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The Leon Trotsky House Museum is a museum honoring Leon Trotsky and an organization that works to promote political asylum, located in the Coyoacán borough of Mexico City. The center of the complex is the house in which Trotsky lived with his wife from 1939 to 1940, and where the Russian dissident was murdered. The house has been kept as it was at that time, especially the study in which a Stalin supporter killed Trotsky with an ice axe to the back of the head. Around the house is a garden and high walls with watchtowers. The complex was turned into the current museum and asylum institution in 1990, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination. ==Trotsky’s exile and assassination at the house== Trotsky was forced into exile in 1929 because of his criticism of Joseph Stalin’s government. For the next eight years, Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, wandered among several countries under a death sentence and pursued by Stalinist agents. In 1937, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo persuaded the Lázaro Cárdenas government to give the Trotskys political asylum in Mexico. At first, the couple lived at Frida Kahlo’s family home called “La Casa Azul” (The Blue House), which is located in the Coyoacán borough of Mexico City. However, by 1939, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky had a falling out. Some stories state that it was over ideology and Diego’s criticism of Trotsky’s writing and others state that Trotsky had had an affair with Frida. The Trotskys then moved to the house on Viena Street in the same borough, not far from The Blue House.〔 While Mexico had an active Communist movement at that time, like elsewhere it was divided between those who supported Stalin and those who did not. In May 1940, an assassination attempt was led by Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. The group was disguised as police officers and managed to overpower guards, set up machine guns in the house’s inner courtyard and began firing at the various rooms of the small house. Those inside survived by hiding under bedroom furniture and only one grandson, Seva, was wounded.〔 This attack prompted the building of the walls that surround the property and the building of guard towers, which gives the property a fortress-like appearance.〔〔 The second and successful attempt on Trotsky’s life came on 20 August of the same year. A Spanish Stalin supporter by the name of Ramón Mercader, under the name of Jacson Mornard and with a Canadian passport, had become the lover of Trotsky’s personal secretary. As such, he gained the household’s trust and was permitted on the premises.〔〔〔 On that day, Mercader asked Trotsky to look over something he had written, and as Trotsky read the work, Mercader removed an alpine climbing axe from his coat and struck Trotsky in the back of the skull.〔〔 Trotsky did not die right away and was conscious for a time as he was taken to the hospital for surgery. However, he died the next day.〔〔 Mercader was arrested by Mexican police, convicted of murder and spent twenty years in Mexican prison. When he was released in 1960, Mercader reportedly fled to Prague then Moscow, where he received the Order of Lenin. According to some later reports, he eventually died of cancer in Havana .〔 The room in which Trotsky was killed remains exactly as it was at that moment, including the papers and the books in their exact positions.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Leon Trotsky Museum, Mexico City」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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