[page 24]
The assassination ON 20 AUGUST, 1940, LEON TROTSKY was struck a fatal blow with an ice-pick by Ramon Mercader, an agent sent to Mexico by Stalin's secret police (the GPU) to murder the exiled revolutionary.
Trotsky's assassination was not just a malicious after-thought on the part of Stalin. It was the culmination of a systematic and bloody terror directed against a whole generation of Bolshevik leaders, and against the young revolutionaries of a second generation prepared to defend the genuine ideas of Marxism against the bureaucratic, repressive regime developing under Stalin. By the time the GPU reached Trotsky in 1940, they had already murdered - or driven to suicide - many members of Trotsky's family, scores of his closest friends and collaborators and countless numbers of the leaders and supporters of the International Left Opposition. Despite the murder of a whole generation of Bolshevik-Leninists, however, and the bureaucracy's Herculean efforts to bury the ideas and historical personality of Trotsky under a mountain of distortions, lies, slanders and grotesque historical fabrication, Trotsky's ideas have never had more relevance or more appeal to working-class activists than they have today. This will no doubt be grudgingly conceded by even the capitalist press this August. But an enormous amount of rubbish will be written, Whether through an inability to understand the real historical role of Trotsky or a deliberate effort to obscure and confuse the political issues involved.
Old questions (raised, for instance, by Max Eastman in the 1930s) will inevitably come up Why, if Trotsky was one of the foremost leaders of the Bolshevik party and the head of the Red Army, did he allow Stalin to concentrate power in his hands? Why did Trotsky not take power himself? The idea will no doubt be put forward again that Trotsky was 'too doctrinaire', that he allowed himself to be 'outmanoeuvred' by Stalin. As a corollary, it will again be suggested that Stalin was more 'practical', a more 'astute' and 'forceful' leader.
Trotsky himself completely refuted these ideas, not just in answering Max Eastman, but through his whole analysis of the degeneration of the Soviet workers' state and his criticism of the bureaucracy's policies. From the standpoint of Marxism, it is completely false to pose the conflict that opened up after 1923 as a personal struggle for power between rival leaders. "In view of the prolonged decline in the international revolution," wrote Trotsky in 1935, of Trotsky "Stalin conducts a struggle on a totally different plane. He seeks to strike not at the ideas of the opponent, but at bis skull."
Lynn Walsh outlines the bureaucracy's bloody terror campaign against the Opposition.
MIR •23
[page 25]
240 MIR Summer 1990 Trotsky's assassination
"the victory of the bureaucracy - and consequently of Stalin - was foreordained. The result which idle observers and fools attribute to the personal forcefulness of Stalin, or at least to his exceptional cunning, stemmed from causes lying deep in the dynamics of historical forces. Stalin emerged as the half-conscious expression of the second chapter of the revolution, its 'morning after'." (Diary in Exile, p38)
Neither Trotsky, nor any of the Bolshevik leaders in 1917, had imagined that the working class of Russia could build a socialist society in isolation, in an economically backward and culturally primitive country. They were convinced that the workers had to take the power in order to carry through the largely unfinished tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution; but in pressing forward to the imperative tasks of the socialist revolution, they could proceed only in collaboration with the working class of the more developed capitalist countries - because, as compared to capitalism, socialism requires a higher level of production and mater-
ial culture.
The defeat of the German revolution in 1923 - to which the blunders of the Stalin-Bukharin leadership contributed - reinforced the isolation of the Soviet state, and the enforced retreat of the New Economic Policy speeded up the crystallisation of a bureaucratic caste which increasingly put its own creature comforts, desire for tranquility, and demands for privil eges before the interests of the international
revolution.
The ruling stratum of the bureaucracy was
rapidly discovering that Stalin was flesh of its
flesh'. Reflecting the interests of the bureau-
cracy, Stalin began a struggle against "Trotskyism'
- an ideological bogey which he invented to
distort and stigmatise the genuine ideas of
Marxism and of Lenin, upheld by Trotsky and
the Left Opposition.
