Trotsky's End

Seventy five years ago this August, Leon Trotsky, a pivotal leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, was murdered in Mexican exile. The site of his murder is now a museum and shrine, of sorts.

On a cool spring night in May 1940, a band of Stalinists entered Leon Trotsky’s home in Mexico City and blasted his bedroom with machine gun fire. Trotsky’s wife, Natalia Sedova, threw herself on top of her husband to shield him from the bullets. In the next room, Trotsky’s grandson, Sieva Volkov, pushed his bed away from the wall and hid behind it to protect himself. A bullet hit Sieva in the foot, but all three members of the Trotsky family survived. After the attack, Trotsky wrote that his most anguished memory from that night was hearing Sieva’s tearful cries as the bullets rattled the building.

The failed attempt on Trotsky’s life occurred in Coyoacán, a colonial village just outside Mexico City, where the cobbled streets are lined with jacaranda trees that explode with purple blossoms during the first days of spring.

Central Mexico was a long way from Yanovka, the small Ukrainian village where Trotsky was born. The son of Jewish farmers, Trotsky first became involved in revolutionary activities as a young man. After spending most of his early adulthood abroad, Trotsky returned to Russia during the first Russian Revolution of 1905, was arrested in 1906, fled exile, then spent the next decade in Europe. He returned to Russia in May 1917 and was crucial in the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. As Stalin wrote in 1918, “All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet.” He subsequently became Commissar for Foreign Affairs and was instrumental in negotiating the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.

Trotsky’s study reconstructed as it was in 1940.

The bullet-ridden wall of Trotsky’s study.

During the Russian Civil war (1918-1922), Trotsky commanded the Red Army, and was assumed by many to be Lenin’s heir. Yet, famously out of the capital when Lenin died, Trotsky played his hand badly. Over the next four years, from 1924 to 1928, Trotsky was engaged in a power struggle with Josef Stalin that he ultimately lost. Despite being one of the primary architects of the Revolution, he was expelled from the Communist Party, exiled to Central Asia, and finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929.

Throughout their exile, Trotsky and his wife Natalia lived in constant fear of assassination by Stalin’s agents – hardly unfounded, given that by this time almost every other Old Bolshevik had been imprisoned, shot, or both.

When the couple moved into their house in Coyoacán, walls surrounding the property were extended to over twice their original height to keep out intruders, and equipped with watchtowers. A dedicated group of Mexican and American guards lived in a neighboring home. Windows facing the street were bricked up and Trotsky kept two cars at the ready to use in a potential escape.

Yet even the mountains of Central Mexico did not offer refuge from the Stalinist purges. Robert Sheldon Harte, a 25-year-old American guard, let in the group of attackers who shot up Trotsky’s bedroom. The mercenaries included the famous Mexican painter, David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of the leaders of the Mexican muralist movement of the early twentieth century. The would-be killers split into two groups, the first showering the guards’ house next door with bullets, while the others fired over 200 shots at the windows and doors of Trotsky’s home until they were sure the famous revolutionary was dead. Siqueiros and the other assailants fled with Robert Harte and later murdered him, dumping his body on the outskirts of Mexico City. Trotsky never admitted the possibility that Harte had betrayed him. Instead, he put a plaque by the entrance to his home that read, “In Memory of Robert Sheldon Harte, Murdered by Stalin.”

Three months after Siqueiros’ unsuccessful attempt, a second, more elaborate plot was organized. Ramón Mercader, a Spanish communist originally from Barcelona, was recruited by the Soviet NKVD to assassinate Trotsky.

After receiving professional training as a secret agent in Moscow, Mercader assumed the identity of a Belgian named Jacques Mornard. He then posed as a Trotskyite in Paris, where he met Sylvia Ageloff, the sister of one of Trotsky’s secretaries. The two became lovers and eventually moved to Mexico City. Later, when Ageloff visited Trotsky, Mercader would wait outside, playing the part of the loyal boyfriend and making small talk with the guards. Mercader further allayed suspicions and endeared himself to Trotsky’s inner circle by offering rides to the guards and leaving gifts for Trotsky’s grandson, Sieva.

Late in the summer of 1940, Mercader asked Trotsky if he would read and correct a political paper he had written. The guards had long since stopped checking Mercader for weapons, and, when he arrived with the paper, Mercader simply walked in with an ice axe hidden beneath the heavy coat he wore during Mexico’s summer rainy season. While Trotsky sat reviewing the paper, Mercader drove the axe into his skull.

