Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Stalin: Man of Steel, Episode 5

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Joseph Stalin finally has the power he’s been working decades to achieve. But as the new leader of the Soviet Union, he thinks everyone around him is a threat– even friends and defenseless peasants. And for some reason, Stalin can’t stop obsessing about his old enemy Leon Trotsky. But, a devious plot just might rid him of his nemesis once and for all. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson Writers/researchers: Mandy Reid, Amy Watkin, Kari Anton, Sharon McMahon, Melanie Buck Parks Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Dairy Farmers of Ontario, from our families to your table, everybody milk. Visit milk.org to learn more. Here's Where It Gets Interesting is now available ad-free. Head to SharonMcMahon.com slash ad-free to subscribe today. mcmahon.com slash ad free to subscribe today. By the time Lenin died in January 1924, he had grown wary of Stalin's increasing power, the power Lenin himself helped Stalin attain. Lenin had Stalin appointed to such a powerful position that it would be hard to get rid of him. And that was just what Stalin wanted. As a child, Stalin watched the men playing chess at the local bazaar,

where he first learned how to think several moves ahead. He perfected this skill as a young man when he continually evaded police, committed scores of bank robberies, and walked away from almost all of his exiles. Now, he was ready for his final move in his longest game. Stalin had played the long game with Lenin for over two decades. With Lenin gone, Stalin had just one obstacle left, one last opponent to beat. He had to keep his nemesis, Leon Trotsky, from grabbing power out from underneath him. Trotsky had basically called Stalin an idiot and argued that Stalin's plan for communism only in the Soviet Union instead of across the globe was inadequate. Trotsky's ideas were gaining attention, followers, and power. Stalin knew this was the biggest threat

he faced and that he had to take action. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Trotsky's big mouth actually helped Stalin get rid of him. At a Bolshevik party convention in May 1924, Stalin and his allies saw an opening. Trotsky had always been an outsider. He was a Menshevik, which made him a political rival to Lenin. Up until mid-1917, Trotsky had regularly opposed Lenin and the Bolsheviks, until he grudgingly joined them, realizing he couldn't beat them. But he was never truly one of them. So Stalin and his sidekicks made a play. Trotsky had always been against Lenin, they told people. Couldn't everyone else see that? How could a man who didn't really believe in what they had all worked so hard for, a man who openly defied Lenin. Become a leader in the party, they asked.

That got under Trotsky's skin, as they knew it would. He responded as Stalin had expected, by attacking and insulting the other men in the room, the ones who held his fate in their hands. The men responded to Trotsky's insults by removing him from his powerful position as war commissar. Stalin's path was now clear. He called on the Bolsheviks to come together, implementing one of Lenin's laws demanding unity within the party. Division would only make them weaker, Stalin said. And the good Bolsheviks fell in line. them weaker, Stalin said. And the good Bolsheviks fell in line. Of course, Trotsky wasn't gone forever. And Stalin would continue to feel threatened and worried that Trotsky would somehow, someday, find a way to take him out. Stalin would spend subsequent decades figuring

out ways to destroy Trotsky, which you'll hear more about soon. But for now, Trotsky was out of the way. With his perch atop the Bolshevik party, Stalin began working to establish his agenda as leader. He plotted ways, both economic and social, to help him attain full-blown communism at home, all the while making alliances with whomever was politically helpful, and often turning right around to take out the men who had just helped him. This was his way of consolidating and maintaining power. Stalin filled important positions with people loyal to him, always making sure that they were taken care of, giving away money, even going so far as to give up his apartment to someone who liked it.

even going so far as to give up his apartment to someone who liked it. Was he buying their loyalty? Sure. But Stalin's loyalty was only to himself. In 1928, Stalin rolled out his first set of plans, which he called the First Five-Year Plan. The ultimate goal of the plan was to abolish any remnant of capitalism and replace it with communism, to out-industrialize the West by increasing productivity by 110%, and to destroy all enemies that impeded his progress. Always in need of an enemy to push back against, Stalin set his sights on a group of farmers called kulaks.

