Anniversary: Leon Trotsky’s assassination
21/08/2013, On 21 August 1940 Leon Trotsky, the Marxist thinker and fighter, and co-leader of the Russian Revolution, along with Lenin, was murdered by one of Stalin’s agents.
Lynn Walsh, Socialist Party (CWI England & Wales)
Leon Trotsky’s assassination
www.socialistworld.net, 21/08/2013
website of the committee for a workers' international, CWI
On 21 August 1940 Leon Trotsky, the Marxist thinker and fighter, and co-leader of the Russian Revolution, along with Lenin, was murdered by one of Stalin’s agents.
Lynn Walsh, Socialist Party (CWI England & Wales)
’Trotsky’s Assassination’ originally appeared in the quarterly theoretical magazine of the Militant (now the Socialist Party - England and Wales section of the CWI), in 1980.
Lynn Walsh honours there the life and struggles of this great socialist revolutionary.
Read the article on our theoretical website, marxist.net
Forty Years Since Leon Trotsky’s Assassination
Exile And Repression
Stalin conducts the struggle "on a different plane with different methods."
By Lynn Walsh, writing in 1980
This year is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Leon
Trotsky.
On 20 August, 1940, 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—alongside Lenin, the leader of the
October revolution, the founder and leader of the Red Army, and the co-founder
of the Third, Communist International.
Trotsky in 1919
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 distort
ions, 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, at the beginning of the 1980s, when there is unmistakably a
perspective of new revolutionary developments in the advanced capitalist
countries, the underdeveloped lands of the ex-colonial world, and the deformed
workers' states of Russia and Eastern Europe.
This will no doubt be grudgingly conceded by even the
capitalist press this August. But, predictably, 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.
For instance, despite the incontrovertible evidence—some
clear at the time, much more which has since come to light—some journals (e.g.
the 'New Statesman', 8th December 1978), anxious, it seems, to exculpate
Stalinism, have even tried to cast doubt on the GPU's responsibility for
Trotsky's murder.
More fundamentally, however, the old question (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 his policies were "impractical", and that he
allowed himself to be "out-manoeuvred" by Stalin. As a corollary, it will again
be suggested that Stalin was more "practical" and that he was a more "astute"
and "forceful" leader.
Trotsky himself completely refuted these ideas, not just
in answering Max Eastman's point, 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, "the victory of the bureaucracy—and consequently of Stalin—was foreordained. The result which the 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', p.38)
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 material
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 tranquillity, and demands for privileges before
the interests of the international revolution.
The ruling stratum of the bureaucracy "was rapidly
discovering that Stalin was flesh of its flesh," and reflecting the interests of
the bureaucracy, 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 opposition's
programme for the restoration of workers' democracy would find an echo among a
new layer of young workers and give new momentum to the struggle against
bureaucratic degeneration 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', p.66)
This fear also explained Stalin's personal craving for
revenge against Trotsky and his family. Stalin, remarked Trotsky, "is clever
enough to realise that even today I would not change places with him [in 1935,
while living in "modified prison style" in France]... hence the psychology of a
man stung."
Expulsion and Exile
Answering in advance the false idea that the conflict was
in some way the result of "misunderstanding" or unwillingness to compromise,
Trotsky related how, while he was exiled at Alma-Ata in 1928, a "sympathetic"
engineer, probably "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 moment 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' p.39).
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 agreed with Trotsky
on a block 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 the 7th November 1927, the 10th
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 oppositionist and friend, Adolph Joffe, killed
himself in protest at the dictatorial action of the Stalin leadership. This was
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
repression of its opponents, opened up a river of blood between genuine workers'
democracy and its own bureaucratic, totalitarian methods.
