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Trotsky, Stalin, And The Ice Axe

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 163

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A single ice axe swung in a quiet Mexico City study, but the shockwave started decades earlier, on the edges of a collapsing empire. We follow the combustible rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin—from exile and revolution to a propaganda war that turned one man’s image into the regime’s most useful enemy. Our guest, author Josh Ireland, brings meticulous research and narrative clarity to a story where ideology cuts into daily life, and private love becomes a public weapon.

We dig into the fractures that shaped Soviet power: the Bolshevik belief in a tight revolutionary vanguard, the Menshevik alternative that lost momentum, and the way that early choices hardened into a state ethos of control. You’ll hear how the NKVD evolved into a sprawling security apparatus that hunted at home and abroad, and why Stalin’s paranoia wasn’t just a psychological quirk—it was a method for governing through fear. Along the way, we trace Trotsky’s exile from Turkey to Norway to Mexico, his brief orbit with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and the shrinking circle of trust that defined his final years.

At the center stands Ramon Mercader, a handsome Spaniard whose path to murder ran through the Spanish Civil War, a ruthless handler, and a calculated romance with Sylvia Ageloff. Their honey trap shows how Soviet intelligence manipulated intimacy to breach fortified lives. After the killing, Mercader’s airtight cover story holds for years, his mother faces the cost of loyalty in Moscow, and Sylvia fades into obscurity, carrying a wound history rarely credits. Threaded through it all is a modern echo: the institutional lineage from Cheka to NKVD to KGB to today’s security state, and the cultural logic that still shapes power in Russia.

If you’re drawn to political history, true crime, or the human drama behind world-shaping events, this conversation delivers context, character, and consequence. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review to help others find the show—what part of Trotsky’s story surprised you most?

find Josh Ireland  at    https://www.joshireland.co.uk/

Dutton publishing https://www.penguin.com/dutton-overview


Michele McAloon:

You're listening to Crossword where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon, your host. You can find out more about me and the show at bookclues.com. Today we've got a great interview with a man named Josh Ireland who has written THE DEATH OF TROTSKY, THE TRUE STORY OF THE PLOT TO KILL STALIN'S GREATEST ENEMY, besides it being a very good tale, a little macabre, but a good tale. And you kind of learn of the intellectual heritage of where a character like Vladimir Putin comes from. So it's well worth the conversation, well worth the listen, and well worth the read. Please tell a friend about crossword books and uh stick with us. We've got some great books coming up. Amelia Earhart, Lewis and Clark, Western Lore, and all of this coming up. Really hope you stay with us. And you can find out more about me at bookclues.com. All right. Thanks, guys. Happy listening. God bless. And this is kind of probably the assassinations that started all the assassinations. Maybe not, but it's the death of Trotsky, the true story of the plot to kill Stalin's greatest enemy, and it is by Joseph Ireland. Mr. Ireland, I'd like to welcome you to the show.

Josh Ireland :

Thank you very much for having me on. Yeah, I'm really pleased to be here.

Michele McAloon:

Okay. One your biography says that you are a ghost writer. What is a ghost writer?

Josh Ireland :

I help interesting people write their stories, really. You know, the people who, because they don't have enough time or they haven't got the confidence to write a book, or it's they don't feel as if it's something that they would be confident doing. Then I sit with them, we craft their story, and then after a few months, hopefully we should have a good book at the end of it. And you know, so I do a a range of people from sort of famous people to interesting members of the public who, you know, who want to make a record of their life or their achievements or their thoughts.

Michele McAloon:

Okay.

Josh Ireland :

And I f I find them all equally interesting, actually. I think I'm probably quite nosy. I like the sort of the right it gives you to ask impertinent questions.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, I think that's good. And we call nosy curious around here.

Josh Ireland :

Yeah, curious. I think curious isn't is a less sort of a word, less burdened by judgment. Yeah. There we go.

Michele McAloon:

Well, m Mr. Ireland has written two other books that have actually been a critically acclaimed nonfiction works, The Traitors in 2017, and his excellent, excellent book, Churchill and Son, which was a Daily Telegraph book of the year in 2021. His current book is put out by Dutton Press in the United States. And we have to start with the very first thing. So the death of Trotsky, which happened, what, 1941?

Josh Ireland :

August August 1940.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, August 1940. And you are a ghostwriter, you're not of Russian expertise, or you're not even a Russian dissident. How did you go about researching this book? Because your research is really good. And according to one of my favorite Russian experts, it's actually extremely accurate.