The Soviet Union had fallen far behind other countries when it came to industrial outputs. He wanted the Soviet Union to compete with the rest of the world in the production of steel, coal, and electricity. But how could industrialization increase when the people and country were just coming off World War I with the loss of millions of able-bodied men, crumbling infrastructure, and an ongoing famine. Especially when too many people in the country were farmers, not industrial workers.

I'll tell you, the first step is getting rid of the farmers. The Five-Year Plan collectivized agriculture, meaning that everything a farmer grew went into one pile, and then the government would distribute what people needed. Theoretically, this meant that fewer farmers would be needed, and especially one group of farmers. Kulaks were peasants who were better off than most because they owned, like, one cow, or had a surplus of seed for the next planting season. Some of them might have been able to hire other peasants to help with their harvest. Stalin identified kulaks as enemies of the state, greedy people who were stealing from the country in order to line their own pockets. So he took away their land and their livestock. In 1929, Stalin made a plan

for the liquidation of the kulak as a class. Kulaks were divided into three groups, those who would be immediately executed, those who would be sent to labor camps, and those who would be exiled. would be sent to labor camps and those who would be exiled. Up to 7 million people fell into these three categories. Liquidation, by the way, is a word found all over Soviet history records, and it usually means murder. But here, liquidation also meant the destruction of their villages, too. To be clear, Stalin knew that collectivization and decoulocation would inevitably result in a famine. He knew it and he welcomed it because it shored up his own power. An old revolutionary saying, the worse the better, applied. It meant that the worse things were for the people, the better the results for the revolutionaries working for change.

the people, the better the results for the revolutionaries working for change. Vyacheslav Molotov was Stalin's henchman for this process. And while these policies were in place throughout the Soviet Union, Molotov focused on Ukraine, which had the highest grain production, so it had a higher percentage of kulaks. One of the most devious parts of the de-kulakization plan was that pretty much anyone could name someone else a kulak, making them eligible for eviction from their homes and land. It doesn't take much imagination to see how quickly this could turn into a way to settle a grudge with your neighbor. All you had to do was write a letter to your local police officer claiming you knew your neighbor was hiding two extra cows in the barn. That was enough to have them evicted and sent away. Molotov deported nearly 50,000 Ukrainian families to areas like Siberia in 1930. 50,000 people who were accustomed to farming for their food sent off into a place where farming was barely possible.

So the first part of the plan, the worst part, the plan to starve people to death, was clearly working. But what about the assumption that all of this would increase production? That wasn't working, as Stalin had planned. Stalin had concluded that machines could do the work of the people without requiring any food. That extra food would then be available for the country to sell. If the people died, it wasn't a huge loss because the grain they would have eaten could be sold abroad, which made the Soviet Union look strong on the world stage.

abroad, which made the Soviet Union look strong on the world stage. Another benefit, if the peasants were too famished to work, then they could not band together and attempt a revolt. Everything Stalin did was to beef up his own power and reputation, no matter the cost. But Stalin hadn't thought of the unintended consequences of starving millions of people. As the peasants starved, so did their animals, including horses, which were necessary to plow the land. These deaths weren't initially a problem for Stalin, who thought that replacing them with tractors would be cheaper, but the machines broke down. They weren't as efficient as people thought they would be, and the new people in charge of farming didn't have the same expertise as the peasants, and getting a good yield from crops depends on multiple factors, some of which they could

control with the right knowledge, and some of which they could not. Dead horses and cows meant the soil could not be fertilized as frequently as it was in the pre-industrialization days. Poor soil quality didn't produce the quantity of crops Stalin demanded. In 1931, instead of total grain production numbers going up from previous years, they went down by 20%. And livestock numbers fell even faster. Never one to look inward to determine the problem, Stalin decided there must be anti-revolutionary saboteurs purposely tanking his plan by ruining the crops. By December 1932, nearly every region of Ukraine was being accused of sabotage.

