Three Houses, Three Blocks: Coyoacán in the 1930s

In January 1937 a Norwegian oil tanker docked at the Mexican port of Tampico. Leon Trotsky walked off it with his wife Natalia Sedova. He had been expelled from the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin in 1929. He had been refused asylum by Norway, Turkey, France, and the United States. Mexico took him in. The country was governed by Lázaro Cárdenas, a left-wing populist president who saw refuge for Trotsky as a political statement. The painter Diego Rivera had personally lobbied for the visa.

Diego Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo, met the Trotskys at the dock.

For the next thirty months, the Trotskys lived in the same compound as the Riveras in Coyoacán, then moved three blocks east into a separate house. Within those three blocks, the two households exchanged letters, paintings, affairs, and at one point near-fatal political theatre. By August 1940 Trotsky was dead, killed in his study by a Spanish-born NKVD agent named Ramón Mercader. By July 1954 Frida was dead too, at forty-seven. Both of their houses are now museums. Walk the three blocks between them and you walk an argument that mattered, briefly, to every left-wing movement on Earth.

The first house, before Trotsky

Frida Kahlo was born in the house at the corner of Londres and Allende streets on July 6, 1907. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a German-Hungarian Jewish photographer who had immigrated to Mexico in 1891. The house was a modest single-storey property built around a central courtyard. Frida was raised there, contracted polio there at age six, and after the 1925 bus accident that fractured her spine, pelvis, and right leg, she convalesced there. The accident is the fact that runs under everything she painted.

In 1929 she married Diego Rivera. The marriage was twenty-one years older, almost three hundred pounds heavier, three times more famous, and at the time entirely consumed with painting murals in the United States. The couple lived for short stretches in Detroit and New York. In 1933 they returned to Mexico permanently. By 1934 they had moved into a pair of joined modernist studios in San Ángel, designed by the Mexican architect Juan O'Gorman, the two buildings connected by a bridge. The Casa Azul, the Coyoacán house, became Frida's parents' home and her own retreat.

Frida had Diego paint the house's exterior walls cobalt blue around 1937, the colour traditionally used for indigo dye in Mexico. The pigment is the source of the name.

The Trotskys arrive

When Trotsky arrived in January 1937, the Casa Azul became his refuge. Diego Rivera moved out for the duration. The Trotskys took over the central rooms. The garden was extended and reinforced with concrete walls to a height of three metres. Mexican federal guards rotated outside the entrance. For two and a half years the four of them lived together: Diego, Frida, Leon, and Natalia.

During that period Trotsky wrote The Revolution Betrayed, his most influential indictment of Stalinism, and conducted the Dewey Commission, the philosopher John Dewey's investigation of the Moscow show trials in which Stalin had condemned Trotsky in absentia. Frida, in the same months, painted some of the work for which she is now most known. Her 1937 painting "Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky" was a gift. She inscribed it on the back with a personal message. The painting hung in his study for the rest of his life. It now hangs in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.

Frida and Leon had an affair through the spring and summer of 1937. The historian Bertrand Patenaude documented it in his 2009 biography of Trotsky in Mexico. It ended badly for the political project the four of them were trying to sustain. By April 1939 the Trotskys had moved out of the Casa Azul to a house at Viena 19, three blocks east. The new house was fortified far more heavily than the Kahlo compound. Watchtowers. Steel shutters. A blockhouse at the gate. Trotsky was sleeping with a pistol on the desk.

The first attempt

On May 24, 1940, twenty Stalinist gunmen led by the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros stormed the Viena 19 compound at three in the morning. Siqueiros was a former colleague of Diego's in the muralist movement, a committed Stalinist, and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. The gunmen poured machine gun fire into Trotsky's bedroom for several minutes. They burned the building's exterior. They left believing they had succeeded.

Trotsky and Natalia had thrown themselves to the floor and rolled under the bed. The bullets passed over them. Their grandson Seva was injured by a ricochet but survived. Siqueiros was eventually arrested, jailed for several months, and released on bail to flee to Chile. Diego Rivera, whose Stalinist period was over by then, claimed in private letters that he had known Siqueiros was planning an attempt but had not believed it would come.

The second attempt

The successful attempt came three months later. Ramón Mercader was a Spanish Civil War veteran and an NKVD agent. He had spent two years cultivating an American Trotskyite named Sylvia Ageloff in Paris, then followed her to New York and then to Mexico, where she introduced him to the Trotsky household under a false name. Through the spring and summer of 1940 he visited the Viena 19 compound several times, became a familiar face to the guards, and gained access to Trotsky's study.

On August 20, 1940, Mercader brought Trotsky a manuscript he had supposedly written and asked the older man to read it. While Trotsky bent over the typescript at his desk, Mercader produced a mountaineer's ice axe from under his coat and struck him in the back of the head. Trotsky did not die instantly. He fought back, bit Mercader's hand, and was carried to the Cruz Verde hospital. He died the following day. He was sixty.

Mercader was arrested at the house. He served twenty years in a Mexican prison, was released in 1960, and travelled to Czechoslovakia and then to the Soviet Union, which awarded him the Order of Lenin. He died in Havana in 1978.

The houses after

The Viena 19 compound became the Museo Casa Trotsky, opened to the public in 1990. Trotsky's study has been preserved as he left it. The ice axe is not on display. The bullet holes from the May 1940 attack are still visible in the bedroom walls.

The Casa Azul became the Museo Frida Kahlo, opened in 1958, four years after Frida's death. Diego had stipulated in his will that the house and its contents be preserved exactly as Frida had left them. Her bed, her wheelchair, her studio, her medical corsets, her paint cabinets, her ashes in a pre-Columbian urn on her dressing table.

In 2004 the museum's restoration team opened a sealed room that Diego had ordered closed in 1957. Inside they found three hundred of Frida's personal letters, dozens of paintings she had never exhibited, hundreds of dresses, the medical corsets she had painted while wearing them, and a wardrobe of huipiles and Tehuana skirts that became the basis of the museum's permanent costume exhibition.

The walk between the two houses takes about six minutes. In 1940 it was the longest three blocks in the international left.