Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast.

I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers

in the history of the world.

These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Magellan, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark,

and so many other famous and not so famous adventures from throughout history.

Go to Explorerspodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app. That's the Explorers Podcast.

Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Inber,

and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

Today, we're going back to our archive to hear a conversation with Keith Melton.

Keith is a historian who's been an advisor to the U.S. intelligence community for decades.

He's also an avid collector and has donated thousands of artifacts to the International Spy Museum.

One of those objects that attracts a lot of

attention is the axe used to assassinate Leon Trotsky. Keith found the weapon after decades of

searching, and now it's a centerpiece in the collection. In 2007, he talked to Peter Ernest,

the founding director of the International Spy Museum,

about the plot on Trotsky and the weapon that did the job.

Keith, welcome.

Thank you, Peter. It's a pleasure.

Let me ask you, and I think this would be very helpful to our readers.

Who was Trotsky?

Leon Trotsky was an intellectual giant of his era, and certainly along with Linen, the intellectual father of the Russian Revolution.

And he was the founder of Pravda, the internationally known propaganda newspaper. He was the

...