The Assassination of Trotsky

This is the true story of the plot to kill Stalin's greatest enemy. It involves 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. 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/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6 Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast Sign 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 [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:02Speaker 02

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• 1:45Speaker 02

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• 1:53Dan Snow?

  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've got Trotsky, a revolutionary, electrifying, a commander of men. He helped orchestrate the Bolshevik revolution. He led the Red Army to victory in the brutal Russian civil war. He dreamed of spreading revolution across the world. But that brilliance provoked jealousy, hatred, enmity. And he was unlucky enough to draw the rage of one Joseph Stalin. He ended up exiled, hunted across continents.

• 2:38Dan Snow?

  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.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  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, you know that Trotsky dies in Mexico, you know it's an ice axe, but you don't know why he's in Mexico. You don't know who's wielding the ice axe. You know, we all know who killed Julius Caesar or we all know who killed JFK. But like, 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?

• 3:38Dan Snow?

  Well, you're going to tell us right now. Let's get into it.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Brilliant.

• 3:46Dan Snow?

  Josh, good to see you.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  I'm delighted to be here.

• 3:48Dan Snow?

  Tell me about Trotsky. Where was he, in the mighty Russian Empire, where was he born?

• 3:52Speaker 03

  So he comes from the edges of the Russian Empire.

• 3:55Dan Snow?

  Another one, interesting, like Stalin.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Like Stalin. So there is a kind of weird, I mean, obviously, they go on to develop this fierce, vicious rivalry, but you can see quite a lot of similarities. And they're both bright boys who come from the edges of what was once the Russian Empire. So in Trotsky's case, he comes from what is now Ukraine, and Stalin is from Georgia. And both of them come from quite humble provincial families, both of them from illiterate families. So Trotsky's father was a farmer, and Stalin's was a sort of alcoholic bootmaker.

• 4:30Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  So there isn't any sign that they will go on to become the sorts of people that will, you know, grab the 20th century by the scruff of the neck and sort of shake it. But I think there's two things about them. Both of them incredibly bright, both of them incredibly ambitious. But also, when they're young, both of them get seized by a sort of overwhelming passion for world revolution.

• 4:53Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  In a way that I don't think we can quite understand, the sort of force with which it hits them.

• 4:57Dan Snow?

  It's in the air.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:08Dan Snow?

  But I guess it would do, because if they're hyperintelligent, they're in a system, they're in the Russian Empire, where people like them cannot really, aren't going to get on.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  I mean, Trotsky's Jewish, which I think for him wasn't particularly significant. He wasn't a believer, he was a believer in communism, but, you know, he shrugged off his past when he became Trotsky rather than Leon Bronstein. 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. You know, and it would also become a sort of antisemitic trope in the way that he was talked about later.

• 5:45Dan Snow?

  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.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Well, I think so, and I think also... There is just, I think the thing that 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 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, with that. Because it's not just the passion, but it's also this belief that that paradise is so close, that you, all you need to do is is push a little bit more to get paradise. But where is, what marks them apart from Christians is that whereas Christians believe in peace and

• 6:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:48Dan Snow?

  Just, just one more push and we're going to bring about the biggest change in human relations for thousands of years.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Exactly, it's just one more push, one more push, yeah.

• 6:55Dan Snow?

  And where does it, so where does the communist, where does he start? Is it high school, does he get to high school, does he go to university? Where does it, no, he's not one of these kids that goes to university and goes all liberal, is he?

• 7:04Speaker 03

  No, it's, 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 in, in, he's admirable in many ways, but also I imagine insufferable. But at some point, he meets a woman

• 7:23Speaker 03

  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, and that is his, you know, Damascene moment. And he marries this woman, but he, but more than that, he marries this faith.

• 7:37Dan Snow?

  And so he is, so it's a heady combination, it's you're in love.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  You're in love.

• 7:41Dan Snow?

  New, you know, you're together, you're newly married, you're.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  And also just the excitement of, of the thought of being a revolutionary. I mean, that's the other thing that Trotsky realizes is when he's in his early twenties is, 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, he can persuade people, he can rise them to the pitches 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. The province, 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.

• 8:22Dan Snow?

  It's so like Conrad, I'm thinking Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent, it's so.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's very, yeah.

• 8:26Dan Snow?

  But sordid to do with, anyways, it's fascinating. Okay.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is, there is something very Conradian about all of, all of these people, because that, you know, the, the sort of, that's that, the world that Conrad builds in is the secret agent of sort of slightly shabby rooms and plotting.

• 8:39Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  And the sort of like the smell of sulphur.

• 8:41Dan Snow?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  And the sort of sordidness, but also that lives alongside idealism and excitement.

• 8:46Dan Snow?

  Yeah, there's a sort of sordidness, but a bit of a romance to it, but.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:49Dan Snow?

  Excitement, yeah, yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:51Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  And so he suddenly becomes a central figure in this, in this revolution, this first, the first sort of sign that the, the rule of the Tsars, which is, which has lasted just over 500 years, the Romanov family have ruled Russia. There have been one or two attempts to sort of unseat them, but it never particularly serious. And then this is the first rumble of something. Um, 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, 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.

• 9:28Dan Snow?

  But I'm sorry, what, he was, had he got himself to St Petersburg? Was he addressing crowds now in the centre of the empire?

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, right in the centre, he's suddenly in the centre of empire, he's suddenly there on a, 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, he would wear beautiful white linen suits, he had this sort of sweep of hair, black hair that sort of swept back from his head. And these tiny little paws and airs and then, and then these glittering eyes that were sort of hypnotic apparently.

