Richard Overy
ICE-COLD IN COYOACAN
Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
By Bertrand M Patenaude (Faber & Faber 340pp £20)

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For years the name Trotsky has been associated with an alternative to the crude and violent communism that grew out of Stalin's dictatorship and the hope for a purer socialism that had seemed to evaporate in the Bolshevik power struggles of the 1920s. Trotsky was in fact a revolutionary nom de plume, which the young Marxist militant Lev Davidovich Bronstein borrowed from one of his jailors in pre-revolutionary Russia. His challenge to Stalin's encroaching dictatorship not only failed to stem the Stalinisation of the revolutionary state that Trotsky had helped to build, but sealed his personal fate too. On 21 August 1940 Trotsky died in a Mexican hospital from injuries to his head sustained the previous day in an attack by a Soviet agent.

The story of Trotsky's last years in Mexico, where he arrived in January 1937, is the subject of this haunting and dramatic reconstruction of life and death in exile. The detail is fascinating, almost voyeuristic, culled from the personal records of a group of enthusiastic Trotskyists and from Trotsky's own voluminous archive, which he sold to Harvard University in 1940 for $6,000 partly because he was strapped for cash and partly because he could not be sure that Stalin would not send a fireraiser to destroy his records, just as Stalin had Trotsky expunged from the photographs of the revolutionary years. News that his archive had arrived safely came, ironically enough, on the very day that his assassin expunged Trotsky himself.

To make sense of why Trotsky went to Mexico and why he mattered so much to be murdered, Patenaude devotes a good deal of his account to the life and thought of his subject. This makes for a rather awkward read, for the text darts back and forth, often rather bewilderingly, building up a picture of Trotsky and his entourage brick by brick, until at the end all is resolved in an act of ham-handed murder. But the text is never dull, and the story has a remarkable tension to it even though most people reading it will know the ending already. The final hours of murder and death are retold here with a rare poignancy, capable of touching even the most hardened of anti-communist hearts.

The hardest heart of all was Stalin's. Close in age to Trotsky, in the pre-revolutionary years up to 1917 he stayed in Russia to fight for the Bolshevik cause while Trotsky, never a Bolshevik, wrote harsh anti-Leninist tracts and sat out the period in exile abroad. On returning to Russia in 1917, Trotsky eventually became reconciled with Bolshevism as the only instrument capable of turning the confused revolutionary urges of the Russian people into a real Marxist revolution. He had no military experience, but became famous first as the organiser of the revolutionary militia in 1917, then as commissar for war and de facto commander of the Red Army from 1918. He inspired communist resistance in the civil war that followed and became second only to Lenin as a name to conjure with for the outside world. Then he abruptly stepped back from the limelight. With no party power base and no real job, he was easily outmanoeuvred by the ambitious Stalin. In 1929 he was exiled from the Soviet Union, first going to Turkey and finally, following brief stays elsewhere in Europe, sailing for Mexico from virtual imprisonment in Norway.

The rise and fall of Trotsky have never been easy to explain. He was accepted by Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1917 because he was absolutely committed to creating a workers' paradise at all costs and was vastly popular with the revolutionary masses. His inspirational leadership in the civil war prompted fears among some of his colleagues that he harboured Bonapartist ambitions, but the chief problem was his absolute championship of the idea of 'permanent revolution' - transforming Russian society on the one hand but pressing on with the revolution elsewhere to make sure that the infant Soviet state would not wither on the vine. Other Bolsheviks, Stalin in particular, emphasised socialism in one country, which became the realistic orthodoxy from the mid-1920s. Trotsky was isolated, and at a famous Politburo meeting in 1926 accused Stalin of becoming 'the gravedigger of the revolution'. Stalin never forgave him and after his exile in 1929 Trotsky became the lightning conductor for all the fears and resentments of the Stalinist state. 'Trotskyism' became, in the eyes of most pro-Soviet communists, synonymous with fascism, betrayal and counter-revolution. Outside the Soviet Union, Trotsky became the symbol for continuous communist revolutionary activity as a direct challenge to the stifling effects of Stalin's Communist International. This explains the devotion of many communists to Trotskyism in the 1930s. It also explains why Trotsky was a target for assassination.

