Ever since the Russian Revolution, with a brief hiatus during the Gorbachev era, the Kremlin has practised murder as a matter of state policy. Lenin, who survived several attempts on his own life, quickly established the Cheka (subsequently GPU, NKVD, KGB and today FSB), which was empowered to act as ‘policeman, investigator, prosecutor, judge and executioner’. It organised mass killings during the Red Terror and set up a secret poison laboratory (using Gulag prisoners as guinea pigs) to eliminate individual ‘enemies of the people’. These assassinations were known as ‘liquid affairs’ and Soviet agents also used guns, bombs, knives and other weapons to carry them out. Homicide, in the view of committed Bolsheviks, was a necessary means to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat and the creation of a workers’ paradise. Like Lenin, Leon Trotsky gloried in revolutionary ruthlessness: ‘We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker–Papist babble about the sanctity of life.’ 

In March 1918, at a crucial point in the civil war, Lenin appointed Trotsky Commissar for Military Affairs and in that capacity he took draconian measures to reorganise and reinvigorate the Red Army. Deserters were summarily shot on Trotsky’s orders, and other exemplary executions took place. He coerced tsarist officers into his own ranks by taking their families hostage and aimed ‘to run a hot iron down the spine of the Ukrainian kulaks’. As an exponent of repression, Trotsky equalled Stalin, whom he despised as ‘an oafish provincial’ and who in turn, repelled by his rival’s prissy pince-nez and primped goatee, derided him as ‘an operetta commander’. Certainly Trotsky was vain and theatrical, racing around in his armoured train with a film crew, a radio station, a printing press and a band. But he was also an inspired demagogue, a brilliant propagandist and a charismatic leader, who made an incomparable contribution to defeating the Whites. Many thought he would emerge as the Soviet Napoleon; the American Red Cross representative Raymond Robins pronounced him ‘the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ’.

However, Trotsky was no match for Stalin when it came to monopolising power. After Lenin’s death the malign Georgian began to fashion a new kind of tyranny, gradually isolating Trotsky, who famously castigated him as ‘the grave digger of the revolution’. In 1929, Trotsky was expelled from Russia and endured a peripatetic exile until 1937, when he was given asylum in Mexico thanks to the intervention of the communist artist Diego Rivera. By then, Stalin was eliminating any last suspected foes, validating the purge in show trials which supposedly revealed that the USSR was under threat from a monstrous Trotskyite conspiracy. Maybe he believed this and maybe Trotsky did too, imagining that he was still (in Churchill’s phrase) ‘the ogre of Europe’, although he rightly denounced the trials as ‘the greatest frame-up in history’. By the outbreak of the Second World War Stalin was less preoccupied by Hitler than by Trotsky, making his liquidation a principal goal of Soviet foreign policy.

As Josh Ireland relates in this agreeably written book, Stalin devoted immense resources to the operation, codenamed UTKA (Russian for both ‘duck’ and ‘hoax’). The NKVD thoroughly penetrated Trotsky’s communications, planting an agent on his devoted but exploited son Lev in Paris. They may also have poisoned Lev, who died unexpectedly after an appendectomy and perhaps illustrated the NKVD dictum, cited by Walter Krivitsky: ‘Any fool can commit a murder, but it takes an artist to commit a natural death.’ The direct assault on Trotsky was orchestrated by Leonid Eitingon, an accomplished executioner who had refined his skills during the Spanish Civil War. Having bedded a beautiful Catalan firebrand named Caridad Mercader, he recruited her son Ramón to infiltrate Trotsky’s fortified headquarters on the outskirts of Mexico City. This was achieved by means of a classic honey trap. 

A master of deception who disguised his Stalinist fanaticism behind a playboy facade, Ramón seduced the American sister of one of Trotsky’s secretaries. Posing as a businessman under the alias Frank Jacson, he often accompanied her to Trotsky’s villa, which he observed with photographic precision. It was protected by guards who were neither happy nor efficient in their work. Trotsky, who was in poor health, alienated them by his martinet behaviour. He held himself aloof, seldom used the familiar form of address, gave way to fits of petulance (he disapproved of women smoking and wearing make-up), insisted that everything should be subordinated to his own convenience and turned conversation into a harangue. This antagonised Rivera, who liked to hold the floor with mendacious accounts of fighting for the Reds and devouring female flesh – ‘It’s like the tenderest young pig.’ Trotsky also had a brief affair with Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo. Anxious to assure his own wife, Natalia, that he still loved her, Trotsky wrote her an extraordinary letter (not quoted by Ireland) promising ‘to fuck you hard with my tongue and my prick’. 

In May 1940, Eitingon sent in a hit squad which surprised and overwhelmed the guards and broke into Trotsky’s compound. Firing wildly in the dark, the raiders peppered his bedroom with over seventy bullets. But Trotsky and Natalia hid under their bed and, to general astonishment, both survived. Afterwards, Ramón added to the suspicions he had already aroused by predicting that next time the GPU would use other methods, and Eitingon did indeed decide to employ him as a solitary assassin. Although Trotsky supported Russia’s invasion of Poland, on the grounds that it was spreading socialism, he was fatalistic about becoming the victim of Stalin’s ‘powerful killing-machine’. He remarked that ‘a single agent of the GPU who passes for my friend could murder me in my own house’. Yet he continued with his familiar routine, writing, gardening, cultivating cacti, feeding his rabbits and chickens and declining to live like a prisoner. He saw visitors alone and refused to have them searched. On 24 August, saying that he wanted Trotsky to read an article he had written, Ramón entered his study with various weapons concealed under his gabardine raincoat. As Trotsky sat at his desk Ramón hit him on the head with a short-handled ice axe. 

Trotsky let out a blood-curdling scream, identified ‘Jacson’ as the culprit and died the following day. Despite being beaten by the guards and imprisoned for twenty years, Ramón never confessed to working for the GPU. On his release he was decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union. Stalin, of course, denied any responsibility for Trotsky’s death. But, like Putin, he virtually courted disbelief since the assassination of dissidents, defectors and foreign foes advertised the Kremlin’s reach and mercilessness. As Ireland demonstrates, Trotsky was a victim, the most prominent victim, of the implacable creed he had championed. It must be said, however, that this book has little or nothing new to add to the story of Trotsky’s fate. About that, a vast literature exists and Ireland’s account is much less scholarly and comprehensive than, say, Bertrand Patenaude’s Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky, which appeared as recently as 2009. Ireland handsomely acknowledges his debt to previous authorities, but he provides no justification for retelling such an oft-told tale.