It was the bureaucracy's fear that the Opposit-
ion's programme for the restoration of workers'
democracy would find an echo among a new
layer of young workers and give new momen-
tum to the struggle against bureaucratic degen-
eration that motivated Stalin's bloody purge
against the Opposition. Its ideas were "the
source of the gravest apprehensions of Stalin:
that savage fears ideas, since he knows their
explosive power and knows his own weakness
in the face of them." (Diary in Exile, p66)
Answering in advance the false idea that the
conflict was in some way the result of 'misun-
derstanding' or unwillingness to compromise,
Trotsky related how, while he was exiled to
Alma-Ata in 1928, a 'sympathetic' engineer, prob-
ably "sent surreptitiously to feel my pulse" ", asked
him whether he didn't think some steps towards
reconciliation with Stalin were possible:
"I answered him to the effect that at that mo-
Adolf Joffe.
ment there could be no question of reconciliation, not because I did not want it, but because Stalin could not make his peace with me. He was forced to pursue to the end the course set him by the bureaucracy. 'How will it end?' 'It will come to a sticky end; I answered. 'Stalin cannot settle it any other way. My visitor was visibly startled; he obviously had not expected such an answer and soon left." (Diary in Exile, p39)
Beginning in 1923 Trotsky led a fight in the Russian Communist Party. In a series of articles (published as The New Course), he began to warn of the danger of a post-revolutionary reaction. The isolation of the revolution in a backward country was leading to the incipient growth of a bureaucracy in the Bolshevik party and the state. Trotsky began to protest at the arbitrary behaviour of the Party bureaucracy crystallising under Stalin. Shortly before he died in 1924, Lenin had agreed with Trotsky on a bloc in the party to fight bureaucracy.
When Trotsky and a group of left oppositionists began a fight for a revival of workers' democracy, the politbureau was obliged to promise the restoration of freedom of expression and criticism in the Communist Party. But Stalin and his associates made sure that this remained a dead letter.
Within four years - on 7 November 1927, the tenth anniversary of the October revolution - Trotsky was forced to leave the Kremlin and take refuge with oppositionist friends. A week later, Trotsky and Zinoviev, the first chairman
of the Communist International, were expelled
from the party. Next day, Trotsky's fellow opp-
ositionist and friend, Adolph Joffe, killed himself
in protest at the dictatorial action of the Stalin
leadership. He was one of the first of Trotsky's
comrades, friends and family to be driven to
death or directly murdered by Stalin's regime,
which through systematic and ruthless repress-
ion of its opponents, opened up a river of blood
between genuine workers' democracy and its
own bureaucratic, totalitarian methods.
In January 1928, Trotsky was forced into his
third foreign exile. First he was deported to
Alma-Ata, a small Russian town near the Chin-
ese border, and from there he was deported to
Turkey, where he took up residence on Prin-
kipo Island, on the Sea of Marmara near
Istanbul.
In an attempt to paralyse Trotsky's literary
and political work, Stalin struck at his small
'apparat', which had consisted of five or six
close collaborators: "Glazman, driven to suic-
ide; Butov, dead in a GPU prison; Blumkin, shot,
Sermuks and Poznansky, vanished. Stalin did not
see that even without a secretariat I could carry
on literary work, which, in its turn, could fur-
ther the creating of a new apparat. Even the
cleverest bureaucrat displays an incredible
[page 26]
Bulletin der Opposition (Belsdesth-Lebridien)
NA Cremie
short-sightedness in certain questions!" (Diary in Exile, p40) All these revolutionaries had played important roles, particularly as members of the military secretariat or on Trotsky's armed train during the civil war. But Stalin, as Trotsky remarked, "was conducting the struggle on a different plane, and with different weapons."
If Stalin subsequently devoted such a large part of the resources of his secret police (known by its various abbreviated names: Cheka, GPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB), to planning and executing the assassination of Trotsky, why did Stalin allow his opponent to go into exile in the first place?
In an open letter to the politbureau in January 1932, Trotsky publicly warned that Stalin would prepare an attempt on his life. "The question' of terrorist reprisals against the author of this letter," he wrote, "was posed long ago: in 1924/25 at an intimate gathering Stalin weighed the pros and cons. The pros were obvious and clear. The chief consideration against was that there were too many selfless young Trotskyists who might reply with counter-terrorist actions." (Writings, 1932, p19) Trotsky had been informed of these discussions by Zinovie and Kamenev, who had briefly formed a 'ruling triumvirate' with Stalin, but later moved temporarily - into opposition against Stalin.
