Question by guest987654321: Why Did Leon Trotsky end up escaping to Mexico? Wouldn’t Mexico be a country that was heavily contradictory to
Leon Trotsky politics? I know his life was in danger (I’m not asking why escape) I’m asking why Mexico when in fact Mexico was very different from the Soviet Union in that time period.
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Answer by Naz F
Trotsky didn’t have much of a choice, but Diego Rivera – He was a Communist artist, you might’ve seen him in the movie about his wife, Frida Kalo – arranged to bring him to Mexico.
By the way, the house where he stayed is a preserved memorial in an upscale Mexican neighborhood. There’s a legend that he was writing on his typewriter ‘The result of the Russian revolution is…’ when he was assasinated (spraying the page with blood to finish the sentence), but the typewriter is elsewhere.
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Alfonso M says
Trotsky had to get as far away from the Soviet Union as possible once Lenin died and Stalin ousted him. Mexico may have been where he was living but South America was a area ripe with revolution and Communists,Socalists, and Facists the world over traveled to South America. Leon Trotsky was killed by a Communist sympatheizer in 1940.
Trotsky vs Kerensky- says
Trotsky first went on exile to Turkey, Büyükada. (To an island in the sea of Marmara)
Then, because of its distance to the Soviet Union and the communist friendly people of Mexico like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, he moved to Mexico where he thought he would be much more free to publish his articles and attack Stalin. Yes, indeed he went to Mexico because "it was so different from the Soviet Union", as you say. You know that Latin America was always a safe haven for guilty/not guilty politicians because one sometimes needs to do 'illegal' things, like publishing articles attacking Stalin of corruption, to be free. Mexico, in that respect, was a great place but of course, unfortunately even that didn't save Trotsky.
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Koshu says
After leading the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet Union, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. As the head of the International Left Opposition and then of the Fourth International, he continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent.[1] Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories and practices of Stalinism.
jim says
Communist sympathizers who had met Trotsky in New York and elsewhere arranged for his stay. Diego Riviera was certainly one of them, if not the organizer of the escape.