397. Stalin: Killing Trotsky (Part 3)

Was it an ice axe or an ice pick? The murder of Trotsky in Mexico is infamous, but what does it say about Stalin’s willingness to seek out and destroy his rivals? Who was Leon Trotsky and why was he such a threat to Stalin by the end of his life? In Episode 3 of this series, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple are joined once again by Giles Milton, author of The Stalin Affair, to discuss the life and death of Trotsky. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. Empire listeners can use code 'EMPIRE' to get a 10% discount on their first order at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/empire Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  A BetterHelp ad. BetterHelp is one of the world's leading online therapy services. Now, insurance options may be available nationwide with average copays of just $23 per session for eligible members. But cost isn't the only thing holding people back. Many of us weren't taught to manage stress or overwhelm. Therapy gives you tools to keep stress from building. BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plans, making it easy to get started with low-cost sessions. Don't have eligible insurance? Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/empire. Cost and coverage may vary. Discount cannot be combined with insurance.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Want to be the one who's always in the know about the game, the scores, the plays? Here's a tip: the Apple Sports app. Just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules. And when your team scores, it shows up right on your iPhone lock screen, making it easy to check in anytime. So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own methods, sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often, we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there, sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation, and that no longer need happen ever again. Because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo, it records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can refer to afterwards. I only picked up Plaud a few

• 1:41Speaker 02

  weeks ago, and already it's changing the way that I work. With one press, the device transcribes those real conversations and turns them into clear actions. It also has a brilliant feature called Ask Plaud, which calls up details of hazy, long-gone conversations in seconds. Empire listeners can go to uk.plaud.ai/empire. That's u k dot p l a u d dot a i forward slash empire and use the promo code empire to get 10% off any Plaud device.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Born Lev Bronstein, his comfortable childhood was far removed from the life we might expect for a communist revolutionary. But what drove him to become one of the leading figures of the Russian Revolution? And why, long after Stalin had stripped him of his army, his party, and his country, did he still want Trotsky dead?

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Well, hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arndt.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  And me, William Derumpel.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Last time, we left you with Lenin's dying testament, a letter about the men who should step into his job. And in that document, he talked about Stalin, and he called him too crude for the job. And he asked comrades, he went further and said, find a way to remove him. And this document also had something to say about the other man vying for the job. Lenin thought Trotsky might have been the most able man on the Central Committee, but he had a caveat. But, but, but Trotsky, he said, has an excessive self-confidence.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Today, we turn to Trotsky properly, the rival Stalin feared and hated most, and eventually had killed by an ice pick, or was it an ice axe on the other side of the world? Anyway, we are joined today by the wonderful Giles Milton, friend of the show and author of The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won the War. With Giles, we're going to be discussing Stalin and Trotsky's infamous rivalry. Welcome, Giles. Welcome back.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Thank you very much for having me back. And it was an ice axe. We know definitely from the wound, the ghastly wound, the gash to Trotsky's head, which we will be coming to, I'm sure, later in the episode. We know for sure that it was a, an ice axe.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Something with a long-flanged head rather than a kind of micro pick.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Exactly. If you get one of those in the back of your head, it doesn't go well for you.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  I wouldn't want either.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  No, I wouldn't think an ice pick is that much fun either. But look, before we get to the end, because this is the Dalrymple method, before we get to the end of the story, let's start at the beginning of the story. Giles, tell us about Trotsky the boy. He wasn't Trotsky. He was Lev Bronstein. And can I just say that, I don't know if I've mentioned it on the other podcast, but Lev Bronstein also happens to be the name of Leon Britton, a former Tory cabinet minister. Yeah, he changed, he was also Lev Bronstein, and he changed his name to Leon Britton. So you've got two very different people. Trotsky, Leon Britton. But we're talking about Trotsky. So he's born on the 26th of October, 1879. Where does he fit in the scheme of his family?

• 4:56Speaker 04

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

• 5:38Speaker 04

  gets drawn into revolutionary activities. These are far more exciting than, you know, doing arithmetic. And this is where we see at a very early age, still a student, Trotsky becomes the revolutionary.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Now, you know, you know, I'm a sucker for a sad story for a sad child. And Robert Service has a wonderful book on Trotsky, and he has this observation that his mum wasn't exactly, you know, sort of apple pie and hugs, because as a toddler, he had, you know, fainting blackouts. It was a thing. It was a mark of his childhood. And it actually came from the mother's side of the family. And when he had this blackout, he wet himself on the floor. And instead of like sweeping him up and going, my love, are you okay? Like anyone would. She just asks him straight out, aren't you ashamed of yourself? And he's sort of largely raised by a much kinder woman, a nanny called Masha, who, you know, sort of allows him to grow. And every time he climbs a tree, she's sort of having a heart

• 6:33Speaker 03

  attack because he might fall out and kill himself. But anyway, he gets through childhood.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  There's another sort of legendary story. And Giles, you could tell us whether this is true, that young Lev watched his dad mistreat a peasant. Is this, is this historical?