The day after the attack, August 21, 1940, Trotsky was dead.

Journey to Coyoacán

Trotsky’s choice of Mexico as a place of refuge was not random. Before Trotsky and Natalia arrived there, they had spent nearly a decade exiled in Kazakhstan, Turkey, France, and Norway. By the end of 1936, the Soviet Union was putting economic pressure on the Norwegian government, forcing Trotsky to search for a new home. The Mexican artist Diego Rivera came to the rescue, petitioning his country’s president, Lázaro Cárdenas, to grant Trotsky asylum. Trotsky and Natalia departed Oslo in an oil tanker and arrived in the Mexican port of Tampico, on the Gulf of Mexico, three weeks later. For the next two years, the couple holed up in the childhood home of Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo, just a few blocks away from the house in Coyoacán where Trotsky would later be murdered.*

If Trotsky was one of the principle Russian figures of his day, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were two of the most well-known and beloved characters in Mexican history. Even the two artists’ physiognomy was famous. Kahlo was a slight woman with a dark unibrow and a penchant for wearing flowers in her hair as well as rebozos – woven shawls worn by indigenous Mexican women. Rivera had an imposing physical stature and a personality to match. He frequently carried a gun and was very outspoken and enormously fat, with a paunch that bulged from his pants and shirt like an overinflated balloon. His chubby face, shadowed by the Stetson hats he favored, resembled that of an obese cartoon lizard. Yet Rivera’s paintings received international acclaim, and, despite his ugliness, women flocked to his side. He had a reputation for infidelity and married four times.

Frida Kahlo’s Blue House.

The revolutionary’s famous hosts, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Kahlo spent her childhood in a house painted the color of blueberries – today known as the Blue House – surrounding a wide courtyard on a tranquil Coyoacán street called Calle Londres. Tragedy marked Kahlo’s childhood. A bout with polio at age six crippled her right leg. Then, as a young woman, she was badly injured in a collision between a streetcar and a bus. A metal handrail sliced through her pelvis during the accident, and her spinal column was broken in three places. Despite countless surgeries, Kahlo never truly recovered from the event. She suffered from chronic pain and was often bedridden for months at a time, during which she painted some of her greatest works.

Kahlo first met Rivera while she was studying at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. She was a young student when Rivera, already a famous artist, was commissioned to paint a mural at her school. She would watch Rivera paint and once confessed to her friends that she desired to have a child by him. Although her physical disability never permitted Kahlo to have children, she met Rivera through mutual friends years later and the two soon married. Though their relationship had its ups and downs – the two divorced and later remarried – they retained a strong emotional bond until Kahlo’s death in 1954, a bond reinforced by their mutual dedication to Communism and art.

Rivera was fascinated with Russia. He learned to speak Russian while living in Paris as a young man, had many Russian friends, and traveled to Russia throughout his life. He also married a Russian woman while living in France and once claimed, falsely, to have fought in the Russian Revolution. Although Kahlo never traveled to Russia, she was devoted to Communism and admired Soviet leaders. Near the end of her life, Kahlo was confined to a hospital and forced to lay still in a plaster corset to heal her back. She hung a Soviet flag in her room and painted a hammer and sickle on one of her corsets.

Although Kahlo once claimed that she was “a better Communist” than her husband, Rivera retained a great, if troublesome, allegiance to the Communist Party throughout his life. Viewed by many Communists as having too close a relationship with capitalists, Rivera was thrown out of the party for accepting commissions to paint murals for the Mexican government and the American Ambassador to Mexico. Rivera countered that his murals, painted in large public spaces, were subversive revolutionary propaganda. He often painted images of industrious proletarians next to greedy capitalists, complete with images of Marx and the Soviet flag. In 1933, Rivera was fired after adding a portrait of Lenin to a fresco he was commissioned to paint inside New York’s Rockefeller Center. So it was that, when he returned to Mexico later that year, Rivera was viewed by his own government as a leftist radical, while Communists viewed him as not extreme enough.

As Stalin consolidated his power over the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Rivera began to ally himself with the ideals of Trotskyism. He believed Stalin had undermined the Revolution’s original intent, and the artist joined Trotsky’s Fourth International in 1936. When Trotsky and Natalia arrived in Mexico, Rivera was too ill to greet them, so he sent Frida in his place. Trotsky traveled from the Gulf Coast to Mexico City in complete secrecy. The president of Mexico himself, Lázaro Cárdenas, sent a train to carry Trotsky and Natalia to the Mexican capital, where they were then covertly escorted to the Blue House on Calle Londres.

