This is a brilliant film featuring the late great British actor Sir Richard Burton as the late and unlamented Communist revolutionary Leon Trostky. The film covers the time in Mexico in 1940 after Trotsky had been expelled from the Soviet Union and outlines the weeks up to Trotsky’s assassination by Stalinist agents.

This is a brilliant drama showing how Trotsky’s world had shrunk down to the house where he was hiding away from his enemies. The film shows how Stalinist assassins gained the confidence of Trotsky which allowed them to bypass his security and murder him with an ice pick. The assassins killed Trotsky to advance Soviet Communism which remained a menace to the world until the 1990’s.

This film attempts to paint Trotsky as a sympathetic character, a man lost in the fog of exile, but it is very difficult to feel sympathy for a man who was one of the architects of the Red Terror that the Communists brought to Russia in the wake of the October Revolution. When the movie was made in 1972, Communism held a large part of the world in its iron grip and Trotsky was the inspiration for a number of far Left organisations that existed at the time and is still central to groups like the Socialist Workers Party in the UK.

I found that whilst watching the film, far from feeling sympathy or empathy for Trotsky, I felt disgust. I’m afraid that disgust is the most appropriate feeling when confronted with a man like Trotsky who hated democracy, believed in authoritarian government and set up concentration camps for dissidents who challenged Soviet rule.

This is one of the few films that I’ve seen where it’s a happy ending because the main character dies. Trotsky was a dangerous revolutionary who along with the other monsters of Soviet rule, Lenin and Stalin, brought untold misery and death to the people of Russia. Because I know enough about Trotsky to turn my stomach I must admit I did find myself saying ‘good riddance’ when the icepick entered the monster’s head. Looking back from my position in the 21^st century I can’t help but wonder ‘what if’ when it comes to Trotsky and many other Soviet revolutionaries. Maybe if the Tsarist regime in Russia had quietly killed the revolutionaries before they could organise then countless millions throughout the world may have been the spared misery and death that was the only thing that Communism ever gave the world.

This is a brilliant movie biopic about the last days of a terrible man who right up to his death believed in Communism with an almost religious fervour. If you want a good film about the end of one of the great monsters of the 20^th century experiment in collectivisation as an alternative to freedom, then this film is definitely for you.

I really enjoyed this film even though it is about a man who became a monster because of his ideology and who formulated ideologies that are still doing damage today.