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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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The Leon Trotsky Museum
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| Parent | Parent Candidate |
| Contributor | Thomas Walker |
| Post Date | , 12:am |
| Description | On a balmy summer evening in August 1940, a young man gained admittance to the study of Leon Trotsky's heavily guarded house near Mexico City. He asked Trotsky to read something he had written. While Trotsky was poring over his article, the visitor removed an alpine climbing axe from his overcoat and sank it into the great thinker's skull.
The assassin, who called himself Jacson Mornard, was traveling with a forged Canadian passport and claimed to be in Mexico on business. In reality, he was a Stalinist agent who had been posing as the boyfriend of Trotsky's personal secretary in order to carry out his mission.
Joseph Stalin had expelled Trotsky from Russia in 1929 for relentless criticism of his dictatorial regime and its corruption of Marxist ideals. For almost a decade, Trotsky was doomed to wander from country to country - Turkey, France, and Norway - under constant pressure from Stalinist elements. However, he continued speaking out in letters, essays and books, including his Diary in Exile and his monumental three-volume History of the Russian Revolution.
Finally, in 1936 Trotsky was granted asylum in Mexico and settled in Coyoacán on the outskirts of Mexico City. At the time, Mexico had a strong Communist party, but it, too, was divided into volatile Stalinist and anti-Stalinist factions. In the middle of this political hotbed, the aging revolutionary and his wife of many years, Natalia Sedova, established their first real home since leaving the Soviet Union.
The house in which they spent most of their life together in Mexico still stands on a peaceful, tree-lined street a few blocks from Coyoacán's main plaza, and is now a museum maintained by a non-profit organization that helps other political dissidents seeking asylum in Mexico. Behind its high stone walls and steel shutters, an intriguing slice of 20th-century history has been preserved for all to see. |
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