The home was secured from potential attack, yet Trotsky could never be sure whom he could trust. Rivera was one of the few people that he would visit with alone. Trotsky took frequent trips to the surrounding country with Kahlo and Rivera, where he collected cacti and went horseback riding. During these outings, Kahlo and Trotsky developed a flirtatious relationship, and the two eventually had a love affair, meeting in secret at Kahlo’s sister’s house. Both Rivera and Kahlo were known for dalliance throughout their marriage, but Kahlo’s romantic encounters with Trotsky were one of her highest-profile liaisons. Trotsky was rumored to have fallen deeply in love with Kahlo, who allegedly ended their romance in the summer of 1937. Although it is unknown whether Rivera ever learned about Kahlo’s affair with Trotsky, some have speculated that it contributed to the couple’s divorce in 1939.

Exterior view of the Trotsky Museum, showing one of the pillboxes constructed on the roof to protect the exiled revolutionary.

Trotsky and Rivera began having disagreements about politics and Rivera’s participation in the Fourth International about a year after Kahlo’s and Trotsky’s affair. Rivera sought a higher bureaucratic position in the Mexican Trotskyist movement, but Trotsky countered that he lacked the political background and focus for such a task. Rivera was infuriated. He left the Fourth International entirely in 1939. Once Rivera broke relations with Trotsky, the Russians moved out of the Blue House to a new home just a few blocks away, on Calle Viena.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, both Kahlo and Rivera became supporters of Stalin.

La Casa de León Trotsky

Trotsky’s new home in Coyoacán was a T-shaped brick house situated along the Churubusco River and formerly owned by a wealthy Italian family. Trotsky and Sedova moved in during May 1939, about a year before the Siqueiros attack. Four months later, Trotsky’s 13-year-old grandson, Sieva, who was in the care of a family in France, arrived in Mexico to live with his grandparents.

The three members of the Trotsky family lived a humble life behind their fortified walls. Trotsky landscaped the grounds with cacti he collected in the Mexican countryside, and installed a henhouse and rabbit hutches. The exiled Russian believed that any good revolutionary should be just as familiar with manual labor as with political and intellectual work. So he took care of his animals for several hours each morning before retiring to his study, where he worked on political and theoretical writing, including a biography of Stalin.

Trotsky with Andre Breton, Diego Rivera, May 1938.

Natalia recalled that Trotsky often interrupted his feeding of his rabbits in the morning when he wanted to put down an idea that he didn’t want to forget. His study was lined with bookcases holding the works of Lenin and Marx, as well as all 86 volumes of the Brockhaus and Efron Russian Encyclopedia. Trotsky spent his last days dictating his writing into an Ediphone, a device invented by Thomas Edison that recorded speech onto wax cylinders. Trotsky’s secretaries worked in an adjacent office, transcribing his recordings. After dinner each night, the entire household met to review the day’s work.

Trotsky was devastated by his falling out with Rivera. Kahlo had left for Paris to attend a show of her paintings when relations between the two men began to fall apart. Trotsky wrote Kahlo in Paris, appealing for her help, “to reestablish the political and personal friendship.” Kahlo sided with her husband’s political decision to break with Trotsky.

Interestingly enough, when Kahlo received Trotsky’s letter, Ramón Mercader, who had been recruited to kill Trotsky, crossed paths with her in Paris. Kahlo later recalled that Mercader asked her to find him a place to live near Trotsky’s house in Coyoacán. Mercader even pursued Kahlo while she was in Paris, but she rejected his advances. As it turned out, Sylvia Ageloff proved to be a more suitable woman to help Mercader gain access to Trotsky.

Because of their soured relationship, Rivera was believed to have taken part in the first botched attempt on Trotsky’s life. Rivera fled to San Francisco to escape possible interrogation, Yet after Ramón Mercader succeeded in entering the house on Calle Viena with the ice axe, it was Kahlo who was accused of collaborating in Trotsky’s death, perhaps because of the couple’s falling out with the Russian revolutionary. Kahlo was held in jail for two days and her health took a turn for the worse. If Trotsky originally created a rift between Rivera and Kahlo, his murder seemed to bring them back together. After Trotsky was killed, Rivera asked Kahlo to join him in San Francisco so that she could receive medical attention. The two remarried three months later.

