Stalin's Nemesis

by Bertrand M. Patenaude

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 nave 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Russia, Politics

472 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be read before 15.03.2013

Withdrawn by LIBRARIES NI

Opening: In the early morning hours of 24 May 1940, Leon Trotsky slept soundly inside his villa in Coyoacán, a small town on the southern outskirts of Mexico City.

Potted history leading up to the murder:

•Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, in 1879, in the southern Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire.

•1904 Trotsky is Lenin's fiercest critic, citing substitutionism, which was patently against Marx's idiom of dictatorship by the people not over the people.

•Though a newcomer to the party, Trotsky proved to be Lenin's most important ally when the Bolsheviks stormed to power in the October Revolution. Then, as the Revolution came under threat in 1918, he created the Red Army.

•At Lenin's Death 1924, Trotsky was heir-apparent. Yet he was easily outmanoeuvered by Stalin (general secreatary of the party), who expelled him from the communist party in 1927, exiled him to Central Asia in 1928, cast him out of the Soviet Union in 1929.

•Turkey - 4 years
•Paris (incognito) - 2 years
•Norway (Oslo internment). 1st Jan 1937, Norwegian tanker Ruth transports Leon and Natalia
•Mexico asylum(Diego Rivera: mural painter)

Avowed Trotskyist Rivera with Frida Kahlo

•Dewey Commission

•Trotsky affair with Kahlo



Trotsky's speech in Copenhagen (Denmark): http://youtu.be/kBLnTNL5ZPQ

Leon Trotsky Speech in Mexico about the Moscow trials in English ~1937: http://youtu.be/Xv--EVbmMys

The Revolution Betrayed

Coyoacán

This is a short book, the main being just over 200 pages; most of its bulk is in epilogue, afternotes and index. Trotsky was a haughty and arrogant man and it is my opinion that if he had succeeded instead of Stalin, the outcome would not have been so dissimilar. What say you?

[Fiona · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[David Vaughan · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Available on Kindle, quality paperback and small paperback.)

Thorough research with apparently impartial fact-checking, a feel for narrative flow, clear diction and flawless editing make this book a little wonder. I picked it up at Hong Kong International Airport for an airplane read in January, 2014. A few days ago I noted the receipt I've been using as a book mark has "International" in decorative script as a boilerplate header (probably for "International Airport"). Given the subject's deep involvement with the origin of the "Fourth International," I found that ironic, as I did the price, marked in a large yellow sticker on the front cover with a dollar sign (Hong Kong as well as US monetary designator), "$39" -- about US$5. It was evidently remaindered as a low-selling 2010 paperback reprint of a 2009 London publication.

Starting long after Trotsky's involvement in the events of 1917 Moscow and treaties that ended the Great War, we find Trotsky already in Coyoacan, Mexico (today a section of Mexico City), ensconced in the "Blue House" home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and involved in multiple intrigues: an affair with his hostess; concerns about security with both the NKVD and GRU after him and him in turn vocal about their efforts; his involvement with the Fourth International, a pipe dream given his situation; desperate finances due to inability to publish quickly enough to satisfy readers or publishers; and defense of his legacy, starting with Dewey Commission investigations into Moscow show trial charges.

There is no prelude about Trotsky joining the Bolsheviks before Red October, no mention of his leadership of the Red Army or his handling of negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that gained time for the Soviet Union to form, giving up huge chunks of real estate.

Philosopher John Dewey headed a quasi-legal investigation of Trotsky, who was supported by John Dos Passos, Reihnhold Niebuhr, Suzanne La Follette, Edmund Wilson and others. Dewey found the Moscow activity fabricated to discredit the Bolshevik née Menshevik. The verdict bolstered Trotsky's spirits but did nothing to dispel well-grounded fears Stalin would view the decision as a trifle and continue destruction of the counter-movement leader and his family.

Before the inevitable conclusion, Trotsky is depicted as a man devoted to the revolutionary duty to maintain a strong physicality. He hunts, fishes, and hikes to dig up cacti in the Mexican desert, often wearing out younger, presumably fitter bodyguards.

A falling out with Rivera and Kahlo caused Trotsky to move from the Blue House to a house shaped like the letter "T," still in Coyoacan, depleting his finances for remodeling to house his guard/secretaries and enhancing security. Walls were heightened, alarms installed, bodyguards hired. Money was tight.

In this house one night not long after the Trotsky's moved in, a well-planned full-on frontal assault by a group of men armed with pistols, bombs and sub-machine guns led by the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and backed by the NKVD failed to wound a single member of the household despite fifteen minutes of fire and over 300 rounds. Later investigation uncovered the body of an infiltrator in a shallow grave elsewhere in Mexico City -- the man who had unbolted a door allowing the assassination crew inside without setting off alarms.

The assault prevented further excursions to the countryside, and Trotsky turned to tending his beloved rabbits and cactus garden in the T-house grounds, with its 14-foot barrier, installed in part with funds supplied by a mysterious American benefactor known only as "Mr. K."

