Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924 left a power vacuum at the top of Soviet leadership. Joseph Stalin, then the general secretary, outmaneuvered his political opponents to replace Lenin as the head of government. Chief among these rivals was Leon Trotsky, a charismatic Old Bolshevik—one of the largely middle- and upper-class revolutionaries who led the Russian Revolution of 1917. Trotsky was a skilled military commander whom Lenin credited with leading the Red Army to victory against the anti-Bolshevik White Army in the two-year civil war that followed the Revolution of 1917; however, Trotsky’s domineering style of management made him a lot of enemies in the Communist Party, including Stalin, who hated him.

Stalin managed to expel Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929. In exile in Turkey, Trotsky formed an anti-Stalin coalition with factions within the Soviet Union in 1932. This conspiratorial bloc, known as the Bloc of Oppositions or Trotsky’s Bloc, threatened Stalin, who in fear tightened his grip on power. In the press Stalin accused Trotsky’s Bloc of colluding with Japan and Fascist Germany to overthrow him: These fascist “saboteurs” are the bogeymen that appear throughout Sofia Petrovna (there’s no evidence of such collusion).

Although the Bloc dissolved in 1933, Stalin grew increasingly paranoid about being overthrown.