The Last Revolutionary - The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky #956833

On August 20, 1940, a man named Jacques Mornard entered Leon Trotsky's study in Mexico City, carrying a manuscript and an ice axe hidden beneath his raincoat. Twenty-six hours later, the last revolutionary was dead.
The assassination of Leon Trotsky was the culmination of the twentieth century's most relentless manhunt. For over a decade, Joseph Stalin had deployed thousands of agents across three continents with a single obsession: destroy the one man who could expose the truth about what the Russian Revolution had become.
The Last Revolutionary tells the complete story of Trotsky's extraordinary life — from his childhood on the Ukrainian steppe to the Siberian exile from which he escaped hidden in a hay cart, from the streets of revolutionary Petrograd where he helped overthrow an empire to the fortified compound in Mexico where Stalin's assassin finally reached him.
This is a story of ideas powerful enough to shake the world and hatred deep enough to pursue a man to the ends of the earth. It is the story of a brilliant intellectual who built an army from nothing, commanded millions of soldiers, and stood second only to Lenin in the revolution that transformed the twentieth century. It is also the story of his fall — outmaneuvered by Stalin, expelled from his country, watching helplessly as his children were murdered one by one, his comrades executed, his legacy erased.
But Trotsky refused to be silenced. From exile in Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico, he continued to write, to organize, to fight. His pen became his weapon, his words a constant threat to Stalin's grip on power. The dictator who controlled the largest country on earth could not tolerate the existence of one man with a typewriter.
Drawing on letters, diaries, declassified intelligence files, and eyewitness accounts, The Last Revolutionary brings to life the dramatic final years of a man hunted across continents by the world's most powerful secret police. It reveals the patient work of Soviet intelligence in grooming an assassin, the tragic love affair that gave him access to Trotsky's inner circle, and the terrible morning when the ice axe finally fell.
The Last Revolutionary is both an intimate biography and an epic tale of ideas in collision, a story that illuminates how the twentieth century's great ideological struggles played out in the life of a single extraordinary individual.