In Janaury 1928, Trotsky was forced into his third
foreign exile. First he was deported to Alma-Ata, a small Russian town near the
Chinese border, and from there he was deported to Turkey, where he took up
residence on Prinkipo Island, on the Sea of Marmara near Constantinople (now
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 suicide; 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 further the creating of a new apparat. Even the cleverest bureaucrat
displays an incredible short-sightedness, in certain questions!" ("Diary in
Exile', p. 40) 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 1924/5 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 young Trotskyists who might reply with
counter-terrorist actions." (Writings 1932, p.l9)
Trotsky was informed of these discussions by Zinoviev and
Kamenev, who had briefly formed a "ruling triumvirate" with Stalin, but later
moved—temporarily— into opposition against Stalin.
Persecution
But "Stalin has come to the conclusion that it was a
mistake to have exiled Trotsky from the Soviet Union", wrote Trotsky:
"...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 hollow 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, pp.18-20)
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 introduced him to socialist ideas, was sent to a
concentration 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 Trotsky later learned that he had died in prison.
Alongside his morbid fear of ideas, "the motive of personal revenge has always
been a considerable factor in the repressive policies of Stalin." ('Diary in
Exile', p.66)
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 Prinkipo 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
Stalinism. Another, known as Kharin (or Joseph) handed over the text of one
edition of the "Bulletin of the Opposition" to the GPU, thus seriously
disrupting its production. There was also the case of Mill (Paul Okun, or Obin)
who also went over to the Stalinists, leaving Trotsky and his collaborators
uncertain whether he was just a turncoat or a GPU plant.
Why were such people accepted as genuine collaborators?
In a public comment on Mill's treachery, Trotsky pointed out that,
"The Left Opposition is placed in extremely difficult conditions from an organisational point of view. No revolutionary party in the past has worked under such persecution. In addition to repression by the capitalist police of all countries, the Opposition is exposed to the blows of the Stalinist bureaucracy which stops at nothing...it is of course the Russian section which is having the hardest time...But to find a Russian Bolshevik-Leninist abroad, even for purely technical 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 Secretariat 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 one time been a member of the official Party and in this sense could claim a certain personal confidence." ('Writings 1932, p.237)
Looking back, it is clear that the lack of adequate
security checks was to have tragic consequences. But resources were extremely
limited, 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.
One visitor to Prinkipo, however, was quite definitely a
professional GPU agent. The subsequent course of this agent's treacherous career
was much later to throw considerable light on the GPU's deadly manoeuvres
against Trotsky and the Opposition. This was Abraham Sobolevicius, who as
"Senin" was a leading member of the German Left Opposition, together with his
brother, Ruvin Soblevicius, known as "Roman Well".
These brothers conspired to disrupt the activities of the
German group—with considerable success. In 1933, with Hitler's seizure of power,
they returned to the GPU headquarters in Moscow—but not before Trotsky had
confronted "Senin" while on a brief visit to Copenhagen in 1932 and denounced
the "so-called Trotskyite" as "more or less an agent of the Stalinists." "At the
mildest estimate," Trotsky wrote, "we can call these people [the Sobolevicius
brothers] nothing but the garbage of the revolution," and commented that there
were certainly connections between such agents and the GPU in Moscow.
Purge Trials
Much later, this was confirmed by "Senin" himself: "My
services for the Soviet secret police went back to 1931," he confessed (though
they almost certainly began earlier).
"The job was to spy on Leon Trotsky for Joseph Stalin, who was obsessed with the idea of knowing everything his hated rival was doing and thinking even in exile... for two years, in 1931 and 1932, I spied on Trotsky and the men around him. Trotsky, suspecting nothing, invited me to his heavily guarded home at Prinkipo, Turkey. I duly reported back to the Kremlin everything Trotsky told me in confidence including his pungent remarks about Stalin."
This was revealed in the United States in 1957/8, when
"Senin", now under the name of Jack Sobel, was put on trial as the key member of
a Russian spy ring in America. In the course of his testimony, at his own trial,
at the perjury trial of his fellow agent, Mark Zborowski, and also at Senate
hearings on espionage, Jack Sobel, together with his brother, now known as
Robert Sobel, confirmed in detail the murderous role of the GPU in relation to
Trotsky, his family, and his supporters.
