In a strange epilogue to a strange murder, the ice axe used to murder Leon Trostky has emerged in the hands of a Florida collector of spy memorabilia, as Julian Borger and Jo Tuckman report in The Guardian. After a Spanish Stalinist used the axe to bludgeon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940, it fell into the hands of the Mexican police, and then disappeared for decades. To find out how it was recovered—and why the assassin used an ice axe rather than a gun or knife—read an excerpt from the article below, or the full text here.
The story of the ice axe is a convoluted one, befitting the extraordinary and macabre story of the Trotsky assassination. After the 1940 press conference, it was stored in a Mexico City evidence room for several years until it was checked out by a secret police officer, Alfredo Salas, who argued he wanted to preserve it for posterity. He passed it on his daughter, Ana Alicia, who kept it under her bed for 40 years until deciding to put it up for sale in 2005.
Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, offered to give blood for a DNA test – but only on condition that Salas donated the weapon to the museum at Trotsky’s house, preserved intact from the time of the murder. Salas rejected the deal.
“I am looking for some financial benefit,” she told the Guardian at the time. “I think something as historically important at this should be worth something, no?”
The weapon was eventually bought by a US private collector, Keith Melton, a prolific author of books on the history of espionage, and a founding board member of the International Spy Museum. For the avid collector, who lives in Boca Raton, Florida, the ice axe had become something of an obsession.
Image via The Guardian.