Josh Ireland :

Well, that is very, very kind. I mean, I think it's two things. One is I have always been interested in Russia, by no means a Russianist. I studied it at Russian history at school and then several semesters at university, that had that sort of foundation that I could build upon. And I think the second thing is there's lots of really excellent scholarship, you know, whether that's someone someone like Robert Service or Simon Montefiori, there's there's this architecture that you can work within, people who have had incredible access to archival material, especially people writing in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. I mean, I think what we now know is that there is there it has been a sort of window where people could have could have access to stuff that had been hidden for for decades. And unfortunately, that window is probably shut now. And I was keen to be able to gain access to stuff in Russia, but sort of world events overtook me and meant that that sort of that door really was firmly shut. Um but yeah, I think otherwise it was just a question of following your interest, doing the sort of detective work that you always do with any book, which is you know, sort of spending a lot of time reading people's bibliographies.

Michele McAloon:

There's another author that I have interviewed, a guy named Sean Walker with the Guardian, who the Illegals, who also has done extensive research. I interviewed him, I think last spring. It actually an extensively researched book, again, using a lot of archival material. And I thought that your book is a great compliment to his book. So, to my listening audience, if you get a chance, I will put up that first interview I did with Sean Walker because both of these actually mirror each other very, very well. The death of Trotsky. Stalin kills Trotsky. Let's start from the very beginning. First thing, tell us who Stalin was, and then I'm gonna ask you about Trotsky, and then I'm gonna ask you about the beef between Stalin and Trotsky. And this really has to be contextualized. Your book does a really good job of it, of showing kind of the mirror image of these two men, and really their their deep hatred for each other.

Josh Ireland :

Well, I think I think you're right to sort of use the image of a mirror image because there is a kind of very profound similarity, but also very profound differences between the two men. So Stalin is a sort of like Trotsky, is a creature of the edges of the old Russian Empire. So Stalin comes from Georgia. He's the son of a cleaner and a sort of alcoholic, I think a shoemaker. So this is no sign that he is going to have any sort of imprint on the 20th century. But he is bright, he's ambitious, and then the thing happens to Stalin that also happens to Trotsky. He was also, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I think the parallel is also useful. And again, Trot Trotsky's this he's from what is now Ukraine, he's the son of an illiterate farmer, but he's incredibly bright. I mean, he's probably too bright for his own good. And and and whatever he would have done, I imagine he would have had a different life from his parents. But what happens to both Stalin and Trotsky is is that they both become I guess they both have what now seems almost like a downseen conversion to communism, to socialism, that they are animated by this great, great drive to completely upend the the world as as they name it. And and I don't think from our I think from our perspective it's quite understand it's quite hard to understand the sort of depth and strength of their fervour for this belief, their their willingness to do anything to whether that's in the context of their own lives or as as will happen later on, the impact it has on other people's lives. So they're both sort of that that's the the sort of propulsion that keep pushes them forward through the early the first couple of decades of the 20th century. They both spend time both spend time in exile, and and that their the exile they have is a sort of first clue to the very profound differences in their personality. So whereas Stalin spends a lot of time in Siberia, Trotsky escapes from Siberia and has a much more cosmopolitan life. You know, he's he sort of skips from England to France to Spain. And then in 1917, the Russian Empire, which has been governed by the Tsars for the Romanov family for upwards of five centuries, finally begins to collapse. And there's a there's a popular evolution. And for several months Russia has its first and and you could almost argue its only um period of actual something approaching democratic rule. But the revolution is, you know, attracts Stalin, Trotsky, who are all who are both part of a small group of revolutionaries who are known as Bolsheviks. They realize that this is their opportunity to do the thing that they've dreamed of for two decades.

Michele McAloon:

But they have a fundamental disagreement. And this is this Mensheviks Bolshevik thing, right? The and the Bolsheviks thought there needed to be world revolution, and Mensheviks thought, or maybe I've got this mixed up, Mensheviks.

