a load of troops under his command. But Stalin is not interested in Warsaw. He's interested in capturing the city of Levov. And so he uses all his forces, all his energies, everything at his disposal to take the city of Levov, which ends in Trotsky and his Red Army being defeated by the power. The polls. The polls see a glimmer of opportunity here. They take it. They crush the Red Army

outside the gates of Warsaw and the Red Army is forced back into Soviet territory. So this is kind of a moment of humiliation for Trotsky and he sees that he blames it directly on Stalin, who could have come to his aid but didn't. I mean, strategically, capturing Lvov is going to be really important in the Second World War because it's going to give Stalin at Yalta a massive bargaining chip when he installs his own sort of alternative Polish government. And where they're talking about what happens to Poland, He says, you know, they're all there. What are you talking about?

Forget about these London polls. You know, we've got the people who are going to take over a D-German-Fied, you know, Poland already. But, you know, that's a chat for another time. Trotsky then. The landscape of all this, if you like, is the question of whether the Soviet revolution is a revolution in one country or if this is going to be a revolution that's going to spread right the way across Europe through all the Western democracies. And there are very different points of view here between Lenin and Trotsky, on the one hand,

let's try and promote revolution everywhere. And Stalin, on the other hand, saying, hold on a minute, let's consolidate the revolution within the Soviet Union. So there's a sort of hinterland to this whole whole story going, what's taking place? Right. So, I mean, let's talk then. I mean, it's kind of the power play that will set up the relationship between these two men, which will be sort of Stalin doing everything he can to undermine Trotsky.

And I don't know, it looks to me that Stalin is the one with all of the energy and all the impetus. We kind of touched on this in the last episode, but there are a series of dirty tricks that then Stalin uses on Trotsky, starting with the funeral of Lenin, which we covered in glorious detail with the embalming that his wife did not want, did not ask for. The Palmer hand machine slicing Lenin's brain as well. Yeah, I know, yes, yes, thank you for that, Giles.

But just tell us how exactly they manoeuvied it, so Trotsky couldn't be there. and didn't have his photo taken at this really important moment. Yeah, this is a wonderful piece of stagecraft on the part of Stalin. Stalin saw a unique opportunity at Lenin's funeral to present himself as the natural replacement, the natural leader to step into Lenin's shoes. And so he engineers a funeral. He orchestrates a whole event to make sure that Trotsky will not be there.

Trotsky is actually sick in hospital, but obviously he wants to be there at the funeral. He wants to be seen by all the thousands of people who are going to attend this. funeral. And so what does Stalin do? He gives Trotsky the wrong date. You thought Trotsky would double check or someone else would call him up and say, where are you? Well, Stalin had thought of that as well. He calls his old mate, Jersinski, running the checker, and ensures that any telegrams and any messages sent to Trotsky to tell him the date has been changed, don't get through. And so on the day of the funeral, Stalin, center stage, delivers a eulogy, he presents himself as the obvious natural successor. to Lenin and everyone's thinking,

what about Trotsky? Trotsky's not here, you know. Obviously, he doesn't care that much about Lenin. You can sort of see the whispering going on in the crowds, you know. It's a brilliant and totally malevolent sort of act on the part of Stalin. And, you know, he loved pieces of theatre, Stalin.

And this is perhaps his most malign piece of theatre to date is simply airbrushing Trotsky out of the most important event in the Soviet Union to take place in years. you know. It's an extraordinary story. So what happens next? How does he build on this to maneuver Trotsky out of their succession? So what happens in the aftermath of Lenin's death is Stalin begins to consolidate his grip on power. Now, we spoke in the last episode about he has this role in the mechanisms of the party, which enables him to place his own supporters in key positions. And he really begins to form what becomes

known as a Troika around him. There's Stalin, the Zinoviev and there's Kamenev, two loyal supporters of Stalin, and they begin to engineer Trotsky out of the picture. And so Trotsky is removed of commissar for military affairs. That happens in 1920 January, 2025, soon after Lenin's death. Then he's voted off the Politburo. This is a pretty big step. Then he's expelled from the party completely by 1927, and then he's sent into exile in 1928. So in the space of four years, or actually three years, really, Trotsky is outmaneuvered and just pushed out of the picture. You make it sound very easy, Giles. I mean, is there no counter coup by Trotsky?

