Josh Ireland

So they're kind of... On the one hand, they feel very distant from that.

And it's this weird time where...

Trotsky begins an affair with Frida Kahlo.

So this is Trotsky, the upright family man, also a man who likes sort of touching people's knees under the table.

And Frida Kahlo, one of the most seductive, fascinating figures of the 20th century, who seems to have initiated the affair as a way of taking revenge on her own husband, Diego Rivera, who had been sleeping with her sister.

So it's a very sort of febrile atmosphere.

Yeah, say that again.

And the affair lasts for a while, you know, they're sort of, it's kind of, it's kind of high fast really that they're exchanging notes, you know, they,

They're talking in English so no one else can understand what they're saying.

And then it doesn't last because it can't last.

They leave the Blue House for another home, probably because I imagine it was quite tense, but also because Rivera began as quite a sort of fulsome ally of Trotsky.

But he's, you know, you can't rely on muralists if you're trying to...

build a revenue two reasonably unreliable people I imagine well there's a thing like Trotsky is incredibly right he's punctilious he's famously the only person that ever turned up on time in the Soviet Union he allegedly once shot a driver for being late don't think that's true but I think it gives a good sense of who he was and his personality he likes order he needs order and people like Rivera exist in chaos so they fall out and Trotsky moves to the house he would die in

And its chief attraction is it has, it's a kind of compound, you know, like the kind of thing you might see in Afghanistan or something.

So there's high walls around it.

So he's worried about being assassinated?

I think he knows from the moment he leaves Russia that at some point they're going to catch up.

And Stalin has spent the last 10 years trying to organise his assassination.

So part of the frustration that feeds, that drives the terror is,

is Stalin's rage that the thing he wants to be done hasn't been done.