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, you know, his father was quite a brutal individual, as many, you know, you might expect the patriarch of a farming family to be. He was also extraordinarily miserly, apparently. So, you know, the family were wealthy, but young Trotsky writes about his father coming to meet him at the station when he was coming back from his studies. And his father would give the most minuscule tip to the porter carrying all the bags and everything. And even the young Trotsky at the time was really embarrassed and ashamed of his father, thinking, come on, you could give this poor peasant a little bit more money.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  What did sort of friends and neighbors think of him? Because we know that when Stalin was growing up, people were generally afraid of him because he was a thug who spake with his fists rather than his mouth. What about Trotsky?

• 7:34Speaker 04

  I think they were a bit, a little bit sort of bemused by him. This is rough peasant country in the Ukraine. And suddenly, this guy comes along, who's rather elegant, rather effete, extremely intelligent, enormously fastidious about how he looks. And there are some fabulous photos of the young Trotsky with his hair.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Yes, wonderful hair.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  We'd say now it's called embros, you know, he wears this, this hair swept upwards and, you know, always looking very neat and tidy in his clothes and everything. So I think people couldn't quite make him out. What the hell have the Bronstein family produced? They've sort of produced this weird intellectual in his, in his rather smart clothes.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, just in case you haven't, you know, you're listening to us and you're not watching us on the YouTube, because we're on the YouTube now, everyone. Come join us on that. He, he looks so much like Steve from Stranger Things, if you're a fan of Stranger Things. This is a man who could have worked in Scoops Ahoy, let me tell you that. Anyway, that's just my tuppence where.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  I do think his contemporaries thought he was perhaps a little bit of a weirdo. They were, he was not always very pleasant as well. I think he had a habit of putting people down.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Lenin's wife had a particular dislike of him, didn't she?

• 8:39Speaker 04

  She really didn't like him. This, this is going to be a long-running sort of element of their, of their relationship. Yeah. I think you have a, you have a quote there, don't you, Willie, about what she said?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yes, we have a letter, not from Lenin's wife, but to her, from a guy called Alexander Bogdanov, who's another of these early revolutionaries. And he wrote, Trotsky came round to see me. I very much dislike him. He's totally uncongenial.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  And Nadia, I have to say, would have agreed with that wholeheartedly. But Lenin had one strength, and this certainly marks him out from Stalin. He was a brilliant public orator. If you put him in a room with a thousand people, he could whip them up into a crazy thing, you know. I mean, he was really fantastic at speaking.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  And there are pictures of him, aren't there, at the time, on top of sort of cars and trucks, speaking to the crowds very animatedly?

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Absolutely. He never used a script, by the way. It was all off the cuff. And he just had this way with words, and he just knew how to get a crowd going. And this was to really mark him out from Stalin. Stalin, who was hopeless public speaker, had a thick Georgian accent, hated speaking in public as well. So there's a real difference between the two as they as they become rivals for the leadership to take over from Lenin.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  You can understand why Stalin, who we now know is a man who bears a grudge, and sometimes even for very small things, hates Lenin. There is another story, which I'd love you to tell us. Before the revolution, that tells you a lot about where Trotsky stood with Lenin. Can you tell us about Paris and the shoes?

• 10:07Speaker 04

  This is a lovely little anecdote. Yeah. Lenin and Trotsky went off to Paris together, which gives an indication of, you know, they were pretty close friends, genuine friends at this point. Lenin buys a pair of shoes, very elegant, dainty shoes, puts them on, starts walking around, and they are absolute agony. They're squeezing his feet, you know. And so he takes them off, gives them to Trotsky.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  I've had shoes like that, exactly.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  He says, I can't wear these shoes, they're for you. So Trotsky puts them on, they're all rather comfortable. He thanks Lenin, starts walking around, and they're agony for him too. And Lenin takes great delight in tormenting him as Trotsky's walking around in these incredibly painful shoes. And some people have said that this is a sign of Lenin's sadism, perhaps, but I think it's also a sign of their friendship, their banter, that they were genuinely pretty close to each other, far more than Lenin was ever close to Stalin. You know, they were friends, they were friends to the point where they go off to Paris together. There's another little anecdote, which I think is absolutely wonderful, that at the time of the civil war, so this is a desperate time in Russia, a young American-British sculptress goes off to Moscow. This is one of the Westerners who's fired by the potential

• 11:12Speaker 04

  hopes and promises of the revolution. She's called Claire Sheridan, and she sculpts several of the main, the principal architects of the revolution. She sculpts Lenin, Żezinski, and she sculpts Trotsky. So she spends a lot of time on her own in the room with him, and they develop a very, very close friendship. Claire Sheridan is a great believer in free love. She persuades Trotsky, she rather finds him rather dishy, persuades him to take off his shirt, admires his chest. Trotsky says, as she measures him with her calipers, he says, you're caressing me with your tools of steel. So, and all of this, so clearly, they quite possibly have a sexual relationship, in fact. Now, this would just be a simple

• 11:53Speaker 04

  anecdote, were it not for one extraordinary fact. Claire Sheridan has a very famous first cousin. Her first cousin is Winston Churchill. So at the very time Churchill is pouring British troops and munitions into Russia to try and snuff out this new regime, Claire Sheridan, his first cousin, is there, not only sculpting Trotsky, but quite possibly sleeping with her as well.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  Sleeping with the enemy, wow.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Sleeping with the enemy. And from that point on, she will be monitored by what becomes MI6, who monitor all her phone conversations, all her letters and everything, desperately worried that she's going to cause real problems for for her cousin.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Is there a suggestion, though, that Trotsky knows who's in power and knows how to rock boats, and that's why he himself is drawn to her? Or is this just one of those things that happens?

