WASHINGTON, November 6 (RIA Novosti) – A house belonging to an US bodyguard of Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky has gone on sale in Los Angeles for the robustly capitalist sum of $950,000.
The two-bedroom house, which belonged to Alexander Buchman and his wife, is described in a real estate listing as “modest in scale,” but “outsized in style.”
The Eastsider LA news site reported earlier this week that the house is located in a suburb of Los Angeles once dubbed “Red Hill” due to the high concentration of socialist, communist and leftist residents.
Ohio-born Buchman, who died in 2003 aged 91, met Trotsky in 1939, while the revolutionary leader was living in exile in Mexico.
An engineer by training, Buchman was enlisted to upgrade Trotsky’s security system and also to act as a guard, according to Solidarity-us.org.
Buchman spent five months with Trotsky, during which time he took photographs and films of the exiled Bolshevik in a domestic setting. Many of the photographs have since been reproduced in books held in university collections around the world.
According to a journalist who interviewed Buchman for GQ magazine in 2001, the veteran leftist still lived in fear of Stalinists half a century later:
“I didn’t want to be earmarked in this neighborhood as a Trotskyite,” Buchman told the magazine. “Because I’m not a Trotskyite. I’m a Socialist.”
