Josh Ireland

He's perhaps, you know, Stalin is this man who controls an empire, but is effectively an empire of millions of people.

I can't outrun him forever.

But I think what keeps Trotsky going is the thing we've talked about earlier, that passion, that desire for revolution, because...

Although he is in exile, although he has hardly any followers left, hardly any money, he can barely leave the house because they're so afraid that an assassin will be waiting for him.

If he gets in a car, he has to bend down and hide behind the seats.

He still believes that his time might come again.

he has been a revolutionary in exile before twice.

Yeah.

And he's come back both times.

So I think there's part of him that believes that stuff happens, you know, and when the second world war begins, this is what he, he thinks stuff is happening.

Um, but at all this time, the sort of wheels are turning and, uh, the, the terrorists, the terror is still sort of consuming millions of thousands and thousands of Russian lives.

Um, but,

after cycling through various different people who

the NKVD want to head up the operation against Trotsky.

They sort of finally find two very competent, slightly chilling figures.

The most significant of them is a man called Leonard Eitingon, who is the link between Stalin and the man that will eventually kill Trotsky.

Yeah.

Well, so that he is in charge of organising the attack on Stalin, on Trotsky.

And

It's a fairly multi-layered effort, and there are parts of it that begin in ways that don't seem particularly significant.