Josh Ireland

um, awkward line where he has to be incredibly, he wants to be supportive of the Russian revolution, which is still under attack from most of the West, at least rhetorically.

Um, you know, it's still seen as this, this sort of the greatest, one of the great threats in Europe.

Um,

But at the same time, he has to denigrate Stalin and what Stalin is doing and present him as being a failure.

He describes him as being the gravedigger of the revolution.

So he has to try and nuance his messages.

But this is the other thing that Stalin, especially as time goes by and as dissent within the Soviet Union shrinks and shrinks and shrinks to the point where there is almost no one else presenting any other perspective other than the story that Stalin wants to be told.

Trotsky is one of the only people that is saying something different.

And he's also this person who has this lingering aura because of the role he played in 1917.

He has an authority.

And I think that is one of the things that Stalin can't bear and sends him into a fury.

He reads everything.

This is the weird thing.

He reads everything that Trotsky writes.

He's probably one of the only people in the Soviet Union that actually does care about

Trotsky speeches or read his articles because the censorship is so sort of fierce by this point.

So he has brief periods of exile in first France after he leaves Istanbul for France and then Norway and he's never a happy, he's no one's idea of a good guest.

People are always terrified he's there to foment revolution.

So no government really wants him to stay if they can avoid it.

But one government that is reasonably friendly towards him is the revolutionary or socialist government of Cárdenas in Mexico, which is enacting huge land reforms.