Josh Ireland

It's a kind of medieval king's irrational, why hasn't this been done?

Why are we not following my orders?

Why are you not doing this?

And because he's paranoid, he assumes that it's not incompetence, that it's a plot.

So one leader after another of the secret services is assassinated.

Why are they full?

They're awful because they're not working hard enough to kill Trotsky.

So there were various attempts in Europe to bump him off.

None of them come really that close.

But what they have done is they've penetrated the Trotskyists.

What remains of the Trotskyist organisation is riddled with spies.

There's the person who...

in Paris is Trotsky's son's best friend, who's also a FIDI.

Everything, every letter that Trotsky sends is read by the NKVD, every letter he receives.

They know where they're going, what they're doing.

There's nothing, you know, they can't really move without being watched or being monitored.

So the net's getting tighter and tighter, and Trotsky knows he's going to be killed.

And the people around him seem much more anxious about this than Trotsky does.

I think Trotsky, he's sort of torn between a sort of sense of fatalism in which he thinks what's going to happen is going to happen.

I'm one person.