• 12:39Speaker 04

  It's quite possible, but it's also possible Trotsky, bit of a womanizer, as many of these Bolshevik revolutionaries were, saw his opportunity, good-looking woman in his studio, oh, well, if she wants me to take my clothes off, why not, you know?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  She wants to caress me with her calipers, I'm up.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Exactly. It sounds like a Carry On film, doesn't it?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Anyway, we discussed how, surprisingly perhaps, Stalin is is sort of oddly absent in Petrograd in 1917 at the key moment in October, when the Bolsheviks are actually seizing power. Now, in contrast to that, Trotsky genuinely is everywhere.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  Trotsky is at the heart of everything. He runs the Petrograd Soviet, which is one of the key engines of the revolution. He chairs the Military Revolutionary Committee in Petrograd. He orchestrates the men, the militias, who are going to attack and seize the Winter Palace. So he's really at the heart of it. And Trotsky being Trotsky, he makes sure that everyone knows he's at the heart of it. And while he's doing that, what a great opportunity to put Stalin down and say, where the hell were you? You weren't doing anything. And this becomes a sort of story of the revolution, is that Trotsky does everything and Stalin does nothing. It's totally unfair, actually. I mean, I'm not one to defend Stalin for many things, but Stalin was actually in Petrograd, he was writing for Pravda, he was producing all the propaganda that was to be so important

• 13:56Speaker 04

  for the success of the revolution. So he was there, of course he was there, at the heart of things. But Trotsky used this opportunity to promote himself.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  It's also interesting, because the idea that Trotsky is the man of action, and Stalin is the man of words. Because in a sense, you'd imagine that Trotsky, the intellectual, would be the one doing that, and that Stalin, the thug, would be out on the streets. But it's not, it's the opposite.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Well, the thing is about Trotsky is that he was also incredibly courageous. I mean, there is this one scene in 1917, which sums up, you know, the courage of the man from the civil war, you know. Tell us about the facing off against a mob of furious sailors, Giles, because that tells us a lot about the man.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Yes, this is the naval rebellion or mutiny in Kronstadt, where there are thousands of sailors who are sick of not having, of being deprived of a voice, of not being paid. They're really angry, and they gather as a demonstration. And Trotsky goes out and he confronts them head on. He gives a, delivers a speech, he shouts them down, harangues them. And this is quite a brave thing to do, you know. He's got, these guys could have come out and killed him.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  These guys are joining the revolution, or they're opposing the revolution?

• 15:08Speaker 04

  Well, that's a very good question. What side are they going to fall on? They, a lot of them would have supported the revolution, but now they're realising they've been left completely without a voice, as they were under the old Tsarist regime. So Trotsky comes out, harangues them. There's a postscript of this, to this story, which is rather less glorious for Trotsky, is that he then, when they continue to be truculent, he sends in the troops and brutally murders huge numbers of them. So this shows that, you know, Trotsky, the intellectual, the dilettante, if you like, can also be just as brutal as Lenin and Stalin, when he has to be.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  How interesting, because we often think of him as the victim and gentler than Stalin, in the sense that he was the one that got the ice pick run the other way around. But you think, had he got to power, he'd have been every bit as much of a brute as Stalin was.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  I think they were all brutes. All of the leading Bolshevik revolutionaries came from the same stable, in terms of violence and using violence to keep control. Just going back to one thing, which is quite interesting about Trotsky's role during the the actual revolution itself. Stalin himself wrote at the time, he wrote that Trotsky had played the leading vital role in the revolution. And when Stalin later came to publish his his sort of collected works, that particular document was removed by him. He wanted it expunged from the records. He wanted no trace of that he'd ever said this. So, so you can see this extraordinary sort of rivalry between the two of them playing out in paperwork as well. Who did what? Who was where, when? And, you know, who actually made this revolution successful?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  And there's this crucial moment, three years later, in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920, when the two have a confrontation. Tell us about that, Giles.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Yes, the Poles are hoping to regain lands that they've lost in the Great War. They go to war with the New Soviet Union. They do very well at first, but then gradually the Soviet forces, I have to say, under the brilliant command of Trotsky and his Red Army, remember Trotsky has built the Red Army from scratch into an incredible fighting force. And by 1920, they're pushing their way across Poland, and they are at the gates of Warsaw. They're almost, they're about to take the Polish capital, but they need more troops. Where can those troops come from? Well, Stalin has got a load of troops under his command. But Stalin is not interested in Warsaw, he's interested in capturing the city of Lvov. And so he uses all his forces, all his energies, everything at his disposal

