© Wikimedia Commons (Trotsky) / iStock (Background)
In August 1940, a Russian expatriate worked in his
well-sheltered garden in Mexico City. He surrounded himself with chickens, rabbits, and peaceful trees. But the man was no vacationing grandpa - he was one of the most famous political exiles in the world, and his home in Coyoacan was surrounded by armed guards and fortress-like walls.
Leon Trotsky had been a political liability in Russia for years before his hasty expulsion. Though he had helped lead the Communist Party to power in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Trotsky quickly became
persona non grata to Joseph Stalin. Trotsky's opposition to Stalin's bloated bureaucracy and his
publicly-stated belief that Stalinism wasn't taking Communism far enough toward permanent world revolution cost him everything.
When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, it was thought that Trotsky, who had endured a long
Ramón Mercader
marriage of political convenience with Lenin, might come to power. But Stalin helped drum up and took advantage of anti-Trotsky sentiment to seize Soviet control instead. Stalin acted swiftly against the former hero, and he swept Trotsky out of his political positions, the Communist Party, and eventually the USSR itself.
As Trotsky looked for a new state to call home, Stalin scrubbed him from photographs and published texts, but Trotsky was more concerned about preserving his actual life. Though he managed to find political asylum in Mexico, he
survived multiple assassination attempts over the years and a raid on his compound.
However, on August 20, 1940, Trotsky's luck ran out. A man
who called himself Jacques Mornard had become friends with Trotsky and his armed guards. They exchanged sympathetic political views and chatted about trivial matters, but Mornard was actually Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent.
Comment: Evidently throughout human history our world has undergone considerable and dramatic changes: