"The pressure in the Soviet Union for a realpolitik in international relations that represented the normalisation of relations with other states was not linked to the abandonment of the Communist cause, but, rather, to a focus on the pursuit of Socialism (ie. Communism) in one state (the Soviet Union). This was a course presented as leading to the strengthening of the cause. This emphasis was associated with Stalin who dominated the state after Lenin’s death in 1924. However, Stalin was also interested in world revolution and committed to the spread of Communism. Thus, his difference with the more volatile Leon Trotsky’s demand for permanent and global revolution was more one of tactics than goals, although that was still a highly significant difference. At a meeting of the Politburo in 1926, Trotsky accused his rival Stalin of becoming ‘the gravedigger of the revolution’. Trotsky was to be forced into exile, first internal (1927), and then external (1929), by Stalin. A major element of Stalinist policy, both before and after World War Two, was suppressing those held to be Trotskyites. This was a rift that fed Stalinist paranoia and gave potent force to the idea of the enemy within. This idea was brutally enforced in Communist and allied movements abroad, as with the hunting down of those in the Republican camp considered suspect during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Sentenced to death in absentia in 1937, Trotsky himself was murdered in Mexico in 1940 in a plot by Soviet Intelligence, the NKVD."