Villages who were suspected of harboring saboteurs were put onto a blacklist, which meant they were no longer allowed to trade with other villages. Whatever meager help they'd received from the government so far was now completely gone. Let's recap. They don't have their own food. They can't trade with others. They can't receive aid. There was no food for them to eat. People in blacklisted villages became desperate to get out. In 1932, reports were coming into the Kremlin saying things like, one village has four to five deaths every day. 25% of the village swollen from starvation. They are eating sugar beet pulp, weeds, and dogs. More than 200 children are in the nursery. There is no movement among them. Some sit, others recline, pale, weak, and swollen. In another village, the daily death rate is 8 to 12 people. There are 10 pigs for the entire village, and there are only 18 cows for

450 collective farmers. Stalin read these reports. He learned that people were so desperate, some resorted to cannibalism. There are even accounts of families eating infants. Truly horrific. But Stalin didn't believe any of it was real, so he sent people out to check, and they reported back, yes, this is happening. Stalin's response? Even stricter policies to starve even more people, all while using his propaganda machine to cover it all up. Propaganda posters proclaimed the glory of the workers on the collective farms. Life is getting merrier, comrades, proclaimed a poster showing smiling farm workers on shining equipment. Things are getting easier. In 1932, Stalin drafted a resolution declaring that persons misappropriating public property must be regarded as enemies of the law.

Persons misappropriating public property must be regarded as enemies of the law. People called this the Five Ears Law because anyone caught with more than a few ears of corn or grain was severely punished or killed. A starving person who picked up a few grains of wheat left on the ground after harvest, an amount that wouldn't even come close to being enough to make one loaf of bread and would otherwise rot on the ground? They were now an enemy of the state? According to Stalin and his laws, absolutely. When local judges balked at applying the punishments to this new law, they were instructed in no uncertain terms that the laws of the party trump any personal sense of morality. A judge giving his own punishment instead of applying what Stalin decreed would risk not only his life, but the lives of his family

as well. Everything, everything was owned by the state and taking even a tiny bit more than your allotted share was stealing, punishable by 10 years in prison doing hard labor. Sometimes the punishment itself included killing an entire family for the quote-unquote greed of one. The law was so extensive that it not only rationed bread, it banned storing grain at home. Ukrainians couldn't even keep seeds for planting the following spring. Only six months after the Five Ears Law went into effect, 2,000 people had been executed, and more than 55,000 people had been convicted. In 1933, two journalists traveling through Ukraine spoke with many starving peasants. Malcolm Muggeridge

smuggled out his reports in a British diplomatic bag to avoid censorship. He recounted his experience interviewing a poor peasant family. I was a poor peasant, the man said. I thought that things would be better for me on the collective farm. Before, we had a cow and something to feed it, plenty of bread, meat sometimes, but now nothing but potatoes and millet. Muggeridge also wrote of the pervasive sight and smell of death, and commented that the famine is an organized one, a military occupation, worse, it's active war against the peasants. He spoke of a crowd of people in the street holding fragments of food, inconsiderable fragments that a housewife would throw away or give to the cat. Gareth Jones, the second reporter, had a similar experience. He said,

I talked to every peasant I met. The present state of Russian agriculture is already catastrophic, but in a year's time, its condition will have worsened tenfold. The five-year plan has built many fine factories, but it is bread that makes factory wheels go round, and the five-year plan has destroyed the bread supplier of Russia. It's hard to hide hundreds of thousands of dead and dying bodies, yet that's exactly what the propaganda machine tried to do. Neighboring areas where the weak and dying fled were overwhelmed. Workers who lived in Belarus said,

starving and destitute Ukrainians are everywhere, lying on the streets of Belarusian towns. People are saying that the government wants to starve Ukrainians to death, while the newspapers write that everything is fine. Why don't they write the truth? Millions are starving and grain is rotting in the fields, many of which have been overgrown with grass and left untilled because able men and women have run off into the world for a piece of bread to avoid dying from famine. Stalin wasn't concerned about people starving, but he was concerned about shortages of labor and international journalists' reports about the fate of the peasants