But, Trotsky continued, "Stalin has come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to have exiled Trotsky from the Soviet Union... contrary to his expectations it turned out that ideas have a power of their own, even without an apparatus and without resources. The Comintern is a grandiose structure, that has been left as a holl-
taper mentos
15 лет!
ow shell, both theoretically and politically. The future of revolutionary Marxism, which is to say of Leninism as well, is inseparably bound up from now on with the international cadres of the Left Opposition. No amount of falsification can change that. The basic works of the opposition have been, are being or will be published in every language. Opposition cadres, as yet not very numerous but nonetheless indomitable, are to be found in every country. Stalin understands perfectly well what a grave danger the ideological irreconcilability and persistent growth of the International Left Opposition represent to him personally, to his fake 'authority', to his Bonapartist almightiness." (Writings, 1932, p19-20)
In the early period of his Turkish exile, Trotsky wrote his monumental History of the Russian Revolution and also his brilliant autobiography, My Life. Through voluminous correspondence with oppositionists in other countries and especially through The Bulletin of the Opposition (published from Autumn, 1929), Trotsky began to draw together the nucleus of an international opposition of genuine Bolsheviks. But Trotsky's prognosis that, using the GPU, Stalin would ferociously purge and attempt to destroy everything working against him, was soon borne out.
Towards the end of his Turkish exile, Trotsky suffered a cruel blow when his daughter, Zinaida, ill and demoralised, was driven to suicide in Berlin. Her husband, Platon Volkov, a young opposition militant, was arrested and disappeared forever. Trotsky's first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, the woman who first ntroduced
An actual size copy of the Bulletin of the Opposition, 1932, for smuggling the USSR.
Zinaida.
MIR
[page 27]
him to socialist ideas, was sent to a concentrat-
ion camp where she died. Later Trotsky's son,
Sergey, a scientist with no political interests or
connections, was arrested on a trumped-up
charge of 'poisoning the workers' - and later
Trotsky learned that he had died in prison.
Alongside his morbid fear of ideas, "the motive
of personal revenge has always been a consid-
erable factor in the repressive policies of Stal-
in." (Diary in Exile, p66)
From the start, moreover, the GPU began to
penetrate Trotsky's household and the groups
of the Left Opposition. Suspicion surrounded a
number of people who appeared in Opposition
organisations in Europe, or who came to Prin-
kipo to visit Trotsky or assist in his work. Jakob
Frank, for example, a Lithuanian Jew, worked at
Prinkipo for a time but later went over to Stal-
inism. There was also the case of Mill (Paul
Okun, or Obin) who also went over to the Stal-
inists, leaving Trotsky and his collaborators
uncertain whether he was just a turn-coat or a
GPU plant.
Why were such people accepted as genuine approaching a treachery, Trotsky pointed out that "the Left new frontier". Opposition is placed in extremely difficult con-
ditions from an organisational point of view. No
revolutionary party in the past has worked un-
der such persecution. In addition to repress-
ion by the capitalist police of all countries, the
Opposition is exposed to the blows of the Stal-
inist bureaucracy which stops at nothing... it is
of course the Russian section which is having
the hardest time... But to find a Russian Bol-
shevik-Leninist abroad, even for purely technic-
al functions, is an extremely difficult task. This
and only this explains the fact that Mill was able
for a time to get into the Administrative Sec-
retariat of the Left Opposition. There was a
need for a person who knew Russian and was able to carry out secretarial duties. Mill had at
and in this sense could claim a certain personal confidence." (Writings, 1932, p237)
Looking back, it is clear that the lack of adequate security checks was to have tragic conseq-
and Trotsky understood that a phobia about infiltration and an exaggerated suspicion of everyone who offered support to the work of the Opposition could be counter-productive. With his positive, optimistic view of human character, moreover, Trotsky was averse to subjecting individuals to searching enquiries and personal investigation.