Josh Ireland :

Yeah, it's so yeah, so that this is this is a sort of one of the I mean, I think there are there are sort of several reasons why they become such implacable enemies. I mean, some of it is just personality that Trotsky's a much more flamboyant, self intellectually self-confident, eloquent person. I think you know the thing that people talk about him when they remember him is his incredible ability to speak, to, to, to speak off the cuff, to write, to inspire crowds, you know, and it and that all of this was sort of embodied in his physical appearance. You know, he he he took a lot of effort in the way he dressed, he wear white spotless suits, his hair was sort of immaculately brushed back, he'd wear these sort of delicate pans and airs over his nose. Whereas Stalin, by contrast, is he's more sort of sturdy and he's he's more sparing of his words, he's very conscious of the gaps in his education, he's very conscious of his his sense of what Trotsky would describe as being a sort of coarse provincial, whereas you know, Trotsky's a sort of European sophisticate. And so they have a sort of physical, intense physical loathing. But then on top of this is is the sort of more kind of obscure doctrinal argument that begins at pretty much at the beginning of the sort of in the 1910s, where there is the Russians have social revolutionaries who have a split and they split into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and broadly speaking, the Bolsheviks means the majoritarians, see Mensheviks mean the minor minoritarians, which reflects about that the bulk of the group followed Lenin and became Bolsheviks. And it was it was the same, it wasn't a particularly, I mean, it now feels one of those incredibly small, fine points of history, but it was an argument about the way in which a revolutionary party should try and seize power, whether it should try and motivate a large group of people, which is what the Mensheviks thought, or whether it should be a small elite cadre who should lead the revolution, which is what the Bolsheviks believed, and what which is what they went on to do. Stalin was a very, very loyal follower of Lenin, was thus Bolshevik. Trotsky, much more inclined to go his own way, more sort of heterodox thinker, was sort of tried to steer a middle course, but was broadly aligned with the mentrifix. So this meant that for actually for quite a long period before 1917, he was alienated from the rest of the Bolsheviks. But I think once the revolution broke out and this sort of chasm opened and with it, an opportunity to affect the thing that they'd they'd planned and dreamed about and talked about for you know their almost their entire adult lives, they put he puts aside those those differences and very rapidly becomes a very significant part of the Bolshevik plans to seize power. And that again adds to Stalin's resentment because Stalin's been this loyal foot soldier for a long time and suddenly this person who wasn't even part of the organization sort of swans in and is being given, you know, it's a sort of seized center stage for himself.

Michele McAloon:

This is what I don't understand. When was Menshevik or Menshevism or when was that sort of squeezed out? Because Lenin was very much a Bolshevik. Stalin is firmly attached to Lenin. When did that split occur that it was going to be a Bolshevik revolution and the Mensheviks, the white Russians or the Mensheviks were going to be left behind?

Josh Ireland :

In those months between February when the Tsar falls and October when the Bolshevik coup takes place, there is a sort of paralysis that the liberal government, which is trying to sort of continue to keep Russia into the participating in the First World War, which has been a complete disaster for the entire country. They've lost millions of people, economies collapsing, only the Bolsheviks who are plotting to do anything different. It's only them who have got the will and the ruthlessness to do something, which on the face of it seems completely crazy because they're this tiny, tiny handful of revolutionaries. And what they're planning to do is to seize control of this sort of empire, millions of people. And so it is precisely that energy and that ruthlessness, that ambition that propels them past all the other rival groups. And what Trotsky does is he embodies all of those things. He's a key organizer on the ground, he's their mode, you know, creating the alliances they need. And he, you know, helps lead the revolution when it comes on in October 1917.

Michele McAloon:

What point did Stalin and Trotsky look at each other and decide we just hate each other? This is we are we're done with each other. What your book really shows is that Trotskyism almost becomes a phenomenon in itself in the large imagination of Stalin. I mean, Stalin Stalin saw the keys around every corner, right? It was almost imaginative in Stalin's mind. But at what point did Stalin and Trotsky decide, you know what, we just hate each other. This didn't work.

Josh Ireland :

I don't think there was any prelude to that hatred. I suspect, I mean, it's difficult to be confident when they first were in the same room. It's probably in about 1901 in a sort of shabby room in London where th there was one of the Bolshevik congresses where Stalin was apparently present, and I think Trotsky instantly wrote him off as a sort of mediocrity. When Trotsky would later write, he would characterize him as a sort of grabler, you know, this this sort of bureaucratic mediocrity, whereas he is the shining light, this ambitious, clever, talented person in comparison. I don't think there was ever a moment in their lives when they ever liked each other. But I think it was their distaste for each other sharpened into hatred when it became clear that Lenin was ailing and that at some point, whether it was, you know, in four or five months' time, in five years' time, someone would succeed him as as a leader of Russia or the Slovak Union as they were building. And I think that knowledge that that they were in a sort of unspoken competition must have tipped over whatever kind of predispositions they had into a sort of very visceral, very fierce hatred.