Because he's got the whole army on his side. He presumably could march in and sort of, you know, drive some tanks into the middle of proceedings if he wanted to. Yeah, he could have done that, but he didn't. There are, of course, all sorts of shenanigans and manoeuvrings taking place. What's extraordinary is who backs Stalin as well. If you look at this, Kamenev, one of his key supporters, one of the members of this Troika, Kamenav was married to Trotsky's sister, Olga. So this has the elements of sort of family feud about it

that actually individual members of the family are turning against their own. This is what Trotsky was to find. Simply because they recognise Stalin's overwhelming powers, he's packed the whole party with his men. Maybe he didn't like his brother-in-law. I mean, you know, he wouldn't be the first to sort of chafe against a family member. I think Mr. Self-interest comes into play here as well.

You know, they see which ways the way is. wind is blowing. You know, it's very, this is typical of politicians, isn't it? They see who's on the winning, who's got the winning streak and they back them to the Hilt, you know. And these guys know that if they back Stalin and Stalin wins, they're going to be in with a very good job at the end of it. Yeah, and Kamenev lived happily ever after. No, he didn't. Join us after the break before you find out what happens next. Confidence, it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex.

Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing! We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. And disseminated into an operation order, or Fraggo. A Fraggo that says to kill the president of Russia. Yes.

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Against its strongest foe. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. So Trotsky realizes everybody's against him. Stalin has all the winning pieces. So he basically goes into exile. Where does he go, Giles? This is a problem for Totsky, because if you're Totsky, no one particularly likes you,

particularly in the West. And so he tries, he goes to Turkey, then he goes to France, then he goes to Norway. What about the lady with her calipus? Did she not take him in for a while? Maybe, but maybe I think MI6 were keeping such a close watch on her by this point that that wasn't a possibility. So, yeah, he goes to these various countries and stays for a few months, and then he starts producing revolutionary materially,

and they will think, well, actually, we don't want this guy in our country. And so he ends up in the only place that will actually give him a home, and that's Mexico. And so this is where he settles in 1937. So it's quite a long time has passed. But he ends up there with his wife, who's followed him loyally, even though he's had a string of affairs, not very well documented, so we don't know much about them. But clearly he's been having affairs. But anyway, she's loyal. She follows him. And he is living in Mexico and very, very worried. Trotsky is a frightened man because he knows that Starzzi. Stalin bears his grudges, and Stalin will surely come after him at some point in the future.

Now, one of the more jolly sort of diversions in Mexico when you're not dodging Stalin's assassins is hobnobby with Frida Carlo and Diego Rivera, which would be quite fun, presumably. Yes, the famous artists. Many people will be familiar with Frida Carlo's famous paintings. The woman with the monobrower who's on lots of cushions at the moment. She's a favourite. of illustrated cushions at the moment. I mean, a terrific painter who sort of documented her own pain through painting. You know, often she had a terrible spinal problem

and, you know, a lot of them are hugely graphic depictions of what pain feels like. As you were, just sort of fill that in, yeah. And Diego, we should also say less famous today, but more famous at the time. Then, yeah. And doing extraordinary pictures of workers, but in a rather more sort of human workers

than the kind of Soviet kitsch that we see of sort of chaps and in steelworks and that sort of thing. But they lived in Mexico. They lived a very bohemian, artistic lifestyle. Everyone was pretty chilled out and Trotsky fell into this lifestyle. He actually rather enjoyed it.

He enjoyed it to the extent where he begins a relationship with Frida Carlo. And so all goes well for the time being. But as I say, he's always aware that there's a shadow hanging over here. him. And he, this, you know, constantly... Does he know this? I mean, are there earlier attempts that go wrong? He has seen what's happened in the Soviet Union with Stalin, the Great Purge, where Stalin systematically kills off his enemies. And we mentioned a few minutes earlier. We mentioned

Zinovier, we mentioned Kavanaugh, all of these people, all of these commissars, the people who have supported Stalin's rise to power, virtually all of them will end up liquidated in Stalin's great purge. Stalin is utterly merciless. He will kill off anyone who he thinks is a challenge to his supreme authority. And the grudges he bears go way beyond just his inner circle in Moscow surrounding him. He will kill off anyone who he thinks might could damage him. And Trotsky has the power to damage Stalin while in exile because Trotsky, remember, loves writing. He's writing all sorts of stuff. And he's writing how he views the events that took place in the aftermath of the revolution. and Stalin is not going to come out of this very well.

