Whatever Happened to . . .
Leon Trotsky?

Murdered in Coyoacan, Mexico, 1940. The popular Marxist leader who was at the forefront of the Russian revolution and its immediate aftermath was one of countless victims of Joseph Stalin's brutal power grab.

Trotsky spent much of his life in hiding and more than a bit of it in jail. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein to a Ukranian Jewish family in 1879, he became involved in radical activities against the tsarist government while a teen-ager. After five years in prison for union endeavors, he escaped to Europe in 1902 and became a socialist leader. He took part in the abortive 1905 revolt in his home country, for which he was banished to Siberia. Again he escaped. At the time of the 1917 revolution, he was living in New York City. Returning to Russia, he quickly became a leader of the Bolsheviks, the party which emerged in control.

As commissar of foreign affairs, commissar of war and a Red Army commander, Trotsky became the second most powerful man in Russia after Vladimir Lenin. Unhappily for him, when Lenin was felled by a stroke in 1922, Trotsky was incapable of vying for control with Stalin and other contenders. In early 1928, he was exiled, first to Central Asia, then to a Turkish island, to France, to Norway and ultimately to Mexico. He made feeble attempts at organizing international communist entities but is best remembered for his literary efforts, including a history of the revolution and an autobiography.

After one failed assassination attempt against him by machine-gun, Trotsky was slain by an ax-wielding Spanish communist named Ramon Mercader. Historians generally agree Mercader was a Soviet agent, though Stalin's regime denied it.

One macabre footnote: At Stalin's behest, Trotsky's image was photographically removed from certain significant group pictures that documented the early history of communist Russia. Other rivals and traitors, perceived or real, likewise were literally blotted out of Russian history books after being blotted bodily from the face of the earth. In effect, they "died twice."

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