One-by-one, we watch as Trotsky's children disappear into the Gulags and anonymous graves of the Stalinist era. Trotsky and his wife sink into depression and despair, yet attempt to keep spirits up with thoughts of publication and political change, busying themselves with household duties and friends, one of whom turns out to be a second NKVD assassin.

They remain devoted to each other, are obviously deeply in love despite Trotsky's amorous malfeasances, and mourn the dissolution of their family and legacy together. He comforts his wife when their son dies blaming Trotsky in writing for not rescuing him as he sinks into disease, wasting away alone in a foreign land. She in turn comforts him when he suffers recurrent fevers, sweats and pains, perhaps stress-induced psychosomatic illness suffered since the war with the Whites during the Russian Civil War. This same illness struck him as Lenin died, and his well-publicized failure to attend Lenin's funeral is discussed in detail.

In latter chapters, we watch along with Trotsky as Europe descends into the horrors of WWII, as the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact is signed, Poland is divided, and Russian history books and speeches regarding German fascism are rewritten, providing the background for Orwell's descriptions of journalistic memory holes in _1984_.

Agents of Moscow surround Trotsky's small group of trusted secretaries, guards, drivers and associates, creating plan after plan for assassination and submitting them to the NKVD for approval. (Parallels with hare-brained CIA plans to do in Fidel Castro come to mind.) At the end Trotsky is murdered. Like Lincoln, he takes hours to die of a head wound. There is surgery, lucidity, paralysis and a final coma. The event's description dispels many myths. There was no icepick. Trotsky was not struck from behind.

Mexican police behave laudably and with skill. We see what happens to the plotters as justice takes its odd course. The aftermath to Trotsky's family is described, to his wife and poignantly, to a granddaughter he never knew he had, decades later.

As a coda, during the reign of Khrushchev while the USSR went through de-Stalinization, there was no resurrection of the reputation of Leon Trotsky. During Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, while other thought criminals were brought out from behind the curtains and smoke of history, cleaned off and put back on shelves, Trotsky was not. China referred to Gorbachev as a "Trotskyite revisionist" -- still the ultimate insult, decades after his death.

It doesn't matter if you're interested in the history of Trotsky, the Russian Revolution, Stalin or Communism -- this book is a mystery novel, dense biography of the latter portion of an important historical figure's life, and soap opera.

Although I give this book 4 and not 5 stars, that's only because I wished it were longer and contained even more detail. I also gave this book the implicit praise of slow reading, because I didn't want it to end.

References are thorough, the index well wrought, editorial judgment light-handed and tactful. There is no heavy Stalin bashing or effulgent praise of Trotsky. The author is not a Communist but an historian. This is an historical record and treated as such, yet with obvious understanding and some affection for the travails of the "Old Man" as he wrestled with his monstrous enemy.

[Chris Coffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was delighted to see this book appear, because I've always wanted to know more about the last several years of Trotsky's life, when he had been exiled to Mexico, the last country on earth that would give him asylum, and was holed up with his wife, grandson, and bodyguards in a house owned by the artist Frida Kahlo.

Trotsky owed his safe haven to the direct intervention of Kahlo's husband, the great muralist and revolutionary firebrand, Diego Rivera.

Of course, Stalin's GPU was on the hunt, and it was only a question of time before the assassins closed in, and Trotsky knew it. I don't think I'm giving much away by saying that Trotsky was brutally assassinated with an icepick blow to the head by a GPU operative who had insinuated himself into the confidence of the Trotsky household.

Patenaude has done a superb job with this material. His sensitive, insightful, and well-written account is so replete with irony, pathos, and tragedy that there really isn't much point to adding more to this review except to say that Trotsky has found the biographer he deserves in Patenaude.

[Cathal Kenneally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great history told like a hunted man tale. Stalin despotic and evil by nature gets the better of his enemies eventually like a Mafia don would. Trotsky thought he was safe in Mexico but when Stalin wants rid of someone he will go to extraordinary lengths to get the job done. Trotsky didn’t see it coming. His killer gained his confidence by befriending security guards who worked for Trotsky’s friends. By then it was too late

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: Trotsky was the charismatic heart of the Russian Revolution. And Lenin's heir apparent; he was exiled then killed in Mexico in 1940.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tells the story of Leon Trotsky and his years of exile and eventual assassination in Mexico from 1937 to 1940. Unfortunately it is marred by an extremely eccentric approach to story-telling with over-clever cutting between times and places. This is intended to tell the background to the main story but it soon gets out of hand. It is as if someone suggested to Patenaude that the story might make an art film one day and that he should cut and shape the story with that in mind.

The result is that the core of the story is often not entirely clear. Every time that you think you have a firm grasp of the narrative, the author goes hurtling off into a disconnected account of either Trotsky's role in the Bolshevik movement or the early history of Trotskyism. It is like a rambling conversation where the professor suddenly says, "Ah, that reminds me ..."

