Mexico FOR THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, Hungarian television ran a film about the event, with a commentary by experts, including Miklós Kun, one of the country's leading authorities on Soviet history (among other things, he is the author of a biography of Bukharin).
Before the broadcast,
Népszabadság, formerly the Communist Party organ and still the most important daily, published an article, reprinted below, by Miklós
Kun about the assassination. In his television commentary, Kun distanced himself from Trotskyism. However, the article presents a sympathetic view of Trotsky's fight against Stalin's dictatorship. It is a reflection of the growing interest in Trotsky in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and a symptom of a sharpening debate about the history of the October revolution. DOCUMENT
N AUGUST 17, 1940, Leon Trotsky was busy writing an extensive study. He wanted to point up the foreign operations of Stalin's notorious political police, the GPU (renamed the NKVD). The time had already passed when he was held back by the thought that publishing such writings harmed a Soviet Union that was building socialism.
Having seen the "purge" that wiped out almost the entire old party leadership — including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Krestinsky, Shliapnikov — he was finally convinced that in his former homeland it was not a new society that 25 was being built but a degenerate, violent
"Most of all, I have worked in the archives of the secret services, and i have discovered many things there, I have found personal documents by Stalin concerning Trotsky, Including those linked to the decision about his fate, about the pursuit of Trotsky. All this will be published for the first time....J have about 40,000 copies of documents, but i think that the most Interesting thing Is the discovery of the man who directed the opera-
"He is still alive. He is 85 years old. When I first met him, he did not want to tell me anything, because he is a
Beria [chief of Stalin's secret policel, Khrushchev ordered the arrest of those responsible for political assas. man of the system, who keeps his secrets well. But finally, I convinced him...After the arrest of Lavrenty sinations abroad, and this person spent 15 years in prison. He is an interesting figure, who knows a lot of
"The only person much talked about in the West is Eitingon, who was part of his group." (Eitingon, a GPU general, was the lover of Carldad Mercader, the assassin's mother, who also worked for the GPU In Spain.)
"But he was the brains....His name will be revealed in my book. As for the operation, I can tell you that it pro.
vided for many eventualities, and Involved a great number of people, both in Mexico and the United States."
quite falsely, of having "decided on the extermination of the Kulaks in 1921-28". But this position is cush- Volkogonov's line on Trotsky has been that he was a sort of estranged brother of Stalin, accusing Trotsky, ioned in the interview: "Trotsky's great merit is that from the beginning to the end, he was the only one to come out against Stalin. In the most difficult and dramatic moments, in the 1920s, he had the historic courage to oppose Stalin. That Is sufficient reason for Trotsky to go down forever in history.
The revolutionist's great error, Volkogonov said, was that "Trotsky was a hostage, a prison of a false big idea, the idea of world revolution. Even a week before his death, he wrote that he believed in the world revolution. It was a false Idea, but a big one. That is why he also is a great man, a moving personality."
Volkogonov also said, "to tell the truth, I found it much more interesting to write about Trotsky than about
It seems that increasingly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, even the official historians of the regime have to recognize that Trotsky Is a compelling figure for study and reflection. However those wishing to learn Trotsky's real views should turn to Trotsky's own writings and the biographles by Isaac Deutscher and
International Viewpoint #191 • October 1, 1990
TROTSKY bureaucratic elite that would stop at nothing to maintain itself in power.
Nothing held him back after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been signed, displaying to the world Stalin's complicity with Hitler.
One of Stalin's "tricks" was to present himself to influential world left public opinion as the repository of Lenin's idealism. Therefore, Trotsky resolved to destroy the myth. That led him to write the stunning article published in the American press under the title "Super Borgia in the Kremlin."
It was entirely certain, he wrote, that Stalin, who had done away with so many people, had been involved in some way in Lenin's death.
Trotsky preparing offensive against Stalin
Trotsky intended the Borgia article to be the introduction to a big public offensive against Stalin. Many documents relating to the discussions in the Soviet Politbureau in the 1920s had already accumulated on the exiled political leader's desk, as well as many other sources that could reveal dirty doings behind the scenes. There was another thing that may have worried Stalin.