• 10:00Dan Snow?

  And this is, this is a revolution of, not of, of social media, of radio, it's, it's spoken word. So it's, it's running, commanding the street with your voice.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And I think this is, this is the root of his power, but later, I think his understanding of how, how you build power and, and hold on to power is formed in these, in this, in this time. But it will also later prove to be quite an outmoded way of, of seizing and holding on to power.

• 10:25Dan Snow?

  So he's in, so he's Siberia?

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Siberia.

• 10:27Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  And then he decides, along with his wife, that he should escape Siberia. So he hops, he, um, he puts on a disguise.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  And then finds his way, he then hops onto a carriage and then finds his way out of Siberia.

• 10:41Dan Snow?

  Well done him, that's not easy.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Incredibly good, sort of bad for the wife and two children he leaves behind.

• 10:46Dan Snow?

  Oh, that she's not coming with him?

• 10:47Speaker 03

  They don't come with them.

• 10:49Dan Snow?

  For the revolution, darling.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Exactly, you can justify, this is, this is the first sign that these are people that can justify anything to themselves and to anyone else in the name of what they're doing. And so he, he leaves his wife and two daughters who will barely see again for the rest of their lives.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  And then begins a sort of peregrination across Europe. And the one very significant meeting he has during this period is with Lenin, who is the leader of the Social Democrats Party in Russia.

• 11:18Dan Snow?

  But he was not in Russia though, he's what, he's in?

• 11:19Speaker 03

  They, 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 the next, over the next ten, ten years, Trotsky will be in Paris where he meets his second life partner and they, he refers to his wife, but they never marry.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  He's in Vienna, I mean, this is an extraordinary time.

• 11:41Dan Snow?

  Endless, smoke-filled rooms and committees and maneuvering.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Poverty-stricken, they're, they're printing newspapers, they're writing screeds.

• 11:48Dan Snow?

  And pretty hopeless, because the Russian Empire actually seems to sort of bounce back, you know, there's industrialization.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  It's slowly, there are, you know, there are, there's a man called Stolypin who seems to be writing the foundations of the empire that, you know, that, I think, you know, and I think that the thing they all have trying to reconcile is that, that they, they are Marxists. So they have absorbed everything that Karl Marx has said, the sort of iron laws of the world. So they, they think revolution is going to happen and they, they think it's going to come from the working classes. And it's only a matter of time, but they, but until it happens, they have to wait. And what they, the, the, what they do while they wait is really is, is write articles, smoke, argue, read.

• 12:28Dan Snow?

  Warm their eyes.

• 12:29Speaker 03

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

• 12:55Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  He's, he's the sort of person that. You know, doesn't think is is gets incredibly cross 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 he does have an eye for for the for women. I mean, and this will become a sort of a feature later in his story.

• 13:16Dan Snow?

  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.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 13:32Dan Snow?

  And suddenly, everything's up for grabs.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  It's a disaster for the Russian Empire. And it's been badly led for for decades by a weak, indecisive, incompetent Tsar Nicholas II. And eventually, after sort of the death of millions, wasteful death of millions and the collapse of the economy in 1917, there's a revolution. And it's not the revolution the Bolsheviks expected. And in fact, they're also surprised by that none of them are in in Russia. Lenin is in Switzerland. Trotsky is in the United States. And so all of them are desperate to get there. So Lenin is famously taken in that in the train.

• 14:09Dan Snow?

  Yeah, the German Empire, one of the most extraordinary own goals in history, the German Empire, put Lenin on a sealed train.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:16Dan Snow?

  I think he does actually stop to go to the Louvre. But anyway, and they whizz him through the German Empire and inject him like a virus.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  It's so it's so virus like, it's like, this is a basilisk, we're gonna drop into the empire.

• 14:26Dan Snow?

  Just push it into the Russian Empire. And he arrives and gives a barnstorming speech in in St Petersburg. And it's he they're off.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  Well, they kind of are in the art and because then quite quickly Lenin has to go to Finland to to avoid arrest.

• 14:37Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  So there is there is so there's this brief window of 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 than maybe it's going to resemble. It's neighbours like for our, no, well, not neighbours, it's continental neighbours.

• 14:54Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  But what happens is that Trotsky arrives and so does 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 as a sort of small cadre of elite revolutionaries or a sort of wider.

• 15:21Dan Snow?

  Yeah, the whole population.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  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 and it's not the revolution they expected, but it's a revolution.

• 16:00Dan Snow?

  They'll take it.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Like the, you know, it's like, 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 Trotsky's other great gifts, he's an incredible organizer.

• 16:10Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  He knows how to set up a coup.

• 16:12Dan Snow?

  And I, we don't want to get off topic here, but this is one of those really interesting examples of the impact a small group of very well organized people can have.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  And determined, completely determined, completely ruthless.

• 16:22Dan Snow?

  There was no gigantic popular movement in Russia for Bolshevism, for communism Bolshevism at the time.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, people in Vadivostok weren't saying, I like that Lenin.

• 16:31Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  I think we should give him a chance. No one knew who these people were. They was, these were incredibly obscure figures. They would, I mean, it would be as if, you know, we woke up tomorrow and a Marxist sect had sort of, had stormed into Downing Street and said, we're now in charge. And it's now, knowing what we know, it's difficult to sort of applaud it because what follows is the death of millions, but it's an incredible feat of audacity.

• 16:54Dan Snow?

  Astonishingly effective.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:10Dan Snow?