And Stalin does not want this published. He wants Trotsky silenced. This is not exactly about Trotsky, but Stalin does sort of give his manifesto, if you like. And this is a, again, Robert Service's biography is a treasure trove of these wonderful quotes from Stalin, to pick out one's enemy to prepare all the details of the blow, to slake one's thirst for a cruel revenge and then go home to be.

There is nothing sweeter. So you've got, you know, the roadmap ahead for Trotsky, and his life is, you know, being made hell because he's always looking over his shoulder and also Diego Rivera's not too happy with him anymore. And so, you know, his friend circle is getting smaller. Must be quite suffocating for him in Mexico. And at the same time, Stalin is making Trotsky's life hell. He's pretty much doing the same thing to that young wife that we met in the last episode. Nadia. Nadia. Nadija. Nadija. Nadija. Tell us a little bit about how this is all unfolding for her, poor thing. Poor old Nadia, who wanted just desperately to be more than just a housewife and doing the cooking and stuff. And already during the revolution, she's played quite a role. She's been transcribing telegrams. She's been working for Lenin's personal office as well. She's played a role.

And now she's got kind of nothing to do. But she wants to do something. So she enrolls on the Industrial Academy in Moscow, taking a course in textiles. we get a little glimmer of the home life. It's really fascinating in the letters she writes to Stalin. She describes, you know, going into college in the morning and the tram breaks down or the bus breaks down and this sort of all these domestic details. And you realize that what's so strange about these people, particularly Stalin, the monstrous Stalin, is he had kind of quite a normal domestic life. You know, life went on. They had their family meals. They had their picnics. They went mushroom hunting. They did all the sort of stuff that people usually do. And then he'd go into work and sign off an order to killing 50,000 people. And it reminds me a little bit like the sort of guards of the concentration camps who would go into the camp in the morning, order 50,000 people to be gassed in the gas chambers. And then they come home for lunch with their wife. And then go and go and listen to a string quartet in the evening. Yeah.

That's what I've found extraordinary with Stalin, it's this ability to separate these two things. Let's murder 50,000 people in the morning and then have a really nice picnic in the afternoon, you know. Although, Charles, he wasn't lovely. He wasn't the picnicking sort. And he constantly, if we are to believe, you know, sort of the documents, belittled her, made her feel stupid, got in the way of any kind of progress that she might make. I mean, 1926, she actually goes to Leningrad intending to divorce him, but he manages to talk her back. So this isn't love's young, stroke, very old dream. I mean, it's not that either. I mean, she's not happy.

She's not happy here. No, and I think this is compounded by the fact. And this is something we don't know much about that clearly it's starting. was having mistresses, he was having an affairs. You know, he had this datcher in the countryside. He could pop off there with some attractive young woman. He received letters, begging letters from women all across the Soviet Union. Oh, dear Stalin, I want to be in your embrace, you know. So pretty peculiar, really, but he did. And he acted on some of these, at least. And clearly, poor Nadia knew about this. And it left her absolutely distraught. She just couldn't deal with it.

And remember, she was not the most stable of individuals at the best of times, since there was a was a history of this running in the family. Her brother had been really ill with psychological disorders. She was not as strong in terms of her mind, you know. And so every affair, every rumor that she heard would chip away at that stability. Now, this ends obviously very badly. And there's an extraordinary story about the night of her suicide when she eventually takes her own life. So take us there to the night of the 7th of November 1932. Yeah, this is indeed. a tragic story. All the party commissars have gathered, for they had this dinner every year to celebrate their great victory in the revolution. And at this dinner, Stalin begins to behave,

I think we'd say just boorishly. He begins to flirt with the women at the table, you know, sending out compliments to them. And at the same time, completely ignoring poor Nadia, who's sitting there looking at him, just horrified at Stalin, the more he drinks, the worse he gets. And at the end, she's so in despair that she gets, she storms away from the table and rushes outside. And this should have rung warning bells in Stalin's head, but it doesn't. He carries on flirting. The wife of Molotov, the commissar for foreign affairs, she realizes something is seriously awry here, and she runs out after Nadia and tries to calm her down. Nadia's in a terrible state. She's in tears. She can't bear it any longer. And Polina takes her, they walk around

