Stalin's murderous vendetta against Trotsky

Mexico City, August 1940. A study door closes, an ice axe is razed, and the Bolshevik Revolution's greatest exile meets a grisly end. But what led to this dramatic moment? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Danny Byrd speaks to Josh Ireland about Joseph Stalin's mortal enemy and the story behind their deadly rivalry. From Istanbul to Paris, Norway to Mexico, to Trotsky's affair with the artist Frida Karlo and the pitiless destruction of his family, Josh explains how this is a story of exile, obsession, and the long reach of totalitarian power.

Josh, for the benefit of listeners who might only know the name, who was Leon Trotsky and how did he become Stalin's most dangerous enemy? So Leon Trotsky was one of the most significant figures in the Russian Revolution of 1917. And like a lot of the other revolutionaries, he was sort of a figure that emerged from the outer corners of what was then the Russian Empire. In his case, he came from what we now know as Ukraine.

And he was an incredibly bright, gifted son of illiterate farmers. So there was no sort of sign in his early life that he would go on to have the sort of career or existence that he did. And I think what took him, sort of catapulted him into, you know, the center of the 20th century was what catapulted a lot of his comrades into, into the same space, was that he discovered communism, that he found this animating. belief that kind of filled every atom of his body with obsession would to create a new world. The Bolsheviks, who were the radical socialists who would eventually seize control of the whole of Russia, they've often been compared to millenarian Christians.

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