  It's all up for grabs.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  It's all up for grabs. So this is what they do.

• 17:13Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break. This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 17:59Dan Snow?

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• 20:34Speaker 03

  So this is what they do. They form a government, you know, they, they, there's a coup.

• 20:39Dan Snow?

  And Trotsky's part of this.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Trotsky is absolutely essential.

• 20:42Dan Snow?

  A key organizer.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  You can't, you can't imagine that revolution without Trotsky, I don't think.

• 20:46Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  And obviously, this will all be rewritten later because for Stalin, the idea that Trotsky could ever have played a positive role.

• 20:53Dan Snow?

  But you've peeled back the layers of propaganda you've got to the teeth. So we've got Lenin in charge, Trotsky's were organizing, getting everyone ready, right? Going to storm this building on that day. Here we go, some weapons, these, these people are reliable. Okay, fine.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  And what, what's sort of weird is it's quite a bloodless coup.

• 21:07Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Bizarre. I mean, what 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, and, and suddenly everyone, suddenly, suddenly everyone wakes up and this has happened, this, that there is this group of... In the eyes of many maniacs who are in charge of the country.

• 21:24Dan Snow?

  They've stormed the former Imperial Palace in St Petersburg. They've got the key buildings. They move on to Moscow and that's it. They've got the cerebral cortex of the state.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 21:38Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  And this is this is sort of Trotsky's second great moment. So Russia descends into like absurdly brutal civil wars. The kind of thing, it's a kind of real prefigurating of the sort of bloodiness and the viciousness and the brutality that will follow in the breast later in the 20th century. You know, it's the kind of war where people are being like prisoners are being skinned alive, where people are 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 like are going to seize power again. The Bolsheviks are going to fall. And this is where Trotsky is appointed leader of the Red Army.

• 22:19Dan Snow?

  And he's got no military.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  There's no military background. I mean, he's again, it's like putting a podcaster in charge of.

• 22:24Dan Snow?

  Well, hang on, hang on lads. Wait a second. This guy's available.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  An incredibly good speaker, you know, a talented person, charismatic, but you know, I don't.

• 22:34Dan Snow?

  Very good at maths, though. That's fair.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  You know, wouldn't know how to load a rifle, I'm pretty sure. But takes to it with aplomb, you know, he he wears, he kind of, he embraces the look, which is, you know, you wear cool, long leather suits. You have this huge 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, you know, 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, you know, from it. I think it's not until the mid, the early twenties that this war is finally won, that

• 23:19Speaker 03

  finally they feel as if they have a handle on this huge, huge.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Country, because the problem they had is that Marxist theory says that there are various stages and of a state's development and it's only when the working class could have achieved what they described as political consciousness that a revolution would take place. But Russia is this enormous country that's almost entirely populated by peasant farmers. You know, they're not the working classes that

• 23:50Dan Snow?

  Of Manchester.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. There is no, there is no proletariat really, whose loyalty they can rely. So they kind of have to impose their will on this, this massive country.

• 24:00Dan Snow?

  It's sort of recon- conquer the Russian Empire.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly.

• 24:06Dan Snow?

  And so Trotsky's riding high. They've won the war. Lenin's in China. He's close, he's maintained relations with Lenin.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  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, but, you know, they, they had spent most of the previous decade exchanging vicious letters and, 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 organised.

• 24:40Dan Snow?

  But Lenin has the good judgement to give him the top job.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, Lenin, Lenin is, I mean, amidst a sort of cast of incredibly ruthless people, Lenin is very good at understanding what a situation needs and who is best equipped to deal with that situation. But, you know, Lenin is also ailing. He's, he's been sick. He's had strokes. There's been a failed assassination attempt, which has left him incredibly weak. So what Trotsky and all the Bolsheviks know is that Lenin's time on this planet is numbered, that at some point there's going to be a succession struggle. And this is where the rivalry that has already existed, that already exists between Trotsky and Stalin begins to become sharpened and fiercer because they know that both of them

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Are prime candidates to, well, Trotsky certainly sees himself as a prime candidate and most of the world would 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 gray blur, as a kind of mediocrity, a bureaucratic mediocrity who somehow accidentally became powerful, who 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-y weirdly, sort of. Yeah, I mean, there was, there were similarities, there was, I mean, both have

• 26:04Speaker 03

  a kind of a weird obsessive interest in Russian history and a kind of, so I think there was, there was this very diff, Stalin and Trotsky have very different personalities, they, they have a kind of physical loathing for each other, because whereas Trotsky is a kind of cosmopolitan who's lived in Vienna, you know, who knows about psychoanalysis, who writes literary criticism, who has interests in science and things like that. Stalin is, is a big reader, but, and is by most definition an intellectual, but he doesn't speak much. He kind of, he's this sort of strange, short figure with limp and pockmarked cheeks. You know, Trotsky would sort of denigrate him as a coarse provincial. Okay.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  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 power is in the 20th century is significant, because for Trotsky, it's, it's being able to deliver a sort of sparkling speech. 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, 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 in newspapers or, you know, the... Uh, the minor functionaries in some city far outside Moscow, like that's, that's where real power lies.

• 27:32Dan Snow?

  Interesting.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  And also by being able to sort of negotiate, um, you know, person, different personalities, different um, people's ambitions, because what Stalin also is incredibly good at is understanding where people's weaknesses lie. You know, he's one of the people that can read a human being instantly and know what they want and what they need, but also how you can take advantage of them, so.

• 27:54Dan Snow?

