Book description
Leon Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian
Revolution, an authoritarian organizer, who might have succeeded Lenin
and become the ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time the Second
World War broke out he was in exile, living in Mexico in a villa
borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, guarded
only by several naïve young American acolytes. The household was awash
with emotional turmoil - tensions grew between Trotsky and Rivera, as
questions arose over his relations with Frida Kahlo. His wife was
restless and jealous. Outside of the villa, Mexican communists tried
to storm the house, the Trotskys' sons were being persecuted and
killed in Europe, and in Moscow, Stalin personally ordered his secret
police to kill his fiercest left-wing critic - at any cost. By the
summer of 1940, they had found a man who could penetrate the tight
security around the house in far-away Mexico . . . Bertrand
Patenaude's book reconstructs a famous state crime with chilling
precision and a page-turning quality. It tells the amazing story of a
deadly rivalry, revolutionary fanaticism and tragic violence and loss.
Bertrand Patenaude teaches history at the Hoover Institution,
Stanford, California. He is the author of The Big Show in Bololand, a
remarkable account of the US relief expedition to the Soviet Union
during the famine of 1921.