• 17:33Speaker 04

  to take the city of Lvov, which ends in Trotsky and his Red Army being defeated by the Poles. The Poles see a glimmer of opportunity here, they take it, they crush the Red Army outside the gates of Warsaw, and the Red Army is forced back into Soviet territory. So this is kind of a moment of humiliation for Trotsky, and he sees it, he blames it directly on Stalin, who could have come to his aid, but didn't.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  I mean, strategically, capturing Lvov is going to be really important in the Second World War, because it's going to give Stalin at Yalta a massive bargaining chip when he installs his own sort of alternative Polish government. And when they're talking about what happens to Poland, he says, you know, they're all, they're all there. What are you talking about? Forget about these London Poles. You know, we've got, we've got the people who are going to take over a de-Germanfied, you know, Poland already. But, you know, that's a chat for another time. Trotsky, then.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  The landscape of all this, if you like, is the question of whether the Soviet Revolution is a revolution in one country, or if this is going to be a revolution that's going to spread right the way across Europe, through all the Western democracies. And there are very different points of view here between Lenin and Trotsky. On the one hand, let's have, try and promote revolution everywhere. And Stalin, on the other hand, saying, hold on a minute, let's get, let's consolidate the revolution within the Soviet Union. So there's a sort of hint to land to this whole, whole story going, what's, what's taking place?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Right, so I mean, let's, let's talk then. I mean, it's, it's kind of the power play that will set up the relationship between these two men, which will be sort of Stalin doing everything he can to undermine Trotsky. And I don't know, it looks to me that Stalin is the one with all of the energy and all the impetus. We kind of touched on this in the last episode, but there are a series of dirty tricks that then Stalin uses on Trotsky, starting with the funeral of Lenin, which, you know, we covered in glorious detail with the embalming that his wife did not want, did not ask for.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  The Palmer ham machine slicing Lenin's brain as well.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. Yes. Thank, thank you for that, Giles. But, but just, I mean, just tell us how exactly they maneuvered it so Trotsky couldn't be there and, you know, didn't have his photo taken at this really important moment.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is a wonderful piece of stagecraft on the part of Stalin. Stalin saw a unique opportunity at Lenin's funeral to present himself as the natural replacement, the natural leader to step into Lenin's shoes. And so he engineers the funeral, he orchestrates a whole event to make sure that Trotsky will not be there. Trotsky is actually sick in hospital, but obviously wants to be there at the funeral. He wants to be seen by all the thousands of people who are going to attend this funeral. And so what does Stalin do? He gives Trotsky the wrong date.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  I thought Trotsky would double check or someone else would call him up and say, where are you?

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Well, Stalin had thought of that as well. He calls his old mate Zhurzhinsky, running the checker, and ensures that any telegrams and any messages sent to Trotsky to tell him the date has been changed, don't get through. And so on the day of the funeral, Stalin, centre stage, delivers a eulogy, presents himself as the obvious natural successor to Lenin. And everyone's thinking, what about Trotsky? Oh, Trotsky's not here, you know. Obviously, he doesn't care that much about Lenin. You can sort of see the whispering going on in the crowds, you know. It's a brilliant and totally malevolent sort of act on the part of Stalin. And, and, you know, he loved pieces of theatre, Stalin, and

• 20:55Speaker 04

  this is perhaps his most malign piece of theatre to date, is simply airbrushing Trotsky out of the most important event in the Soviet Union to take place in years, you know.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  It's an extraordinary story. So what happens next? How does he build on this to maneuver Trotsky out of the succession?

• 21:12Speaker 04

  So what happens in the aftermath of Lenin's death is Stalin begins to consolidate his grip on power. Now, we spoke in the last episode about he has this role in the mechanisms of the party, which enables him to place his own supporters in key positions. And he really begins to form what becomes known as a troika around him. There's Stalin, there's Zinoviev and there's Kamenov, two loyal supporters of Stalin, and they begin to engineer Trotsky out of the picture. And so Trotsky is removed of Commissar for Military Affairs. That happens in 1920, January 1925, soon after Lenin's death. Then he's voted off the Politburo. This is a pretty big step. Then he's expelled from the party completely by 1927, and then

• 21:54Speaker 04

  he's sent into exile in 1928. So in the space of four years, or actually three years, really, Trotsky is outmaneuvered and just pushed out of the picture.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  You make it sound very easy, Giles. I mean, is there no counter coup by Trotsky? Because he's got the whole army on his side. He presumably could march in and, and sort of, you know, drive some tanks into the middle of proceedings if he wanted to.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, he could have done that, but he didn't. There are, of course, all sorts of shenanigans, manoeuvrings taking place. What's extraordinary is who backs Stalin as well. If you look at this, Kamenov, one of his key supporters, one of the members of this troika, Kamenov was married to Trotsky's sister, Olga. So this has the elements of sort of family feud about it, that actually individual members of the family are turning against their own. And this is what Trotsky was to find. So

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Simply because they recognized Stalin's overwhelming powers, he's packed the whole party with his men.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Or maybe he didn't like his brother-in-law. I mean, you know, he wouldn't be the first to sort of shave against a family member.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  I think Mr. Self-interest comes into play here as well. You know, they see which ways the wind is blowing. You know, it's very, this is typical of politicians, isn't it? They see who's on the winning, who's got the winning streak, and they back them to the hilt, you know. And these guys know that if they back Stalin and Stalin wins, they're going to be, they're in with a very good job at the end of it.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Kamenov lived happily ever after. No, he didn't. Join us after the break before we find out what happens next.

• 23:25Speaker 05

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 23:49Speaker 06

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 24:16Speaker 07

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Welcome back. So Trotsky realizes everybody's against him. Stalin has all the winning pieces. So he basically goes into exile. Where does he go, Giles?

