This is John Batchelow. Conversation with the author, Josh Ireland, The Death of Trotsky,

leads us to the assassin, a man whose first name was Ramon. He had many names in the course of his time

working for the NKVD and afterwards. It was buried in Moscow's Ramon Lopez, not his real name.

He was an assassin, but an ideological assassin.

And here, Josh explains the transformation of a man who fought on the leftist side in the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s,

becoming the assassin of a man who represented the extreme left, Leon Trotsky.

More of this tonight. Thank you.

Yeah, that's the story.

I mean, both of them, because of what the sort of strange, one of the strange dynamics of the Spanish

civil war was that the, the side of which we are from our perspective and courage to identify with the the the government at the time who were a socialist who attracted you know idealists from across the world like George Orwell to fight in their cause.

It was actually ridden by all these vicious disputes, which were to a very great extent fermented by a small but significant Russian presence in the country at the time.

And so the Republican forces spent as much time persecuting their own soldiers

as they did trying to sort of prosecute the war against General Franco.

And that's the kind of crucible within which Ramon especially is formed, you know, that he is in this

war and his understanding is that Trotskyists are just as dangerous as fascists. And, you know,

he's a very bright person and he's a very competent leader of men, but I think he's also naive politically.

He has a very simplistic understanding of the universe,

and it's a very doctrinaire Stalinist understanding of it.