Unspecified/General

In the Coyoacan district of Mexico City stands the fortified house where the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky spent the last years of his life in exile and where he was assassinated in 1940, now preserved as a museum to his memory. Driven from the Soviet Union by his rival Joseph Stalin, Trotsky found refuge in Mexico in 1937, welcomed by the painter Diego Rivera and at first living at the nearby Casa Azul of Frida Kahlo before moving to this house. As the threat to his life grew, the house was turned into a fortress, its windows bricked up and high walls and watchtowers added, and an armed assault in May 1940 failed to kill him, but a few months later an agent of Stalin gained his confidence and struck him down with an ice axe. The museum preserves the house much as it was, the rooms left with Trotsky's books, furniture and personal effects, the study with the desk where he was attacked, and the garden where his ashes are buried beneath a monument bearing the hammer and sickle. Bullet holes from the first attack are still visible. The house offers a vivid and sobering window onto one of the dramatic episodes of twentieth-century political history. The house museum preserves with great care the atmosphere of the last refuge of a man who had once stood at the very summit of the Russian Revolution as a close comrade of Lenin and the organiser of the Red Army, only to be driven into exile, hounded across continents and stripped of his country by Stalin, who saw in him a dangerous rival. Mexico, under a sympathetic government, granted him asylum, and Rivera and Kahlo, then admirers of his ideas, helped arrange his arrival and first sheltered him; the relationship later soured, and Trotsky moved to this house, which the rising danger forced him to fortify with bricked windows, reinforced doors and guard towers. The failed machine-gun assault of May 1940, in which a group of attackers including the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros sprayed the bedroom with bullets that Trotsky and his wife survived by dropping to the floor, left marks still pointed out today, and only weeks later the assassin Ramon Mercader, having posed as a friend, delivered the fatal blow. The study where he fell is kept as it was, his glasses, books and papers in place, and his ashes lie in the garden beneath a stone carved with the hammer and sickle. Quiet and affecting, the museum offers visitors a direct and unsettling encounter with the violence and intrigue of twentieth-century revolutionary politics.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: 410 Avenida Rio Churubusco, Mexico City, Mexico