so in early 1933 the Politburo which is the political Bureau or the highest ranking policy making body of the Communist Party ordered the police to stop people from fleeing the area claiming that the Exodus was organized by the enemies of the Soviet government. Travel permits from Ukraine were denied to anyone trying to leave and to almost anyone trying to go to Ukraine. Nearly 100,000 people were caught trying to leave Ukraine. Roving patrols of secret police officials rounded them up and sent them back if they did not have the proper papers. It was a death sentence. There's a Ukrainian word coined to describe what was happening. The word Holodomor means death by hunger in Ukrainian, But not a sort of natural death by hunger. Specifically,

Holodomor refers to death by man-made hunger, because Stalin was simply disposing of people he didn't want. The daughter of Stalin's former sister-in-law traveled by train through Ukraine and reported seeing the bloated bellies and skeletal frames of humans and animals outside. She told her mother, who immediately confronted Stalin, Don't pay attention, Stalin counseled. She's a child and makes things up. Thereafter, trains passing through towns decimated by the famine, had window coverings that could not be raised. In the civic records of Ukraine for the early 1930s, there are visible areas on multiple death certificates where the cause of death had been changed because people were strictly prohibited from recording starvation as a death factor.

from recording starvation as a death factor. Alternatives such as edema, intestinal tuberculosis, swelling, and pneumonia or emaciation were listed instead of the truth. Some villages simply stopped recording the number of dead altogether. In some towns, the death rate from the compounded effects of malnutrition and poor sanitation reached as high as 80 to 90 percent. Imagine 80 to 90 percent of your town dying at the hands of a single individual. Exact numbers will never be known, but official estimates set the death toll of this man-made catastrophe between 7.5 and 10 million people. At the height of the Holodomor in June 1933, 28,000 people died every day. A third of them were under the age of 10. A third of them were under the age of 10.

The Holodomor in Ukraine was not officially recognized as a genocide by the international community until the 21st century. As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at Fizz.ca. This episode is brought to you by Dyson OnTrack. Dyson OnTrack headphones offer best-in-class noise cancellation and an enhanced sound range,

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Accessories sold separately. Stalin wasn't going to stop at eradicating the kulaks. Not only was the policy a way to increase state ownership of farmland, it was more broadly a way to increase the Soviet labor force. For the Soviet Union to beat the West in industrial production, Stalin needed efficient machines and workers to fill up the factories. And more than that, he needed workers who were compelled to be there. It wasn't that hard to convince them to do a good job because they'd be killed if they didn't. So in

addition to the de-Kulakization as a means of ramping up industrialization, Stalin also expanded a practice begun under Lenin, the implementation of gulags or labor camps. The camps housed roughly 100,000 people at the time of Lenin's death in 1924, and by the end of the 1930s, over 1.6 million people lived in the camps. By the early 1950s, the number was nearly two and a half million people. The number was nearly two and a half million people. The tasks assigned to prisoners in the camps depended on the region in which the camps were located. Some prisoners were forced to mine. Others had to saw lumber or use their hands to dig in the frozen ground.

A significant challenge those in a gulag faced was the lack of nutrition. Food was strictly rationed, and after a hard day's work, the men needed to eat. But how much they could eat depended upon how closely they met their daily quotas. If a worker met their quota, they had bread and soup that wasn't almost entirely water. If they were close, they got less food. If they didn't meet their quota or didn't work, they usually got nothing at all. The weak became even more so, to the point of extreme illness and death. One man later recalled, my nosebleed during work in the woods was not an accident, but a symptom of my deteriorating health. My heart became weak. The boils that appeared on my swollen legs, my teeth that became loose and began falling out, my pale lips and gums

were all unmistakable signs of scurvy. I knew that whoever fell seriously ill in conditions such as existed here was almost invariablyably doomed, never to rise again. The conditions in labor camps were horrific, and records are scarce. Prisoners were expected to work 14 hours a day on meager rations, with little equipment and absolutely zero safety precautions. Each camp housed between 2,000 and 10,000 prisoners who ranged from kulaks to criminals to those who opposed the Communist Party. At the time, criminals were divided into two groups, those who committed robberies and assault, and those who did other things such as miss work or take bread home from a restaurant. One prisoner, quote, cut his hand open with an axe in order to get into the hospital to relax for at least a couple of days.

