On June 19, 1933, Leon Trotsky, expelled from the USSR, sought political asylum in France and received it.
Three years later, in 1936, Trotsky emigrated to Mexico, where he was killed in 1940 by Spanish communist Ramon Mercader.
Before that, NKVD agents made an unsuccessful attempt to kill him.
Leo Trotsky played an important role in the history of the 20th century, recalls "Deutsche Welle". As the main organizer of the Bolshevik revolution, he led the Red Army to victory in the Civil War and fought irreconcilably against Stalin throughout his life.
Therefore, in the West, he was considered an alternative to Stalin. If, after Lenin's death, Trotsky, not Stalin, had taken over the leadership of the USSR (the standard argument goes), then the socialist social experiment might not have ended in a misanthropic dictatorship.
Many Western socialists were dazzled by Trotsky's intellectual brilliance and hastily concluded from his feud with Stalin that Trotsky's ideal was socialism with a human face. In his biography of the Bolshevik revolutionary (Robert Service. Trotsky: A Biography), the renowned Oxford historian Robert Service emphasizes that Trotsky was not at all a "humane alternative" of Stalin.
Early in his career, as Commissar of War, Trotsky displayed all his cruelty - from the shooting of 40 soldiers near Kazan in 1918, through the crushing of the Kronstadt sailors' revolt in 1921 and the sending of the Mensheviks into exile to the crushing of the uprising in Georgia in 1924. Perhaps it was Trotsky's relentless cruelty that led to the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Civil War; their rule was incompatible with any democracy.
Trotskyists never cease to point out that after his removal from power, Trotsky pleaded for more democracy in the party. It is forgotten that he began to use "democracy" as a slogan only after he himself had already been pushed out of the center of power. Service also addresses the central question of why Stalin, and not Trotsky, succeeded Lenin.
In his will, Lenin calls Trotsky “the most capable man in the Central Committee,” but at the same time condemns his arrogance. On the other hand, he warns that Stalin has too much power. Service believes that Trotsky did not pay enough attention to the top leadership position and had neither the interest nor the talent for mediation between the different factions. But of decisive importance for Stalin's success was the apparently widespread and completely justified fear among the Bolsheviks that Trotsky could degenerate into a kind of Soviet Napoleon and hijack the revolution.
In his book, Service covers the entire biography of Trotsky. Stanford University historian Bertrand Patenaude offers a detailed account of Trotsky's exile (Bertrand Patenaude. Stalin's Nemesis). In 1929, Trotsky was expelled from the USSR and after stays in Turkey, France and Norway he finally settled in Mexico. Trotsky fled to the other side of the world because he knew that Stalin wanted to eliminate him at all costs, recalls "Deutsche Welle". The necessary security faced him with enormous financial and organizational problems. He was dependent on the profits from the sale of his books and on the help of his followers, he even sold parts of his archive. But all precautions proved insufficient: in the summer of 1940, a Soviet agent, who became the fiancé of Trotsky's secretary, sneaked into his house and cracked his skull open with the infamous ice pick.
Although there can no longer be any doubt about Trotsky's dictatorial tendencies, there are still communist nostalgics who present their idol as the victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by Stalin and "world capital". Among them is the American Trotskyist David North, who in his recent book (David North. In Defense of Leon Trotsky) interprets the new biographical interest in Trotsky as a continuation of Stalinist slander. North's erroneous logical conclusion is, of course, that not everyone who criticizes Trotsky must be a Stalinist.