Stalin's Nemesis

Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian Revolution, and a brilliant writer and orator. He was also a ruthless and authoritarian figure who could have become Lenins successor as ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time of the Second World War, he was a powerless exile in Mexico who had been refused entry to every country in Europe. Living in a villa borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Trotsky was protected by naive young American acolytes who saw him as the supreme theoretician of world revolution. The hothouse atmosphere of the villa was heightened by emotional turmoil in the relations between Trotsky and Rivera, a volcanically unstable man, and the sexual tension in his relations with the beautiful Frida Kahlo. Trotskys wife was restless and jealous. Exotic visitors like the Surrealist poet André Breton came and went. The puritanical Trotsky drove his young followers hard.