TROTSKY WAS EAGER to escape the isolation of Prinkipo and find a base nearer to the centre of European events. But the capitalist democracies were far from willing to grant Trotsky the democratic right of asylum. Eventually, in
260 MIR Summer 1990 Trotsky's assassination
1933, Trotsky was admitted to France.
sharpening of political tension, however,
particularly the growth of the nationalist
fascist right, soon led the Daladier governm
to order his expulsion. Practically every Eur
pean government had already refused him as
lum. Trotsky lived, as he wrote, on "a plame
without a visa." Expelled in 1935, Trotsky
found refuge for a short time in Norway, where
Shortly after his arrival in Norway, the first h
Moscow purge trial exploded in the face of th
world. "Stalin's dictatorship is approaching
new frontier," wrote Trotsky in his Diary tim
Exile. In the first monstrous show trial, Zinon
iev, Kamenev and other prominent leaders a
the Bolshevik party were tried on trumped-up
charges - based on false confessions extorted
by brutal pressure, torture and threats agains.
the defendants' families. The leading defendants
were sentenced to death and immediately exec
uted. Stalin's campaign against Trotskyism
reached a climax. In these great purge trials.
Trotsky was the chief defendant in absentia
accused of staging innumerable conspiracies
with the alleged purpose of assassinating Stalin
Voroshilov, Kaganovich and other Soviet lead-
ers, and of acting in secret collusion with Hitler
and the Emperor of Japan in order to bring
about the downfall of the Soviet regime and the
disintegration of the Soviet Union.
At the same time, Stalin exerted intense press-
ure on the Norwegan government to restrict
Trotsky in order to prevent his replying to and
refuting the vile charges hurled against him in
Moscow. To avoid virtual imprisonment, Trotsky was obliged to find an alternative refuge and he eagerly accepted an offer of asylum from the Cardenas government in Mexico. En route, Trotsky recalled his open letter to the polit-
"world-wide bureaucratic slander campaign and predicted attempts on his life. With chilling premonition, Trotsky added: "Stalin conducts a struggle on a totally different plane. He seeks to strike not at the ideas of the opponent, but at
The purge in Russia was not confined to a handful of old Bolsheviks or Left Oppositionists. For every leader who appeared in a show trial, hundreds or thousands were silently imprisoned, sent to certain death in Artic prison camps, or summarily executed in prison cellars. At least eight million were arrested in the course of the purges, and five or six millions rotted, many of them to death, in the camps. It was undoubtedly the supporters of the Left Opposition, adherents of Trotsky's ideas, who bore the
In his memoirs, Leopold Trepper, a genuine revolutionary caught up in the machinery of the GPU, posed the question: "But who did protest
[page 28]
at the time? Who nose to voice his outrage?
He gives this answer:
(The Great Game, 10 "The Trotskyites can
claim to this honour.
Following the example of their leader who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice axe, they fought Stalinism to the death and they were theonly ones who did. By the time of the great purges, they could only shout their rebellion in the freezing wastelands where they had been dragged in order to be exterminated In the camps, their conduct was admirable. But their voices were lost in the tundra. Today, the Trotskyites have a ght to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, howewer that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system apable of replacing Stalinism They had som
g to cling to in the midst of their profound mess at seeing the revolution betrayed. They di not confess", for they knew that their co
d serve neither the party nor sor (p56)
The purges in
ere also linked to Stal-
unionary intervention in's direct. co in the revolut
rar which erupted in Spain in the
1936. Through the agency of a bu
adership of the Span-
rolled from Moscow, ish Communist P the apparatus
litary advisers, and through the GP
Tasks Force, Stalin extended his tem
anarchists, left-wing militants and
Trotskyists who stood in the
policies.
Meanwhille.
ret police also intensit ied their meas
stroy the centre of the International
position, based in Paris and under the direction of Trotsky's son, Leon Sedor.
Sedov had
mensable to Trotsky in his literary
aring and distributing The Bulletin
sition, and in maintaining contac
groups of oppositionists internationa
Sedov also made an outstanding, indepe
omtribution to the work of the opposit
Early in 1937, however, he was taken ill
spected appendicitis. On the advice of a taur who had become his closest collaborator, "Etienne" Sedor entered a clinic which subsequently turmed out to be run by both White" Russian emigres and Russians with known Stalinist leamings. Sedov appeared to recover from the surgery which was carried out; but shortly afterwards he died with extremely mysterious symptoms. The evidence and the opinion of at least one doctor, pointed to poisoning, and further investigation produced a strong suggestion that his illness had in the first place been produced by sophisticated. virtually undetectable poisoning
Trotsky wrote a moving tribute to his dead son, Leon Sedov - Son, Friend, Fighter. (In Writings, 1937/1938, pp166-179) He paid trib-
ute to Sedov's role in the struggle to defend the genuine ideas of Marxism against their Stalinist perversion. But he also gave some indication of the depth of the personal blow. "He was part of both of us," Trotsky wrote, speaking for himself and for Natalia: "Our young part. By hundreds of channels our thoughts and feelings daily reach out to him in Paris. Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us."