So what we have is a mish-mash - part entertainment like those romantic lives of princesses that graced the history shelves of my local library forty years ago, part disconnected noddy-and-big-ears account of the Russian revolution and early Soviet history and part (the most, fortunately) a genuinely informative history of three vital years in(strangely) the intellectual history of what was soon to be the greatest global power the world has ever seen - of which more in a moment.

The real value of this book lies in the fact that Patenaude's specialism is not Russia or communism at all but in American responses to Russia and communism. His previous book was on the American Relief Expedition to Russia during the Famine of 1921. This new story takes place in a context where the largest concentration of followers of Trotsky was to be found in the US in the wake of the New Deal.

Why this should be so is not covered in much detail by the author although we might cite the legacy of the IWW and radical syndicalism after the collapse of Eugene Debs' challenge to the system in 1918, the attraction towards Trotskyism of cosmopolitan New York liberal and Jewish intellectuals, the negative fact that interwar fascism and Stalinist aggression did for most Trotskyists in Europe and the fact that Trotsky (not actually doing much real dictating other than into a dictaphone or to a secretary) could combine the attributes of proletarian war hero with ostensible free thinker and modernist to the libertarian and machismo culture of the American Left.

Trotsky certainly had a remarkable ability to seem a tad more liberal than he actually was. Stalin's brutal and obviously manufactured war on the Left Opposition (the Purges) in Russia made Trotsky the underdog and American 'bourgeois' progressive liberals made a career out of defending the underdog.

Meanwhile, operating in a milieu where surrealists and muralists found Trotskyism a more amenable artistic model than Stalin's simplistic socialist realism (essentially, offering art as mass propaganda), Trotsky's writings on art implied an openness to modernism (probably more apparent than real) that was attractive to forward-thinking intellectuals. Patenaude also refers to a certain snobbisme and orientalism that may be relevant - "[Trotsky was:] the cultivated, Western, internationalist alternative to the peasant, Asiatic and nationalistic Stalin". Already I prefer Stalin!

Although you can certainly buy intellectuals with cash as the State Department discovered in the 1950s, flattery is much cheaper. The illusion that you could be both free and Left in Trotsky's world (especially as news emerged of the growing repression within Russia itself and the vicious assault on the POUM in Catalonia by Communist operatives) drew in what can only be described as worshippers.

In fact, the remarkable achievement of this book is to present us not with a true hero (Patenaude is not biased or a polemicist) but with a narcissist of exceptional moral blindness who one soon understands (whether the author intends this or not) would probably have been a disaster for Russia - probably worse than Stalin if civil war and chaos is worse than internal tyranny and the gulag.

Only Trotsky can possibly make this reviewer sympathetic to Stalin. The man lacked judgement and he possessed an ego the size of the Kremlin. The fact that a brutal choice lay between the Man of Steel and this over-intellectual egotist suggests just what a wrong turn the Bolshevik Revolution proved to be and how much the weak Kerensky, perhaps more than Lenin who was 'only doing his job' as a revolutionary, must take responsibility for allowing it to happen.

Kerensky's blind refusal to bring Russia out of the war and mobilise workers and peasants for democratic socialism led to an unnecessary revolution that gave Russia the eventual choice between two monsters. We only had the chance to consider Stalin the worse monster because Trotsky failed to get his chance to show what he could do with the full force of the State. His treatment of the Kronstadt mutineers alone tells us what Russian workers, peasants and intellectuals had to fear from this man - a round of executions without trial to 'save the revolution'.

However, Patenaude does manage to bring the man to life. He is very good at interconnecting family concerns (Trotsky was proof positive of ideological obsession as a biological dead end as his gene pool was systematically wiped out by his opponent), the left-wing politics of Mexico (in which artistic concerns and rivalries loomed large in the squabbles of the world class muralists), the distrust and espionage undermining the networks of Trotskyists in Europe and the often very young circles of workers and intellectuals in North America who provided money and muscle to his court in exile.

Patenaude's narrative style does make it difficult to follow the plot sometimes but his research and judgements appear sound. He plays a straight bat in not taking sides and in letting the facts speak for themselves - which makes the narrative complexity all the more unnecessary.

But what we have here is not a story of ideology and politics so much as one of trans-national gang warfare in which our hero is a defeated don, holed up in a near-fortress, with inexperienced young political hoodlums who were facing, by 1940, direct murderous assaults on the compound and, eventually, the most brutal and fanatic personal attack imaginable on the Old Man himself. Only in Mexico would a leading artist launch a murderous attack by an assault team on a political figure! Only Soviet Communism could find a killer like Mercader to do the deed and take the rap in the way that he did - subsequently awarded great honours in the Soviet Union after many years in a Mexican jail.

The fact that this war was conducted over the supply of ideas and power rather than guns, contraband, drugs or prostitutes does not change the essential manner in which business was being conducted. Trotsky was just a less competent gangster than his rival while Stalin had the massive reserves of Russian state power to ensure the eventual elimination of not only Trotsky but of any future leaders with his 'brand'. Despite the existence of the Fourth International, Trotskyism effectively died with Trotsky in 1940 as anything more than an irritant and pot-stirrer to capitalists and communists alike.

