Museo Leon Trotsky

The Leon Trotsky Museum is the house where the exiled Russian revolutionary lived his final years and was assassinated on August 20, 1940 — killed by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish NKVD agent who embedded an ice axe in Trotsky's skull while he was reading at his desk. The house is preserved almost exactly as it was on the day of the murder, and visiting it is one of the most unsettling historical experiences in Mexico City.

Trotsky arrived in Mexico in 1937, granted asylum by President Lázaro Cárdenas, and initially lived with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo at the Casa Azul (where he had an affair with Kahlo that ended his friendship with Rivera). After the falling out, he moved to this house on Río Churubusco, where he fortified the compound with high walls, guard towers, and steel doors — security measures that proved insufficient when Mercader, posing as a sympathiser, was admitted to the study.

The study where the assassination took place is preserved with Trotsky's books, papers, and personal effects. The gardens contain his grave — a modest stone marker bearing the hammer and sickle — and the cactus garden he tended during his exile. The museum's small exhibition rooms display photographs, letters, and documents that trace Trotsky's trajectory from Bolshevik leader to Stalinist target to Mexican exile. The house is in Coyoacán, a 10-minute walk from the Frida Kahlo Museum, and visiting both on the same day provides a connected narrative of two households that briefly, explosively intersected.