You mean to tell us he didn't die because he was boning a crappy Mexican artist?
by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] On August 20, 1940, at about half past five in the evening, a young man entered the gate of the house at 410 Rio Churubusco Avenue in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan. The visitor was dressed inappropriately for the weather, in a long raincoat. However, the guards had already gotten used to the fact that the frequent guest was having a strange time with the Mexican heat.
It was a good friend of the family living in the house, the Canadian left-wing journalist Frank Jackson.
As agreed, he came to discuss with the guest, Leon Trotsky, an article about American renegades who had betrayed true Marxism. Later, Trotsky's wife Natalya Sedova recalled: For some reason, Lev was afraid of this particular meeting with a family friend...
As on previous visits, Frank entered the house without being searched, took off his coat in the hallway, and hung it over his arm. Entering the study, he stood behind Lev Davidovich while he read the article written by Jackson. The guest leaned over and looked over his shoulder. Trotsky complained to his wife that such behavior made him nervous, but the "demon of the revolution" was polite and tolerated it.
The guest placed the folded raincoat on the desk so that the sharpened ice pick was not visible.
Around six o'clock in the evening, a "terrible scream" was heard from the office, as they later recalled. The guards who broke down the door, led by the leader of the German Trotskyists, Otto Schuessel, saw a terrible picture: blood on the floor and a mortally wounded "Comrade Leon", who was nevertheless still alive.
"Lev Davidovich appeared at the door, his face covered in blood. He said: 'This time they got their way,' " Sedova wrote in her memoirs.
The murder weapon, an ice pick, penetrated seven centimeters into the back of the head.
As the investigation later found out, Trotsky managed to turn around and grab an ice pick at the moment of the blow. The killer was confused. He was already afraid and struck with his eyes tightly closed. And when the victim turned around screaming, the attacker pulled out a knife he had in reserve, but was unable to finish him off...
As Schuessel and his assistant, Comrade Coronel, rained blows on Jackson, he screamed: "They made me do this... They have my mother in prison. They are going to kill her... Please kill me!"
The killer, however, was not Frank Jackson, and he had no intention of dying. He was an NKVD foreign officer with the nom de guerre "Raymond," aka Jean Mornar, aka Jaime Ramon Mercader del Rio. And his mother was not in prison.
According to the testimony of Pavel Sudoplatov, the curator of the "Duck" operation to eliminate Trotsky, agent "Mother", aka Caridad Mercader, was in a car parked near the house at 140 Rio Churubusco. In the seat next to her was her good friend, the immediate leader of the operation, Naum Eitingon. Caridad watched as the police took her son away.
Before losing consciousness in his hospital bed, Trotsky demanded to know who exactly sent "Jackson." At 7:25 a.m. local time, one of the leaders of October (according to Soviet propaganda until the mid-1920s) and the leader of "gangs of murderers and poisoners" (according to the 1930s-1950s) died.
Who exactly was behind Mercader's assassination attempt was obvious to the entire world. The question was posed differently: why did Joseph Stalin delay for so long the elimination of the man who had once been his main rival?
SECOND AFTER ILYICH, BUT NOT HIS OWN
The relations between the Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council and People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs Trotsky and Comrade Koba had never been close, but they clearly deteriorated during the Tsaritsyn conflict of 1918. Then Stalin, whom the Central Committee sent to the city besieged by the Whites (the future Stalingrad), "entered into a clinch" with Trotsky and his appointees. And Koba was not alone.
Trotsky relied on his authority in the Red Army, among the "specialists" and the party youth. But the second man in the party was never one of Lenin's old guard.
Yes, he showed himself brilliantly in St. Petersburg in 1905, but in the RSDLP he kept to himself, scolding Ilyich (who in response made, as they would say now, the word “Trotskyism” a meme).
He settled into the New York emigration with suspicious skill. A certain philanthropist, Arthur Concors, a trusted person of the financier Jacob Schiff, who was connected with the banking house Kuhn, Loeb and Co., found him an apartment in a prestigious, rather than “emigrant,” part of the Bronx. Out of nowhere, the poor social democratic publicist acquired a car with a driver…
In 1917, upon his return via Canada and Sweden, Trotsky became very active, but officially became a Bolshevik only in July. He was inclined to attribute the merits of overthrowing the Provisional Government to himself - not without reason, but almost overshadowing Ilyich himself.
