When did Joseph Stalin decide to crush, or destroy, or kill Leon Trotsky?

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Perhaps it was the first time these two men met—in 1907, at the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s Fifth Party Congress in a damp, shabby church in London. Trotsky claimed later not to remember even seeing Stalin, who apparently remained mute for the whole three weeks of debates and arguments.

Trotsky was tall, with broad, muscular shoulders, a “great head,” abundant hair, and curiously small hands. He looked, at times, like a bird of prey: most of all because of his “mouth—big, crooked, biting. A frightful mouth.”

He was vain. There was something instinctively theatrical about him. He was always “calculating the effects of his gestures, his pauses and intonation.” He loved dressing up in gloves and shapely clothing—the things that the revolution he identified with so closely was supposed to be sweeping away.

He was clever, with an insatiable desire to exceed others.…