Having successfully disposed of one dynasty, the Romanovs, Stalin certainly seemed determined not to allow a new Soviet one to appear, the Trotskys - anyone connected to Trotsky within reach of Stalin simply disappeared. At a human level, the story of the killing and disappearances of Trotsky's family is heart-rending and he is by no means immune to the pain of loss - a sympathy rendered a little less likely to cause a sleepless night by the sure knowledge that he seems to have had few such nights himself over those he had murdered for equally valid reasons of state in the Civil War.

Perhaps Trotsky might only have survived if the US had permitted him entry. To murder a political opponent in Mexico is one thing, to do so within the rising superpower is another - poison would probably have had to have been substituted for an icepick. You get the impression that Trotsky was seriously concerned towards the end about moderating his position to effect such an entry but, equally, that, the Old Man (as he was called) being an acquired taste for only a small section of American political society, there was no interest in giving him sanctuary or creating a centre for revolutionary subversion to the Left of the New Deal settlement and unnecessary diplomatic problems at a time of global instability.

As for American Trotskyists, their numbers may have been small but the ideological squabbles of these years proved to have unintended consequences many decades later. The hatred of Stalin and Communism within America may be associated with the American Right but it was at its most virulent in the disappointed American Left.

Whereas in Europe, the challenge of fascism was immediate and put many radical socialists firmly into the Communist camp despite repeated political monstrosities (the purge trials of the 1930s, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and, later, the systematic colonisation of Eastern Europe), in the US a combination of free worker resentment of Communist practice and Trotskyist rage against Stalin placed much of the American Left in a position of aggressive universalism which privileged the export of American liberal values against the claims of what came to be called the 'evil empire'.

Dialectical materialism, already intellectually under severe pressure to Trotsky's dismay during his last years amongst his US followers, crumbled under liberal pressure and anti-Communist virulence. Although Patenaude does not go into much detail on events after 1940, the debates surrounding the purge trials, the invasion of Finland and the Nazi-Soviet Pact and around Marxist philosophy, led to the Minority breakaway and to the eventual trajectory of key intellectuals all the way across to what would become the hardest form of Reaganite anti-Sovietism.

Not all the 'Partisan Review' mob ceased to be socialists but the trajectory was clearly from late 1930s Trotskyism through Cold War Liberalism to the origins of neo-conservatism for many - and the common denominator in all these positions was anti-Stalinism and anti-nationalism. The ideology of the modern Anglo-American imperium was born to a surprising degree out of Trotsky's circle in those last years of his life.

James Burnham, for example, the most extreme example, moved from a central position in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party across to Reaganite groupie over thirty or forty years and the move seems, in retrospect, surprisingly natural. Often but not always Jewish East Coast intellectuals, filled with righteous indignation at Stalin's crimes and replacing the inevitable victory of the proletariat with the inevitable victory of liberal capitalism and 'freedom', moved across the political spectrum and influenced, eventually and alongside European conservative nationalists, the circles that eventually coalesced as neo-conservatism.

Ironically, the high point of Idealism in politics was probably not the furthest extent of the Nazi or Soviet Empires but the furthest extent of the Anglo-American Imperial tradition in the post-invasion occupation of Iraq. If you consider that Saddam Hussein modelled his methods in Stalin, then the Iraq War might be regarded as the Marxist struggles of the 1930s replayed once again as both tragedy and farce! If you really are determined on black humour, you can see the funny side of this. Two sides without the nonsensical philosophy of their ancestors playing radical internationalist and nationalist roles no different from those of Trotsky and Stalin during the struggle for policy and power in Russia in the 1920s. As before, so later - the one with the most firepower wins.

We should not exaggerate the importance of Anglo-Saxon intellectual Trotskyists as representatives of the international revolutionary Left. The opposing Majority Fourth International continues to this day with a strong base in France (inheriting opportunities created by the collapse of Communism as ideological home for the left trades unions) and the numbers active in the Minority Trotskyist Movement were always very small. But, in American intellectual history, these were 'players'!

The revolutionary vanguardism inherited from Lenin (which Trotsky had actually opposed at the time) and the intellectualism of the circle around the Partisan Review created a fairly vibrant politically active set who came to live their hates and anger and who redirected their universalism and idealism into forms that were imbued with a typically American pragmatism. The numbers of former Trotskyists who supported the Iraq adventure and who underpinned the transformation of New Labour (a deeply transtlantic project) is more than chance would permit. The mentality is consistent.

Trotsky himself gives us a clue to this thinking when he stubbornly insisted, against the evidence, that the Soviet Union was a progressive state, refusing to condemn the Soviet attacks on Poland and Finland and advocating full American support for Britain against the Nazi threat. It would not take much, once Trotsky was murdered, for increasing numbers of former followers who disagreed with him on the Soviet invasions and who had their doubts about dialectical materialism and on the ability of a bureaucratic workers state to be progressive to shift that 'tide of history' commitment to a different state power as vector for global revolution - the United States. This may be unhinged perhaps but it is consistent in its insane way.

