Trotsky's Murderer Dies in Havana

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Last week in Havana died of cancer of the bone.

Thirty years ago in Coyoacan, Mexico, Mercader was the man who smashed an ice-pick into Leon Trotsky's skull as the murderous climax to Stalin's campaign to physically liquidate all who stood for the defence of the October Revolution against its bureaucratic degeneration.

Both within Russia as the leader of the Left Opposition and outside Russia in the years of exile after 1929, Trotsky had kept up an uninterrupted exposure and principled attack on every aspect of the growth of He had fought relentlessly for the revolutionary heritage of Marx and Lenin, uncompromisingly flying the banner of proletarian internationalism against the combined forces of Stalinism, fascism and imperialism.

From August 1936 through to 1938 Trotsky was tried in his absence in the carefully stage-managed Moscow Trials.

and murdered Untold numbers of Old Bolsheviks and all shades of oppositionists were framed and murdered.

Trotsky was sentenced to death in his absence and the GPU were ordered to carry out the execution.

Before this took place, eight of Trotsky's personal secretaries were murdered, his son Leon Sedov was poisoned in a Paris clinic and several key figures amongst his supporters and friends were gunned down or simply disappeared.

Only three months before Mercader finally carried out the brutal assassination, Trotsky had survived the GPU's most determined attempt to kill him when 25 Stalinist gunmen raided the house in Coyoacan at 4 a.m. on the morning of Over 200 bullets were pumped into the house by a gang of GPU agents and accomplices from the Mexican Communist Party.

Trotsky's bodyguard, Sheldon Harte, who had been on guard at the gate disappeared with the attackers and was found months later buried in a time pit with bullet holes in the head.

Grimly exultant

Trotsky himself defended Harte's reputation but the true facts of this incident remain shrouded in mystery.

Trotsky himself was grimly exultant over the GPU's failure and he immediately produced the damning pamphlet "Stalin Seeks My Death", in which he mercilessly exposed the role of the GPU and the Mexican CP.

After initially seeing the raid a "put-up job" the Mexicar police later factually corroborated Trotsky's testament.

He concluded the document with a recognition that his death was in the interests of both imperialism and Stalinism:

"In a reactionary epoch such as ours, a revolutionist is compelled to swim against the stream. I am doing this to the best of my ability.

"The pressure of world reaction has expressed itself perhaps most implacably personal fate and the fate of those close to me"

Even as he wrote this, and the exhaustive study The Comintern and the GPU, the eventual assassin was finalising his plans to silence Trotsky for ever.

Ramon Mercader had first appeared on the scene in July 1939, arriving as the friend and lover of Sylvia Ageloff, an American Trotskyist who had attended the founding conference of the Fourth International.

Mercader posed as an agent of an oil company with business in Mexico City.

He acted out the role of a non-political fringe character for a while, showing no great interest in visiting Trotsky's fortified house but happy to do small favours for Trotsky's friends.

He assumed the name Jacques Mornard and claimed to be Belgian.

In fact he was the son of Caridad Mercader, a Spanish Stalinist known for her connections with the GPU during the Civil War.

To complicate matters further he arrived in Mexico with a Canadian passport in the name of Frank Jacson, saying that this was simply a ploy to avoid military service in Belgium.

Cementing He remained in Mexico after Ageloff returned to New York and began a gradual process of cementing finks with the Trotsky household by helping out Trotsky's close friends the Rosmers when Alfred Rosmer fell ill.

At this stage it is quite possible that he was merely acting under orders to help plan the armed assault on the night of May 24, 1940.

When that attack failed, Jacson-Mornard-Mercader became the lynch-pin in the GPU's strategy for murder.

Four days after the raid he arranged his first, very "innocent", meeting with Trotsky when he came to Coyoacan to drive the Rosmers to Vera Cruz to board ship for Europe.

He gave a glider to Seva, Trotsky's grandson, who was still limping from a bullet wound in the toe inflicted by one of Mercader's own Stalinist accomplices.

For the next four months Mercader travelled back and forth between Mexico and New York, both with and without Sylvia Ageloff.

The carefully kept records of the house in Coyoacan show that he visited ten times, and of these only saw Trotsky on two or three occasions.

Ageloff had sided with Burnham and Schachtman on the question of the nature of the Soviet state in the split with the American SWP, the largest section of the Fourth International, but she was still welcome at Trotsky's table.

On one occasion Mercader let it be known that he opposed Ageloff and the state capitalists, and on the 17 August appeared at the house with an article he claimed to have written attacking Schachtman's positions:

In her "Life and Death of Leon Trotsky" his wife, Natalia, records that Trotsky had begun to be suspicious of "Jacson" and his suspicions were compounded by the confused and amateurish nature of the article.

When Mercader reappeared on 20 August having rewritten and typed the article Trotsky grudgingly agreed to check it over.

As Trotsky read over the article in his study, Mercader drew out an ice-pick and "closing my eyes, brought it down on his head with all my strength"

In a spasm of violent reaction Trotsky, his skuil smashed, and covered in blood, leapt to his feet and fought his assassin desperately.

He hurled anything he could get his hands on and then threw himself at Mercader, biting and punching.

The GPU agent was so shocked that he could not even strike another blow or use the revolver and dagger he had brought with him.

The guards rushed in and clubbed Mercader to the ground as Trotsky was helped away by Natalia. He died 22 hours later in hospital with splinters of bone embedded in his brain.

Mercader was obviously picked by the GPU for his task. Throughout the trial and throughout his 20 year imprisonment in Mexico he stuck to his flimsy cover story, though it was conclusively blown apart even by the bourgeois authorities and media.

He stated at one point that he would never talk "even if you cut my skin off inch by inch"

On his release Mercader was smuggled into Cuba by the Stalinists and from there travelled to Prague.

Eventually he moved to Moscow. As cancer of the bone set in he returned to Havana, where he died last week at the age of 64.

All that has been pieced together of the wretched existence of this pathetic tool of Stalinism reveals a blood-stained career of penetration into the Trotskyist movement by GPU agents.

There are direct links through Caridad Mercader to Stalinist thugs implicated in every murder of Trotsky's secretaries and associates.

Fresh air

The mother was given the Order of Lenin by Stalin, her son was given the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Earlier in 1940 Trotsky had written his Testament and it comes as a gulp of fresh air to return to this document after dwelling on the vile perversions of Stalinist degeneration. WEIN

Here Trotsky declares:

"1 have been a revolutionary for 43 years of my conscious life; and for 42 | have fought under the banner of Marxism • I shall die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and consequently an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth."

In the Testament he also asserts that a new "revolutionary generation will rehabilitate the political honour" of himself and the other victims of Stalin's assassination squads.

The Workers Socialist League stands firmly London NW5 1AR.

Trotsky Mercader principle of the need for a reconstructed Fourth International based on the Transitional The ice-pick that ended Trotsky's life is a symbol of the counter-revolutionary force represented by Stalinism in all its forms.

The central task of a reconstructed Fourth International must be to dévelop a full theoretical analysis of Stalinism as it has developed in the postwar period as a guide to the revolutionary action needed to destroy it once and for all and construct in every country of the world revolutionary parties to lead the working class forward to socialism and communism.

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SOCIALIST PRESS, Heinesial i Vorember 1978 Page y

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