  So that's so interesting. So Trotsky's a believer, you go out, you, you deliver a barn, you win over the senate, you win over the parliament, you win over the streets, that's the job done. Stalin's using this sort of 20th century massive state bureaucracy and pulling levers.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  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, say, if you'd asked that question in, say, 1922, they would have said Trotsky.

• 28:20Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:29Dan Snow?

  This guy, yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  So events begin to move quickly, so Stalin, so Lenin's health deteriorates further and further, and in 1924, he finally dies.

• 28:38Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  And this is one of the sort of the key moments in the sort of Trotsky-Stalin rivalry, because he's sickly, he's often, he often falls victim to these mysterious illnesses that sort of seem to afflict him when a moment, the moment of greatest stress.

• 28:53Dan Snow?

  Interesting.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  He's, and so when Lenin dies, he's in the Caucasus.

• 28:57Dan Snow?

  Oh.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 29:19Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 29:32Dan Snow?

  Yeah, it's like Mark Antony, go out and give the big speech after Caesar's, come on, man.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  So you present yourself, you present yourself as the guardian of Lenins. The, the person that is loved or at least respected across the empire. You, you, you said the, what was the empire? You present yourself as being the only person that could protect his legacy. And by contrast, you'd say this, that Trotsky, you know, he's, he's a strange person who spent too much time in Europe. He has strange ideas.

• 29:56Dan Snow?

  Didn't even turn up.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, he doesn't turn up to the funeral. He, he wants to change things, but I'm going to keep things, things the same. You know, you don't, don't trust him.

• 30:05Dan Snow?

  It's funny, on, on him being ill, whether it's hypochondriac, but I, 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.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's.

• 30:15Dan Snow?

  I think we underestimate, you know, because the water's bad, food's bad and people are sick all the time. And also I didn't, you know, I, I couldn't be a leader. I, I wouldn't sleep at night. I'd come out at night, you know, these people have got to have the ability to sort of barrel through.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  Well, look at Churchill in the Second World War, I mean, the, the, the sort of small, on the face of it, frail figure, but, but who works phenomenal hours. Doesn't ever stop because I, I mean, I, I wouldn't have lasted until sort of June nineteen forty.

• 30:40Dan Snow?

  Yeah. So, okay, so Trotsky, he's in trouble now, he's in trouble at this point.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think, I remember when I was at school, it was sort of presented as a contest between Stalin and Trotsky that, that somehow Stalin won. But actually, I think the more you look at it, the more you realize it's, it's like they've, they've both started playing a game. But, but by the time that, you know, the, the, the, the time the whistle's been blown, Stalin's already sort of bought the referee. He's changed, he's actually changed the rules of the game, you know, he's, he's got the sort of twenty players on his team and Trotsky only has one player on his team. There were never, it was, it, it, it wasn't a contest, you know, he was so comprehensively, so quickly, so ruthlessly.

• 31:20Dan Snow?

  So it wasn't even, it wasn't a, yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  There was no, yeah, it was, it was, and I think he was bewildered by the speed with which that happened.

• 31:25Dan Snow?

  How funny, he's, he hasn't done all the hard work, he hasn't built a power base, he just delivers the barnstorming speeches.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  There's, there's this, there's this weird thing about, so Trotsky. Completely indifferent to other human beings, that you know, there's, there's one of his closest friends writes a memoir later on where he, he says, I realised that after two decades of friendship, he'd never asked me a single question about myself. He never, he was, had no interest in me. He, you know, barely knew what my name was. Whereas Stalin, though we later kind of learned 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 function.

• 32:01Dan Snow?

  He charmed the pants off the British Americans during the war.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's incredibly, incredibly clever at that sort of thing, you know, and, and obviously he will then turn against them. But when he needs people, he knows what he needs, needs to do to give them. He needs what they, knows what they want. He knows that, you know, this person will want a promotion. This one person wants a nice flat in, you know, near the Kremlin, you know, that's what he, he's very good at that sort of stuff.

• 32:22Dan Snow?

  Right. And Trotsky's nowhere. That's so fascinating. And when do we, when does Trotsky find out that he's been totally outmaneuvered? So he's, currently he has a job title? Is he, he's, he's still in charge of the army or?

• 32:32Speaker 03

  No, he, he resigns from that.

• 32:34Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Um, and, and I think this is the thing, Lenin even offered him the chance to be his, you know, nominal second in command in the party and he didn't take it. So he kind of, he takes a sort of a succession of, of slightly less important jobs.

• 32:48Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  And then that becomes a sort of, a kind of minister without a portfolio in the, in the.

• 32:53Dan Snow?

  So Stalin keeps, Stalin keeps him around for a bit.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. 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, the person whose photo is still, you know, in, 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.

• 33:22Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Publicly. He can start to chip away at his reputation, which he does relentlessly, you know, they, 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. So without, without a second thought. So he's very, very cautious about what he does. But it culminates in nineteen twenty eight when Trotsky is sent into internal exile in Kazakhstan.

• 33:47Dan Snow?

  Right. So he actually really does move against him at that point.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  And that's pretty decisive. There's. I think, whether Trotsky understands it or not, there's no way back after that.

• 33:56Dan Snow?

  Okay. And it's not like Trotsky has to support it, like he's.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Well, he has a small group, he has a small group of supporters, but most of them either very quickly understand the drift of things, that 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.

• 34:20Dan Snow?

  And he can't give you.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  And he can't give you anything. If you're interested in becoming, joining the Politburo or rising up in the party, he's not your person.

• 34:28Dan Snow?

