page_title: Leon Trotsky
section_title: Exile (1929–1940)
hierarchical_section_title: Leon Trotsky / Exile (1929–1940)
caption_attribution_description: The Gun Tower didn't save him.
context_page_description: Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Russian revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Trotskyism.
  Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party a few weeks before the October Revolution and became one of the leaders of the party. Once in government, Trotsky initially held the post of the Commissar for Foreign Affairs and was involved in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany as Russia pulled out of World War One. Trotsky became more prominent from March 1918 to January 1925 as the leader of the Red Army in the post of Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. Trotsky was a vital leading figure in the Red victory in the Russian Civil War. He was one of the seven members of the first Politburo.
  After the rise of Joseph Stalin, Trotsky was removed from his positions and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929. He spent the rest of his life in exile and was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet NKVD agent.
  Trotsky was openly critical of Stalinism.
context_section_description: In February 1929, Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union to his new exile in Turkey. During his first two months in Turkey, Trotsky lived with his wife and eldest son at the Soviet Union Consulate in Constantinople and then at a nearby hotel in the city. In April 1929, Trotsky, his wife and son were moved to the island of Büyükada (aka Prinkipo) by the Turkish authorities. On Büyükada, they were moved into a house called the Yanaros mansion. During his exile in Turkey, Trotsky was under the surveillance of the Turkish police forces of Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Trotsky was also at risk from the many former White Army officers who lived on Prinkipo, officers who had opposed the October Revolution and who had been defeated by Trotsky and the Red Army in the Russian Civil War. However, Trotsky's European supporters volunteered to serve as bodyguards and assured his safety.
  In 1931, Trotsky wrote a letter to a friend titled “What is Fascism” to tell his friend that the Comintern was wrong to describe the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera as “fascist” and to try and define fascism.
  On 20 February 1932, Trotsky and all of his family lost their Soviet citizenship and were forbidden to enter the Soviet Union. In 1932 he was hosted by the fascist regime in the Kingdom of Italy during a trip to Denmark. By the end of that same year Trotsky had joined a conspiratorial political bloc with the anti-Stalin opposition inside the USSR. There was no evidence of an alliance with Nazi Germany or Japan, as the Soviet Union claimed. The members of the bloc were zinovievites, rightists and trotskyists who "capitulated" to Stalin. Kamenev and Zinoviev also were members of the bloc. Trotsky wanted by no means that the alliance became a fusion, and he was afraid of the right gaining much power inside the bloc. Historian Pierre Broué concluded that the bloc dissolved in early 1933, since some of its members like Zinoviev and Kamenev joined Stalin again, and because there were no letters in the Trotsky Harvard archive mentioning the bloc after 1932. In July 1933, Trotsky was offered asylum in France by Prime Minister Édouard Daladier. Trotsky accepted the offer, but he was forbidden to live in Paris and soon found himself under the surveillance of the French police. From July 1933 to February 1934, Trotsky and his wife lived in Royan. The philosopher and activist Simone Weil also arranged for Trotsky and his bodyguards to stay for a few days at her parents' house. Following the 6 February 1934 crisis in France, the French minister of internal affairs, Albert Sarraut, signed a decree to deport Trotsky from France. However, no foreign government was found willing to accept Trotsky within its borders. Accordingly, the French authorities instructed Trotsky to move to a residence in the tiny village of Barbizon under the strict surveillance of the French police, where Trotsky found his contact with the outside world to be even worse than during his exile in Turkey.
  In May 1935, soon after the French government had agreed the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union government, Trotsky was officially told that he was no longer welcome in France. After weighing his options, Trotsky applied to move to Norway. After obtaining permission from then Justice Minister Trygve Lie to enter the country, Trotsky and his wife became a guest of Konrad Knudsen at Norderhov, near Hønefoss, and spent over a year living at Knudsen's house, from 18 June 1935 to 2 September 1936, although Trotsky was hospitalized for a few weeks at the nearby Oslo Community Hospital from 19 September 1935. 
  Following French media complaints about Trotsky's role in encouraging the mass strikes in France in May and June 1936 with his articles, the Johan Nygaardsvold-led Norwegian government began to exhibit disquiet about Trotsky's actions. In the summer of 1936, Trotsky's asylum was increasingly made a political issue by the fascist Nasjonal Samling, led by Vidkun Quisling,  along with an increase in pressure from the Soviet government on the Norwegian authorities. On 5 A
caption: Trotsky's house in Mexico City from April 1939 until his assassination in August 1940
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