Leon trotsky death ice pick

Leon Trotsky awaited the inevitable as he fed his rabbits on the afternoon of August 20, 1940. Marked for death by Joseph Stalin, the 60-year-old intellectual architect of the Russian Revolution knew that neither the armed guards patrolling the high walls of his Mexico City compound nor even the thousands of miles of land and sea that stretched between him and Moscow could completely protect him from the Soviet dictator’s deadly reach.

Any thoughts of finding a sanctuary in exile had been destroyed like his bullet-riddled bedroom door when Stalinist agents stormed his villa less than three months earlier in an unsuccessful assassination attempt.

A 1936 anti-Trotsky Soviet propaganda poster.

Trotsky, though, had been used to dangerous enemies since his early days as a student revolutionary in Russia.

The czarist government had twice exiled him to Siberia for his Marxist beliefs. In between, the man born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein had escaped to London on a forged British passpor