  Okay, so he's in Siberia?

• 34:30Speaker 03

  He's in Kazakhstan.

• 34:31Dan Snow?

  He's in Kazakhstan.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  For a year, and then, and you know, that's the beginning, that suddenly he realizes that he gets fewer and fewer letters, and the people who are still writing to him are writing to him from places like Siberia, from the Gulag, as it will become. And then in 1929, he is shipped out of Russia. He goes first to Istanbul, a small island called Prinkopo off Istanbul.

• 34:59Dan Snow?

  Allegedly for what purposes? He's just sort of.

• 35:01Speaker 03

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

• 35:21Dan Snow?

  I'll bet.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  Because he's done two things. He's let Trotsky escape, but Trotsky's also taken his archive with him.

• 35:25Dan Snow?

  Interesting.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:33Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 36:20Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're going to be back after this break.

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• 37:15Speaker 04

  In a world where swords were sharp.

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  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is.

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  Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis.

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  And me, Dr Eleanor Yanaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

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  So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 37:48Dan Snow?

  And does Trotsky go into opposition? I mean, does he start organising and writing?

• 37:54Speaker 03

  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 toe this awkward line where he has to be, he wants to be supportive of the Russian revolution, which is still under attack from most of the West, at least rhetorically. You know, it's still seen as this sort of the great, one of the great threats in Europe. But at the same time, he has to denigrate Stalin and what Stalin is doing and present him as being a failure.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  You know, he describes him as being the gravedigger 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 as dissent within the Soviet Union shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and to the point where there is almost no one, 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. 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, you know, he reads everything that, this is the weird thing, he reads everything that Trotsky

• 39:23Speaker 03

  writes. You know, he's probably one of the only people in the Soviet Union that actually doesn't hear Trotsky's speeches or read his articles because the censorship is so sort of fierce by this point.

• 39:32Dan Snow?

  So Trotsky famously ends up in Mexico. Just get him to Mexico for us.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  So he has brief periods of exile in first France, after he leaves Istanbul for France, where, and then Norway. And he's never a happy, he's no one's idea of a good guest. People are always terrified he's there to foment revolution. So no government really wants him to stay if they can avoid it. But one government that is reasonably friendly towards him is the revolutionary or socialist government of Cardenas in Mexico, which is enacting huge land reforms. And one of the figures who's quite close to the government is Diego Rivera, the leading muralist in the country, which in Mexico is a huge deal.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  He's an amazing, credible painter who has synthesized like 18th century artists like Goya with Aztec art and also infused it with his political passion. And part of his political passion is for Trotsky, so he helps secure Trotsky a visa for Trotsky. So Trotsky and his wife get on a back.

• 40:38Dan Snow?

  This is his French wife.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  This is the second wife, who's not French, she's also Russian, another passionate revolutionary called Natalia Sidover.

• 40:46Dan Snow?

  All right, but we're in Mexico.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  We're in Mexico.

• 40:48Dan Snow?

  With Trotsky. He's living in a, comfortably with Diego Rivera.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, to begin with, they live in this idyllic home called the Blue House, which was Frida Kahlo's, Frida Kahlo, who is married to Diego Rivera. It's her childhood home and it's this kind of oasis with butterflies and beautiful tropical plants. And to begin with, the trauma and terror of what's happening in Russia, which by this point, the terror is in full swing.

• 41:17Dan Snow?

  Late 30s.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  Late 30s. So Stalin is relentlessly, mercilessly just eliminating every single one of his enemies and also anyone who isn't even close to being an enemy. And specifically, the people he is eliminating are Trotskyists. So if anyone has ever shared 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 churned up by the knowledge of what's happening in his own country. He's haunted by ghosts of the people that have either been murdered already or even worse, as far as he sees, have turned on him and have recanted and have started, his

• 41:59Speaker 03

  former allies who are now standing up in pulpits, slagging him off.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  So they're kind of, on the one hand, they feel very distant from that. And it's this weird time where Trotsky begins an affair with Frida Kahlo. So this is Trotsky. The upright family man, also a man who likes sort of touching people's knees under the table. Yeah. And Frida Kahlo, you know, one of the most seductive, fascinating figures of the 20th century, who seems to have initiated the affair as a way of taking revenge on her own husband, Diego Rivera, who had been sleeping with her sister. Crikey. So it's a very sort of febrile atmosphere. Yeah. And the affair lasts for a while, you know, they're sort of, it's kind of, it's kind of high fast, really, that they're exchanging notes, you know, they're talking in English

• 42:50Speaker 03

  so no one else can understand what they're saying. And then it doesn't, 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 revolution. Two reasonably unreliable people, I imagine. 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. Oh. Don't think that's true, but I think it gives a good sense of who he was and his personality, you know, he likes order, he needs order, and people like Rivera exist

• 43:35Speaker 03

  in chaos. Right, so completely. And so, so they fall out, they, 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, you know, so it's, there's, there's high walls around it. So he's worried about being assassinated? I think he knows from the moment he leaves Russia that at some point Yeah. they're going to catch up. And Stalin has been, has spent the last 10 years trying to organize his assassination. So part of the frustration that feeds, that drives the terror. Is Stalin's rage, the thing he wants to be done.

• 44:12Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  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 the other of the secret services is assassin.

• 44:27Dan Snow?