Massive study of Stalin taking shape
At the time, Trotsky was sending more and more chapters to the translators of his. biography of Stalin, which was planned to amount to at least 800 pages. Trotsky intended the book to be ready in January 1941. Besides history and political analysis, it would also use psychological methodology.
For the first time, it would answer the question of how Stalin seized power, and how he wiped out all his opponents, as well as all his allies.
Trotsky was preparing to reveal to the world in an independent study who stood behind the criminals. This work, however, was still just a draft on his table. To prevent him from finishing his biography of Stalin, in an event unprecedented in history, the hero of the biography in progress killed the author.
The writing of the biography had been interrupted by a savage interlude. On May 24, 1940, an armed commando group broke into Trotsky's home. The murderers sprayed the building with bullets, and threw hand grenades into what they thought was the political leader's bedroom.
They took away with them one of the Americans guarding the villa, and later killed him. They left thinking that they had killed Trotsky.
In the half century since the murder, it has become clear that the idea of assassinating Trotsky had been in Stalin's mind for a long time. In the last months of Lenin's life, when a bitter struggle started for succession to the Soviet Olympus, Stalin made a cautious suggestion to his allies of the time, Zinovie and Kamenev: What if we were freed from Trotsky?
Stalin then went back on the secret thought that he had expressed. If we did that, he said, Trotsky's followers would revive the traditions of Narodnik terror and respond with the weapon of assassination.
Zinoviev and Kamenev told Trotsky
New facts and old distortions THE TASK of working out a new, more credible line on Trotsky for the Soviet bureaucracy has apparently tallen to General Dmitri Volkogonov, who, after publishing articles on the revolutionary leader, is about to publish a biography of him. (See International Viewpoint, No. 147, September 19, 1988) In an Interview in the July 26 issue of the Italian daily La Stampa, Volkogonov said that his book would include new revelations 26 about the assassination.
tion to murder Trotsky…...
things. He had the rank of general.
Stalin."
Pierre Broue. *
October 1, 1990 • #191 International Viewpoint some embarrassment — in the winter of 1926, when they decided to form a "united opposition" with him against Stalin. They accorded a surprising amount of credibility to the story. The brutal and barbarous Stalin - they knew him well - was capable of anything. "If Il'ich were alive, Stalin would put him in prison," Lenin's widow said bitterly in 1926.
In contrast, others, Bukharin for example, were impressed by Stalin's "Asiatic barbarism," which he affected most readily among intellectuals. "A man of action," the Bolshevik leaders said at the time about the party general secretary, until the
Trotsky had a presentiment early on that the circle was closing around him. From the end of 1926, he hardly ever left his home without being accompanied by a of armed followers - mainly
On his forty-ninth birthday, November 7, 1927, when he drove through Moscow together with Kamenev to greet a demonstration against the Stalin-Bukharin unknown assassins fired on him. Several well known political figures were eye-witnesses, among cavalry commander. This officer, who had formerly served under Trotsky, nonetheless tried to pretend that he had seen nothing.
The affair reached the Politbureau, which was obliged to answer the accusation by the Opposition. The question was put as to why the regime had dealt with the demonstration through armed hooligans, and this on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Why did they rough up Trotsky's wife and the economist Preobrademonstrating workers?
The party leadership responded to the charges in their own way. The victims were expelled from the party, and some of them were thrown into prison.
Trotsky's murder planned since 1926
From a still unpublished letter that Trotsky wrote in 1938, we know that the wife of a colleague, who at the time was close to Stalin's circle, had warned him already in 1926 that the party general secretary was preparing to rub him out.
Paradoxically, it was not Trotsky who was afraid of assassination but rather Stalin, who was becoming the all-powerful master of the Soviet Union. In these months, discontent came to a peak.
