The Eitingons

This “riveting history of the 20th century”—and one larger-than-life family at its center—shines new light on the KGB, the fur trade, Freud, and the assassination of Trotsky (Colm Tóibín). Leonid Eitingon was a KGB assassin who dedicated his life to the Soviet regime. He was in China in the early 1920s, in Turkey in the late 1920s, in Spain during the Civil War, and, crucially, in Mexico, helping to organize the assassination of Trotsky. “As long as I live,” Stalin said, “not a hair of his head