Ian Thomson

The many attempts to assassinate Trotsky

Leonardo Padura's The Man Who Loved Dogs is an atmospheric noir on how the revolutionary was killed by an ice-pick, after other murder attempts

[Getty Images/Shutterstock/Alamy/iStock] 
issue 04 January 2014

  • The Man Who Loved Dogs

    Leonardo Padura, translated by Anna Kushner

    Bitter Lemon Press, pp. 576

Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in the house in Mexico City where his grandfather was murdered in 1940 with an ice-pick. Volkov had grown up in that house surrounded by 20-foot garden walls and watchtowers with slits in them for machine-guns.

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