LEON TROTSKY, LENIN

Leon Trotsky had a busy year. Starting to consolidate his total power, Stalin had been pushing out anyone he thought represented a threat, and Trotsky was high up on that long and never-ending list. Trotsky finally resigned as head of the military in January 1925 and was forced out of the Politburo in 1926. His book Lenin was published in 1925 by Blue Ribbon Books, a small publisher in New York; the book’s title page says it is an “authorized translation,” although according to the Marxists Internet Archive, nobody is sure who translated it or authorized it. Max Eastman published two books about Trotsky that year after returning from his visit to Russia; in July, Trotsky wrote an open letter disavowing some of the things Eastman said, finding them overly “sentimental.” When Stalin also published a book on Lenin in 1925 (see Stalin), Trotsky called it “an official manual of narrow-mindedness” and “ideological garbage.”

Trotsky would be exiled internally in 1927, deported to Kazakhstan in 1928, to Turkey in 1929, then Norway and eventually Mexico in 1937, where he lived in the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo—a not entirely drama-free arrangment. The Moscow Show Trials ended in 1938 with death sentences for everyone who had opposed Stalin or who he thought might. Stalin sent repeated assassins to Mexico City and finally succeeded in killing Trotsky in 1940.

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Kahlo and Trotsky; Rivera and Kahlo