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Death in Coyoacán

How the long arm of Stalin liquidated Leon Trotsky.

Sep 28, 2009, Vol. 15, No. 02 • By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ
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Trotsky

Downfall of a Revolutionary

by Bertrand M. Patenaude

HarperCollins, 384 pp., $27.99

In 1939, while Stalin and Hitler were allied against the democratic West, the predecessor of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and its chairman, Texas Democratic congressman Martin Dies, sought testimony from one of the world's leading authorities on Soviet Communism. But the witness was living outside the United States, and a visa to cross the border and appear before the committee was denied him. Less than a year later, the prospective witness had been murdered in a brutal, flamboyant manner.

The man who desperately wished to "name names" to the House committee was Leon Trotsky, exiled in Mexico. Although his death had been ordered by Stalin since the mid-1930s, the invitation to appear before the committee--where Trotsky intended to disclose the full extent of Soviet financing and control of Communists in America and around the world--must have made his killing even more urgent to the Russian dictator. Certainly, had the exile been allowed to answer the committee's invitation, today's common wisdom about communism in America, about the House Committee on Un-American Activities, about testifying before it, and even about Leon Trotsky himself, might be very different.

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