The Death of Trotsky
The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin's Greatest Enemy
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
A LitHub and Parade Most Anticipated Book of the Year
For fans of Ben Macintyre and Erik Larson, the gripping story of the assassination of Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the deadly game of cat and mouse that preceded it
On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky invited a man he knew only as Jacques Mornard into his study. Mornard waited for Trotsky to sit, then smashed an ice pick he had hidden in his raincoat into Trotsky’s skull.
For over a decade, Trotsky’s greatest enemy, Joseph Stalin, had been trying to arrange his murder. Stalin’s agents had hunted him across Europe and into a lonely, bitter exile in Mexico. He had liquidated Trotsky’s family and friends, and yet Trotsky had always escaped his clutches. The man who changed this all was Ramón Mercader, a minor Spanish aristocrat and Soviet agent who had posed as Mornard, a dissolute Belgian playboy, and infiltrated Trotsky’s inner circle.
In The Death of Trotsky, Josh Ireland traces the separate paths walked by each of these protagonists as they steadily draw closer and closer to that fateful encounter on August 20. Blending intimate historical detail and thrilling historical narrative, swinging from Moscow to Paris to Mexico, and taking in a cast of morally conflicted Russian spies, fanatical Mexican painters, and innocent American idealists, The Death of Trotsky delves into the lives of two fascinating, complex men locked in a life-or-death struggle that would bend the course of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this riveting real-life thriller, journalist Ireland (Churchill & Son) traces how a group of Russian spies managed to infiltrate Leon Trotsky's inner circle. Ireland begins with Trotsky's banishment to Siberia in 1928, which was the first of a series of exiles that would each see a physically ailing but politically fiery Trotsky pushed farther and farther away from Russia, eventually landing him in Mexico. Against the narrative of Trotsky's banishments, Ireland presents the parallel stories of the Russian spies who hounded, undermined, and surveilled him, including one who grew so close as to become the publisher of Trotsky's newsletter. Ireland dissects the techniques used by Soviet intelligence to recruit and groom spies to join Trotsky's circle, while also noting how, in a topsy-turvy twist, "looking after Trotsky" carried its own dangers—just opening his mail was risky, as the packages could contain bombs. Ultimately, the narrative begins to swirl around Soviet recruit Ramon Mercador, a young Spanish aristocrat who grew close enough to Trotsky to know where the switch for his alarm system was in his study, meaning he was able to block it with his body when, on orders from Moscow, he infamously struck Trotsky in the head with an ice pick on August 21, 1940. Cinematic and suspenseful, this vividly depicts the yearslong tightening of the noose around a brilliant and hunted man.
