Heart & Brain

Last week the cold, still heart of Leon Trotsky was removed from his corpse, weighed, and bottled in alcohol. Weight: 1.13 Ib. A surgeon sawed open the Trotsky skull, cut away the brain envelope, severed the nerves leading to the spinal column, lifted out that once-great brain. Weight: 3-44 Ib.*

To the civil cemetery of the Federal District of Mexico in a grey steel casket went the body of Leon Trotsky. It was taken out of the casket, placed on a heavy steel cart. The cart was wheeled to a huge crematory, the door was opened, the body pushed in. The glare from the open door of the furnace shone with ghastly brilliance on the faces of Trotsky's three bodyguards, on duty to the end, of his attorney, Albert Goldman, and of the small, meek, devoted woman who had lived with him as wife and servant for 38 years.

As the body of Trotsky entered the furnace the door jammed, would not shut. Fire licked at Trotsky's black suit, at his hair and his wispy beard. They began to blaze. In the terrible heat and light and stench that filled the room, with the fire roaring and smoke pouring out of the open door, his last attendants saw Trotsky burning, his face turning black and shriveling away, his body shrinking so fast that he seemed to be writhing in pain. Natalie Sedova Trotsky was carried fainting to a car.

One hour and forty minutes later, seven days almost to the minute from the time he walked into his peaceful garden to meet his assassin, the last of Leon Trotsky was removed from the furnace and funneled into an urn. His ashes weighed 1.76 Ib.

Next day Judge Carranza Trujillo committed Trotsky's assassin, pale, dark Frank Jackson, to trial for murder, committed Jackson's girl friend, Sylvia Ageloff, as accessory before the fact. The problem of Mexico City's tough, efficient police was not so much to make them talk as to keep them from being rubbed out before they talked too much.

-- Other great-brain weights: Turgenev, 4.435 Ib.; Byron, 3.98 Ib.; Kant, 3.5 Ib.; Schiller, 3.48 Ib.; Dante, 3.14 Ib.; Anatole France, 2.24 Ib. Average: 3.1 Ib.

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