Mary Kay Wilmers Talks to Anita Sethi

The LRB Editor discusses her remarkable family exploration The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story. Leonid Eitingon was a KGB killer who dedicated his life to the Soviet regime. He was in China in the early 1920s, in Turkey in the late 1920s, in Spain during the Civil War, and, crucially, in Mexico when Trotsky was assassinated. 'As long as I live,' Stalin had said, 'not a hair of his head shall be touched.' It did not work out like that.