Living in exile under guard in Coyoacán, Mexico, Leon Trotsky appeared before the Dewey Commission, an independent panel led by philosopher John Dewey investigating Stalin's accusations that Trotsky had conspired with Nazi Germany and Japan to overthrow the Soviet government. Trotsky methodically dismantled the charges point by point over multiple days of testimony. The commission ultimately declared him not guilty, though it did little to slow Stalin's terror or delay Trotsky's eventual assassination three years later.
By 1937, Leon Trotsky had been expelled from the Soviet Union for eight years, hounded across Turkey, France, and Norway before Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas granted him asylum. He settled in a fortified compound in Coyoacán, on the outskirts of Mexico City, guarded by supporters and increasingly paranoid about Stalinist assassins — a fear that proved entirely justified.
The Moscow show trials of 1936-38 had named Trotsky as the mastermind of a vast conspiracy to restore capitalism through sabotage, assassination, and collaboration with fascist powers, charges built almost entirely on coerced confessions from former Bolshevik comrades now facing firing squads. John Dewey, the eminent American philosopher and educator, agreed to chair an independent commission of inquiry, traveling to Mexico despite being nearly eighty years old, to hear Trotsky's rebuttal directly.
Over several days of testimony that included November 20, Trotsky — fluent, combative, meticulous — walked through the charges using documents, timelines, and logical inconsistencies to argue the confessions were fabricated under torture and threat to defendants' families. The commission's final report, issued in 1938, cleared him of the charges. It changed nothing in Moscow: the purges continued, and in 1940 a Stalinist agent drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull in his own study.