Subsequently it was revealed that Leon Sedov had been betrayed by 'Etienne' , who was a GPU agent far more insidious and ruthless than the previous spies and provocateurs who had infiltrated Trotsky's circle. Etienne was later unmasked as one Mark Zborowski who was exposed in the late 1950s as the key figure in the GU's American espionage network. By then, Zborowski already had a long trial of duplicity and blood behind him. In his US trial, Zborowski confessed that he had 'fingered Rudolf Klement, (Trotsky's secretary, murdered in Paris in 1938), Erwin Wolf (a supporter of Trotsky who was murdered in Spain in July 1937), and Ignace Reiss (a top GPU agent who renounced Stalin's terror machine and declared his support for the Fourth International, murdered in Switzerland in September 1937).
Zborowski had contact with the agents of the GPU's 'Special Tasks Force' in Spain, which was responsible for the murder of Erwin Wolf - and which included in its ranks the infamous Colonel Eitingon. It was this man, under numerous pseudonyms, who was to direct the assassination attempts against Trotsky in Mexico, in conjunction with his GPU associate and lover, Caridad Mercader, and her son Ramon Mercader, the agent who eventually murdered Trotsky.
TROTSKY, NATALIA SEDOVA, AND a handful of close collaborators, arrived in Mexico in January 1937. The administration of General Lazaro Cardenas was the only government in the world that would grant Trotsky asylum in the last years of his life. In marked contrast to his reception elsewhere, Trotsky was given a flamboyant official welcome and went to live in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, in a house lent by his friend and political supporter, Diego Rivera, a well-known Mexican painter.
Trotsky's arrival, however, coincided with a second Moscow show trial, shortly followed by a third, even more grotesque trial. "We listened to the radio," related Natalia, "opened the mail and the Moscow newspapers, and we felt that insanity, absurdity, and outrage, fraud and blood were flooding us from all sides, here in Mexico as in Norway..." (The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, p212). Once again Trotsky exposed the internal contradictions of the manufactured evidence used in these monstrous frame-ups, and in a stream of articles complete-
MIR ummer
Tro assassin
П27 1990 sky's ition
Ignace Reiss.
Trotsky with Erwin Wolf, 1936.
[page 29]
280 MIR Summer 1990 Trotsky's assassination
ly refuted all
supporters.
It proved possible, moreover, to organise a
counter-trial' presided over by the liberal
American philosopher, John Dewey, and this
commission completely exonerated Trotsky of
the charges hurled against him. Trotsky warned
that the purpose of the trials was to justify a
new wave of terror - which would be directed
against all those who represented the slightest
threat to Stalin's dictatorial leadership, whether
as active opponents, potential bureaucratic
rivals, or simply embarrassing accomplices
from the past. Trotsky was well aware that the
death penalty pronounced against him was far
from being a platonic sentence.
From the moment of his arrival, the Mexican
Communist Party, whose leaders loyally follow-
ed the Moscow line, began to agitate for rest-
rictions to be placed on Trotsky to prevent him
answering the show trial allegations, and ultim-
ately to bring about his expulsion from the
country. The newspapers and journals publish-
ed by the Communist Party and the Communist
controlled trade union federation (the CTM),
poured out a stream of slanderous allegations,
to the effect that Trotsky was plotting against
the Cardenas government and allegedly collab-
orating with fascist and reactionary elements.
Trotsky was well aware that the Stalinist press was using the language of people who decide things not by votes but by the machine gun.
In the middle of the night on 24 May, 1940, came the first direct assault on Trotsky's life. A group of armed raiders forced their way into Trotsky's house, raked the bedrooms with machine-gun fire, and set off incendiaries evidently intended to destroy Trotsky's archives and cause the maximum possible damage. Trotsky and Natalia narrowly escaped death by lying on the floor beneath the bed. Their grandson, Seva, was slightly injured by a bullet. A large bomb left by the raiders fortunately failed to go off. Afterwards, it was found that the raiders had been let in by Robert Sheldon Harte, one of the secretary-guards, who was apparently tricked by someone in the raiding party he knew and trusted. His body was later found buried in a lime pit.