The key figure, of course, is James Burnham who argued as early as 1937 that the Soviet bureaucracy was not a caste (as Trotsky suggested) but a new exploiting class so that the Soviet Union was not a degenerate workers' state but represented bureaucratic collectivism. He was almost certainly right but this revisionism which caused major splits in the Movement showed how Trotsky's use value in America was not as independent Marxist thinker at all but as an anti-Communist.

If you condemn bureaucratic collectivism, it soon gets to mean that you are inclined to prefer individualism if you cannot de-bureaucratise collectivism. The trajectory to free market internationalism which is central to the current Western project was embedded even at this very early stage in the thinking of the Marxist revisionists of the late 1930s. Patenaude must be thanked for helping to elucidate some of the background to the transformation of American ideology under conditions of empire.

Max Eastman, initially a great admirer of Trotsky and always a friend, represented the tendency, you might call it romantic-radical, to be moved deeply by the revolution itself but to hold great doubts about its results and about the German Idealist theory of dialectical materialism, especially that of Engels, that underpinned it. As Trotsky understood, there was no Marxist-Leninist revolution without dialectical materialism and that's why the Kronstadt mutineers had to be executed.

But Eastman must be seen in the context of Dewey and American pragmatism and progressivism. Trotsky intellectually feared American pragmatism with great justification. In the end, we have a problem for Trotsky that could not be resolved in his favour - the largest number of Trotskyists were in the US, Americans were indelibly pragmatist, ergo Trotskyism could either be dialectical materialist or it could be at the heart of the American Left but it could not be both.

The struggle went on for some years (most notably in the debates between Eastman and Sidney Hook) but, with dialectical materialism captured for the global Communist Party, Trotskyism did not stand a chance as a credible political movement in the American century. As I suggested above, Trotsky was trying to be a better Communist than the Communists when history wanted him to be a better anti-Communist.

In the end, Eastman, Hook, Burnham, Dewey, Wilson, Shachtman - all the leading thinkers of the American Left of Trotsky's last years who were opposed to the Stalinist capture of the Revolution from their different perspectives - rejected dialectical materialism as a credible philosophy. End of game for Trotsky intellectually. The Old Man was past it!

I have not written much of Trotsky himself in this review because we want to avoid spoiling the strength of the book, the characterisation of a man who comes out of the pages of this book as a real person, warts and all. There are some excellent photographs from these years in exile.

I think I would have enjoyed meeting a man who was undoubtedly exceptionally intelligent - a political Einstein in some respects - but this was not a man to be followed unless you were prepared for your bones to whiten on some far off plain. This was a man, like Napoleon or Hitler, who saw other persons as adjuncts to his ideas, expendable in a cause in which he, supreme egotist, must live regardless of others because of the values and beliefs he embodied.

British intelligence agent Bruce Lockhart cruelly wrote of Trotsky in full-on revolutionary mode: "He strikes me as a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it."

The surprise is not that people like him exist but that there are so many mugs in the world prepared to subsume themselves under such people. It's much more than the banality of evil expressed in Milgram's depressing experiments, it is also about the determination of many people to embody their myth of the world in a person (whether Pope or dictator) to whom they give up their autonomy as an act of 'heroic' self denial.

For a husband or wife to do this may be simple love but for a man to sentence his children (in effect) to death for his ideals strikes me as either wilfully stupid or inhuman while for fit young bright men and women to throw themselves, their labour value and their lives at the feet of others in the way that they did for Trotsky is just plain stupid if the price is a complete suspension of their critical faculties. But is it any more stupid than joining the military for patriotic reasons? I suppose there may be a marginally greater reason in dying for a better world than the profits of Wall Street - but not that much!

The relationship between Trotsky and Natalia (his wife) is touching and that between Trotsky and Frida Kahlo amusing but his relationships with the rest of the world were often as exploitative as those of the capitalists and feudalists against which he warred.

By 1937, though he fought on gallantly, clinging to his already outmoded beliefs, Trotsky was already an utter political failure whose death in 1940 possibly came at the right time to maintain his credibility for his remaining supporters. He was running out of money, increasingly politically irrelevant, with supporters who were beginning to walk away from ideas honed in the struggle against feudalism at the turn of the century.