Michele McAloon:

When Trotsky died in 1940, he was writing kind of a three-volume book on Stalin, a biography on Stalin. Did that ever see the light of day? Was it ever published?

Josh Ireland :

Yeah, it was. I mean, it wasn't published in his life. I mean, it one of the gruesome details is that he's working on it in the his study. It's all galleys of it are in his study when he's murdered. There are pages into which his own blood has seeped. He hadn't finished it at the time. I don't think he was ever particularly happy either about working on it or about or about its quality. I mean, I think it's probably one of his worst books. But weirdly, it's also one of his most influential because it was published after the war. And I think it helped, for a long time, it helped set the West's perspective on Stalin. It created this image of the colourless bureaucrat who almost accidentally bungled his way into power and then bundled the revolution. Whereas actually the truth is that Stalin was a much more interesting, strange, and talented person, you know, than Trotsky ever gave him credit for. Even after he'd been manoeuvred out of the country, even after Stalin had so sort of comprehensively destroyed him and destroyed his career, I don't think Trotsky ever really could see him in any kind of perspective. And that then, by the same token, Stalin couldn't see Trotsky with any kind of perspective, even after he'd run him out of the country, even after he'd, you know, killed almost all of his family, almost all of his followers. No, Trotsky, the image of Trotsky, as you say, loomed in this kind of astonishing way in Stalin's imagination. That this person he'd comprehensively defeated also resembled to him his greatest enemy. And whether that's because he was, in some way, an emblem of all of Stalin's own insecurities and anxieties. I think one of the other things it illustrates is the kind of strange, bifurcated nature of Stalin's mind. On the one hand, it he's overrun by paranoia, but on the other hand, he also understands in almost intuitively how effectively he can use Trotsky to consolidate his own power, his hold on power in the Soviet Union, turning this demon that exists in his imagination into a demon that exists in the imaginations of millions of people across the Soviet Union. He can justify his the terror, he can justify all of the changes he wants to push through, he can justify his ever tighter grip on power, because there's this enemy that's going to bring down the revolution and this grey experiment that Russia is at the forefront of persisting with. His relationship with Trotsky is a really good insight into how Stalin or as much of one air can ever do that.

Michele McAloon:

And you know, it's interesting because you really do show with the takedown of Trotsky of how the former Soviet Union, how they really operated on foreign ground, how they used the Spanish Civil War, how they used their networks in both the United States and Europe to really a very, very deadly fashion. And you talk about an organization called the NKBD, which I'm not real sure what that stands for, but I know it's it's basically their foreign intelligence service, correct?

Josh Ireland :

Yeah, well, it's it's it's a blanket term for all of their secret police. So it's both foreign intelligence, it's within the NKBD, which later becomes the KGB, which is sort of incarnation of that organization that we were almost familiar with from the Cold War. So within it, organs that are charged with you know domestic security, but also foreign intelligence. So it's effectively, if you were thinking about it in as a comparison to the USA, it's the FBI and the CIA, but within one umbrella organization, each of the divisions within are kind of siloed off. And and as always, in sort of a totalitarian state, there's this kind of constant state of rivalry and suspicion. During the course of this book, the person that the NKVD were most interested in was Stalin and Trotsky and Trotsky's followers.

Michele McAloon:

And Trotsky's followers. And and folks, this is something that has to really be paid attention to because the NKVD Cheka, NKVD goes into the KGB, which goes into the GRU. And guess who comes from that? That's Vladimir Putin. And his intellectual heritage is actually this organization that uh destroyed thousands of people, both abroad and in Russia during the Great Terror. Tell us a little bit about the Great Terror.

Josh Ireland :

