(2 of 3)
Eventually Trotsky chafed at his isolation. He applied for visas to other countries. But at the time, Stalin was considered the "moderate" who was content to establish "socialism in one country," while Trotsky was the firebrand who wanted to spread revolution everywhere. Democratic governments were understandably reluctant to extend their hospitality to a man who would advocate their overthrow. Finally, in 1933, France agreed to admit him, provided he did not meddle in French politics. Trotsky complied, but local Stalinists, as well as Nazis, would not let him be. They pressured local authorities to keep him on the move, and he was hounded from town to town. He was given brief refuge in Norway when a socialist government came to power. But Stalin protested, and in 1936 Trotsky was packed off to Mexico—his last place of exile.
Trotsky was enchanted by the Mexican landscape. He was fascinated by cacti and took long hikes to search for rare specimens. The hard-bitten revolutionary also kept rabbits and chickens at his home in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, and spent hours feeding them according to the latest scientific methods.
Closing In. Back in Russia the monstrous purge trials were under way. One after another, the old Bolsheviks took the stand, confessed monotonously to fantastic plots and implicated Trotsky. The more of them the maniacal Stalin murdered, the more he seemed to fear Trotsky. "The frenzy with which Stalin pursued the feud, making it the paramount preoccupation of international Communism, beggars description," writes Deutscher. "There is in the whole of history hardly another case in which such immense sources of power and propaganda were employed against a single individual."
Trotsky fought back doggedly. He dashed off articles condemning the bloodbath; he wrote his great dogmatic book, The Revolution Betrayed. In 1937, Trotskyites in various countries set up a commission of reasonably impartial observers, with John Dewey at its head, to establish the facts. The commission held a week of hearings at Trotsky's home in Mexico. After months of sifting the evidence, it solemnly found Trotsky innocent of all the charges brought against him in Moscow.
Inexorably, Stalin closed in. He embarked on a policy of worldwide assassination of Trotskyites. One of Trotsky's sons was executed in Russia; the other was poisoned in a hospital in France, where he had been taken for an appendectomy. Had Trotsky stopped his attacks on Stalin, had he gone into hiding as his friends urged, he might have survived or at least lived longer. But he refused to knuckle under. "I will endure this hell-black night to the end," he said. One night a gang of Stalinists, led by the Mexican artist Siqueiros, broke into Trotsky's casually guarded home and sprayed 200 machine-gun bullets around his bedroom. But he and Natalya had flung themselves under the bed just in time and were not hit.