Despite building a guarded compound in Mexico City to protect himself, Leon Trotsky was killed in August 1940 by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent who pretended to be one of Trotsky's followers.

The death of Leon Trotsky in the summer of 1940 wasn’t necessarily a surprise to the Russian revolutionary. He knew that Joseph Stalin wanted him dead. He just didn’t know who was going to do the killing.

He found out on August 20, 1940. That afternoon, Trotsky was sitting in his study in Coyoacán, a leafy suburb of Mexico City. It was quite a different setting than he was used to.

The man who had once commanded the Red Army, who had stood beside Lenin during the most tumultuous days of the Russian Revolution, was now living behind fortified walls topped with watchtowers far from the country he had

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