the Kremlin several times. she eventually calms her down and she takes her back to her apartment in the in the Kremlin. Her and Stalin incidentally have separate bedrooms, quite common at the time, and she goes to bed. Stalin that night, we don't know his exact movements, but it is believed that he went off to one of the dachers in the countryside, perhaps owned by one of his friends, and has an affair with one of the women he's been flirting with. He doesn't come back to his own apartment until the early hours of the morning. In fact, probably before at four or five a.m. in the morning, goes straight to bed, doesn't even look in on checkup on Nadia, sees how she is. So the maids and domestics

come into Nadia's bedroom that morning and they can't believe what they see. Nadia is lying in a pool of blood. She shot herself through the heart. And this in itself is obviously devastating news, but now they have to break that news to Joseph Stalin. Not a job anyone would envy doing. No. I mean, there are two ways of breaking the news. So, you know, on the one, and we'll come to Stalin's reaction in a moment because it may not be, as you expect. But certainly, you know, the official announcement in Pravda will not say that there was a gun involved.

You know, they say she died of complications through appendicitis. And you have this whole sort of charade of the Politburo wives signing a public letter of condolence to Stalin. That gets published as well. There is such a tiny, tight circle that knows this poor, poor woman. And you need to just to add one thing to that as well, which astonished me and actually horrified me, Swetlana, the daughter of Stalin, was never told the truth either.

She was told that her mother had died of an illness. And it was many years later, I think she was reading Time magazine, which had done a profile of Stalin. And it said, you know, of course, his wife, Nadia, you know, shot herself through the heart. And Svetlana was devastated because all her life, she'd been told this lie by her own father

that her mother, you know, had died from natural causes. Yeah. And I mean, it's so paranoid. this circle of keeping this news under wraps that actually, you know, a maid is sent to a labour camp for repeating a rumour that she thought Stalin had killed her. I mean, you know, he hadn't. She'd done it herself. But still, so what privately, he is shattered by this. I mean, you'd think a philandra would go, woohoo, free at last, free at last. But he isn't, is he? I mean, he's kind of haunted by how he treated her. It's kind of odd. I've never really, and there's many

things that we cannot understand about Stalin. I think this is one of them. Because in one sense, on one hand, he really genuinely seemed horrified and grief-stricken by what had taken place and perhaps saw that he had played a role in this. You know, he's appalling behaviour. At the same time, he starts to blame Nadia for being the cause of all his woes. I mean, he says, she made a cripple out of me. Now, is this grief-speaking? Was he genuinely grief-stricken? Or was he now going to blame Nadia for everything that happened? It's very, very hard to know. There are those descriptions, Giles, which we should put into the picture, of him sitting in the room with her body, spitting at the floor. And I think he doesn't eat for four days or something.

He sits there with the corpse, doesn't he, for an incredible amount of time. And no one knows what to do, whether to do, no one dares to go in and sort of fish him out. And we see this in moments of great crisis in Stalin's life. So this is one of them where simply he almost seems to fall apart. He seems like an empty vessel almost, you know. And we have it again, of course, famously when the Hitler's tanks roll over the Soviet fronter in 1941. Now, this is a moment of great crisis. Stalin is the leader, the ultimate leader of the Soviet Union.

He should be addressing the nation. He should be acting on this great invasion. What does he do? He disappears again. He does exactly what he does when Nadia commits suicide. He disappears and no one sees him for four days. You know, they can't get hold of him or anything. It's a peculiar way for somebody who's so in control, so dominant, you know, this all-powerful dictator,

at moments of the greatest crisis, he seems unable to cope and he just disappears. Well, I mean, what follows that is the Great Terror, and we're going to go into the terror a lot more in episode four. And, you know, what you need to know is that Zinoviev and Kamenev, the people who sort of helped Stalin to get rid of Trotsky, they come to a dreadful end, and we'll go into the details of that. Let us cast our eyes to Trotsky, all this is going on on the home front. What is going on in Mexico? Because, you know, he must be saying, somebody who can wreak this much havoc on the lives of people he loves.

It's not looking good for him, is it? It's not looking good. And, of course, Trotsky is getting very good intelligence of what's taking place inside the Soviet Union. So he knows absolutely everything about Stalin's purges taking place. and he knows, as we said earlier, that Sarlene bears his grudges over many, many years. And so if we want to imagine picture Trotsky in Mexico now, he's effectively living in a fortified compound. He's got guards there. He's got a watchtower.