Yes, he was able to win the Civil War by attracting officers from the former imperial army (even generals). But could such a Red Army with military experts be called a genuine workers' and peasants' army? It was this question that forced Klim Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny to take Stalin's side in Tsaritsyn.
The war awakened Bonapartist ambitions in Trotsky, which clearly frightened the other leaders.
Lev Davidovich's post-war proposals were often met with hostility. The militarization of industry, "labor armies," super-industrialization, the theory of permanent revolution that Lev Davidovich expounded from the Comintern rostrum - all this was the reason for the discussions that shook the party in the 1920s. Stalin had someone to "make friends with" against the ambitious Trotsky, who was unable to build profitable connections.
FIGHT WITH THE LION
Stalin launched a political attack on the seemingly all-powerful creator of the Red Army while Vladimir Lenin was still alive, in 1923. At that time, Koba’s allies were the future “enemies of the people” – the head of the Comintern Executive Committee and leader of the Petrograd communists Grigory Zinoviev and the head of the Moscow organization of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Lev Kamenev.
Trotsky had enough resources to participate in the squabble for power, which he did in 1922–1925. Given a certain scenario, this inventor of frontline decimations would have dealt with his enemies, becoming Ilyich’s sole successor.
But Joseph Vissarionovich, who as General Secretary of the Central Committee (a purely administrative position at the time) was responsible for the party’s personnel policy, built an administrative vertical – from district and provincial committees to the Moscow nomenklatura – for himself and as a battering ram against other leaders.
Lenin was dying when, at the 13th Party Conference on January 18, 1924, Trotskyism was called a petty-bourgeois deviation. People from Lev Davidovich's inner circle - Abram Ioffe, Nikolai Krestinsky and Christian Rakovsky - were removed from their posts and sent abroad as ambassadors.
After the death of Ilyich (whose funeral Trotsky for some reason was unable to attend), the trio of Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin waged a full-force struggle. In 1925, the People's Commissar for Military Affairs and the head of the Revolutionary Military Council were deprived of their posts. His closest associates, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko and the commander of the Moscow District, Nikolai Muralov, were removed from key army positions.
From a recognized leader, Trotsky moves into the ranks of the leader of the left opposition - while the party, thanks to the mass "Leninist" (and in fact Stalinist) recruitment of personnel, changes its character. In 1925-1926, General Secretary Stalin removes "from the board" former allies Zinoviev and Kamenev, who are forced into the opposition, to Trotsky.
Stalin crushed this party minority in tandem with Nikolai Bukharin.
The united opposition fought its “last battle” on the tenth anniversary of October, November 7, 1927. But the alternative demonstrations of “left deviationists” in Moscow and Leningrad were dispersed not even by police officers, but by party activists (among them, there may have been plainclothes officers).
The oppositionists were pelted with "ice floes, potatoes and firewood", and several shots were fired after the car with Trotsky, Kamenev and Muralov. A week later, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), then from the Society of Old Bolsheviks, and Lev Davidovich was sent into exile to Alma-Ata.
In January 1929, the Special Conference of the OGPU Board decided to expel the former hero of the revolution from the USSR. And here in his biography a motif appears that would perhaps come back to haunt him in 1940.
THE MYSTERY OF THE RED FILE
The prominent party leader managed to take a collection of documents and materials into exile and then abroad. This is a well-known fact - Trotsky's archive is now stored in the Harvard University library. But in recent decades, materials have emerged (one of which is posted on the FSB website) that indicate that the so-called "red card index" - or at least part of it - was among the materials taken away.
We are talking about a special archive of the KRO (counterintelligence department) of the Petrograd Military District, compiled during the years of the First World War. It allegedly contained data collected by military counterintelligence and the "okhrana" - the political police - on the leaders of the RSDLP, including the Bolsheviks: Lenin, Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev.
Judging by the context, it was not about the notorious "Kaiser's millions", but about personal incriminating evidence. Including, allegedly, in one of the papers it was said that Stalin, while in exile in the Turukhansk region, cohabited with an underage local woman, who gave birth to his child.
The Red Card Index was considered missing in 1917.
