It may all seem a long time ago, but there are lessons for today in the severity and determination with which Joseph Stalin went after his enemies, and The Death of Trotsky reveals just how relentless the Russian despot was in arranging the assassination of his number one enemy.
Josh Ireland reveals in this meticulously researched, real-life spy thriller that Leon Trotsky had every reason to believe he would be killed by Stalin, who may not have been the most evil man ever to have lived but is certainly in the running for that title.
He writes: “Trotsky knew he would be murdered. For him, the only question was when.”
After the death in 1924 of the first Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, there was a succession battle between the two other founding fathers of the Soviet state, Trotsky and Stalin.
The two men had formed an immediate and almost physical revulsion for each other. “Stalin hated Trotsky’s delicately balanced pince-nez and sweep of dark glossy hair, his self-confidence, eloquence and authority. Trotsky was repulsed by the Georgian’s pockmarked face, his coarse manners, his provincialism.”
Trotsky’s ill health at a critical moment in the succession struggle meant that he lost the race to become the new Russian leader.
Once Stalin had triumphed and taken control it was clear that Trotsky’s days were numbered.
Ireland writes: “He thought about Trotsky at night, in the last moments before the book he was reading slipped out of his hands and he fell asleep on one of the large, hard divans that were in every room in his residences… There were no upper limits to Stalin’s paranoia or vindictiveness.
“He was a greedy, indiscriminate hater. He understood Trotskyism as a particularly virulent virus: even fleeting contact could infect you, leaving marks that were impossible to wash off.
“Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent people lost their lives, or were condemned to the various hells of Soviet incarceration, because somebody somewhere imagined that they were connected to Trotsky.”
While Stalin came from peasant stock, Trotsky was far more dynamic, urbane and eloquent, despite his own humble background.
“This precocious son of an illiterate Jewish farmer from an obscure part of what is now Ukraine, he emerged as a national figure during the revolution in 1905 that briefly shook the Russian Empire’s foundations.
“Somehow this shortsighted dandy who had never worked in a factory, nor spent a day in uniform, nor even studied at a university … could fire the imaginations and mirror the emotions of workers, soldiers and students,” Ireland writes.
From the moment Stalin took power, his persecution of Trotsky began, first by banishing him from Moscow and then by deporting him from Russia in 1928. However, the banishment of his rival was not enough.
“The liquidation of Trotsky became the chief objective of Stalin’s foreign policy. In the fevered corners of Stalin’s imagination, his credibility and authority depended on the extermination of his former comrade.
“Trotsky was, in his own words, Stalin’s ‘enemy number one’. Stalin could not bear the idea that most people who called themselves communists saw Trotsky as synonymous with the October Revolution and the creation of the Red Army.”
Trotsky ended up in exile in Mexico in 1936, after stays in Norway, France and Turkey.
“And yet, although Mexico offered a respite from many of the troubles that had plagued him for so long, it was not an escape. Within days of his arrival, a cohort of experienced Soviet agents slipped into the country. They were there to watch him. Others, surely, would soon come; but they would have a very different purpose in mind,” Ireland notes.
The Death of Trotsky tells how friends, family and supporters of Stalin’s main rival were tracked down and assassinated by the Soviet secret service, how his supporter base was successfully infiltrated by Stalin’s agents and how the assassination of Trotsky in his seemingly secure compound in Mexico was plotted and executed.
An initial attempt came close to killing Trotsky and his wife, but they survived. It was not long before a successful assault was carried out by a lone assassin, a Spanish communist, Ramón Mercader del Río.
Much of the book covers the activities of Mercader and his associates — and of the way in which he won the trust of members of Trotsky’s entourage, allowing the necessary access to carry out the killing, which took place in August 1940.
Even though we know what happened in the end, this is still a gripping read.
The reader still recoils from the choice of weapon — an ice axe, which was thrust into Trotsky’s skull. It was a fatal blow, but it took him a few days to die.
Mexico was a good place to be an assassin, with no death penalty. Mercader served a term in jail after he was convicted of killing Trotsky, but he was freed in 1960 and went to Russia, where he was acclaimed a hero. He died in Cuba in 1978.
While Stalin may have been the most brutal leader to have defiled the corridors of the Kremlin, it is not difficult to detect the same steely determination, ruthlessness, contempt for human life and human rights in the more recent holders of the Russian presidency.
Stalin and Trotsky may be no more, but brutality and the assassination of political opponents are still in favour in Moscow.
As modern-day dissidents have also discovered, you can run from Russia, but you cannot always escape the state assassin’s axe, poison or dagger.
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