Another prisoner said every day he saw different men intentionally inserting their arms into a wood stove to avoid working. For many, reprieve wasn't achieved through self-inflicted wounds, but through death. through self-inflicted wounds, but through death. In addition to his war on kulaks and his malevolent use of gulags to manipulate Soviet people into creating a workforce for his ambitious goals, Stalin also attacked religion and its role in Soviet culture. Remember little Sosa, the third-born and only surviving son of a devout woman who spent her life and his childhood pushing him to become a priest? The young student enamored with the ideas published

in the Communist Manifesto, including Marx's idea that communism begins where atheism begins? It's clear to see how Stalin's anti-religious sentiment developed over time, and for two decades, he sought to limit the influence religion had over the people he ruled. That was all part of his five-year godless plan. He oversaw the murder of priests, bishops, and other church officials by the tens of thousands. He closed houses of worship and converted the buildings into other things, ranging from grain storage to a planetarium. But Stalin wanted to go one step further. In his attempt to erase not only religion, but the very concept of God, he torched cathedrals and other houses of worship. The ongoing famine was used as justification to seize the many

resources of the church. The accumulation of resources in turn helped Stalin in his campaign to repaint the world's view of the Soviet Union. No longer were the Soviets backwards with horse-drawn plows and peasants growing grain. Now they appeared to outsiders as though they were a wealthy industrial powerhouse, soon to dwarf the West in the sheer quantities of resources they could sell around the world. And as a side benefit of destroying the church and everyone who worked there, it ended their preaching about mercy and kindness, which didn't exactly align with Stalin's ruthless, bloody dictatorship. Besides, all communists were atheists, or they should be, he thought.

Stalin's boundless cruelty affected everyone, from the lowliest peasants to political rivals to his own family members, including his firstborn son. Yakov had known more rejection than love from his father throughout his life. Remember, Stalin left him to live with family members for 14 years after Yakov's mother died. Still, Yakov tried to mend their relationship, desperate for his father's approval. Settling down and marrying was what he was supposed to do, so he brought his fiancée to meet his father. They stood together in a room, you can imagine Yakov searching his father's face, hoping for a smile or at least a glimpse of something positive. Instead, Stalin forbade

the marriage. Yakov's would-be wife ran from the house, upset, and Yakov, distraught, left too. No matter what he did, he couldn't seem to earn his father's love, which Stalin gave so easily to Yakov's half-sister, Svetlana, the daughter of Stalin's second wife, Nadia, who we learned about in the last episode. Yakov had made a decision. At 19, he was done. He pulled out a gun, placed his finger on the trigger, and pulled.

Given the trajectory of the bullet, Yakov likely flinched at the last minute. The bullet grazed his flesh but didn't kill him. When he heard about Yakov's suicide attempt, Stalin remarked that Yakov couldn't do anything right. He later wrote in a letter that Yakov was behaving like a hooligan and a blackmailer, with whom I have and can have nothing in common. Yakov decided then and there that one day he would show his father. He too was learning to play the long game. Stalin couldn't be bothered to deal with an emotional son. He had a country to run. By now, he had dealt with the kulaks, ramped up industrialization,

filled gulags with workers who could literally work themselves to death, and struck a blow against religious influences among his people. But he still worried about the threats he saw everywhere. And top of mind for him, once again, was his enemy, Leon Trotsky. By this time, Trotsky and his wife had been living in exile outside of Russia for 11 years. Had Stalin let it go? Had he accepted his victory in having his rival banished? No. Stalin's paranoia told him that Trotsky was leading a plot against him despite their physical distance. And frankly, Trotsky was leading a plot against him, despite their physical distance. And frankly, Trotsky also couldn't quit Stalin. He spent his exile writing diatribes about Stalin and his incompetence.

