Mexican police with the ice pick used by Stalin’s agent to kill Leon Trotsky.

Had Trotsky been prepared to use his control of the Red Army to achieve power, as Lenin’s likely successor he would undoubtedly have gotten the better of his rival, Stalin. Instead he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. For the next decade, he lived in exile in various countries. His anti-Stalinist harangues landed him a death sentence in absentia from a Soviet court in 1937. The long arm of Stalinist terror finally caught up to him in the summer of 1940. A Spanish-born assassin in the pay of the Soviet Secret Service Police attacked the great Russian revolutionary with an ice pick on August 20, 1940 in Coyoacan in Mexico. He died of his wounds the following day and was cremated.