Leon Trotsky

On 20 August 1940 Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe by KGB agent Ramon Mercader, thereby given The Stranglers a line for their 1977 hit No More Heroes. Mercader drove the axe into Trotsky's skull but it failed to kill him. Some of the people in the room who witnessed the incident claimed that Trotsky tried to struggle with his would be assailant. Upon hearing the commotion, Trotsky's bodyguards burst into the room and nearly killed Mercader, but Trotsky stopped them, shouting, "Do not kill him! This man has a story to tell."

Trotsky was taken to a hospital, operated on, and survived for more than a day. He was 60 when he died.

Trotsky had been a pivotal figure during post revolution Russia, he had been Number Two to Lenin's leadership, but when Lenin died Trotsky found himself at odds with the ideas of Stalin. Trotsky used his writings to oppose Stalin, and to establish an alternative direction for communism, and his followers became known as Trotskyists. While Stalin was struggling with practical problems in the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists were fighting for class equality between intellectuals and capitalists.

Being labelled a Trotskyist could be considered a badge of honour I suppose if you like the idea of being a capitalist, intellectual. Old Leon wanted communism on a world scale whilst Lenin and Stalin had wanted the ideology to develop fully within the boundaries of the Soviet Union. Stalin eventually had enough and deported him in 1929, but old Leon wasn't going to be silenced and kept writing and campaigning against Stalin's style of communism. No prizes for guessing who ordered Mercader's visit to Mexico.