Josh Ireland

They all think he's a bit of an idiot, but a nice idiot.

And then in May of 1940, the NKV decide to strike.

And what they do is there's another spy within Trotsky's household, one of his guards, a kind of naive young American college boy.

and he is persuaded to open the door to the compound.

And when he does so, a sort of force of about 20 men led by another Mexican muralist.

There's quite a lot of muralists who are all drunk, who are all overexcited, none of whom are particularly trained, but they're wearing Mexican army uniforms.

They're all pretending to be Mexican army.

And they rush in.

Trotsky's asleep.

He can't sleep without sleeping pills, so he's knocked out.

They smash in and his wife Natalia instantly realizes something terrible, something shocking is happening.

So she grabs Trotsky and they dive under the bed and there's kind of chaos everywhere.

There's bullets.

I think they will find later 200 bullets are fired in the household.

The walls are kind of shot, you know, turned into sort of lace by the number of shells that are being fired.

But miraculously, they kind of sweep in, they sweep out.

Trotsky's grandson has a sort of small scratch on his ankle where I think a bullet ricocheted and caught him.

But they're kind of idiots.

They've basically given the job to people who shouldn't have been given the job.

Stalin, obviously, incredibly upset.