All the evidence pointed to the Mexican Stalinists and, behind them, the GPU. Through a detailed analysis of the Stalinist press in the weeks before the raid, Trotsky clearly showed that they had foreknowledge of, and were preparing for, an armed attempt on his life. The Mexican police soon arrested some of the minor accomplices of the raiders, and their evidence soon incriminated leading members of the Mexican Communist Party. The trial led to David Alfaro Siqueiros, like Diego Rivera a well-known painter, but unlike Rivera, a leading member of the Mexican CP. Siqueiros had also been in
Trotsky was
aware that
the death
penalty pronounced against him is far from
being a
platonic
sentence.
the accusations against
Spain and had long been suspected of connec
ions with the GPU. Despite the Stalinists outrag
eous attempt to portray the attack as self-im
flicted', supposedly organised by Trotsky to dis
credit the CP and the Cardenas government
the police eventually arrested the ring-leaders
including Siqueiros. But as a result of pressure
from the CP and the CTM, they were released in
March 1941 for 'lack of material and incrimin
ating evidence!
Siqueiros did not deny his role in the assauln.
In fact, he openly boasted about it. But the
Communist Party leadership, clearly embarrass
ed not so much by the attempt itself but by the
way it was bungled, tried to disassociate itself
from the raid, blaming it on a gang of uncont-
rollable elements' and 'agents provocateurs
The Stalinist press alternated between proc
aiming Squiros a hero, and, on the other
hand, a 'half-crazed madman' and even...
being in Trotsky's pay! With shameless logic
the CP press asserted that the attack was an act
of provocation directed against the Communist
Party and against the Mexican state - and therefore Trotsky should be expelled immediately,
Thirty-eight years later, however, a leading member of the Mexican CP admitted the truth In his memoirs, My Testimony, published the Mexican CP's own publishing house
1978, Valentin Campa, a veteran member of the party, flatly contradicted the official denials o the party's involvement and gave details of the preparation for the attempt on Trotsky's life.
Campa relates how, in the Autumn of 1938, he, together with Raphael Carrillo (a member of the CP's central committee), was summoned by Herman Laborde (the party's general secretary) and informed of"an extremely confidentia and delicate affair." Laborde told them he had been visited by a Comintern delegate (in reality, a GPU representative) who had informed him of the "decision to eliminate Trotsky" and had asked for their co-operation "for the task off carrying out this elimination." After a "vigorous analysis", ', however, Campa says that they rejected the proposal. "We concluded... that Trotsky was finished politically, that his influence was almost zero, moreover we had said so often enough throughout the world, besides, the results of his elimination would do great disservice to the Mexican Communist Party and the revolutionary movement of Mexico and to the whole international Communist movement We therefore concluded that to propose the elimination of Trotsky was clearly a serious mistake." For their opposition, however, Laborde and Campa were accused of 'sectarian opportunism', of being 'soft on Trotsky', and were driven out of the party.
The campaign to prepare the Mexican CP for the murder of Trotsky was carried through by a number of Stalinist leaders already experienced
[page 30]
in ruthlessly carrying out the orders of their
master in Moscow: Siqueiros himself, who had
been active in Spain, probably a GPU agent
since 1928; Vittoria Codovila, an Argentinian
Stalinist who had operated in Spain under Eit-
ingon, probably involved in the torture and
murder of the POUM leader Andreas Nin; Pedro
Checa, leader of the Spanish Communist Party in exile in Mexico, who actually took his pseudonym from the Soviet secret police, the Cheka; and Carlos Contreras, alias Vittorio Vidali, who had been active with the GPU's 'Special Tasks Force' in Spain under the pseudonym of 'General Carlos. Co-ordinating their efforts was the ubiquitous Colonel Eitingon.
After the failure of the attempt by Siqueiros and his group to take Trotsky's house by storm, Campa writes: "a third alternative was put into practice. Raymond Mercader, who was living under the pseudonym Jacques Mornard, assassinated Trotsky on the evening of the 20 August, 1940."
