Show Notes
The assassin is already in position.
As Leon Trotsky settles into his fortified compound in Mexico, Stalin's campaign to destroy him enters its final and most dangerous phase.
In this fifth episode, we follow the NKVD's hunt for Trotsky and the extraordinary operation designed to penetrate his inner circle.
We meet Ramón Mercader, the young Spanish communist who would eventually become one of the most notorious assassins of the twentieth century.
Under the identity of "Jack Mornard", Mercader begins a carefully constructed romance with Silvia Ageloff, a Trotskyist who unknowingly becomes the key to his access to Trotsky.
As Mercader slowly works his way towards Mexico, the NKVD prepares multiple teams and infiltrates Trotsky's organisation from within.
But while Stalin's agents close in, Trotsky himself begins to confront a more personal enemy: doubt.
The revolutionary who once believed Marxism was an inevitable scientific truth now looks around the world and sees capitalism surviving, fascism advancing and the Soviet Union transformed into the Stalinist dictatorship he had spent years fighting.
For the first time, Trotsky is forced to ask whether the revolution, and perhaps his entire life's work, had been a mistake. Yet his faith survives.
As Trotsky writes his final testament and reflects on his life, the NKVD prepares to strike.
In May 1940, an armed force led by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros launches a daring assault on Trotsky's compound.
Machine guns tear through the house.
The guards are overwhelmed.
Trotsky and Natalia hide beneath the hail of bullets.
And yet, somehow, Trotsky survives.
The first attempt has failed.
But Stalin is not going to give up.
The next assassin will not come with twenty men and machine guns.
He will come alone.
He will come as a friend.
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