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 1933, Trotsky was admitted to France. The sharpening of
political tension, however, and particularly the growth of the nationalist and
fascist right, soon led the Daladier government to order his expulsion.
Practically every European government had already refused him asylum. Trotsky
lived, as he wrote, on "a planet without a visa." Expelled in 1935, Trotsky
found refuge for a short time in Norway where he wrote "The Revolution Betrayed'
(1936).
"Lies, falsification, forgery, and judicial perversion
have assumed a scale hitherto unheard of in history..." ('Diary in Exile', p45)
wrote Trotsky while still in France. But shortly after his arrival in Norway,
the first big Moscow purge trial exploded in the face of the world. "Disturbing
trials are now taking place in the USSR," Trotsky commented in his Diary;
"Stalin's dictatorship is approaching a new frontier."
In the first monstrous show trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and
other prominent leaders of the Bolshevik Party were tried on trumped-up
charges—based on false confessions extorted by brutal pressure, torture, and
threats against the defendants' families. The leading defendants were sentenced
to death and immediately executed. 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 leaders, 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 pressure on the
Norweigan 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 Politbureau in which he had anticipated
Stalin's "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 his skull." (Writings 1936/37, p44)
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
Arctic 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 heaviest
repression.
Writing in his recent memoirs, Leopold Trepper, a genuine
revolutionary caught up in the machinery of the GPU, posed the question:
"But who did protest at the time? Who rose up to voice his outrage?" (The Great Game', 1977). He gives this answer: "The Trotskyites can lay 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 the only 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 right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves.Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not 'confess', for they knew that their confession would serve neither the Party nor socialism." (p56)
The purges in Russia were also linked to Stalin's direct,
counterrevolutionary intervention in the revolution and the civil war which
erupted in Spain in the summer of 1936. Through the agency of a bureaucratic
leadership of the Spanish Communist Party controlled from Moscow, the apparatus
of Soviet military advisers, and through the GPU's "Special Tasks Force," Stalin
extended his terror to the anarchists, left-wing militants and especially the
Trotskyists who stood in the way of his policies.
Meanwhile,
Stalin's secret police also intensified his measures to destroy the centre of
the International Left Opposition, based in Paris and under the direction of
Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov.
Leon Sedov
In 1936 the GPU stole part of Trotsky's archives stored
in Paris, a move intended to undermine Trotsky's ability to reply to the
monstrous charges and faked evidence put forward in the Moscow trials. But a far
heavier blow to both Trotsky personally and to the Opposition in general was the
death of Leon Sedov.
Sedov had been indispensable to Trotsky in his literary
work, in preparing and distributing the 'Bulletin of the Opposition', and in
maintaining contacts between groups of oppositionists internationally. But Sedov
also made an outstanding, independent contribution to the work of the
opposition.
Early in 1937, however, he was taken ill with suspected
appendicitis. On the advice of a man who had become his closest collaborator,
"Etienne", Sedov entered a clinic—which subsequently turned out to be run by
both "White" Russian emigres and Russians with known Stalinist leanings. 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". (Writings 1937/38, pp 166-179). He paid tribute 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", 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 like the Sobels was exposed in the
United States in the late 1950s as the key figure in the GPU's American
espionage network.
By that time, Zborowski, already had a long trail of
duplicity and blood behind him. In his US trial, Zborowski confessed that he had
led the GPU to Trotsky's archives and had been responsible for "fingering"
Rudolf Klement (Trotsky's secretary, murdered in Paris in 1938), Erwin Wolf (a
supporter of Trotsky who went to Spain and was murdered 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).