I mean, it's one of the sort of central tragedies, I think, of the 20th century, or of history, really. And it's kind of an outcrop of Stalin's paranoia. The sort of astonishing thing about Stalin is that he achieved an unbelievable amount for this sort of peasant from Georgia, but he never stopped looking over his shoulder. He could never stop looking over his shoulder. And perhaps that is part of the reason why he was so sort of relentlessly successful by his own terms. Paranoia was churning constantly inside him. I think he constantly thought there was there were enemies, there were plots. And partly that's because he came from Emilia, which were constantly plotting, which were constantly looking to bring down governments, which were so I think that you know that that's the sort of atmosphere within which he moved. I think the the other sort of strand is that political violence was built into the Soviet system from the very first days of its existence. You know, they came to power in a violent coup. They then rapidly moved to consolidate that power by creating this sort of whole apparatus of oppression, which you know began as the checker, then becomes various different organizations before it ends up as the the KGB. And as you mentioned, it now has there was a brief period when Putin, having been a KGB edit agent, then led the Russian Secret Service. So he's absolutely a creature of that environment, that cultural. He will say that the the collapse of the Soviet Union is the greatest tragedy in history, and that informs his entire worldview. But sorry, but I've got ahead of myself. But yeah, so so political violence against your enemies is is sort of completely baked into the Bolshevik philosophy of how you govern. Your ability to rule is kind of a function of your ability to be ruthless. And when you add to that an incredibly paranoid leader who has almost complete control over almost every organ of government, from you know, from Moscow to sort of Kutzin, the sort of Far East, a man who sees enemies everywhere, but who also understands the value of seeing enemies everywhere as a way of effectively terrorizing an entire population into. Disobedience. Sorry. I think he understood that A frightened population is a population that's easier to govern, that's easier to to mould, and the way you terrify them is by killing millions of people, sending millions of others to concentration camps to make sure that everybody lives in permanent fear of that sort of midnight knock on the door.

Michele McAloon:

And Stalin was because he accused them of Trotskyism, right? Not being Bolshevik enough or not really believing in the revolution. So Trotsky gets thrown out of Russia. He gets thrown out three times, but on the third time, when was the third time that he got bounced out of Russia?

Josh Ireland :

He first goes into internal exile in 1928. So he's definitely sort of the wilds of what's now Kazakhstan. And then he spends, I think it's until 1933 in in a small island just off Istanbul.

Michele McAloon:

Okay.

Josh Ireland :

And then he has a couple of years in France, then Norway, and then finally Mexico. And he's always, you know, treated as this sort of alien, terrifying object by pretty much all the governments of the country through which he passes. You know, in in France he's allowed to stay there as long as he doesn't go anywhere near Paris. It's always a precondition of his being given a sort of residence that he won't try and involve himself in any kind of domestic politics. Because, you know, he's the thing that one of the problems that Stalin had was that Trotsky is was perhaps alongside Lenin one of the two most infamous figures from the first revolution from 1917. When Western leaders like Churchill, you know, thought a lot about um the Bolsheviks, when they wanted to sort of terrify people in in parliamentary speeches or newspaper columns, they'd invoke Trotsky in his hands sort of soaked in blood. But he was, you know, the fear he held was also a sort of sign of his res the people, the way in which people have respected him as a sort of very significant figure, even if for them mostly a repellent one. And I think there's sort of this was another sort of problem that Stalin had, that Stalin emerged almost from nowhere, that people didn't know who he was, but they did know who Trotsky was. And I think even into the 30s, Russia or the Soviet Union remained a sort of mystery to the rest of the world. Then its politics were opaque. You know, people still believed that maybe Trotsky was being sent as a sort of Trojan horse by Stalin into the West. So I mean, I think most people were pretty either desperate to keep him out, or once he came in, were desperate to get rid of him, which is how he ends up in Mexico in 1937.

Michele McAloon:

By the time he ends up in Mexico, he is an international celebrity, but he also knows he's a wanted man at this point because this is in the middle of the terror, people are disappearing, he understands us, he becomes increasingly more isolated. But I tell you, the figure that is almost more colorful than Trotsky in your book is the you know, the cabal that tries to murder Trotsky and this family that comes out of the Spanish Civil War, the Mercard Mercadov. Yeah, the and the figure of Ramon, and he is who eventually becomes the murderer of Trotsky.

Josh Ireland :

But I mean, his relationship with Sylvia, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's it's an incredible psychodrama. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. When I I think that was one of the things that so when I started looking into the idea of writing this book, I think one of the things that struck me was that the death of Trotsky is sort of one of the most famous murders uh in history. Oh, absolutely. You know who puts the the knife into Julius Caesar's back. You know that it's um Lee Harvey Oswald in Texas in in 1961, but you don't know who it is that that kills Trotsky. And I I thought maybe that's because he was just sort of an obscure, sort of featureless, sort of fairly uninteresting character. But actually, as soon as you start reading about Ramon and also his family, you just think it it's this sort of incredible family tragedy, which is once particular to then, but also sort of, I think also speaks to a lot of the thing, the family tragedies that occurred in the 20th century, because they were so completely caught up in in the sort of the kind of the the grip of the sort of mad political obsession led to so much carnage in in the course of you know 30 years.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean that's what's amazing, is he I mean, people really got swept up into these movements and and maybe it's a little bit like red and blue politics in the United States today. I don't know. But I mean, they people were you know willing to give their lives for communism or for the revolution around the world. It was interesting. And this family actually it was what about four kids. It was they were from Spain, they were kind of this cosmopolitan international family that their son ends up as an assassin in Mexico.