  It's like being a defence against dark arts teacher at Hogwarts.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they know why they fall, they all fall because they're not doing, they're not working hard enough to kill Trotsky. So there were 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 of the Trotskyist organisation is riddled with spies. You know, there's the person who in Paris is Trotsky's son's best friend, who's also 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.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  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, Stalin is this man who controls an empire, but 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 that passion, that desire for revolution. Because although he is in exile, although he's, he has, you know, hardly any followers left, hardly any money. He can barely leave the house without, because they're so afraid that he, an assassin will be waiting for him. You know, he gets in a car, he has to bend down and hide behind the seats.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  He still believes that his time might come again. He has been a revolutionary in exile before, twice.

• 46:01Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  And he's come back both times. So I think there's part of him that believes that.

• 46:05Dan Snow?

  You never know.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  That stuff happens, you know, and when the Second World War begins, this is what he thinks stuff is happening.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  But at all this time, the sort of wheels are turning and. The terror is still sort of consuming millions, 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 Itingon, who is the link between Stalin and the man that will eventually kill Trotsky.

• 46:48Dan Snow?

  So and so he'll recruit an actual assassin, really?

• 46:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so that he is in charge of organising 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 Itingon and a family called the Mercadas. So Itingon 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 use, the methods of repression that will be employed later on. Stalin is not a man who lets a sort of war

• 47:37Speaker 03

  go to waste. And the Mercadas are this fascinating family, they're bourgeois, semi aristocratic, from Barcelona. And their family business falls apart, so they're sort of thrown into poverty. She begins teaching and very quickly gets, I guess we would call radicalised. She's always been this sort of reckless, thrill-seeking personality. And very quickly, she becomes both a communist and a heroin addict. So the marriage doesn't last very long. She leaves, takes with her the children who were brought up to sort of imbibe her philosophy. And then when the civil war comes around, her eldest son Ramon, who's this tall, handsome, charismatic

• 48:20Speaker 03

  figure, starts fighting. He's part of a communist brigade. And we can't precisely locate the moment when the NKBD...

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Recruited him, but there's this extraordinary moment, moment where his younger brother's watching. And it's a cold snowy day, sort of somewhere in the hills of Russia. And he sees his mother and his brother talking and they, every time anyone comes closer to them, they edge away, edge away. It's as if they've got this incredible secret. And then he said, from that moment on, I understood my, um, my brother was working for Los, they call them Los Sovieticos.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  And so that's the, that's when Ramon unwilling unwittingly becomes the sort of, he has embroiled in this bigger thing. And the Russian, the, the NKVD do what the KGB would later do after the war. And also the FSB, um, you know, the future iterations of the Russian secret services would do is they, they recruit people who they think are useful. They don't know what they're gonna, they want them to do, but they just think, well, this, this person speaks Spanish, that could be useful. Yeah, tall, strapping lad. Yeah, he's, and he's, he's, he's, um, you know, he can, apparently he can strip a rifle in the dark. He's got a photographic memory. He's a great, um, he can speak several languages. He's, he's very strong, he's very athletic, he's. So just keep him on the books.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  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 Trotskyist called Sylvia Agalov, who's traveling from, um, New York to Paris to observe, um, a sort of Trotskyist meeting called the Fourth International. Actually, the NKVD have got it wrong. They think she's a much more significant figure than she is. They think, I think they've got her confused with the one of her sisters, Ruth, who was actually Trotskyist, Trotsky's secretary. Oh, my goodness, okay. Uh, and so the family is, you know, is sort of adjacent to Trotsky, but she is not really part of it. But their, their plan is that Ramon will seduce her, become her girlfriend or her husband.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  Um, and then see what, see what happens then really. I mean, it's, it's a real punt. Yeah. They don't know what's gonna happen. And he didn't know, and I don't, it's unclear quite what, how much they told him and what he's supposed to do and what his brief is. So you see, he has to assume a different personality. He emerges in the Ritz bar in, you know, in, in the summer of nineteen thirty eight, 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 Monard. And he's this Belgian, he presents himself as being not the committed fanatical communist that he is,

• 51:03Speaker 03

  but as a sort of feckless Belgian playboy, a sports reporter who has no interest in politics. He 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. Um, and so swept away that, you know, no matter how many times there are sort of funny little hints that something strange is afoot, she never really questions it. Okay. And even as they get closer and closer to Trotsky, so they move to Mexico,

• 51:41Speaker 03

  where Jacques claims to be working for an import-export business, the oldest trick in the book, like the most suspicious job you could ever have. Well, but yeah, being a journalist to import-export, two, two absolutely indefinable jobs. They move to Mexico City where Trotsky already is and Sylvia, completely unaware of what is being, what's happening, makes contact with the Trotskyists out there because she knows them. I know the Trotskyists. Exactly, you know, they, they, they think fondly of her. Yeah. Um, and so she begins to visit the compound. And what Ramon does, 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.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  What he does is he, he has this beautiful car and he'll drop Sylvia off and, well, Sylvia's inside chatting to Trotsky or Trotsky's wife or another family who live there. He'll just chat to the guards or he'll give them cigarettes or he'll offer to do them little 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, he's observing what's happening. Because at the moment, all he's there is to, is to gather intelligence. He's just a spy at this 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 movie. She's like, you can't have this story without this mad woman.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  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 Ithing, the NKVD 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 thicken, they get closer and closer to Trotsky. You know, Ramon is beginning to get the respect and also the trust of the people around Trotsky.

• 53:44Dan Snow?

