Born in the Ukraine in 1879 and later hailed by one admirer as the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ, Lev Bronstein became famous under another name. From 1902 he called himself Trotsky, adapted from the German word trotz, essentially meaning ‘defiance’, which would prove prophetic. He was a leading figure in the Bolshevik movement under Lenin, after whose death in 1924 he was the most important victim of Joseph Stalin’s insatiable lust for power.
Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1927 and exiled to Turkey in 1929. He and his wife, Natalia Sedova, later moved to France and then to Norway. In December 1936 Trotsky, now 56, and Natalia were put on a freighter to cross the Atlantic to Mexico. There they were warmly welcomed by the Mexican president, the former revolutionary leader Lazaro Cardenas, and taken to live in the Coyoacan area of Mexico City at the home of two other admirers, the painters Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, with whom Trotsky had an affair.