• 24:50Speaker 04

  This is a problem for Trotsky, because if you're Trotsky, no one particularly likes you, particularly in the West. And so he tries, he goes to Turkey, then he goes to France, then he goes to Norway.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  What about the lady with her calipers? Did she not take him in for a while?

• 25:03Speaker 04

  Maybe, but maybe. I think MI6 were keeping such a close watch on her by this point, that that wasn't a possibility. So, yeah, he goes to these various countries and stays for a few months. And then he starts producing revolutionary material, and they will think, well, actually, we don't want this guy in our country. And so he ends up in the only place that will actually give him a home, and that's Mexico. And so this is where he settles in 1937. So it's quite a long time has passed, but he ends up there with his wife, who's followed him loyally, even though he's had a string of affairs, not very well documented, so we don't know much about them, but clearly he's been having affairs. But anyway, she's loyal, she follows him, and he is living in Mexico and very,

• 25:44Speaker 04

  very worried. Trotsky is a frightened man because he knows that Stalin bears his grudges and Stalin will surely come after him at some point in the future.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Now, one of the more jolly sort of diversions in Mexico, when you're not dodging Stalin's assassins, is hobnobbing with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, which would be quite fun, presumably.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Yes, the famous artists. Many people will be familiar with Frida Kahlo's famous paintings.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  The woman with the monobrow who's on lots of cushions at the moment. She's a favorite of illustrated cushions at the moment. I mean, a terrific painter who sort of documented her own pain through painting, you know. She had a terrible spinal problem, and, you know, a lot of them are hugely graphic depictions what pain feels like. As you were, just sort of fill that in, yeah.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  And Diego, we should also say, less famous today, but more famous at the time.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Then, yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  And doing extraordinary pictures of workers, but in a rather more sort of human workers than the kind of Soviet kitsch that we see of sort of chaps in steelworks and that sort of thing.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  But they lived in Mexico. They lived a very bohemian, artistic lifestyle. Everyone was pretty chilled out. And Trotsky fell into this lifestyle. He actually rather enjoyed it. He enjoyed it to the extent where he begins a relationship with Frida Kahlo. And so all goes well for the time being. But as I say, he's always aware that there's a shadow hanging over him. And he, this, you know, constantly.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Does he know this? I mean, is, are there earlier attempts that go wrong?

• 27:22Speaker 04

  He has seen what's happened in the Soviet Union with Stalin, the Great Purge, where Stalin systematically kills off his enemies. And we mentioned a few minutes earlier, we mentioned Zinoviev, we mentioned Kamenov, all of these people, all of these Commissars, the people who've supported Stalin's rise to power, virtually all of them will end up liquidated in Stalin's Great Purge. Stalin is utterly merciless. He will kill off anyone who he thinks is a challenge to his supreme authority. And the grudges he bears go way beyond just his inner circle in Moscow surrounding him. He will kill off anyone who he thinks might could damage him. And Trotsky has the power to damage Stalin while in exile, because

• 28:03Speaker 04

  Trotsky, remember, loves writing. He's writing all sorts of stuff. And he's writing how he views the events that took place in the aftermath of the revolution. And Stalin is not going to come out of this very well. And Stalin does not want this published. He wants Trotsky silenced.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  This is not exactly about Trotsky, but Stalin does sort of give his manifesto, if you like. And this is, again, Robert Service's biography is a treasure trove of these wonderful quotes from Stalin. "To pick out one's enemy, to prepare all the details of the blow, to slake one's thirst for a cruel revenge, and then go home to be. There is nothing sweeter." So you've got, you know, the roadmap ahead for Trotsky. And his life is, you know, being made hell because he's always looking over his shoulder and So Diego Rivera is not too happy with him anymore. And so, you know, he's run his friend circle is getting smaller. Must be quite suffocating for him in in Mexico. And at the same time, Stalin is making Trotsky's life hell.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  He's pretty much doing the same thing to that young wife that we met in the last episode.

• 29:08Speaker 04

  Nadia.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Nadia, yeah, Nadia. Tell us a little bit about how this is all unfolding for her, poor thing.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  Poor old Nadia, who wanted just desperately to be more than just a housewife and doing the cooking and stuff. And already during the revolution, she's played quite a role. She's been transcribing telegrams. She's been working for Lenin's personal office as well. She's played a role and now she's got kind of nothing to do. But she wants to do something, so she enrolls on the Industrial Academy in Moscow, taking a course in textiles. We get a little glimmer of the home life. It's really fascinating. In the letters she writes to Stalin, she describes, you know, going into into college in the morning and the tram breaks down or the bus breaks down and this this sort of all these domestic details. And you realise that what's so strange about these people, particularly Stalin, the monstrous Stalin,