By his own admission Zborowski had been a professional
GPU agent since 1931 or 1932 (though more likely since 1928). He may at one time
have been a member of the Polish Communist Party (though he denied this), but he
was undoubtedly a mercenary Stalinist agent. He undoubtedly had contact with
Jack Sobel in Paris, and also with the agents of the GPU's "Special Tasks Force"
in Spain, which was responsible for the murder in Barcelona 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. Zborowski was also responsible for
beginning the task of infiltrating Mercader into Trotsky's circle. Nearly two
years before the assassination, he set up an elaborate scheme to enable Mercader
to seduce a young American Trotskyist, Sylvia Ageloff, as a means of gaining
entry to Trotsky's household.
Show Trials And Bloody Purges
"Stalin’s dictatorship is approaching a new frontier..."
All the evidence at the time pointed to the GPU's
responsibility for the murder of Trotsky, his son Leon Sedov and other leading
supporters.
But later this was more than amply confirmed, not only by
the detailed evidence of the Sobels, Zborowski, and others forced to testify in
the United States courts and Senate hearings in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
but also by the detailed evidence of a number of top GPU officers who fled from
Russia and revealed the truth about the murderous activity in which they had
been involved.
The first had been Ignace Reiss himself, who soon paid
with his life for his denunciation of Stalin's crimes. Later Alexander Orlov,
who had been director of the GPU machine in Spain during the civil war, escaped
to America. He attempted to warn Trotsky of the plot against his life, though
this was only partially successful because of Trotsky's understandable fear of
being misled by a provocateur.
But Orlov, both in evidence to the US government and in
his revealing book, 'The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes', confirmed in detail
the role of Zborowski, Eitingon, and Mercader. Further corroborative evidence
was brought out much later by other GPU defectors, like Krivitsky (tracked down
and murdered by the GPU in 1941) and later still by Colonel Vladimir Petrov who
fled to Australia and Captain Nikolai Khokhlov. Khokhlov testified that:
"Trotsky's assassination was organised by Major General Eitingon, the same general who was in Spain under the name of General Katov," and who "recruited Spaniards for diversionary activities of the Soviet intelligence."Khokhlov added:"And that is where he recruited a Spaniard who was brought to the Soviet union and who was briefed in detail and who was later sent to Mexico under the name of Mornard" (i.e. Mercader or 'Jacson'). (Quoted in Isaac Don Levine, The Mind of an Assassin', 1960, p.34)
Armed Raid And Assassination
"Retribution will come to the vile murderers…"
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', page 212).
Once again Trotsky exposed the internal contradictions of
the manufactured evidence used in these monstrous frame-ups, and in a stream of
articles completely refuted all the accusations against him and his 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, pr 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 followed the Moscow line, began to agitate for
restrictions to be placed on Trotsky to prevent him answering the show trial
allegations, and ultimately to bring about his expulsion from the country. The
newspapers and journals published by the Communist Party and the
Communist-controlled trade union federation (CTM) poured out a stream of
slanderous allegations, to the effect that Trotsky was plotting against the
Cardenas government and allegedly collaborating 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 24th/25th May, 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 failed—fortunately—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. The raiders, moreover, knew the layout of the building and the security
devices—they clearly had inside information. Although an accusing finger was
pointed at Sheldon Harte as an accomplice, he was undoubtedly duped—as Trotsky
emphatically maintained at the time—by somebody familiar to him. No one fits
this inference better than Mornard, alias 'Jacson.'
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.
For a start, the suspects had previously been involved in
the International Brigades in Spain— already notorious as the recruiting ground
of Stalin's agents and killers. The trail soon led to David Alfaro Siqueiros,
like Diego Rivera a well-known painter, but unlike Rivera, a leading member of
the Mexican Communist Party. Siqueiros had also been in Spain and had long been
suspected of connections with the GPU. Despite the Stalinists' outrageous
attempt to portray the attack as a "self-inflicted attack," supposedly organised
by Trotsky to discredit the CP and the Cardenas government, the police
eventually arrested the ring-leaders, including Siqueiros. However, as a result
of pressure from the CP and the CTM, Siqueiros and the others were released in
March 1941, for "lack of material and incriminating evidence"!