Had he lived through to the late 1940s, his fate might have been to have been picked up by the anti-communists of the Cold War era and be turned into a political Vlasov - a convenient tool to goad Stalin and split the Left, an old and weak king with a subsidised court, a Jacobite in a world of Hanoverians. Maybe it was best that he was forced to move on and died a martyr to his cause.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stalin’s Nemesis – a version based on the book by Bertrand Patenuade
Riveting story, but… Contrary to what some people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts would have you believe, if you ask me, a man who lived in a regime born out of the work of both Stalin and his nemesis:
- Communism is like the Islamic State, Nazism or any other terrorist, massacre inducing “philosophy”

- Why would I read a tale about two villains, with perhaps nothing positive to talk about?
- Sometimes we are surprised and this work is a good one
- And something else that bothered me:
- Why did they portray Trotsky as someone else’s nemesis?
- Sure, Stalin is much more famous, but still, his Nemesis was not exactly a nobody

In fact, we learn from this saga that one way that the head of the Red Army annoyed and infuriated Stalin was by calling him
- The mediocrity within the ruling committee of the party
- A man who would bring about the end…words to that effect, not actual quotes

This note is about an abridged version, produced like the series of works rated over the past few weeks for the BBC.
And I am terribly satisfied that it is a shorter format, for in big, 340 pages volume there’s no way I would engage with it.
I have right near me a big book on Stalin that I did not touch and will never do so.
It is a promise.

Living in a country that was occupied by the tanks of this bastard, there is nothing under the sun to make me wish to know more about the scoundrel.
As aforementioned, a huge appeal in this case was brevity and the opportunity to learn about this dark side in just over an hour.

Since the story is known, especially by anyone who would venture to read such a note and besides moved beyond the first lines, I may give in some historical details.

- Trotsky first went into exile to Norway, which packed and sent him on an empty ship to Mexico
- No European country- and maybe no other period- would want the man who was in conflict with the Kremlin
- In Mexico, there was an interesting, complicated political tableau that made the presence of the former head of the Red Army appealing
It wasn’t for all tastes and convictions, but the president had points to gain and score and besides he was persuaded by Diego Rivera.
The painter was quite a character, described as gargantuan and the opposite of Trotsky with whom he would eventually clash.
Both were philanderers and the painter had an affair even with the sister of his lover- Frida Kahlo, while the latter went to bed with the commie…I mean the other, Russian commie- for a while I forgot that, to my distaste, almost all involved here are just damn Reds.
Frida, known to me from the film of this name, was a remarkable artist, although not my cup of tea, with very outré remarks and penchants:

- Make love, take a bath, make love again.”
That appears to have been her leitmotif and strangely, talked and got involved with Trotsky while his wife was present.
It is true that the spouse could not really understand, for the two infidels talked in English, language that they knew more or less.

The issues of the fake trials is brought forward, with the tortures, the suffering inflicted on the families of those accused and the demonstrations that Leon Trotsky makes of the absurdity of the charges:
- The hotel where he was supposed to have plotted had been burned down
- An airport where he supposedly landed had been closed for six months and so on
Nevertheless, it is hard for me to feel pity for Stalin’s Nemesis…

- Yes, it is possible that Leon Trotsky could have made a better, less bloody leader
- But as it is, he is responsible for the spreading of a very deadly disease:
- Communism in all its forms- “more decent and humane” and really cruel

The principles, the doctrine and basically everything are rotten to the core in this goddamn monstrosity.
Contrary to what some people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts would have you believe, if you ask a man who lived in a regime born out of the work of both Stalin and his nemesis:

- Communism is like the Islamic State, Nazism or any other terrorist, massacre inducing “philosophy”

[Eric Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book when it first came out and when I began reading it, for some reason it didn't grab me and I put it aside. Having just read it now, years later, I cannot imagine what the problem was. This is a brilliantly-written and thoroughly-researched study of the very last years of Trotsky's life, the years of his exile in Mexico leading up to his murder by a Soviet agent in 1940. Patenaude tells the story well, with few signs of bias. Only once does he judge Trotsky negatively, referring to him as "the man who helped create the first totalitarian state, which even now he championed as the world's most advanced country". Much of the story is quite familiar territory, and yet it was still deeply sad to read of the fates of all those involved in this story -- the assassin Ramon Mercader feted in Moscow as a hero, the attempted assassin (the painter David Siqueiros, who led an earlier, botched raid on Trotsky's compound) going on to a glorious career as an artist, and the betrayal by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, once Trotsky's closest friends in the country and his protectors, who went on to become Stalinists, members of the Mexican Communist Party. The Trotsky Patenaude discovers is a difficult man and a terrible politician, but a loving husband and father as well. Highly recommended.

[Ali Rehman · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are looking for a biography of Trotsky then this book will not serve the purpose as it reconstructs a famous state crime with chilling precision and the page-turning qualities of a true crime classic.It is a captivating read that captures a complex and contradictory character and the world he had created around him. The book highlights the important events from Trotsky life. It touches briefly on the subject of struggle for power after Lenin’s death as Stalin emerged as victorious, while Trotsky was removed from all positions of power and later exiled to Mexico and labeled as traitor.

The book gives fascinating insights into the strange world that Trotsky inhabited and describes active socialist underground scene in the US in the 1930s, riven with splits between shifting alliances of Trotskyists, Stalinists and various other factions. The author gives us a humane and panoramic view of Trotsky’s life and of Russia in revolution, as well as a story of deadly rivalry, revolutionary fanaticism and tragic violence and loss.