• 29:57Speaker 04

  is he had a kind of quite a normal domestic life, you know, life went on, they had their family meals, they had their picnics, they went mushroom hunting. They did all the sort of stuff that people usually do. And then he'd go into work and sign off, sign off an order to killing 50,000 people. And it reminds me a little bit like the sort of guards of the concentration camps who would go into the camp in the morning, order 50,000 people to be gassed in the in the gas chambers, and then they come home for lunch with their wife.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  And then go and go and listen to a string quartet in the evening. Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  That's what I found extraordinary with Stalin is this ability to separate these two things. Let's murder 50,000 people in the morning and then have a really nice picnic in the afternoon, you know.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Although Giles, he wasn't lovely. He wasn't the picnicking sort. I mean, he constantly, if we are to believe, you know, sort of the documents, belittled her, made her feel stupid, got in the way of any kind of progress that she might make. I mean, 1926, she actually goes to Leningrad intending to divorce him, but he manages to talk her back. So this isn't, this isn't love's young stroke very old dream. I mean, it's not that either. I mean, she's she's not happy. She's not happy here.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  No, and I think this is compounded by the fact, and this is something we don't know much about, that clearly Stalin was having mistresses, he was having affairs. You know, he had this dacha in the countryside, he could pop off there with some attractive young woman. He he received letters, begging letters from women all across the Soviet Union. Oh, Stalin, dear Stalin, I want to be in your embrace, you know. So pretty peculiar, really, but he did, and he acted on some of these at least. And clearly, poor Nadia knew about this, and it left her absolutely distraught. She just couldn't deal with it. And remember, she was not the most stable of individuals at the best of times. Since there was a history of this running in the family, her brother had been really ill with psychological disorders. She was not a strong in terms of her mind, you know.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  And so every affair, every rumor that she heard would chip away at that that stability.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Now, this ends obviously very badly, and there's an extraordinary story about the night of her suicide, when she eventually takes her own life. So take us there to the night of the 7th of November, 1932.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is indeed a tragic story. All the party commissars have gathered for, they had this dinner every year to celebrate their great victory in the revolution. And at this dinner, Stalin begins to behave, I think we'd say just boorishly, you know, he begins to flirt with the women at the table. You know, sending out compliments to them and at the same time completely ignoring poor Nadia, who's sitting there looking at him just horrified at Stalin. The more he drinks, the worse he gets. And at the end, she's so in despair that she gets, she storms off away from the table and rushes outside. And this should have rung warning bells in Stalin's head, but it doesn't. He carries on flirting.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  The wife of Molotov, the commissar for foreign affairs, she realizes something is serious, seriously awry here. And she runs out after Nadia and tries to calm her down. Nadia is in a terrible state. She's in tears. She's she can't bear it any longer. And Polina takes her, they walk around the Kremlin several times, and she eventually calms her down. And she takes her back to her apartment in the in the Kremlin. Her and Stalin instantly have separate bedrooms, quite common at the time, and she goes to bed. Stalin, that night, we don't know his exact movements, but it is believed that he went off to one of the daches in the countryside, perhaps owned by one of his friends, and has an affair with one of the women he's been flirting with.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  He doesn't come back to his own apartment until the early hours of the morning. In fact, probably before, at four or five AM in the morning, goes straight to bed, doesn't even look in on checkup on Nadia, sees how she is. So the maids and domestics come into Nadia's bedroom that morning and they can't believe what they see. Nadia is lying in a pool of blood. She shot herself through the heart. And this in itself is obviously devastating news, but now they have to break that news to Joseph Stalin.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Not a job anyone would envy doing.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  I mean, and there are two ways of breaking the news. So, you know, on the one hand, we'll come to Stalin's reaction in a moment because it may not be as you expect. But certainly, you know, the official announcement in Pravda will not say that there was a gun involved. You know, they say she died of complications through appendicitis. And you have this whole sort of charade of the Politburo wives signing a public letter of condolence to Stalin. That gets published as well. There is such a tiny, tight circle that knows this poor, poor woman.

• 34:31Speaker 04

  And I need to, you need to just to add one thing to that as well, which astonished me and actually horrified me. Svetlana, the daughter of Stalin, was never told the truth either. She was told that her mother had died of an illness. And it was many years later, I think she was reading Time magazine, which had done a profile of Stalin. And it said, you know, of course, his wife Nadia, you know, shot herself through the heart. And Svetlana was devastated because all her life she'd lived, she'd been taught, told this lie by her own father that her mother, you know, had died from natural causes.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and I mean, it's so paranoid, is this circle of keeping this this news under wraps, that actually, you know, a maid is sent to a labour camp for repeating a rumor that she thought Stalin had killed her. I mean, you know, he hadn't, she'd done it herself, but still. So privately, he is shattered by this. I mean, you'd think a philanderer would go, woo-hoo, free at last, free at last. But he isn't, is he? I mean, he's kind of haunted by how he treated her.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  It's kind of odd. I've never really, and there's many things that we cannot understand about Stalin, and I think this is one of them. Because in one sense, on one hand, he really genuinely seemed horrified and grief-stricken by what had taken place. And perhaps saw that he had played a role in this, you know, his appalling behaviour. At the same time, he starts to blame Nadia for being the cause of all all his woes. I mean, he says, she made a cripple out of me. Now, is this grief speaking? Was he genuinely grief-stricken? Or was he now going to blame Nadia for everything that happened? It's very, very hard to know.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  There are those descriptions, Giles, which which we should put into the picture of him sitting in the room with her body, spitting at the floor. And I think he doesn't eat for four days or so. He sits there with the corpse, doesn't he, for for an incredible amount of time. And no one knows what to do, whether to do, no one dares to go in and sort of fish him out or.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  And and we see this in moments of great crisis in Stalin's life. So this is one of them, where simply he almost seems to fall apart. He seems like an empty vessel almost, you know. And we have it again, of course, famously, when the Hitler's tanks roll over the Soviet fronts in 1941. Now, this is, you know, a moment of great crisis. Stalin is the leader, the ultimate leader of the Soviet Union. He should be addressing the nation. He should be acting on this great invasion. What does he do? He disappears again. He does exactly what he does when Nadia commits suicide. He disappears and no one sees him for four days, you know, they can't get hold of him or anything. It's a peculiar way for somebody who's so in control, so dominant, you know, this all-powerful dictator.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  And at moments of the greatest crisis, he seems unable to cope and he just disappears.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, what follows that is the great terror. And we're going to go into the terror a lot more in in episode four. And, you know, what you need to know is that Zinoviev and Kamenev, the people who sort of helped Stalin to get rid of Trotsky, they come to a dreadful end, and we'll go into the details of that. Let's let us, you know, cast our eyes to Trotsky, who, you know, all this is going on on the home front. What is going on in Mexico? Because, you know, he must be saying, as somebody who can wreak this much havoc on the lives of people he loves, it's not looking good for him, is it?

