Lynn Walsh is a member of the Socialist Party (CWI in England & Wales).
Eighty Years Since Leon Trotsky’s Assassination
An updated version of an article first published by the CWI, predecessor of ISA, in 1980 (The CWI has since been renamed International Socialist Alternative (ISA))
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, who alongside Lenin, had led the October revolution, and then been 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 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, when there is unmistakably a perspective of new revolutionary developments in the advanced capitalist countries, the underdeveloped lands of the ex-colonial world, and in the former 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, for example 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 in his Diary in exile, “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’.”
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 program 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, as Trotsky put it in Diary in exile “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.”
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.”
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 January 1928, Trotsky was forced into his third foreign exile. First he was deported to Alma-Ata, a small 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 “apparatus,” 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 apparatus. Even the cleverest bureaucrat displays an incredible short-sightedness, in certain questions!” 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.”
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, which was 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.”
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” 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. (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 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.“
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. 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, 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 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 May 24/25, 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.
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. Another 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, “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.”