Trotsky regarded his escape from the Siqueiros raid as 'a reprieve. "Our joyous feeling of salvation," wrote Natalia afterwards, "was dampened by the prospect of a new visitation and the need to prepare for it." (Father and Son). The defences of Trotsky's house were strengthened and new precautions were taken. But unfortunately - tragically - no efforts were made to check up more thoroughly on the man who turned out to be the assassin, despite the suspicions that several members of the household
had about this strange character.
Trotsky resisted some of the additional secur-
ity measures suggested by his secretary-guards:
for a guard to be stationed by him at all times, for instance. "It was impossible to convert ones
life solely into self-defence," wrote Natalia,
...for in that case life loses all its value."
Nevertheless, in view of the vital, indispensable nature of Trotsky's work and the inevitability of an attempt on his life, there is no doubt there were serious deficiencies in the security - and that tighter measures should have been implemented. Shortly before Sheldon Harte's abduction, for instance, Trotsky had noticed him allowing workmen strengthening the house to pass freely in and out of the courtyard. Trotsky complained that this was very careless, and added - ironically, this was only a few weeks before Harte's tragic death - "you might prove to be the first victim of your own carelessness." (Natalia Sedova, Father and Son).
Mercader met Trotsky for the first time a few days after the Siqueiros raid. But the preparations for his attempt had already been in hand for a long time. Through Zborowski and other GPU agents who had infiltrated Trotsky's supporters in the United States, Mercader had been introduced in France to Sylvia Ageloff, a young American Trotskyist who subsequently went to work for Trotsky in Coyoacan. The GPU agent managed to seduce Sylvia Ageloff and make her the unwitting accomplice of his crime.
Mercader had an 'elaborate cover' , which
MIR •29
Left to right:
Jan Frankel, Leon Sedov, Natalia, Jiri Kopp and Trotsky in Prinkipo.
[page 31]
300 MIR Summer 1 Trotsky's assassinatı
Ramon Mercader and Sylvia Ageloff,
Paris, 1938.
although it aroused many suspicions, unfortunately served its purpose well enough. Mercader had joined the Communist Party in Spain, and became active in its ranks in the period 1933-36 when it was already a Stalinised party. Probably through his mother, Caridad Mercader, who was already a GPU agent and associated with Eitingon, Mercader too entered the service of the GPU. After the defeat of the Spanish republic, aided by Stalin's sabotage of the revolution in Spain, Mercader went to Moscow where he was prepared for his future role. After meeting Ageloff in Paris in 1938 he later accompanied her to Mexico in January 1940 and gradually ingratiated himself with members of Trotsky's household.
After gaining the acceptance of Trotsky's household, Mornard arranged to meet with Trotsky personally on the pretext of discussing an article that he had written - which Trotsky considered to an embarrassing degree banal and devoid of interest. The first meeting was clearly a 'dress rehersal' for the actual assassination.
The next time he came was on the morning of 20 August. Despite the misgivings of Natalia and Trotsky's guards, Mornard was again allowed to see Trotsky alone - "three or four minutes went by," Natalia relates: "I was in the room next door. There was a terrible piercing cry... Lev Davidovich appeared, leaning against the door frame. His face was covered with blood, his blue eyes glistening without spectacles and his arms hung limply by his side..." Mornard had struck Trotsky a fatal blow in the back of the head with a cut-down ice axe concealed in his raincoat. But the blow was not immediately lethal; Trotsky "screamed very long, infinitely long," as Mercader himself put it - and courageously grappled with his assassin, preventing further blows.
"The doctor declared that the injury was not very serious," says Natalia. "Lev Davidovich listened to him without emotion, as one would a conventional message of comfort. Pointing to his heart, he said to Hansen in English, I feel... here... that this is the end... this time... they've succeeded." (Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, p268)
Trotsky was taken to hospital, operated on, and survived for more than a day after that, dying at the age of 60 on 21 August 1940.
Mercader seems to have hoped that, after Siqueiros' lenient treatment, he too might get a light sentence. But he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, which he served. But even after his identity had been firmly established by finger-prints and other evidence, he refused to admit who he was or who had ordered him to murder Trotsky. Although the crime was almost universally attributed to Stalin and the GPU, the Stalinists brazenly denied all responsibility. There is ample evidence, however, that Mer-
cader's mother, who escaped from Mexico with Eitingon, was presented to Stalin and decorated with a high bureaucratic honour for her son and herself. Mercader himself was honoured when he returned to Eastern Europe after his release. In spite of his silence, a chain of evidence, which can now be constructed from the elaborate testimony of Russian spies brought to trial in the United States, top GPU agents who defected to Western countries at various times, and the belated memoirs of the Stalinist leaders themselves, clearly link Mercader to Stalin's secret terror machine based in Moscow.
