The Death Of Trotsky: The True Story Of The Plot To Kill Stalin's Greatest Enemy, Ireland - B +

        Lev Bronstein, later Trotsky, was the "precocious son of an illiterate Jewish farmer" from Ukraine. Josef Dzhugashvili, later Stalin, was the brooding, angry, and hateful former seminarian from Georgia. They first met in 1905 and despised each other from day one. Trotsky was a brilliant orator, tall and charismatic. Stalin had a withered left arm and limped because of webbed toes. Trotsky led the Red Army to victory in the revolution, while Stalin was the General Secretary of the party. Trotsky ignored everyone around him; Stalin cultivated and befriended all he met. Trotsky did not even return from vacation to attend Lenin's 1924 funeral. Stalin easily won the succession battle, expelled Trotsky from the party, later the country, and revoked his citizenship. Stalin seldom had much to say; Trotsky wrote prolifically from abroad.
        Ramon Mercader, the man who would eventually assassinate Trotsky, was a movie-star-handsome Spanish communist born in 1913. He fought in the Spanish Civil War and became further committed to the left. His devotion to the Soviet Union was so absolute that his recruitment was very easy.
        Throughout the 1930s, and in particular when the Great Purges began, Stalin tied almost all evils, failures, and counter-revolutionary activities to an affinity with Trotsky. Everything that went wrong in the country was attributed to his influence, even though he had been in exile for a decade and had no role or input in any aspect of Soviet society; his children, grandchildren, and relatives were either murdered or exiled. After a decade of wandering Europe, Trotsky was offered refuge in Mexico and arrived there in 1937. Within days, a handful of Soviet agents followed. Trotsky and Natalia stayed with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. He worked tirelessly refuting every accusation made against him. The NKVD was everywhere and knew every move he made. One of the family's devoted communist friends was Ramon Mercader. Trotsky had a falling out with the famous artist and moved to a smaller house. In 1938, Stalin learned that Trotsky was writing a biography of him. It was bad enough that he published endless denunciations of everything Stalin did, but this was too much. He began to punish those who had failed to capture and kill Trotsky. He assigned the task to an NKVD agent who had recently assassinated a Ukrainian in Holland. Pavel Sudoplatov had to organize an operation in Mexico that did not lead back to Moscow and figure out how to besiege a guarded, secure residence.
         The agents began crossing the Atlantic on forged documents. Trotsky's colleagues throughout Europe were being murdered. He predicted they would kill him at a time when events in the war would reduce the headlines. In May 1940, three months before he was killed, 20,000 communists rallied in Mexico City demanding his expulsion. A few days later, an NKVD force attacked, breached the wall, began firing guns, and threw incendiary bombs into the house. Somehow, no one was hurt. After a few days, Ramon arrived offering his sympathies and the loan of a car for the staff. Natalia had her suspicions, but he was incorporated into the inner circle. He left for a few weeks in New York, and months later he returned to Mexico.
         Stalin was advised of the effort's failure and asked to consider the next option. The primary risk of an assassination by Mercader was that his capture could expose all of the NKVD agents in North America. Nonetheless, he approved the order. Trotsky had become very fatalistic about his future, but on August 20, 1940, he was in high spirits. A terribly anxious Mercader showed up at about 2:20, unannounced, but was ushered in, saying he was coming to say goodbye. Before he went into Trotsky's office, Natalia thought that he looked anxious and unwell. He smashed the business end of a handheld ice axe with a foot-long handle into Trotsky's head. The gory wound was three inches deep. He died the following day.
         No amount of interrogation could stop Mercader from insisting that he was acting on his own because of his disillusionment with Trotsky and that he was not part of the NKVD. He maintained that position through a 20-year imprisonment. After his release, he was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal and lived in Havana until his death in 1978. This is a solid book, with a little too much information at certain points, but all in all informative.