• 37:48Speaker 04

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

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Have there been sort of Soviet assassins spotted in the bushes outside his or is he just expecting that there would be?

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Well, I think he expects there is going to be, and particularly because he set up this newspaper, if you like, or pamphlet called a bulletin of the opposition, in which he is overtly attacking Stalin and everything he's done. So, look, you know, Trotsky is almost inviting himself to be a target at this point, knowing full well what's already taken place in Moscow. But as I say, he's living behind a barricade. He's almost in his own little prison camp, you know. And fearful that at some point assassins are Going to come knocking on his door.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  So Giles, just give us a picture of where Trotsky is holed up. He's got it with his watchtower, his guarded gate, his own alarm system. This is in, what, Coiakan, which is a suburb of Mexico City, it's about 25 miles away?

• 39:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's Coiakan. It's very close to Mexico City. As you say, yeah, he's in this almost fortified compound. And really, we're still living the high life, still living the bohemian life, but increasingly worried that Stalin's hitmen are going to come for him.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  And, you know, he's writing still, but he's writing under a pseudonym, which I always find, you know, sad, old man, is what he writes under. And he knows that everything he's writing, Soviet intelligence is reading his mail, they're reading, you know, getting hold of any scrap of paper that he writes on. But he goes on publishing his journal, The Bulletin of the Opposition, is what it's called. And it's one of these bet noire publications that Stalin absolutely spits teeth about. So you know, you know, there is an attempt coming now. Before the famous ice pick, ice axe, everybody, ice axe to the brain. There is another attempt on Trotsky's life that people don't know about. Can you, can you tell us a little bit about that?

• 40:02Speaker 04

  I can, yes, it's dawn on 24th of May, 1940. The sun is just coming up over Mexico. And an artist named David Sequeros is approaching this compound, this armed compound. He has 20 armed men with him and he is determined to break in. And he's got some help because Trotsky has a young American volunteer who's been working for him for ages called Robert Sheldon Hart. He's, yeah, as I said, he's loyal, he's been helping Trotsky out. And Trotsky has no doubts that, you know, to Hart's loyalty. But he, what he doesn't know is that Hart is working for Soviet intelligence. And when this assassin, would be assassin, David Sequeros,

• 40:46Speaker 04

  with his 20 armed men come to the villa with its watchtowers and its barbed wire, et cetera. Hart lets them into the compound. They burst in, Trotsky and his wife Natalia are in their bedroom. They burst in with their guns, they fire, spray the room with gunfire. Extraordinarily, Trotsky and Natalia roll out of bed, onto the floor, and escape being hit by the gunfire. And bullets go through the wall and actually, one of the grandchildren, actually Trotsky's grandchildren, is hit by a stray bullet. But these two, the couple, Trotsky and his wife, are safe. The assassins leave the place, probably thinking they've done their work, but they haven't. Trotsky gets up completely unharmed.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  So Stalin's first assassination attempt has failed miserably.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  We should say it doesn't end well for Hart either, the guy who let them in.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  It doesn't well end well for him because he finds himself with a bullet in his head. As so often happens, the men who have proved servants to Stalin then get, you know, pay the price as well. So he's killed and yeah, Trotsky, amazing survivor, has survived this first assassination attempt on his life.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Willie, ask him about the ice axe, ask him about the ice axe.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Tell us about the ice axe. What does, what is the final showdown?

• 42:06Speaker 03

  And also, what is an ice axe? What does it look like? Can you describe an ice axe?

• 42:10Speaker 02

  You probably don't need many ice axes in Mexico. I mean, it's not like it's sort of, you know, the Falkland Islands or something.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Can you describe what it looks like?

• 42:17Speaker 04

  Well, well, hold on a minute, just, just wait a minute because this news gets back to Stalin. Can you imagine Stalin being told 20 men armed with machine guns burst into Trotsky's villa, burst into his bedroom, fire at the double bed and actually completely missed their target, you know?

• 42:32Speaker 03

  You're like Trotsky!