Josh Ireland :

There's a a comparison that a lot of historians make between the Bolsheviks and millenarian Christians. They have that in the same tense fervor, the same belief that they are building this incredible new chapter. Or they're about to create an incredible new chapter in the story of human existence. But I think what differentiates millenarian Christians and Bolsheviks, or their followers in the decades that followed the revolution, is that the Bolsheviks believed that that prize was so glittering and so perfect and so beautiful that anything was worth they would be willing to pay any price to achieve it, and they would be willing to trample over anyone that needed to be trampled over in order to get to that point. And I think that's what takes this sort of bourgeois or sort of semi-aristocratic boy from the sort of the safety of this kind of prim, entirely respectable family in Barcelona, or it begins, that's how they start, you know, to eventually become this person that tricks his way into Trotsky's entourage by seducing kind of very naive American Trotskist called Sylvia Agonoff, who's on the edges of the group. And then that's what takes him from Barcelona to Paris, where he initially finds his way into the group, and then on to Mexico City, where he commits that murder. Again, it's just as Stalin and Trotsky were propelled from farmland in Ukraine and the sort of dust and heat of Georgia to the sort of the Kremlin by the force and power of their passion for the new order they wanted to create. That's also what drags him out of his, you know, what could have been a normal existence into becoming one of the most well, he's not one of the most notorious assassins of the 20th century because I don't think he people know his name. But I mean he protagonists in one of the sort of great stories of the 20th century.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I tell you, the story that you have between Sylvie and Ramon, or it's not the story, but the the the story between Sylvie and Mone, the history. I mean, you just want to scream at this woman. No, no, don't you see that this guy fooled you? I mean, it and and that relationship was set up by an NKVD agent, right? They I mean, it would the manufacturer the whole relationship was.

Josh Ireland :

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a version of what we would now know as a sort of honey trap. And but to go back further, you know, that although Ranwan has his own commitment to the cause, the there's no way that he would have become part of the MKVD had it not been for his mother's own relationship with the MKBD, specifically uh a sort of another incredibly charismatic, slightly raffish but completely ruthless figure called uh Leonid Aitingong, who she may or may not have had an affair with. But anyway, she was the one along with Leonid or Aitingong who brought him into the MKBD, you know, and she's always there in the background. She's either with him or one removed watching. And so between them they set up this arrangement where Ramon seduces Sylvia when she's on a trip to Paris. And she's honest, I think, and a good person. But she's incredibly easily manipulated by Ramon. I mean, so easily that I think there are some people who think that she may have been in on the whole plot from the beginning. I don't believe that. But it it does seem almost staggering how she was so easily taken in by him.

Michele McAloon:

You you almost paint a picture of her being a cat lady. I mean, being a Liberian type cat lady, and then she gets swept up by this dashing Ramon, and she's manipulated. And the reason why she's manipulated is because she had actually been on the outside of the Trotsky entourage. Actually, she was not as involved as they originally thought. I mean, the whole story is just weird because it begins with the bodge.

Josh Ireland :

Yeah, right. As you say, it begins with a mistake because we didn't even think that she's actually the sort of the portal into the Trotsky sort of inner sanctum. But actually, she's this sort of tiny figure on the far, far margins of the group. I mean, her sister had worked for Trotsky as a secretary, so she had a sort of degree of credibility with it. There was no sense at all that she was the gateway to what they wanted. To go back to the seduction, I mean, uh, this feels incredibly unfair, but one of the things that almost anyone who talks about her emphasizes is she was quite plain, she was unsophisticated, she was well travelled, but you know, she wasn't a charismatic figure. She knows she was quite mousey. Whereas Ramon was handsome, he was charismatic, he was clever, he could sing, he could improvise stories, you know, he had apparently a good sense of humour. But he was also a mythamaniac, he was an incredibly accomplished liar. I think he had that sort of instinct that all Conman have, the person that tries to sell trick you with selling insurance on the street, right up to sort of someone like Jeffrey Epstein, of knowing what it is you want, what you're afraid of, and and then being able to give it to you. So I think to sort of to accuse her of being uh, you know, a a willing participant in the scheme is is to underplay the dazzling scale and skill of Rammel's seduction of her. There are times when she does have suspicions when she realizes there are kind of gaps in the stories he's told, or you know, in people that turn up in an inexplicable way, and so then he when in his attempts to try and dispel uh her doubts, but but somehow he already always keeps her going, and there's always enough for her to kind of think that he's okay.