Even though Mercader’s ice axe left a seven-centimeter gash in Trotsky’s head, he did not immediately die. Trotsky struggled with Mercader until his guards intervened and nearly beat the murderer to death. Rather than kill Mercader, however, Trotsky insisted that his guards spare the assassin’s life, so that he could confess about his involvement with Stalin. Mercader never revealed his true identity or his motivation for the attack. He spent two decades imprisoned in Mexico City for the crime (his original sentence of 40 years was reduced by half for good behavior). After his release from jail, Mercader traveled to Cuba and the Soviet Union, where he was welcomed as a hero. Upon his death, nearly four decades after he killed Trotsky, Mercader was buried in Moscow.

After Trotsky’s death, the Mexican government bought the house from Natalia in order to help support her through her widowhood. Twenty years after her husband’s assassination, Natalia returned to France, where friends took care of her until her death in 1962. Trotsky’s grandson Sieva adopted the Spanish name of Esteban and married Palmira Fernández, an exile from the Spanish Civil War. The two remained in Mexico and moved into the guard’s house neighboring Trotsky’s final home, where they raised four daughters. In 1972, the rightist Mexican government, which had grown paranoid of Communist influences in Mexico, forced Esteban and his wife off the property. Three years later, however, the government permitted Esteban to found a museum in his grandfather’s former home. The Museo Casa de León Trotsky – The Leon Trotsky House Museum – stands on Calle Viena to this day.

Trotsky’s grave at the site of his house-museum in Coyoacán.

Trotsky with his wife, Natalia Sedova, and son Sieva (who today goes by the name Esteban Volkov).

A Refugee in Mexico

Coyoacán is no longer the peaceful suburb that welcomed Trotsky and Natalia. Mexico City’s population has soared to over 20 million, swallowing Coyoacán and expanding miles beyond into shantytowns that rise up into the surrounding mountains. Rents have skyrocketed as Coyoacán, with its charming colonial plaza set before a sixteenth century church, has become one of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the Churubusco River alongside Trotsky’s former home has long since been filled in. A busy highway, along which city buses belch dark clouds of exhaust into the smoggy skies, now stands in its place.

Every day, groups of Mexican and foreign tourists walk beneath the shade of purple jacaranda trees to visit the Leon Trotsky Museum. Spanish and English speaking guides lead them through the grounds where Trotsky lived out his last days. In addition to the museum, a library and an auditorium on site are open to the public and regularly host movie clubs and seminars on the subject of asylum. Every August, on the anniversary of Trotsky’s death, Esteban Volkov, now 89, comes to speak publicly at the museum about his memories of living with Trotsky as a boy. This summer, the museum will mark the 75th anniversary of Trotsky’s death with a day of talks on the famous revolutionary’s life.

Alternatively known as the Institute for the Right to Asylum, in 2016 the Trotsky Museum plans to start offering legal counsel to refugees in Mexico. This is in response to the growing need for refugee services in Mexico. Every day, scores of Central Americans fleeing drug-related violence in the nations of Honduras and El Salvador arrive outside Mexico City on a dangerous freight train known as La Bestia – The Beast – near the same rail yard where Trotsky and Natalia arrived over 75 years ago.

Many of these Central Americans apply for asylum in Mexico, and wait in hope of attaining legal residency at one of several shelters scattered around the city. These newcomers to Mexico, fleeing for their lives as Trotsky once did, will greatly benefit from the legal resources soon to be offered on the grounds of Trotsky’s former home.

As refugees continue to descend on modern-day Mexico City, the memory of Trotsky is perhaps more relevant to Mexico than ever before. Although Trotsky might have preferred to be remembered for defending the ideals of Marxism from Stalin’s influence, the house on Calle Viena also recalls a moment in history when Mexico was a place of sanctuary.

For his part, Trotsky has become a symbol of this moment in Mexico. His memory lives on in the museum, its centerpiece a tall stone grave in the garden where Trotsky and Natalia’s ashes are stored. Overhead, the red banner of a Soviet flag plays in the breeze above spindly yucca plants, shining in the tropical sunlight. RL

75 years later, Trotsky is still the subject of popular art, as on this Coyoacán mural.

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* For a dramatization, see the 2002 movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek. Geoffrey Rush is an improbable Trotsky and Antonio Banderas plays David Siqueiros.