Top Quote (considering the recent Covid - 19 situation), "Health is revolutionary capital and must not be wasted"

[John Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A closely observed narrative of Trotsky’s life and murder in Mexico. This book isn’t an analysis of his political philosophy but a detailed day to day account of what he did, where he went, what he said and how he came to be butchered with an ice pick. There are interesting people around him, Frida Khalo met him off his boat when he arrived in South America but ultimately he was murdered by a trusted aide who betrayed him. Trotsky was clearly a spent force by the time he got to Mexico but you do get an insight into the man in this revealing text.

[George Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Personally if exiled and banished, living in prison like conditions, convinced I was destined to lead the world revolution but also a prime target for assassination, I probably wouldn’t try and have so many affairs

[Laurence Westwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly stunning!!

[C.]

To leave the Cirque Moderne after giving a speech on the eve of the revolution, Trotsky crowdsurfed

[Bry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read well and interesting book. Learned a lot not just about Trotsky but also about the political climate at that time within different countries and art. Would recommend.

[Raza · Rating 2 out of 5]

a good portion of this book is devoted to trotsky's exile years from 1937-1940 in mexico. Here, he was finally assassinated by stalin's NKVD. the writing is crisp, flows like a novel, though the writer does go into multiple diversions. all in all, its a must read for soviet history buffs.
what will remain with me from this book:
* trotsky was complicated: egoistic, stubborn yet fiercely intelligent. he was , along with stalin, lenin's top 2 guys. he split with stalin in the '20s and had to go into exile after he publicly rebuked stalin once.
*trotsky lost a lot of immediate &extended family to stalin's murderers (2 sons included)
*by 1930s, USA was the biggest trotskyist community (though numbering only 3k)
*during ww2, trotsky refused to condemn USSR even though it was becoming apparently clear that soviet union was no workers' paradise (though in a degenerated form) but a fascist state run by stalin & his bureaucracy. He did this, partly to defend the bolshevik revolution (which he helped bring forth and which gave birth to the soviet union) and partly because of his belief in Marxist-Leninist ideology.
* trotsky had an affair with frieda Kahlo while living in mexico in her husband's (diego) house
* nkvd were running 2 separate operations in Mexico city to get trotsky. finally, they did and the planners were rewarded with USSR medals. the murderer served about 20 years in mexico, and got his medal in russia afterwards.
* A lot of old bolsheviks were rehabilitated by the 1980s (who were purged by stalin), though trotsky was officially not. However, his articles were allowed to publish in USSR after it collapsed.

[Lucynell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although not entirely impossible, one being human and all, it is indeed quite difficult to feel sympathy for Trotsky. Instead one could and will feel sad and freely shed tears for his family and friends who, though just a drop of water in an ocean of misery, suffered much of what millions did - persecution, imprisonment, exile, torture, threats, rape and execution - by one of the most, if not the most, brutal totalitarian regimes the world has ever seen, a bureaucratic killing machine Trotsky did more than most to create. This reads like a political thriller which is what it is only for real. At 400 pages it covers a lot of ground, not just the twists and turns but much background and even reads like a Trotsky biography. The pages just fly by and maybe 200 more would not go amiss, even for casual readers like myself. There's much too much to go into but one character at one point describes the whole period, in all its variations, as "bullshit." Some, quite a lot actually, paid dearly for that plethora of false prophets and indeed bullshitters and that is what sticks with you the most.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a cracking book that I struggled to put down. An excellent portrait that details Trotsky's final years as he struggles to unite a fractured Left Opposition from Mexico City as Stalin's agents tighten the noose around his neck. The book is also a meditation on the fatal flaw that kept Trotsky from the top job in the Soviet Union: That he was an unparalleled public speaker and leader of men but an appalling politician who sought to dominate colleagues instead of building alliances. His poor personal skills led to a sometimes chaotic personal life and destroyed relationships in Mexico at a time when he needed protection from Stalin's NKVD agents. But this is a sympathetic view of Trotsky, with entertaining flashbacks to Russia, detours into Mexico's vibrant arts scene and the colourful characters who dominated the Left at the time. Above all, it is written with a verve and passion that makes it stand above the many other histories of the period.

[Mary Olesen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this one. It drew me into the turbulent political climate of Mexico and the Soviet Union in the 30s up to Trotsky's assasination in 1940. The political wheeling and dealing and the dirty games played by Stalin's secret agents the NKVD as well as the struggle for power between different Trostskyists provides the reader with a thrilling account of how politics will always be a dirty game. There are no good guys here. There is espionage and counter espionage; there is unfaithfulness; there is the artist Frida Kahlo and her husband the eccentric muralist Diego Riviera; there are the Americans trying their hand at being commmunists; there are the trade unions in America; there are double agents... and it's not even fiction. I simply couldn't put it down.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good read, but I would suggest (without wanting to sound too pretentious) more for the general reader than someone who actually knows quite a bit about Stalin/ Trotsky/ the Russian Revolution etc. It was fascinating to learn about all the ins and outs of the trotskyist movement in America and the Old Man's relationships with his staff in Mexico. But occasionally I did feel a little "yes yes, I know about the show trials and the October Revolution and the Bolshevik Menshevik split".



