The Assassination of Leon Trotsky

Good evening. This is Crime Classics. I am Thomas Highland with another true story of crime. Listen. Jacques Mourner at the bench vice, the jaws of which clamped the inch diameter handle of an alpenstock. Now the handle is much shorter than it used to be, a fine length now for hiding under one's trench coat.

He gets the trench coat, throws it over his left arm, over the alpenstock, and walks out into a gray Mexican day. An alpin stock for those among you who do not bother with mountain climbing and its accoutrements is the slender axe used to chip away ice to make footholds or hand holes or whatever,

and is usually very, very sharp. Tonight, my report to you on the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Crime Classics. series of true crime stories taken from the records and newspapers of every land from every time.

Your host each week, Mr. Thomas Highland, Conocier of Crime, Student of Violence and Teller of Murders. Now, once again, Mr. Thomas Highland. Leon Trotsky, revolutionist, son of a farmer, was born in Russia in 1879 and died in Mexico City in 1940.

He received but small education, yet he was an avid reader. When he was in his early teens, he came across a volume written by a German named Karl Marx, and immediately, Leon's path was set.

Before he was twenty, he was arrested as a radical in Santa Siberia. In 1902 he escaped and went into exile, from France to Belgium to Germany and finally to England, always preaching his doctrine of world revolution.

In London he met Nikolai Lanin, and the lasting conspiracy for evil was born. We must proclaim uncompromising hostility to all religion." Said Leon Trotsky when he returned to Russia in 1905 and went about the land mouthing terror.