House of Leon Trotsky

This large old house was a safe haven for the Russian leader Leon Trotsky and became his final resting-place. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, he found refuge in Mexico in 1937, thanks to support from Diego Rivera. In 1940 the Spanish communist Ramon Mercader assassinated him in this very house. The political leader's original furnishings and his remains, buried beneath a modest monument in the garden, add intrigue to the museum.

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein he was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and then as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War.

On a balmy summer evening in August 1940, a young man gained admittance to the study of Leon Trotsky's heavily guarded house near Mexico City. He asked Trotsky to read something he had written. While Trotsky was poring over his article, the visitor removed an alpine climbing axe from his overcoat and sank it into the great thinker's skull.

The assassin, who called himself Jacson Mornard, was traveling with a forged Canadian passport and claimed to be in Mexico on business. In reality, he was a Stalinist agent who had been posing as the boyfriend of Trotsky's personal secretary in order to carry out his mission.