Stalin could not let that stand. He tortured Trotsky throughout the 1930s by murdering or arresting Trotsky's family one by one. One of Trotsky's daughters suffered from tuberculosis after her husband was arrested and sent off to a Siberian labor camp. She could not get medical attention because she was Trotsky's daughter and she died in her sister's arms. Trotsky's other daughter never recovered from watching her sister die. She was exiled after her husband was arrested, and Stalin only allowed her to take one family member with her. She chose her youngest son, and she took her own life after realizing she would never see her other children or mother again. Trotsky's younger son, Sergei, was not political, but that

didn't spare him. He was sent to and moved around labor camps until he was charged with conspiracy against the state and executed at 29 years old. Sergei never got to meet his daughter. His wife was also arrested and sentenced to 10 years in Siberia, and their daughter, Yulia, was raised by her mother's parents until an informant neighbor reported them, and they were all sent to Siberia. The only man who was wanted by Stalin's secret police, as much as Trotsky himself, was Trotsky's older son, Lev. An outspoken supporter of his father, Lev hid carefully for 10 years, but died in Paris in 1938 after an appendectomy. Records suggest, but they're not definitive, that Lev's identity had been reported to the authorities, and when complications arose after his surgery, he was not given further medical attention.

After his surgery, he was not given further medical attention. Trotsky himself eventually settled in Mexico City with his wife, Natalia. They'd been all around the world for years, stalked by Stalin's secret police and exiled farther and farther from Russia. Trotsky's friend, Diego Rivera, a prominent muralist and partner to painter Frida Kahlo, had pleaded with the Mexican government to give the Trotskys asylum, and they eventually loaned Leon and Natalia a house. Trotsky then repaid his friend by having an affair with Frida Kahlo.

Trotsky's wife, Natalia, eventually found out, and the couple separated for a while before eventually reconciling. At the same time, Trotsky was planning an international conference against Stalinism and capitalism. For Stalin, that was the last straw. He had allowed Trotsky to move around the world and had even tolerated his dissenting articles, but an entire conference against him, one that would surely garner his enemy more attention? No way. In a show trial with a predetermined outcome, Trotsky, who wasn't present, was tried for treason and sentenced to death along with a group of others. This was the beginning of the great terror, which we'll explore in a later episode. The stress of living day in and day out

with the knowledge that he and likely his wife too would be executed someday weighed heavily on Trotsky. It affected his sleep to the point that he had used sleeping pills. In May 1940, he had taken a sleeping pill and finally drifted off when suddenly a barrage of bullets struck the house. Jolted out of sleep and terrified that this was the end, Natalia looked over and saw her spouse caught in the stupor of the sleeping pills. Natalia, with a burst of adrenaline, grabbed and pulled him under the bed, where they huddled together, expecting death at any moment. But the sound of bullets suddenly stopped. The attack ended. From their position under the bed, they didn't know their assassins had been startled and fled.

The Trotskys, when their legs were steady enough to hold them, found hundreds of spent cartridge cases, several detonators, 75 live cartridges, an electric saw, 12 sticks of dynamite, electric fuse wire for the explosives, and two incendiary bombs in their home. It was a particularly uneasy summer for Trotsky, as he roamed his gardens and cared for his pet bunnies, all the while knowing that Stalin wouldn't stop until he was dead. By now, he had outlived all of his children. He and his wife were trying to exist as normally as possible, but that felt surreal, knowing that death was coming. They expected the next attack to be a bomb, and some of Trotsky's supporters helped to