  And then he, at some stage, presumably they decide to make him an active assassin, rather than just an intelligence gatherer.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  So this is, so we're into 1940 now. Ramon's closer and closer to family. He's met Trotsky for the first time. He does things like, you know, he'll, he'll take Trotsky's grandson, who's the last surviving member of Trotsky's family, you know, for days out. He'll take Trotsky's wife on shopping trips. They, no one particularly respects him or is interested in him because he's this weird, strange guy. You know, he's Sylvia's novio boyfriend. They all think he's a bit of an idiot, but a nice idiot. And then in May of 1940, the NKVD decide to strike. And what they do is, there's another spy within Trotsky's household, one of his guards,

• 54:37Speaker 03

  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 has to, he can't sleep without sleeping pills, so he's, you know, knocked out. They smash in and his wife Natalia instantly realizes something terrible, something shocking is happening. Um, so she grabs Trotsky and they dive under the bed and there's kind of chaos everywhere. There's bullets that I think they will find later, 200 bullets have fired in the household.

• 55:22Dan Snow?

  Um.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  And, you know, walls are kind of, sort of shot, you know, made, turned into sort of lace by the number of shells that have been fired. But miraculously, they kind of sweep in, they sweep out. No one's hurt. Trotsky's grand sign has a sort of small, um, scratch on his ankle where, um, where I think there were a bullet ricocheted and caught him. But they're, they're kind of idiots. They've, they've basically given the job to people who shouldn't have been given the job.

• 55:47Dan Snow?

  Crikey. Thoughts and prayers for whoever delivers that news to Stalin. Crikey.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  Um, Stalin, obviously incredibly upset.

• 55:54Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Speaker 03

  And this is, this is the other sort of, the other sort of strand that runs across the story. So the terror is, is, seems to be, in Russia, it seems to be directed almost indiscriminately, except the people that it really goes for are the people in the secret services, the, the spies, the agents, you know, they're, 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, if you give these people who are the only people that are allowed to leave the Soviet Union, who have access to networks, that, and money, that, if you, if they feel threatened, they might try and escape.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  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, they all live in this constant, you know, this terror is just. It's just trick, no, it's not tricking, it's sort of coursing down from the top.

• 56:57Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  Everybody, everybody in the entire Soviet Union must have spent the thirties existing in a state of permanent terror, waiting for a knock on the door or the phone call. And, and the people charged with Trotsky's assassination are no different. They know that if they fail, they're, you know, that they're, they'll be poisoned or they'll just have the sort of bullet in the back of the head or, you know, one of those terrible accidents that are such a sort of regular feature.

• 57:23Dan Snow?

  Fall out of a window.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  Fall out of a window. So, Eitingon turns to Ramon and says, so this is the second sort of, there are two significant meetings in, 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.

• 57:44Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  I need you, you are the person that will.

• 57:47Dan Snow?

  So he's worried about him, Eiting is now worried about him getting killed.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  I mean, they're all worried. I think they're all terrified, but Eitingon knows that the first person against the wall is going to be him.

• 57:55Dan Snow?

  Okay, so I'm going to use my other asset.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  And that, and that, and there is a close friendship between the two men, which will persist for decades afterwards.

• 58:02Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  So there is, 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.

• 58:11Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Or might not be.

• 58:11Dan Snow?

  Sure, it's just complicated.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  And so they come up with a plan and the first, there's, there are a couple of terrible plans. I think they, they initially think about bombing the, 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 grand fast of like, they're only one step away from a kind of Ealing style.

• 58:32Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 03

  Comedy. And then the, what the plan that they eventually settle on has sort of two attractive features as far as they're concerned.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  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 incredibly visceral symbol of

• 59:15Dan Snow?

  Oh.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  the price you pay for standing up for Stalin.

• 59:19Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 59:20Speaker 03

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

• 59:32Dan Snow?

  Yep. So a lot of ice axes around.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  A lot of ice axes. Quite easy to get hold of an ice axe. Well, he seems to have had the ice axe for quite a long time. And then at some point, they file, they, they shorten it so that it can be easily hidden underneath his big coat. And the other thing that's happened in this, during this time is that Ramon disappears to America for a bit. Effectively, he says, to, to deal with some, some problems that have arisen in this mysterious import-export business. And when he returns, something as significant has 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

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  this sort of strange arcane arguments that Trotskyists have. And the second is that his personality seems to be changed. So that before he was this confident, sunny, helpful person, and now he seems quite withdrawn. His skin seems to have acquired this greenish pallor. He's nervous, he sort of trembles, he, he will sometimes, you know, 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.

• 1:00:46Dan Snow?

  Yes.

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  And, you know, their business is persuading people. So Trotsky knows that he's a bit unreliable, he's a bit strange, but Trotsky.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  His his whole thing is that I'm one of the great communicators of the 20th century. I can I can take people with me, 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 Ramon has been able to assuage. And then one day in August, Ramon arrives at Trotsky's house. He drives up in his car and he crashes, he dents his car. There's something odd, something off, you know, he's never done this before. He's a guy, he's this flash man, like he takes, so what, there is something strange. The guards on the gate that day, they welcome him in because by this point he's trusted.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  They all know him, you know, the the compound is like a fortress, you know, there's electric gates, there's turrets, it's designed to keep people out, it's designed to keep an army out, but it's not designed to keep out someone who has so cleverly sort of worked his way into right into the middle of it. And he he and the other strange thing that people notice about him is it's Mexico, it's a hot, it's a hot country, it's it's August, it's a hot day. But for some reason, he's got a big raincoat on and a hat and there's, you know, there's a bit of cloud in the sky, but nothing, you know.

• 1:02:10Dan Snow?

