On this date in 1940 an agent of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin struck Trotsky in the head with an ice axe, resulting in his death the following day in a hospital in Mexico City. This post will focus on Trotsky's murder but for the benefit of readers who aren't too familiar with Russian history I will give a very brief overview of Trotsky's career.
Soon after the October Revolution when the Bolsheviks took power Trotsky had become after Lenin, the most important Bolshevik figure.
He was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein to parents who were nonobservant Jews living in the Kherson region. As a boy his father sent him to school in nearby Odessa. He became involved in revolutionary activities while living in the Ukrainian town of Nikolaev.
He became a Marxist and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party near the end of the 19th century. His principal activity was writing. He was a writer and editor of several revolutionary papers. Not long after the Bolsheviks took power in the October Revolution of 1917 Trotsky came to have a great deal of prestige in Party circles. Lenin, the Supreme leader of the Bolsheviks, relied upon Trotsky for several important tasks. Trotsky, as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, was Russia's chief negotiator with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk. Germany had knocked Russia out of the first world war and Lenin decided to make peace with Germany.
But Trotsky's major contribution was as War Commissar during the Russian Civil War. Russia's Bolsheviks (Reds) were at war with Anti-Bolshevik forces (Whites), from 1918-1920. It was a bloody civil war and the Reds were in crisis.* Trotsky organized the Red Army and made it an effective fighting force. He led the Army to victory over the Whites.
After Lenin died in 1924 there was a struggle for power among Bolshevik officials. This struggle was long and complex but eventually Trotsky was pushed out by Joseph Stalin, the Party's General Secretary. Trotsky was stripped of his position on the Party's ruling Politburo in 1926. He was then sent to Kazakhstan, then eventually exiled from the USSR. He had no power anymore, although his writing was read widely by Marxists around the world.
Meanwhile Stalin made Trotsky into a useful boogieman, accusing anyone he wanted to kill of being part of a vast Trotskyite conspiracy. Stalin was not content with merely exiling Trotsky, ordered him to be murdered.
Eventually Trotsky moved to Mexico City, where he stayed at the home of the painter Diego Rivera. Some of you may have seen the film "Frida" about Rivera's wife Frida Kahlo. She was played in the film by the beautiful Salma Hayek.
The NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) official Pavel Sudoplatov was assigned to organize Trotsky's murder. He organized several different networks to carry out the murder. In May of 1940 men from one of these networks staged a raid on Trotsky's house. They failed to kill Trotsky.
But on August 20, 1940 another NKVD man struck the blow that would kill Trotsky. A Spanish communist named Ramon Mercader had maneuvered his way into Trotsky's household as an occasional guest. He smuggled in a mountaineering ice axe and, in his words from his trial:
I laid my raincoat on the table in such a way as to be able to remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head.
The blow did not initially kill Trotsky and there was a struggle. Trotsky's bodyguards burst into the room and stopped Mercader. He was convicted and served about twenty years in prison. Stalin had given him a decoration and when he got out of prison he was awarded with the decoration - Hero of the Soviet Union.
*Someone asked the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky why the civil war had been so bloody and he reportedly answered - because there were Russians on both sides.