Michele McAloon:

Have you watched the television show uh The Americans, the net the series?

Josh Ireland :

I watched some of it, yeah.

Michele McAloon:

Oh my gosh, that's I kept thinking of like because they go out and they seduce other people, and I kept thinking about this character Sylvia. Trotsky is increasingly isolated in Mexico. He has a very small entourage. He runs into and I had no idea this. He ran into Carlo Frida and Diego Riviera.

Josh Ireland :

Yeah.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, who I mean, colorful, colorful artists.

Josh Ireland :

Yeah, he's an extraordinary sort of king in the story, you know.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, stayed at their house, eventually gets kicked out of their house because he's kind of obnoxious, or they get tired of having this house guest for so long.

Josh Ireland :

Well, also that he has an affair with Frida Kahlo.

Michele McAloon:

Well, yeah, that's a little problem too.

Josh Ireland :

I mean, especially given, yeah, I mean, I think um Diego Rivera, I mean it's kind of a weird one where you know Diego Rivera at the time was was the far more famous, far more significant, or considered significant artist. Frida was just his wife, really, in comparison. But he was also the kind of person that would carry the gun. He announced that he would shoot anyone who slept with his wife, which was sort of the height of hypocrisy because he was sleeping with everyone, including her sister. He's the person that brings that helped sponsor um Trotsky's arrival in in Mexico. And it, you know, and it's sort of weird the you know, right, you're not accustomed to writing stories where muralists sort of figure quite largely. He's sort of the great muralist, 20s and 30s, and right did these astonishing, astonishing paintings, which are sort of like this mad mix of like Goya and and Caravaggio, but also like, you know, sort of um Aztec art and things like that. It's an amazing kind of paintings that could only have come from Mexico, could only have come from someone like Diego Rivera. But yeah, eventually they fall out. And so Trotsky's living in this kind of compound. His life is a person who once can know commanding armies, once looked set fair to become the ruler of the second big empire in the entire world, is living this tiny, circumscribed life where he can barely go out, and if he does go out, he has to sort of hide underneath the seats of the car so he doesn't get spotted. He's powerless. Almost his entire family has been wiped out by the stage, whether that's deliberately, I mean directly in the sense of being poisoned, which may or may not have happened to one of his sons. Another one disappeared into Stalin's camps. His two daughters were basically harried into death. Anyone he's ever really sort of almost ever corresponded with, to have known Trotsky becomes in the Soviet Union almost does have tantamount to a death sentence, you know, to have delivered him a letter once to being in the same room with him means that you are an object of suspicion. So anyone that could potentially ever communicate with him, support him, help him, has either disappeared into camps, had a bullet put in the back of their head, or has done what any other sort of acceptable thing as far as Stalin is concerned, which is a complete recantation, you know, to become someone who is fiercely against Trotsky as as anyone else on the planet. But even that is usually not enough in the long run, almost everyone dies. And he knows that every letter he sends is being read, that every letter he receives is already being read. He knows that there probably are people in the household who are spying on him, and he knows that there are people all around him that want him dead, that are plotting, that are looking for the weakness in the door, the guard that's that doesn't do a proper shift, so doesn't watch properly, you know, all of these things. He knows it's coming.

Michele McAloon:

He does, he knows it's coming, and on the day he's killed, he's feeding his rabbits and writing in his study where he's actually he is killed. What happens to Ramon after he is killed?

