Why does stalin look mexican

The exiled legend of the Russian revolution, the roaming scourge of the Kremlin, the man whom Stalin wanted to see dead, very much dead, had to be persecuted and harassed everywhere he went. Most of these letters petitioned the president to kick Trotsky out of Mexico.

One group with a mouthful of a name, the Regional Committee for the Defense of Nationality Against Imperialism and Reaction, sent Mexican authorities a letter with a list of 11 priority issues the government should address for the good of the nation.

The government files containing these letters are kept in the General Archive of the Nation. Most of the documents date back to the summer of In May of that year, a commando attacked the house, riddling it with bullet holes. But the target and his family survived the attack.

Several Communist activists were arrested, and a wave of letters ensued in the following weeks in a bid to get the suspects released and Trotsky deported under Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution, concerning inconvenient foreigners.

He would not take orders from Stalin or from anybody. Trotsky knew that a combination of torture, threats to family members, and promises of freedom, if confessions were given, allowed the travesties to occur. The violence swept away both supporters and opponents of Stalin and Stalinism. Radek and Rakovsky, former allies of Trotsky who later submitted to Stalin, were killed.

Others were murdered in labor camps, the infamous Gulags, or in prisons. The secret police put him to death in January In this period, the Soviet Union was perhaps the most dangerous place in the world for independent-thinking Marxists, an astounding thing to say, given the records of the fascist regimes. From the Show Trials, ever more outlandish tales about Trotsky were spun. The stories relayed by the accused placed him at the center of a massive, worldwide anti-Soviet conspiracy.

Turning his calls for an anti-Stalin revolution against him, Vyshinsky pilloried Trotsky, the inveterate adversary of fascism, as the master fascist, as the string-puller and puppet-master. Yet Trotsky fought back vigorously.

Its aim was to provide a revolutionary alternative to the Moscow-led Third or Communist International Comintern. This Fourth International would bolster radical, anti-Stalinist working-class parties and unions around the world. When it came to repudiating the preposterous charges raised in the Show Trials, he received considerable help. Similar organizations were founded elsewhere. Only one of the members, Alfred Rosmer, a syndicalist and early supporter of the October Revolution, could be described as a Trotsky supporter.

Traveling to the Mexican capital, the Commission held thirteen sessions in April Trotsky, speaking in his quite imperfect English, responded to every accusation leveled by the Stalinists. He cast a powerful impression on those present, including the liberal Dewey, no admirer of his politics. In September , the Commission issued its findings, clearing Trotsky of all the charges.

The following years were dark, awful times for Trotsky, Natalia, and their inner circle. Losing two sons and innumerable comrades and friends to Stalin did not break his spirit, but the losses threw a shadow over everything he had done.

With the Japanese in China, Hitler moving into Austria, and threatening Czechoslovakia, and Mussolini dreaming of a Roman Empire in the Mediterranean, the prospect of a new world war soon overtook him. Following the Munich Agreement of September , Trotsky expected the Soviet government to seek an agreement with Hitler.

Whatever anti-Nazi sentiments issued from the Kremlin, Trotsky thought, were not worth the paper they were written on. In the aftermath of the Show Trials, he believed an even more important reason would drive Stalin to come to an agreement with Berlin: survival. The Stalin regime was too despotic and unpopular to weather the storm of total war. According to Trotsky, a settlement with Nazi Germany might secure some stability for the dictatorship.

When Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, his German counterpart, signed a Non-Aggression Pact between the two nations on August 23, , Trotsky was scarcely surprised. In a steady stream of articles and interviews, he condemned the role of the Soviet Union, a state that, at least in its rhetoric, had sided with the colonized against imperialism.

The betrayal of the principles of Red October had reached a new level of treachery. Perhaps Stalin, Trotsky surmised, now seemed content with partitioning Eastern Europe with the German fascists. The Soviet attack on Finland in November , the beginning of the Winter War , made him wonder how far Stalin was willing to go to create a sphere of interest for himself. While he again damned Soviet aggression, Trotsky, at the same time, despised Marshal Mannerheim, the right-wing Finnish leader rallying his people.

This was a huge dilemma for Trotsky. How could one support social revolution in areas under Soviet control without giving any ground on his anti-Stalinism? An even bigger problem posed itself. Trotsky had no doubt Hitler would do so at the earliest opportunity. His answer was absolutely unequivocal. Socialists and workers everywhere must rally to the defense of the Soviet Union. The achievements of the Bolshevik Revolution had to be defended.

This position, which alienated many of his adherents, coexisted with another claim — the new world war would mean the end of the Stalin regime. Trotsky predicted that the workers and peasants of the USSR, their revolutionary energies revitalized, would put an end to the Stalinist bureaucracy.

The revolution he outlined in The Revolution Betrayed would itself form part of a gigantic wave of revolutionism engulfing the Axis powers and the capitalist democracies. Like Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini would meet the severe justice of the proletariat. The latter, in turn, would form part of a World Federation of Socialist Republics. This would have amounted to the greatest geopolitical revolution in human history with socialism becoming a truly global societal form.

Trotsky held to this radical perspective even as Stalin signed a commercial agreement with Hitler in February , then seized Bessarabia and Bukovina from Romania, and annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

At the end of February, Trotsky wrote a final testament, fearing death was near. It was led by the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, once a friend of Rivera, but now a convinced Stalinist. Miraculously, Trotsky and Natalia survived. Such a position was unacceptable for Soviet art circles, where Rivera made many enemies. Nevertheless, the main reason the Mexican artist became a persona non-grata in the USSR was politics.

Amid the conflict between the two prominent Soviet leaders - Stalin and Trotsky - Rivera supported the latter. Rivera even housed Trotsky in Mexico after his exile from the Soviet Union.

Rivera continued to promote socialist ideals even while working for the Rockefellers in the early s. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was a big fan of his creativity, and the U. The Rockefellers wanted the artist to paint a man at a crossroads, looking to the future while also rooted in the past, a mixture of uncertainty and hope - but ultimately choosing to pursue a new, more optimistic future.

Rivera answered their call in his own way. In his Man at the Crossroads fresco a person stands between the capitalist world of wars, cruelty, and sin, and the new promising world of socialism, world of labor, and brotherhood. The Rockefellers decided to scrape the fresco off the wall.