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Books

The many attempts to assassinate Trotsky

Leonardo Padura's The Man Who Loved Dogs is an atmospheric noir on how the revolutionary was killed by an ice-pick, after other murder attempts

4 January 2014

9:00 AM

4 January 2014

9:00 AM

The Man Who Loved Dogs Leonardo Padura, translated by Anna Kushner

Bitter Lemon Press, pp.576, £20, ISBN: 9781908524102

Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in the house in Mexico City where his grandfather was murdered in 1940 with an ice-pick. Volkov had grown up in that house surrounded by 20-foot garden walls and watchtowers with slits in them for machine-guns.

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