Trotsky Talking Dirty

The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) wrote this letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova, in 1937 — the year when Stalin’s Big Terror reached its peak in the USSR.

The death toll of the purge campaign of 1936—1938 is estimated as somewhere between 700k and 1.2M people.

Trotsky himself was killed with an icepick hit to the head by an NKVD agent in 1940, in his Mexican exile.

But in July of 1937, he’s chilling at the villa of the director Humberto Gómez Landero, where he was invited by the artist Diego Rivera. He’s catching fish, taking naps, reading newspapers — and thinking about his wife.

I translated a letter he sent her and am sharing it here.

If, by the time you finish reading, you feel like a voyeur, know that this is consensual — Trotsky submitted a typed copy of this missive to the archive of Amsterdam’s International Institute of Social History himself, thus engaging in a conscious, delayed, from-the-other-side-of-the-grave kind of historical exhibitionism, which wa…