Have there been sort of Soviet assassins spotted in the bushes outside his home? Or is he just expecting that there would be? Well, I think he expects that is going to be. And particularly because he's set up this newspaper, if you like, pamphlet called a bulletin of the opposition, in which he is overtly attacking Stalin and everything he's done. So look, you know, Trotsky is almost inviting himself to be a target at this point, knowing full well what's already taken place in Moscow. But as I say, he's living behind a barricade. He's almost in his own little prison camp, you know, and fearful that at some point,

assassins are going to come knocking on his door. So, Charles, just give us a picture of where Trotsky is holed up. got it with his watchtower, his guarded gate, his own alarm system. This is in what, Koyokan, which is a suburb of Mexico City. It's about 25 miles away. Yeah, I think it's Koyokan. It's very close to Mexico City. As you say, yeah, he's in this almost fortified compound. And really, still living the high life, still living the bohemian life, but increasingly worried that Stalin's hitmen are going to come for him. And, you know, he's writing still, but he's writing under a pseudonym, which I always find, you know, sad, old man is what he writes under. And he knows that everything he's writing, Soviet intelligence is reading his mail,

the reading, you know, getting hold of any scrap of paper that he writes on. But he goes on publishing his journal, the Bulletin of the Opposition is what it's called. And it's one of these Bet Noir publications that Stalin absolutely spits teeth about. So you know, you know there is an attempt coming. Now, before the famous ice pick, ice axe, everybody, ice axe to the brain, there is another attempt on Trotsky's life that people don't know about. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I can. Yes, it's dawn. On 24th of May, 1940, the sun is just coming up over Mexico.

And an artist named David Sequeiros is approaching this compound, this armed compound. He has 20 armed men with him, and he is determined to break in. got some help because Trotsky has a young American volunteer who's been working for him for ages called Robert Sheldon Hart. He's, yeah, as I said, he's loyal. He's been helping Trotsky out. And Trotsky has no doubts that, you know, to Hart's loyalty. But what he doesn't know is that Hart is working for Soviet intelligence. And when this assassin would be assassin, David Sequeiros, with his 20 armed men, come to the villa with its watchtows and its barbed, are, et cetera, heart lets them into the compound. They burst in. Trotsky and his wife, Natalia,

are in their bedroom. They burst in with their guns. They fire, spray the room with gunfire. Extraordinarily, Trotsky and Natalia roll out of bed onto the floor and escape being hit by the gunfire. And bullets go through the wall and actually one of the grandchildren, actually Trotsky's grandchildren, is hit by a stray bullet. But these two, the couple, Trotsky and his wife, are safe. The assassins leave the place, probably thinking they've done their work, but they haven't. Trotsky gets up completely unharmed. So Stalin's first assassination attempt has failed miserably. We should say it doesn't end well for heart either, the guy who let them in. It doesn't well end well for him because he finds himself with a bullet in his head.

As so often happens, the men who have proved servants to Stalin then get, you know, pay the price as well. So he's killed. And yeah, Trotsky, amazing survivor, has survived this first assassination attempt on his life. Willie, ask him about the Isax. Ask him about the Isax. Tell us about the Isax. What is the final showdown? What does it look like? Can you describe an Issax? You probably don't need many ice axes in Mexico. I mean, it's not like it's sort of, you know, the Falkland Islands or something. Can you describe what it looks like? Well, well, hold on a minute. Just wait a minute because this news gets back to Stalin. Can you imagine Stalin being told 20 men armed with machine guns burst into Trotsky's villa, burst into his bedroom, fire at the double bed and actually completely missed their target.

You know, Stalin... It's like trying to kill Rasputin, you know. The guy simply won't die, you know. Anyway, so of course there is going to be a second attempt. And this time it's a Spanish communist named Raman Mercadar. He decides not to go with the familiar machine gun. technique, he decides to buy himself an ice axe. What is a difference between an ice act and a nice pick? Now, I'm not a mountaineer, I have to say. But I believe, you're going to have

so many people correcting this, I'm sure, but an ice pick, I believe, has two sharp ends, which would be a pretty effective way of killing somebody, I guess, if you sink it into their head. An ice axe has a pick on one end and a blunt sort of like a spade on the other end. It's the thing that people climbers use. I know. It's a lot. It's, I know. Now I know exactly it's the kind of thing that they sort of shove into a glacier and then pull themselves up. I mean, there's a nasty bit of kid. But there are no glaciers in Mexico. No.