Josh Ireland :

That is what helps Sylvia and Ramon after Trotsky, after the deed is done, to sort of say So Ramon he arrives with the sort of famous pickaxe, but also with a letter which is in is nominally as his cover story. So it basically he has found his way into Trotsky's entourage by posing as a sort of bored, dissolute Belgian playboy called Jacques Monard, and that's what they all know him as. So he initially affects to have absolutely no interest in politics, but then sort of in the summer of 1940 becomes incredibly interested in it. And so the letter that he's carrying with him that basically says that he had been a passionate Trotskyist, but then Trotsky's sort of many sins and plots and flaws has turned him against him, and that's why he's killing him. In the aftermath of the killing, where he's sort of dragged down by Trotsky's guards and beat into a bloody pulp, he's then taken to prison, and he spends over the next uh two decades holding stubbornly to his story, pretending that you know he has nothing to do with the NKVD, that he's just this sort of innocent who who was pushed to the edge of his what he could tolerate and finally took justice into his own hands. His mother, who had been in a car just outside Trotsky's house, waiting to take him away in the event that he managed to kill Trotsky and then escape successfully, she returns with the rest of the NKVD unit to the Soviet Union, where initially she's greeted as a hero, as they always are, and she's given, I think, in his absence, sort of the order of the Soviet Union. But very quickly, she has this sort of I think it dawns on her, the sort of sheer scale of what she's done and what she's let her son into. She suddenly realizes that she's embroiled her son in this terrible thing, that she's ruined her son's life, and that she's also lost him. They adored each other. And I think whatever the sort of however unhealthy their relationship, because I think no one would ever suggest that a mother who encourages her son to become a political assassin is that's a healthy relationship. Right. I think she knows she becomes bitter, she becomes, she drinks, she smokes, she sort of paces around her small apartment in Moscow, pesters the NKB to do something. And I think the NKBD have their own plans. They funnel money into the prison where where Ramon is being kept so he can live comfortably. I mean, and he lives so comfortably that he actually marries while he's in there. And I think they are probably plotting at some point to spring him out of jail. But she kind of goes rogue and does this sort of ludicrous attempt to free him, which basically only means that the security around him is amped up, and you know, she basically guarantees that he will have to serve the full sentence.

Michele McAloon:

It's a crazy story. It's crazy.

Josh Ireland :

It's completely mad, and and I didn't really have time to go into it, but I mean it kind of gets wilder and wilder. The more that you pull the threads, it always you wherever you land, it ends somewhere sort of pretty mad.

Michele McAloon:

What happened to Sylvie? What had happened to her?

Josh Ireland :

And then she's very sad. So initially, the there's sort of understandably, there's a great deal of suspicion about her and her motives and her whatever role she did and didn't play in um the murder. And alongside that, she's completely distraught. She realizes she's been used and she's been manipulated and she's been used as this sort of puppet. And you know, she understands she's clever. She understands that without her and the role she played, none of this would have happened, no matter how unwitting it was. So she's initially she's arrested the FBI take a kind of close interest in her. But eventually, within a f a matter of days, she's released, she returns to the United States, uh, basically hides for the next three, four decades of her life. I think she's a uh an elementary or a pr a sort of kindergarten teacher, changes her name, lives quietly with one of her sisters, fades quietly into obscurity.

Michele McAloon:

Just incredible. I I tell you, folks, you have to read this story because and it I'm surprised this story doesn't have more traction because what it's why I do nonfiction. Who needs fiction when you've got stuff like laurel? I mean, you're not sure. There are definitely details here where you think if I'd if I'd been writing written a novel and made it up, it would have been It's why I'm a nonfiction book podcast reader host, because I tell you, truth of reality is crazier than anything we can think upon our own human selves. So I mean, it's just incredible. How long did you take to research this book? The research was about three years. It's well written. It's easy to follow. You gotta kind of get over some of the Russian names. And it's like in reading any Dostoevsky novel. You have to keep looking at the names because the names are truly foreign to us, right? But it's well worth the read. When is this when is this going to be out for publication? Okay, great. So next week, guys. Yeah, and so I'll try to have this up next week when it's really yeah, that'd be a melee thing, yeah. Okay. So again, it's the death of Trotsky, the true story of the plot to kill Stalin's greatest enemy by Josh Ireland. Josh, are you do you have a website where we can find you?

Josh Ireland :

Yeah, I think it's just Josh Ireland. I think I think that's okay.

Michele McAloon:

Great. So, folks, go go look at his website. And really, this is a book you want to go out and buy. It's it's a good book because we did talk about it, and you know how the story ends. There's some great detail in here. And I have to tell you, folks, read this, read it with intent and seriousness. And it's not far to imagine today's Russia from this either. So yeah, just let that be said. Anyway, Mr. Ireland, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much.

Josh Ireland :

I really enjoyed being on. Thank you.

Michele McAloon:

I wish you the best with this book.

Josh Ireland :

Thank you very much.