In the end, Stalin succeeded in murdering the man who - alongside Lenin - was indubitably the greatest revolutionary leader in history. But, as Natalia Sedova wrote afterwards: "Retribution will come to the vile murderers. Throughout his entire heroic and beautiful life, Lev Davidovich believed in the emancipated mankind of the future. During the last years of his lite, his faith did not falter, but on the contrary became only more mature, more firm than ever. Future mankind, emancipated from all oppression will triumph over coercion of all sorts..." How It Happened, November 1940).
MANY ATTEMPTS HAVE have been made to portray Trotsky as a 'tragic' figure, as if his perspective for socialist revolution in the capitalist states and for political revolution in the Soviet Union was 'noble'.. but hopelessly idealistic. This is the view implied by Isaac Deutscher in the third volume of his Trotsky biography, The Prophet Outcast, in which he denigrates Trotsky's efforts to re-organise and re-arm a new international Marxist leadership, dismissing Trotsky's tenacious. painstaking work as futile.
But if there is a tragic element in Trotsky's life, it is because his whole life and work after the victorious Russian revolution was inseparably bound up with the revolutionary struggle of the international working class — in a period first of retreat and then of catastrophic defeats. For the very reason that Trotsky played a leading role in the October revolution, his past dictated that with the ebbing of the revolution he would be forced into exile and political isolation. But while fainthearts and sceptics abandoned Marxist perspectives and made their peace with Stalinism or capitalism - or both - Trotsky, and the small handful who remained committed to the ideas of the Opposition, struggled to re-arm a new generation of revolutionary leaders for the future resurgence of the working class movement.
In exile, Trotsky enriched the literature of Marxism with magnificent works: but he was far from accepting that his role would simply be that of historian and commentator on events. "I am reduced," he wrote in his Diary in Exile,
[page 32]
p53-54, "to carrying on a dialogue with the Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. WorldSocialist Books stocks a wide range of books by orabout Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy: Prophet Armed, Prophet Unarmed, Prophet We also bave a large number of pampblets by Trotsky, as well as a comprebensive selection of books, pampblets and newspapers about the struggle for socialism in Britain and internationally. For a full list, or to order books (below £10, add 10% for post and packing, above £10 post free), write to: World Socialist Books, 3/13 Hepscott Road, London E9 5HB, or phone us on 081 533 3311 - credit cards newspapers, or rather through the newspapers with facts and opinions.
"And I still think that the work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life - more important than 1917, more important than the period of the civil war or any other.
"For the sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October revolution would still have taken place - on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik party would have prevented it from occurring - of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lemin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with "Trotskyism' (ie with the proletariam newolation) would have commenced in May 1917, amd the outcome of the revolution would Iname been in question.
"But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin, the October revolution would have been vic- The same could by and large be torious any although in its first period, said of the ci lime of the fall of Simbirsk and especially at Leon Trotsky, including:
My Life In defence of Marxism Writings 1929-1940 - 14 volumes History of the Russian Revolution Leon Sedow - son, friend, fighter 3rd International after Lenin The Stalin Sobool of Falsification Also:
Outcast £7.95 each.
accepted.
MIR 031 Summer 1990 But this was undoubtedly a passing mood Trotsky's which he probably never even admitted to assassination anyone but me.
"Thus I cannot speak of the 'indispensability" of my work, even about the period from 1917 to 1921. But now my work is 'indispensable' in the full sense of the word. There is no arrog ance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these Internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it.
"There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third International. And I am in complete agreement with Lenin (or rather Turgenev) that the worst vice is to be more than 55 years old! I need at least about five more years of uninterrupted work to ensure the succession."
THIS ARTICLE, slightly abbreviated for this edition, was first printed in Militant International Review, Number 20, Summer 1980, on the fortieth anniversary of Trotsky's death. $7.95 $6.50 68.95 each 69.25 £0.75 £3.95 £4.95
[page 33]