The searches undertaken in 1925 on the orders of the head of the OGPU, Genrikh Yagoda (including the interrogation of one of the former heads of the KRO, Nikolai Lebedev ) yielded nothing.
But in 1927, when Trotsky was fighting his last, desperate rearguard battles, articles that looked like leaks from a red card index began to appear in the Western press, including in the main organ of the German Social Democrats, Vorwärts. It is reported that after this, in 1927–1928, searches were conducted in Soviet archives and further interrogations of former tsarist counterintelligence officers from the KRO. But also without result.
In 1929, Stalin sent Trotsky abroad, leaving him not only with an extensive library, but also with a personal archive, which even contained the originals of many secret party documents, and not only that. Why did he release his enemy, and with compromising material at that?
As previously noted by the Regnum news agency, according to a number of Western researchers, the Kremlin at that time was conducting some secret consultations with the heads of some Western states, in particular with the United States and Germany. According to this version, Moscow was then forced to take on obligations: to save the life of Trotsky and members of his family, to leave some documents in his possession.
That is why, they say, the OGPU-NKVD had a special interest in the movements of Trotsky and his entourage (dictated not only by the need to keep the enemy in sight, but also by the need to steal some compromising documents). And the danger that Trotsky would make something public, according to this version, became one of the reasons for his liquidation in 1940.
There is no mystery as to why Stalin tolerated the presence of his political opponent alive and “out of reach” for so long.
THE GHOST OF GOLDSTEIN AND THE SHADOW OF CLEMENCEAU
Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and the lesser leaders Tomsky, Rykov, Pyatakov, Radek who were left in the Soviet Union were liquidated as a result of the Moscow Trials of 1936–1938. By the end of the 1930s, Trotskyists had been “cleaned out” from everywhere – both genuine ones (like Rakovsky and Muralov) and imaginary ones, convicted in cases of all sorts of “Trotskyist-Zinoviev centers.”
At the Moscow Trials, Trotsky was accused in absentia of conspiracy, espionage, connections with Adolf Hitler (as if he had forgotten his own anti-Semitism) and even the Japanese Emperor Hirohito.
But Lev Davidovich himself, with his name and fame in the international left movement, worked actively and in relative safety in Turkey, France, Norway and finally in Mexico, where in 1937 he received asylum thanks to the left-wing president Lazaro Cardenas and the famous artist and convinced Trotskyist Diego Rivera.
He tried to split the Comintern, created the Fourth International, wrote his own version of the history of October and "The Revolution Betrayed", criticized Stalin and "socialism in one country". Through the Bulletin of the Opposition, he maintained contact with groups of supporters in different countries - including, as it seemed to him, in the USSR.
He himself called his existence "life on a planet without a visa." And in one of his entries he even prophesied his own death: "Stalin... seeks to strike not at the ideas of his opponent, but at his skull."
But for now, the skull of the chief enemy of the Leader of the Peoples seemed to be out of reach.
Although Trotsky's closest circle was regularly thinning out. His daughter Zinaida committed suicide in Berlin, his son Sergei died in a Soviet prison, his first wife Alexandra Sokolovskaya died in a camp. His son and closest assistant Lev Sedov died in 1938 in a Paris clinic - according to one version, from poisoning.
The inner circle was filled with OGPU-NKVD agents. Trotsky's comrade Erwin Wolf was killed in Spain in 1937. Ignaz Reiss was liquidated in Switzerland that same year, Rudolf Klement was kidnapped and killed in Paris in 1938.
Behind each of these episodes were agents of the Foreign Department of the GPU under the NKVD, including Mark Zborovsky, who was later exposed in the United States.
But Trotsky himself remained alive.
The answer to this question can be found in a book published nine years after the assassination by former BBC employee and subject of interest for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department, Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pseudonym George Orwell.
The archives of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, declassified in the 1990s, contain correspondence between Orwell and the editor-in-chief of Foreign Literature, Sergei Dinamov, marked as follows: “On George Orwell’s membership in the Trotskyist organization and the termination of relations with him. July 2–28, 1937.”
The book 1984, which was inspired by the Moscow Trials, puts forward the idea that Big Brother needs an antagonist, a supervillain behind all the conspiracies. This villain is named Emmanuel Goldstein, a clear reference to Trotsky's real name: Leiba Bronstein.
