Loose Ends, Part Two

    During the Republic's early days, Trotsky served as the People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs then the Founder and Commander of the Red Army by serving as the People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs.  As such, he was a major figure in the civil war victory.  

Trotsky office where he was mudered. (Author's collection. copyright 2019)

    After Lenin’s death, Trotsky led the failed struggle of opposition against the rise of Joseph Stalin and his ever increasing bureaucracy.  He was removed from the Politburo and the Central Committee, expelled from the Communist Party and finally, exiled.  Despite this he continued to oppose Stalin's bureaucracy at the fourth Communist International (COMINTERN).  Trotsky's actions put him on Stalin's bad side and set him on a global odyssey seeking political asylum, being repeatedly turned away by western government’s.  Eventually, he ended up in Mexico City and agreed to acceptable terms with the government there about the scope of his political activities.  Trotsky was a theorist and prolific writer, his ideas were the basis for a Marxist school of thought called Trotskyism and he was writing a "tell all" on Stalin.   To say the least, this was not to Stalin's liking and he decided to act. 

    In 1940, Stalin sent a mole to assassinate Trotsky.  By Stalin’s thinking, the world could never know the truth about him and the party’s activities - the only version of the truth was his and there could be no dissent.  So, on the afternoon of August 20, 1940 in the Mexico City neighbourhood of Coyoacán, a trusted member of Trotsky’s inner-circle entered his house under the pretence of giving him a pen.  Once alone with Trotsky in his office, Ramón Mercador hit Trotsky in the head with an ice axe.  Trotsky died later in hospital and Mercador, the assassin, would spend 20 years in prison.  Stalin went on to exterminate Trotsky's family left in Russia, including his children, and re-write Soviet history without a mention of one of its greatest architects.

Mexican authorities with ice axe (Author's collection)

    It would be decades before the world began to see the evil Stalin represented and even more decades before the world understood that communism was a failed experiment.  Yet today, in the United States, the greatest democratic nation in the world,  Politicians are openly calling for the violation of that nation's constitution in order to place their constituents in mortal danger, while they try to re-create this experiment.  Lev Trotsky's story should prove as a cautionary tale to these would-be courtiers to the ruinous and rapacious exercise that is communism.

Leon Trotsky's internment, Mexico City. (Author's Collection, copyright 2019)

Loose Ends, Part One

    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.  

 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.

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.

Trotsky's desk, where he died. (Author's collection. copyright  2019)