No, he brings it with him. He brings it with him. I don't know. Maybe he bought it in Spain. I'm not sure where he bought it is terrifically important in the story. You know, Stalin, where did you buy it, by the way? I'm with you, Giles. I'm not interested in the receipt either.

But so. It's an kind of a probable way of being assassinated. Yes, but Mercadet. Mercadet, he's obviously quite a clever guy. He has built up a very close relationship with one of the maids who works in the household. She's called Sylvia Agoloff. I think she's a very good friend of Trotsky's wife, actually. He makes friends with her, befriends her, and she allows him into the villa to,

because he says he wants to talk with, have a little chat with Trotsky about something he's written, gets into Trotsky's study, Trotsky starts talking about what he's writing about, the new thing he's writing about Stalin, at which point Mercadir pulls out, his eyesacks, which he's kept concealed beneath his coat, raises it above his head and slams it into Trotsky's brain. You might think that would kind of do you in. But Trotsky seems to, as we say, like Rasputin, seems to be made of stronger stuff. He's not killed by this blow to the head. In fact, he goes down, he sinks his teeth into Mercadere's arm, bites him really, really hard, so hard that he draws blood. Well, that Trotsky.

And at this point, the alarm is raised and Mercadir makes his escape. But unfortunately for Trotsky, that ice axe, they almost said ice pick there, has done its business. It's bitten deep into Trotsky's brain. He's rushed to hospital. Doctors try to save him, but all to no avail on the following day, he succumbs to his wounds. He's dead. And Stalin finally has had his revenge. Now, does this actually a direct emissary from Stalin?

Or is this just someone who disagrees with Trotsky? We don't know that directly. but we do know that Soviet intelligence have got bureaus all over the west now, including in the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, certainly. And so it's almost certainly, it will have come through official channels

and will, of course, have had Stalin's orders at the top of it. Of course, Mercadere, he doesn't end, come out of this very well, because he's arrested and will spend... An almost bite mark in his arm. It's with a very nasty, the nasty teeth marks in his arm.

And he will spend 20 years in a Mexican prison for having... Although, although, when he's released Giles in 1960, it's basically back palmed, you know, the hero of the Soviet Union medal in Moscow. So, you know, to answer your question, Willie, I don't think you'd have got that if it wasn't, you know, sort of some kind of state-sanctioned thing.

But, you know, Anita, he has spent 20 years, 20 years in Britain, and for British listeners, then you get a blue Peter badge at the end of it, you know. I mean, it's not great. Fair point. Okay. But it's something, isn't it? You know, it might get him into the zoo.

I got a blue Peter's badge, I should say it well. Yeah, I know. For a drawing of a whale. Did you? Did you? Did you? Have you stopped the drawing? Or the bad.

No, actually. I'm not the drawing, right. I got the bad. Okay. No, lovely. Listen, so Stalin, you know, Revenge is best served cold. He waited over a decade to finish this man off. Just, you know,

again, remind us why did it matter so much to him? This one man, this far away, Trotsky really had, you know, lost every scrap of real power. Why do away with him now? Ah, because Trotsky was pretty much the only person who could contest what Stalin was saying and could write a very, very different narrative of actually what had taken place. Trotsky was there from the very beginning. He knew everyone involved in, in what he was, had taken place during the revolution after Lenin's death, how Stalin had dealt with his enemies. From that point of view, he is extremely dangerous to Stalin. Stalin, remember, always wanted to control the narrative of how he came to power, of how he became ruler of the Soviet Union.

Trotsky could undermine that. And so, from Stalin's point of view, he had to be done away with. So that's Trotsky, the rival who no has stopped being dangerous, even with no army and no country left. And Stalin, who intriguingly never quite stopped being afraid of him right to the very end. Well, in the next episode, we go to a murder in Leningrad in December 1934 that Stalin used to unleash the great terror. We follow that story through to the war that nearly destroyed the country. He ruled. And if you can't wait, EmpirePodUK.com is the place to go. EmpirePoddUK.com.

Just become a member of our gang. You get so many things. You get to listen to things when you want. You don't have to wait. And the fantastic newsletter. Till the next time we meet them, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Durham.