Leon Trotsky's mansion for sale

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Along with the history, the buyer will get the ruined remains of an 800 sq metres home – more capitalist retreat than communist base of operations. It is set in nearly an acre of sprawling seaside grounds, with its own pier, on picturesque Büyükada Island, where cars are banned but the bustle of downtown Istanbul is just a short ferry ride away.

That distance from the mainland apparently gave Trotsky some sense of security from the assassins he knew Moscow was sending to hunt him down, and he spent longer in Turkey than he would anywhere else after leaving his home. He later moved through France and Norway before settling in Mexico. There he reportedly had an affair with the painter Frida Kahlo before he was murdered in his study with an ice-pick in 1940.

It was in his island villa that he wrote his famous autobiography My Life and his doorstop History of the Russian Revolution – one current paperback edition weighs in at more than 1,000 pages – among other books, local historians say.

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