On Aug. 20, 1940, the Bolshevik firebrand Lev Bronstein, better known by his nom de plume, Leon Trotsky, was viciously attacked in the study of his home in Coyoacan, a quiet suburb of Mexico City. A fatal blow was delivered via ice axe to the top of his skull by an assassin working on behalf of the feared Soviet intelligence agency, the NKVD. He died the next day on the operating table of a nearby hospital with his wife, Natasha, by his side. Trotsky’s death was the final chapter of his long dissident struggle with the oppressive Soviet state that he’d been instrumental in establishing.

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In his intoxicatingly good new book, The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy, Josh Ireland immerses us in the violent upheavals of the early 20th century, bringing the fraught geopolitics and murky intelligence world of the pre-World War II era to the heights of the finest espionage thrillers. In his exploration of the rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin, and the colorful life of NKVD agent Ramon Mercader, the Spanish communist who ultimately dealt the fatal blow, Ireland explains how Vladimir Lenin’s revolution ultimately evolved into the paranoid, totalitarian empire of Joseph Stalin.

Born in 1879 to impoverished Jews in what is now Ukraine, Trotsky was one of those remarkable figures in history who, while ascending far beyond what his weak early hand in life should have allowed, never quite became all that he could be. Part of this was due to his personality. While he repeatedly demonstrated the spellbinding charisma needed to win followers and obtain political power, he was also undermined by his blatant narcissism, indifference to those around him, and a rather grandiose image that was not entirely befitting of a class revolutionary. Another........

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