In Mexico, settled near the capital in the small town of Coyoacán, in a house owned by the painter Diego Rivera (who was married to the radical artist Frida Kahlo), Trotsky and his wife Natalia maintained a bizarre imprisoned court. Unable to go out much because of fear that the NKVD would kill him, Trotsky welcomed a regular supply of visitors, was supported by loyal Trotskyist secretaries and guards, and played on a world stage by writing ferociously trenchant articles about Stalin and the character of the deformed workers' state that the Soviet Union had become. The avant-garde artists and writers who flirted with Trotsky form a sparkling backdrop to the political narrative, and Patenaude provides a series of fascinating pen portraits of a motley crew of believers and fellow travellers (a term invented by Trotsky for those who were happy to join the journey but reluctant about the destination). The most famous was Frida Kahlo, who came quickly under Trotsky's spell and indulged in a brief affair until she tired of it. Hovering a little further out on the ring of friends and colleagues were Soviet moles and agents, waiting for Trotsky to drop his guard.

Much of the book is about the slow evolution of an elaborate security net around the Trotsky homes (first Rivera's Blue House and then, after a split with the artist, a second house a few streets away). Trotsky disliked having to live like a recluse. He collected cacti, looked after rabbits and hens in the back garden, argued with his wife, and wrote letters full of a characteristic mixture of exhortation and bile that won him few friends and often offended those he did have. He was a complex individual, puritanical in outlook and absolutely dedicated to the cause at the expense of those around him, not least his family, for whom he seems to have shown a callous disregard even while apparently deeply attached to them. He was suspicious, intellectually arrogant, argumentative, prickly and yet, despite all this, deeply loved. The portrait that appears here is in the end an affectionate one, but it is always important to recall that Trotsky had never had any scruples about killing those in the way of the Marxist utopia. His blindness to any sense of humanity was evident in his last months of exile when he insisted, against the views of most of his allies, that the Soviet war in Finland was a good thing because Finnish capitalists and exploiters would be put up against the wall. His death from an act of Stalinist terrorism would not have surprised him: Bolshevik justice and injustice were about destroying what lay across the revolution's path.

The final act of the drama was an NKVD operation given the curious title 'Operation Duck'. Launched in 1939 with Stalin's blessing, the operation had the single aim of eliminating Trotsky. By then he was of little threat to Stalin, except in the paranoid propaganda of the state, but Stalin hated Trotsky for belittling him. Trotsky's family, sons, first wife and so on were all eliminated or sent to the Gulag. Only Trotsky remained. In 1940 various schemes were tried (including an attempt in May 1940 by a group of radical Mexican artists to storm Trotsky's house), but the burden of execution eventually fell on Ramón Mercader, a Stalinist Spaniard who infiltrated the Trotsky circle and eventually managed to gain entry to the Trotsky household. Calling one day to get him to reread a draft of an article, Mercader managed to get the usually distrustful Trotsky to invite him inside alone. He was ushered, green-faced and nervous, into the study. Taking a small pick from under his raincoat (the day was one of bright sunshine), Mercader closed his eyes and hit Trotsky just once on the skull. Trotsky fought back and staggered away. His guards rushed in and beat up Mercader. Trotsky was still alive but, as it turned out, mortally wounded. His assassin was imprisoned for twenty years and then given a medal in Moscow by the Khrushchev regime as a Hero of the Soviet Union. Trotsky has lived on as the chief martyr for the anti-Soviet cause even though much of the proletariat in the industrialised world has disappeared and permanent revolution remains a chimera.

No doubt Trotsky's reputation has survived better than Stalin's, but in this painstaking reconstruction of one of the world's great revolutionary thinkers and agitators, Bertrand Patenaude makes it difficult for any reader not to come away with a sense of amazement at the mixture of naïve optimism and moral self-serving that infected the communist vision of the future. Trotsky was also famous for the metaphor 'the dustbin of history'; sad to say, he has probably joined the trash.

Richard Overy's 'The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars' was published last month by Allen Lane. '1939: Countdown to War' will be published in August.