alternatehistory.com

If you're wondering about the title, a few months back I made a thread for explaining the backstory for an alternate-history map I made, the link to which you can find in my signature below; one of these PoDs had Leon Trotsky move directly to France instead of Turkey after his initial exile, and almost immediately move to Barcelona, Spain soon afterwards, just in time for the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

From there, he lends his expertise to the various socialist factions within the Popular Front such as the CNT-FAI in Catalonia. The arrival of Soviet volunteer troops led by Mikhail Frunze (who survives his OTL death as another PoD, but I'm not going to into that here) causes an incident where the NKVD unit sent along with the volunteer force attempt to assassinate Trotsky in Barcelona on Stalin's orders; the attempt fails and Trotsky survives, but he is forced to flee Spain and head to Mexico, and Frunze's volunteer force is ejected from Spain by the Republicans in retaliation for the incident, and sent back home to the Soviet Union... just in time for Frunze to get caught up in the Great Purge thanks to the disastrous intervention.

Now, the problem for me is: is this at all plausible, for Trotsky to have been involved in the Spanish Civil War in some fashion? The specific chain of events detailed above are likely to be highly implausible, thanks to little things such as Trotsky and the CNT-FAI being ideologically incompatible, for starters, but most optimistically, given the right conditions, could Trotsky have ended up in Spain to play a role in the Spanish Civil War?
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