Siqueiros did not deny his role in the assault. In fact,
he openly boasted about it. But the Communist Party leadership, clearly
embarrassed—not so much by the attempt itself, but by the way it was
bungled—tried to disassociate itself from the raid, blaming it onto a gang of
"uncontrollable elements" and "agents provocateurs."
The Stalinist press alternated between proclaiming
Siqueiros a hero, and, on the other hand, a "half-crazed madman" and
"irresponsible adventurer"—and even... as 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 Communist Party admitted the truth. In his memoirs, 'My Testimony',
published by the Mexican CP's own publishing house in 1978, Valentin Campa, a
veteran member of the party, flatly contradicted the official denials of the
party's involvement and gave details of the preparation for the attempt on
Trotsky's life. Key extracts from Campa's memoirs, moreover, were published in
the daily paper of the more influential French Communist Party ("L'Humanite',
26/27 June 1978) on the authority of the party's general-secretary, George
Marchais. (see ‘Militant', October 1978.)
Campa relates how, in the autumn of 1938, he, together
with Raphael Carrillo (a member of the Mexican CP’s central committee), was
summoned by Herman Laborde (the party's general secretary) and informed of "an
extremely confidential 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 of 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
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 Eitingon,
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, of course 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 20th 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 security measures
suggested by his secretary-guards: for a guard to be stationed by him at all
times, for instance. "It was impossible to convert one's 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 Agaloff, a young American Trotskyist who subsequently went to
work for Trotsky in Coyoacan. The GPU agent managed to seduce Sylvia Agaloff,
and make her the unwitting accomplice of his crime.
Mercader had an "elaborate cover," which although it
aroused many suspicions, unfortunately served its purpose well enough. Mercader
had joined the Communist Party in Spain, and become 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, 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 rehearsal"
for the actual assassination.
The next time he came was on the morning of 20th 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 Trotsky courageously grappled with his assassin, preventing
further blows.
"The doctor declared that the injury was not very serious," says Natalia. " Leon Davidovich listened to, him without emotion, as one would with 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, p. 268)
Trotsky was
taken to hospital, operated on, and survived for more than a day after that,
dying at the age of 62 on 21st August 1940.
Trotsky in Mexico
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.
However, 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 Mercader'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
life, 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.)
Trotsky's Vital Role
"Arming a new generation with the revolutionary method..."
Many attempts 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.
The latest biographer, Ronald Segal, entitles his book The Tragedy of Leon
Trotsky.'
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," wrote Trotsky in
his 'Diary in Exile' (pp 53-54), "to carrying on a dialogue with the 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 occurring—of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with 'Trotskyism' (i.e. with the proletarian revolution) would have commenced in May 1917, and the outcome of the revolution would have been in question."But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin the October Revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be said of the Civil War, although in its first period, especially at the time of the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. But this was undoubtedly a passing mood which he probably never even admitted to 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 arrogance 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 fifty-five years old! I need at least about five more years of uninterrupted work to ensure the succession."
Books and articles with material relating to Trotsky's assassination:
Trotsky's Diary in Exile (London 1959);
Leon Trotsky: Writings 1929-40 (12 vols plus two-part
supplement, New York 1969-80);
Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky: The Life and
Death of Leon Trotsky (London 1975);
Natalia Trotsky: How it Happened and Father and Son
('Fourth International,' May 1941 and August 1941);
Jean van Heijenoort: With Trotsky in Exile (London
1978);
Elizabeth Poretsky: Our Own People: A Memoir of Ignace
Reiss (London 1969);
Isaac Don Levine; The Mind of an Assassin (London
1960);
Georges Vereeken: The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement
(London 1978);
Alexander Orlov: The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes
(London 1954);
Walter Krivitsky: I Was Stalin's Agent (London
1941);
Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed (1954), The Profit
Unarmed (1959), and The Profit Outcast (1963);
Ronald SegaI: The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky (London
1979).
