Mexico City is known for many things - especially their upcoming annual celebration of Día de Muertos, but the city’s involvement in the closing chapter of the Bolshevik Revolution is little known. It was on a sticky afternoon in August of 1940 in the now stylish borough of Coyoacán that the Bolshevik Revolution wrote its final note as the people’s rebellion.
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| Lev Davidovich Bronstein, AKA Leon Trotsky (Author's collection) |
Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky had built the Russian Revolution to empower the Russian people to rise up against their oppressive Monarch, Tsar Nicholas II but their overall idea was to create a system for world-wide revolution - throwing off the "oppressive" cloak of capitalism and empowering the people. Though the Bolsheviks did a good job of harnessing some of the rampant public discontent extant in Russia at the time, there were many groups actively engaged in subversion in and around St. Petersburg in 1917 and Leon Trotsky was a leader within one of those socialist/communist groups, the Menshevik’s. Because of mounting turmoil, Tsar Nicholas abdicated in March of 1917 and an interim government was set up to try and repair the nation’s economy and social unrest all while fighting World War I. The spark of public agitation was fanned to flames by groups like the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks but it wasn’t until the Germans freed Vladimir Ilyich Lenin from one of their prisons and put him on a train back to St. Petersburg that things began to really heat up. Just before the October revolution, Trotsky joined the Bolshevik party and was an immediate "insider" who went on to be one of the original seven on the first Politburo which led and directed the Bolshevik revolution. From the October revolution, widespread pandemonium ensued and it was obvious that the Bolsheviks didn’t stand a chance of leading Russia into communism. The Bolsheviks were ardent writers and loquacious orators but their ability to create useful policy AND put it into place was another thing all together and yet, somehow, they survived.
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| Secretary office in the house of Trotsky, Mexico City. (Author's Collection, copyright 2019) |
To make a long story short, Russia made a separate peace with Germany, a civil war ensued and countless Russian innocents were murdered while inept policies were implemented and overturned repeatedly and the Bolsheviks blamed everyone but themselves for their failures. As these failures became apparent, the Soviets (the new name for the Bolsheviks) began to rule the people more harshly. Questions were met with beatings and dissent with bullets. During all of this, Trotsky continued to rise through the party ranks.
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| Trotsky's desk, where he died. (Author's collection. copyright 2019) |
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