Official Soviet portrait of Leon Trotsky from Wikipedia
Official Soviet portrait of Leon Trotsky from Wikipedia
Wikipedia image of an ice ax, useful for scaling wintry surfaces or assassinating lapsed revolutionaries.
Born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, he changed his name during Czarist days to Leon Trotsky, derived from a German term for "defiance". Lenin probably would have named him as his successor, but Lenin's stroke prevented that.
Trotsky was a party theorist, and seems to have been closer to the original intent of Marx than any other prominent Soviet figure. He was Marxist but not Stalinist. Not a good move when a murderous tyrant like Stalin is about to take charge.
Trotsky led the Left Opposition in a failed struggle against the policies of Josef Stalin in the 1920s, a rather dangerous move. That got him expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929.
Trotsky fled for exile in Mexico as Stalin seized power. He was sentenced to death in absentia, and was assassinated by an agent of Stalin with an ice ax in Mexico City in 1940.
You can tour Trotsky's home in Mexico City. His home is very swanky. The communist leaders were all for collectivism and "from each according to his abilities, to each according to their needs", so long as it didn't apply to them. Their needs-to-abilities ratios were always rather high.
On the way to Trotsky's house:
The local revolutionaries have marked the way!
Here is the exterior of Trotsky's house.
His estate was was enclosed by a strong wall. You've gotta keep the restless proletariat out!
This is Leon Trotsky's Kitchen
If you enjoy seeing Leon Trotsky's kitchen sink, then you should check out my page showing Trotsky's toilet.
Here I am in Leon Trotsky's Kitchen! Right there in front of Leon Trotsky's stove! And his pots and pans!
Notice the wall? See what color it is?
This is Leon Trotsky's Bedroom, featuring Leon Trotsky's Sombrero and Leon Trotsky's Walking Stick.
This is Leon Trotsky's Study, where he wrote at great length about Lenin and communism. Many of the books on the shelves were authored by Trotsky.
We are looking across Leon Trotsky's Garden, from the corner of the heavy wall keeping the proletariat at bay, across the garden to his large and luxurious house.
The garden is complete with a Soviet flag and hammer-and-sickle monument above the grave holding his ashes. Trotsky was never rehabilitated by the Party, and so he is one of the few prominent Soviet figures not buried at the Kremlin in Moscow.
And finally, unless I can convince you to go look at those pictures of Leon Trotsky's toilet, hot water heater, and other plumbing, we end our visual tour with Leon Trotsky's Rabbit Hutches.
An American leftist was there on a pilgrimage on the day I visited. He didn't seem to see the ironic humor in anything.
He said that he had once won a write-in contest to Radio Havana, and got a free trip to Havana for a couple of weeks at Castro's expense. He and the other contest winners had breakfast every morning with some North Koreans, who he said were very happy to meet him and to be there.
Of course — they were North Koreans! They are accustomed to being starved by their government. Give them breakfast and you own them.
Making it stranger was the fact that he was from Evansville, the city that is one of Indiana's centers of right-wing cranks. There is the group that thinks that U.S. currency is an Illuminati plot or some other nonsense, and so they are producing their own alternative currency (accepted at a few gun stores and pawn shops nation-wide). And then there is the Ku Klux Klan activity in and around Evansville. Plus, it seems, a few left-wing cranks for balance...
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