  So behaving really weirdly, he's nervous, he's crashed his car, he's got a huge raincoat on and they just wave him in.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  And then there's this tragic moment where Trotsky that morning had woken up. He says he wakes, he woke up and for the first time for months, he said he felt confident and he felt happy and he felt and he felt free of anxiety, you know, and there's a moment when he's, you know, he he works relentlessly, he has, you know, this very rigid work schedule and his wife can see him in his office working and and she she thinks everything's going to be okay, this is, this is good, you know, he's happy, I'm happy. What could possibly go wrong? And then, you know, Ramon arrives and he's still strange. He says, I've got this article I want Trotsky to read. Can I take it through to him? And Trotsky comes out, he's wearing, you know, this classic blue worker's outfit.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  And he sees Ramon. Apparently, he looks quite cross to be interrupted, but because he's polite, because he wants to encourage him. He says, yeah, I'll look at your article. So they go through 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 shoves 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 this foolish Belgian.

• 1:03:28Dan Snow?

  He's an exiled revolutionary. I can imagine it's a sort of messy, yeah, there's always people.

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  So they get in. Ramon takes his coat off, balances it on the table. Trotsky sits down. He hands him the typewritten sheet. And it's, you know, it's garbage. It's an idiotic screed, really. So Ramon has three things in the, four things, in fact, in his great coat, his raincoat. He has the ISACs. He has a long dagger. He has a pistol fully loaded. And he has this slightly fatuous 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

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  And Trotsky starts reading. And then there's a moment when Ramon sort of stands above him and then he realizes, then he thinks to 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 Yeah. blow. But what he actually does is he sort of plunges it into Trotsky's skull. It was a deep, horrible, vicious, sort of 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,

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  he says he, he cannot get the precise quality and intensity of the scream out of his head. Yeah. And then it's 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, um, you know, he's got blood all over him. But both of them are covered in blood by this point. And Ramon tries to escape. Um, Trotsky follows him, uh, and then Ramon gets, doesn't get very far when Trotsky's guards who suddenly realise, they hear, they hear the scream too. They realise something terrible has happened. They realise that they failed to do the thing that they're there for.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  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 collapsed in a heap, being sort of nursed by Natalia, says, leave him, leave him. We need to find out who sent him. Yeah. And Ramon, who has remained reasonably cool, has this weird flash where he sort of lets on something different. He says, they, they are saying, the NKVD sent you, the NKVD sent you. He said, no, no, no. But then he says, fairly adroitly, they have my mother, they have my mother, they won't let her go. And then he comes up again and they just, I mean, he's, he's being sort of, they're, they're just taking out all of their frustration and rage out on him. And then he's taken away into prison, into custody.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  And Trotsky goes to hospital where he lingers for another day. I mean, it sounds garfuying. They drapan him in an attempt to try and re- 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 skull is the best way of.

• 1:06:58Dan Snow?

  And he's but he's conscious, he's able to talk about it?

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  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, watches him, you know, his breathing becomes slowly more shallow. Then, then finally, he sort of slips away and that's it.

• 1:07:23Dan Snow?

  What happens to the assassin?

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  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 the Mexican justice system is 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, completely destroyed by the knowledge of what she has unwittingly done.

• 1:08:00Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  And she starts to attack him, has to be drugged off him.

• 1:08:03Dan Snow?

  His girlfriend, his wife?

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, his girlfriend, wife. And so she initially, and she is, she is also sort of swept up by the police quite quickly, who assume that she is in on it.

• 1:08:12Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  And then she eventually is cleared and ends up as a sort of, I think she lived in obscurity as a primary school teacher for the rest of her life. Whereas Ramon spends 20 years in prison.

• 1:08:22Dan Snow?

  Does he?

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  In a prison which is now, which is now sort of fascinatingly is the archive, the central archives in Mexico. So when I went out to do the research for 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.

• 1:08:43Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  You know, he won't speak Spanish or he, as it were, pretends to slowly learn Spanish.

• 1:08:48Dan Snow?

  Oh, really?

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  He, because it's Mexican justice system and it's slightly different to ours, he marries a woman in prison.

• 1:08:55Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  And the other thing, element is although. The NKVD and later the KGB officially keep their distance. They make sure he lives comfortably.

• 1:09:05Dan Snow?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  He has the best lawyers you can get in Mexico. He lives, has a good cell. And after that, he returns, he comes to the Soviet Union again, the first time he's ever been. So this is 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. You know, he's not, he's not even a member of the NKVD officially until he arrives there like. And like so many fellow travellers, like when he actually encounters what, you know, Soviet, the 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 Brezhnev regime, you know, when it's beginning to decay, but it's still malicious. It's still,

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  you know, everyone is, there's a, you're still, there's still very, very fierce limits on 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, the passion that was sort of animated the early years of the Soviet Union has disappeared, is ossified. And he wants to leave. After a while, he'll get, 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 NKVD gave him. So I mean, they get, 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.

• 1:10:31Dan Snow?

  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.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  Oh no, really enjoyed being on. Thank you.

• 1:10:42Dan Snow?

  And, and the book is out now?

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  Out now, right now, yeah.

• 1:10:44Dan Snow?

  What's it called?

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  It's called The Death of Trotsky.

• 1:10:46Dan Snow?

  Going to get it, folks. Thank you very much.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  Brilliant.

• 1:10:49Dan Snow?

  Thanks very much for watching, folks. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And while you're here, why not check out some of these videos that are appearing around me? We're covering the whole of human history. We're not messing about. See you next time.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

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• 1:12:32Dan Snow?

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