The appearance of Big Brother's eternal enemy is also recognizable: "A dry Jewish face in a halo of light gray hair, a goatee - an intelligent face and at the same time inexplicably repulsive."
The "military-fascist conspiracy" could also be blamed on such a "Goldstein" - in connection with which a purge of the highest command staff of the Red Army, headed by the "Bonapartist" Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was carried out in 1937. Especially since the super-enemy itself gave the reason.
Back in 1927, while publicly arguing with Stalin, Trotsky suddenly for some reason recalled the French politician of the First World War, Georges Clemenceau. He said that when the Germans were 80 kilometers from Paris, Clemenceau still waged an opposition struggle, and he was right. Stalin “clung” to this comparison, noting:
"Trotsky is thinking of opening a civil war in the party at the moment when the enemy will be standing 80 kilometers from the Kremlin. It seems there is nowhere else to go..."
And later, already in the 1930s, this “Trotskyist thesis about Clemenceau” repeatedly surfaced at the trials of “sabotage centers.” But with the beginning of the Second World War, with the prospect of Germany attacking the USSR (which happened on June 22, 1941), “a civil war when the enemy is 80 km from the Kremlin” no longer looked like pure fiction.
ONE MANIFESTO AND TWO HUNDRED BULLETS
In May 1940, the Trotskyist Fourth International issued a manifesto at an emergency congress, “Imperialist War and World Proletarian Revolution.” It stated:
"The Fourth International will be able to defend the USSR only by methods of revolutionary class struggle... The defense of the USSR comes from the principles of preparation for the world proletarian revolution."
At the same time, in the conditions of the world war that had already begun, the Trotskyists wrote that "preparation for the revolutionary overthrow of the Moscow ruling caste" is one of the main tasks of the Fourth International.
This is what all true “Marxist-Leninists” were called to do.
At the same time, in May 1940, Soviet intelligence made its first attempt to liquidate the energetic oppositionist. In Sudoplatov's memoirs there is a notable episode related to the beginning of World War II:
"I asked [Lavrenty Beria] to explain the operation connected with Trotsky. To which I received the answer: this matter is of exceptional importance. Trotsky, Beria added, must be destroyed before the start of the big war, in order to decapitate the remnants of the fifth column. Deal with this matter every day, Beria said, but it is possible and necessary to liquidate him, taking into account that he is simultaneously used and hated both in America and in Europe."
The operations were meant to look like manifestations of hatred. On the night of May 24, 1940, a group of 20 people led by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, entered Trotsky's house in Coyoacan.
Robert Sheldon Hart, who served as a security guard, provided them with access.
The attackers were in police uniform and armed with machine guns, rifles and bombs and were supposed to destroy not only the man but also his archive. Trotsky survived and, as usual, recorded the fact of the assassination attempt for his autobiography:
"My wife helped me down to the floor and shielded me while I convinced her to lie down next to me. The shooting was coming from all sides. I felt like about two hundred bullets were fired, half of which hit very close."
Miraculously, no one in the family died. Their 14-year-old grandson Seva, the future famous Mexican chemist Esteban Volkov-Bronstein, was slightly wounded when a bullet pierced the mattress of his bed.
A month after the attack, Hart's body was found, with two bullets in the back of his head, covered in lime. Later declassified documents confirmed that he was an agent of the Soviet secret services.
After this failure, Beria instructs Sudoplatov and Eitengon to step up their work. Then, through the American Trotskyist Sylvia Ageloff, Lev Davidovich is introduced to the agent "Jackson" Mercader, trained in Moscow.
Who eventually received 20 years in prison in Mexico. His mother and the operation's curator left the country and were awarded in Moscow. Ramon himself, after his release, settled in Eastern Europe, receiving the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
And the Fourth International – the party of world revolution and world civil war – after the death of its founder, disintegrated into warring “tendencies” and factions, never becoming a real and global political force.
Trotsky's brainchild suffered what Ilyich and Trotsky himself had tried to protect the Bolshevik Party from. Stalin's "socialism in one country" was no longer threatened by a blow from the left. And compromising information about the leader no longer appeared in the Western press.