pay for defensive upgrades to his home. Young American supporters even came to work as security guards for him. They bricked over the house's windows and built a higher wall around the property. And Trotsky commented in a thank you note to a financial backer, Thanks to the efforts of the North American friends, our peaceful suburban house is now being transformed, week by week, into a fortress, and at the same time, into a prison. But he had no way of knowing. His biggest threat was someone he knew. Nearly three months had passed since the night they had been awakened to the sound of bullets. As usual, Trotsky was out in his garden, feeding his rabbits,

when a familiar visitor dropped by with a request for Trotsky's help. Unbeknownst to anyone, the man whom the guards considered family was not who he claimed to be. He was a communist recruited during the Spanish Civil War by the Soviet secret police. He assumed multiple names over the course of a long, multi-stage, multi-year operation to assassinate Trotsky. A long game, indeed. He had traveled to that international conference and met Sylvia Ageloff, who was a loyal and trusted confidant to Trotsky. At that point, the man was using the name Jacques Monard and said he was a Belgian Trotskyite. He seduced Ageloff and a year later traveled to the United States

and persuaded her to move to Mexico with him so they could be closer to Trotsky. There, he visited the Trotsky home and pretended to share Trotsky's views. But he didn't introduce himself as Mornard. And it's not clear why Sylvia didn't find that suspicious. Maybe it was the rush of being in love. Maybe he had some great explanation. of being in love. Maybe he had some great explanation. Instead, he used the name Frank Jackson, and he quickly ingratiated himself into the family. He praised Trotsky and became his friend. Trotsky was eager to mentor the young man who asked for his assistance with his writing. Jackson visited so frequently that the family, including the guards, didn't think anything amiss, even when he showed up on a hot summer day with a raincoat. And it wasn't raining.

They let him in, as usual. Trotsky led Jackson into his library and held out his hand for the article Jackson had asked him to read. Leaning over his desk, with his eyes on the paper, Leaning over his desk with his eyes on the paper, Trotsky didn't see Jackson reach into his raincoat and pull out a pickaxe. Jackson raised his arm and buried the sharp end in Trotsky's skull, three inches deep. Trotsky screamed in pain and shock and then tried to fight Jackson, who was fumbling in his raincoat for his pistol or dagger to finish the job. Everyone in the house heard Trotsky's piercing cries, and the guards rushed in and pulled Jackson down to the ground, where they began beating him so violently that Trotsky yelled out, Don't kill him! He must talk!

Trotsky was rushed to the hospital, but slipped into a coma and died after emergency surgery. Jackson, too, was taken to the hospital. Sylvia was absolutely distraught at the death of her friend at the hand of her lover, but she had no idea what her boyfriend had been up to. This plot had taken years to carry out. Mornard used the identification of Frank Jackson, who had died in the Spanish Civil War, in order to travel to the United States and manipulate Sylvia. His real name, by the way, was Ramon Mercader, and he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years for Trotsky's murder. While Mercator was imprisoned in Mexico, Stalin secretly awarded him the prestigious Order of Lenin Award for his

actions. Following his release, he moved to Russia, where he was openly awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union Award. This was not the first plan Stalin had to murder Trotsky, just the first one that succeeded. And while it was the end for Trotsky, it was just a beginning for Stalin. He had considered it imperative to eradicate Trotsky because Trotsky had loyal followers of his own, such as Rivera and Kahlo, who preferred his branch of the Communist Party to that of Stalin's. In Stalin's mind, Trotsky posed an existential threat to him and his leadership. But the threat did not stop with Trotsky's death, it just relocated. And it was only a matter of time before anyone, anyone who threatened Stalin would wind up dead.

I'll see you again soon. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks. The show is written and researched by Mandy Reed, Amy Watkin, Kari Anton, Sharon McMahon, and Melanie Buck-Parks. Our audio producer is Craig Thompson. And if you enjoyed this episode, sharing, rating, and subscribing helps podcasters out so much.

Thanks again for listening to Here's Where It G's Interesting, and I'll see you again soon.