Its very readable, even though you know what's coming. If you didn't, the title sort of gives it away!! Its reasonably objective too, which is always nice.

[Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an extremely interesting book which concentrated on Trotsky's final years in Mexico, but also gave an outline of his previous history. What amazed me was his lack of engagement with world affairs. The Soviet Union had entered into a pact with Nazi Germany and was invading various countries (Poland, Finland), but Trotsky was more concerned to argue the rights and wrongs of dialectical materialism with the Trotskyites in the US (about 2.500 at most).

[Khalid · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a true joy to read and gives a good insight into Trotsky life. Patenaude style of writing this thriller makes the reader wanting more.

[Vikas Datta · Rating 4 out of 5]

A phenomenally gripping read... the tragic story of a true revolutionary and an intellectual in all senses of the word, not to mention a politician firmly imbued with the courage of his convictions.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[E.A.M. Van · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940), beter bekend onder zijn schuilnaam Leon Trotski, was een van de ikonen van de Russische Revolutie. In de bittere strijd om de opvolging van de in 1924 overleden Lenin, gaf de intellectueel en begaafde orator Trotski blijk van een gevaarlijk gebrek aan politiek instinct die hem de diepgaande en niet aflatende haat van zijn rivaal Josef Stalin opleverde. Stalin's Nemesis. The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky, van Bertrand M. Patenaude, analyseert op verhelderende wijze en doorspekt met veel, vaak tragi-komische anecdotes hoe het net zich steeds verder rond Trotski sloot culminerend in diens spectaculaire moord.
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\nDe trotskistische beweging was in de jaren dertig wereldwijd een uiterst marginale, en in de Sovjet-Unie zelf praktisch uitgeroeide club. Er was voor Moskou geen enkel gevaar van te duchten. In Trotski vond Stalin echter zijn ideale zondebok. Al het feilen in de Sovjet-Unie werd dankbaar op hem afgewenteld. Desondanks was duidelijk dat Stalin vroeger of later Trotski zou moeten uitschakelen; ten eerste om de krenkingen van de jaren twintig uit te wissen, ten tweede om de hoofdschuldige, zogenaamd verantwoordelijk voor alle fictieve misdaden die tijdens de showprocessen werden bekend, zijn verdiende loon te geven. Trotski was er echter van overtuigd dat Stalin in hem een werkelijk gevaar zag en dichtte zichzelf een hoofdrol toe bij de door hem gehoopte, aanstaande omverwerping van de stalinistische bureaucratie. Wat voor Stalin politieke retoriek was, voedde voor Trotski het idee dat hij nog een politieke factor van betekenis was.
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\nNa enkele omzwervingen belandde Trotski in 1937 in Mexico. Deze keuze van asielland bleek al snel ongelukkig. Een influx van stalinistische huurmoordenaren die Franco's Spanje ontvluchtten, zorgde voor een permanente dreiging. Trotski's woning, beschikbaar gesteld door de muralist Diego Rivera en zijn vrouw Frida Kahlo, werd langzamerhand omgebouwd tot een vesting. Een brouille met Rivera noopte tot een verhuizing naar een minder veilige locatie. In mei 1940 werd Trotski's nieuwe residentie doorzeeft met 300 kogels, wonderlijk genoeg zonder slachtoffers. Een paar maanden later werd Trotski definitief ingehaald door de geschiedenis. De Spaans/Franse NKVD hitman Ramón Mercader infiltreerde Trotski's huishouden en sloeg hem, overigens weinig koelbloedig, met een ijsbijl de hersens in.
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\nDe vervolging van en de uiteindelijke moord op Trotski maakte van hem, ook buiten trotskistische kringen een martelaar. Het romantische beeld van Trotski als geweten van de revolutie, dat hij overigens zelf cultiveerde, gaat echter mank. Zoals Patenaude duidelijk maakt, was Leon Trotski een trotse en bezeten man, overtuigd van zijn hoofdrol in de wereldgeschiedenis. Voor deze ambitie moest alles wijken, wat tot veel slachtoffers in Trotski's inner circle leidde.
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\nDe romantische zweem die sinds jaar en dag om Trotski hangt, wordt door Patinaude vakkundig verwijderd. Wat overblijft is een vooral tragisch personage dat zichzelf in de coulissen terugvindt waar hij eens midden op het podium had gestaan. Patinaude laat er geen onduidelijkheid over bestaan of de wereld beter was afgeweest als Trotski in plaats van Stalin zijn ambities had kunnen waarmaken. De steile dogmaticus Trotski zou waarschijnlijk weinig voor Stalin hebben ondergedaan. Het is de verdienste van dit goed leesbare boek dat het dit, op zich niet nieuwe inzicht, uitstekend onderbouwd onder de aandacht brengt.