• 42:35Speaker 04

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

• 43:00Speaker 03

  Do tell, yeah.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  I believe, you're going to have so many people correcting this, I'm sure. But an ice pick, I believe, has two sharp ends, which would be a pretty effective way of killing somebody, I guess, if you sink it into their head. An ice axe has one, a pick on one end and a blunt, sort of like a spade on the other end.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  It's the thing that people climbers use. It's, I know, I know, now I know exactly, it's the kind of thing that they sort of shove into a glacier and then pull themselves up. I mean, there's a nasty bit of kids.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  But there are no glaciers in Mexico. What, what is this object doing here?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  He brings it with him.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  I don't know, maybe he bought it in Spain. I'm not sure where he bought it is terrifically important to the story, you know? Stalin won't be saying, where did you buy it, by the way?

• 43:40Speaker 03

  I'm with you, Giles. I'm not interested in the receipt either, but so, so tell us how.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  It's an incredibly probable way of being assassinated, anyway.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  Yes, but Mercedar, Mercedar, he's obviously quite a clever guy. He has built up a very close relationship with one of the maids who works in the household. She's called Sylvia Agolov. I think she's a very good friend of Trotsky's wife, actually. He makes friends with her, befriends her, and she allows him into the villa to, because he says he wants to talk with, have a little chat with Trotsky about something he's written. Gets into Trotsky's study. Trotsky starts talking about what he's writing about, something, the new thing he's writing about Stalin. At which point, Mercedar pulls out his ice axe, which he's kept concealed beneath his coat, raises it above his head and slams it into Trotsky's brain.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  You might think that would kind of do you in, but Trotsky seems to, as we say, like Rasputin, seems to be made of stronger stuff. He's not killed by this blow to the head. In fact, he goes down, he sinks his teeth into Mercedar's arm, bites him really, really hard, so hard that he draws blood.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Well done, Trotsky.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  And at this point, the alarm is raised and Mercedar makes his escape. But unfortunately for Trotsky, that ice axe, I almost said ice pick there, has done its business. It's bitten deep into Trotsky's brain. He's rushed to hospital, doctors try to save him, but all to no avail. On the following day, he succumbs to his wounds, he's dead. And Stalin finally has had his revenge.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Now Giles, is this actually a direct emissary from Stalin? Or is this just someone who disagrees with Trotsky?

• 45:18Speaker 04

  We don't know that directly, but we do know that Soviet intelligence have got bureaus all over the West now, including in the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, certainly. And so it's almost certainly, it will have come through official channels and will of course have had Stalin's orders at the top of it. And of course, Mercedar, he doesn't end, come out of this very well, very well because he's arrested. And will spend.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  There's a little bit of bite mark in his arm.

• 45:44Speaker 04

  There's a very nasty, nasty teeth marks in his arm. And he will spend 20 years in a Mexican prison for having.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Although, although, when he's released Giles in 1960, he's basically backpalmed, you know, the hero of the Soviet Union medal in Moscow. So, you know, to answer your question, Willie, I don't think you'd have got that if it wasn't, you know, sort of some kind of state sanctioned thing.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  But you know, you know, Anita, he has, he has spent 20 years, 20 years in prison. And for, for, for British listeners, then you get a Blue Peter badge at the end of it, you know? I mean, it's not, it's not great, is it?

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Fair point, okay, but it's something, isn't it? You know, it might get him into the zoo at a cap price.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  I should say, well, for a drawing of a whale.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  Did you?

• 46:32Speaker 02

  I still got it in the drawer somewhere.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  Have you still got the drawing or the badge?

• 46:36Speaker 02

  I've got the bad.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Okay, lovely. Listen, so Stalin, you know, revenge is best served cold. He waited over a decade to finish this man off. Just, you know, again, remind us, why did it matter so much to him? This one man, this far away, Trotsky really had, you know, lost every scrap of real power. Why do away with him now?

• 47:01Speaker 04

  Ah, because Trotsky was pretty much the only person who could contest what Stalin was saying and could write a very, very different narrative of actually what had taken place. Trotsky was there from the very beginning. He knew everyone involved in, in what had taken place during the revolution. After Lenin's death, how Stalin had dealt with his enemies. From that point of view, he is extremely dangerous to Stalin. Stalin, remember, always wanted to control the narrative of how he came to power, of how he became ruler of the Soviet Union. Trotsky could undermine that. And so from Stalin's point of view, he had to be done away with.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  So that's Trotsky, the rival who never stopped being dangerous, even with no army and no country left.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  And Stalin, who intriguingly never quite stopped being afraid of him, right to the very end. Well, in the next episode, we go to a murder in Leningrad in December 1934 that Stalin used to unleash the great terror. We follow that story through to the war that nearly destroyed the country he ruled.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  And if you can't wait, empirepoduk.com is the place to go. Empirepoduk.com, just become a member of our gang. You get so many things, you get to listen to things when you want, you don't have to wait. And the fantastic newsletter. Tell the next time we meet then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arndt.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  And goodbye from me, William Durumpel.

• 48:35Speaker 05

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Platforms like ChatGPT make marketing 100 times harder. To be the answer in AI, you have to be the answer everywhere, constantly. That's why Profound built a marketing platform that comes with your AI marketer. It ingests your brand and AI search data in real time to identify opportunities, then do the work, all while keeping you in the loop where needed. Profound already powers marketing for a third of the Fortune 100 and thousands of teams globally. To learn more, go to tryprofound.com.

• 49:29Speaker 07

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes.

• 49:37Speaker 07

  A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings. The end of jobs or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.