Party oppositionists demanding a (more) democratic course landed in prison, where they received more brutal, more ruthless treatment than had been meted out to the many among them who had been sentenced to prison terms under the Czar. That aroused an outcry among relatively broad and still influential circles. A well-known Trotskyist, the cavalry officer Dmitri Schmid, threatened Stalin with a sword at the Kremlin gate.
On another occasion, an officer named Okhotnikov, also a member of Trotsky's inner circle, in the sight of a soldier, hit Stalin on the head and sent this personality, who carefully tried to conceal his cowardice, into flight.
### Diagnosis of paranoia confirmed
The two clashes produced a serious breakdown in the party general secretary. He called in a prominent psychiatrist, Bekhterev, and underwent an examination. Without a more detailed examination, the specialist told the truth of the matter. The patient showed signs of para-
Stalin's reaction was a further confirmation of the diagnosis. He had the doctor killed. And now he could give free reign to his persecution mania. From then on, Stalin, thinking that his own life was in serious danger, kept careful track of Trotsky and his entourage, thinking constantly of assassinating him.
However, since for the time being he judged this plan unrealizable, he wanted at least to free himself from the physical presence of his opponent. believed that while his great rival was nearby, either in prison or internal exile, his followers would not fall into line, or in the rather exaggerated language of the time, "lay down their arms".
That was the background to the fact that in January 1928, when Trotsky was
TROTSKY already in exile in Alma Ata, the GPU's local representatives delivered the conclusion of the prosecutor's office investigation.
According to a document that has now come to light, the political leader was obliged to leave his country for an undetermined time because of his "counterrevolutionary activity." The document, bearing an enormous red stamp, was greeted by Trotsky with the exclamation, "What scoundrels!". Trotsky was exiled to Turkey.
Trotsky exposed to new dangers
Despite promises, Trotsky was sent into exile from the territory of the Soviet consulate. In this way, they exposed him to new assassination attempts. It was no secret that many representatives of the old Russia sought his life. Several extreme rightist White emigrants had sworn to do away with him. It would have suited Stalin well if some one else did the dirty work. However, on Prinkipo island in the Sea of Marmara and in Trotsky's other places of exile, in France and Norway, successive Czech, German, Austria, Belgian and American armed bodyguards watched over "the Old Man" day and night. This sort of of hiding was no better than house arrest, and it ruined Trotsky's active life. He had to limit meetings that were all the more important in exile, and if he left his home, every minute of the journey was planned in minute detail.
Before the bigger trips, they sometimes disguised themselves.
There was every reason for taking care. The morning mail almost without exception brought terrible news. More and more relatives, acquaintances, young and older students were falling victim to Stalin's revenge.
GPU operatives set fire to the first floor of the villa in Prinkipo, destroying part of Trotsky's archives. Another time, they stole the Trotskyist movement's rich collection of periodicals in Paris.
However, even in such difficult conditions, Trotsky mounted a serious challenge to the power of the Soviet party bureaucracy and its security apparatus.
In his best known works, he brought all his international prestige to bear in a war against "The Stalin school of falsification." He did this in his memoirs, entitled My Life, in The History of the Russian Revolution, which recalled the events of 1917, and in the extensive articles and studies that he produced almost daily and which were published in several world languages.
Trotsky hastened his end by maintaining regular contact with "discontented" 27 Soviet political figures. Up until 1933, the
Trotsky commemorated in Mexico
ON AUGUST 20, 1990, in Mexico City, the municipal government inaugurated a museum devoted to Leon Trotsky in an annex to the
TROTSKY uniforms broke into the fortress housing Trotsky and his entourage.
For a long time, it seemed that the only well-known personality in the Americas involved in the murderous action was the muralist Siquieros.
house where he lived and was buried. It includes his library, his works, a collection of periodicals published by the organizations that claim to be Trotskyist, cinematographic documents and the only copy of Trotsky's archives in the Harvard University Library
A public meeting was held in connection with the opening of the museum, presided over by the mayor of the city, with many guests, including Ernest Mandel (who represented the Fourth
International), Esteban Volkov (Trotsky's grandson), Manuel Aguilar Mora (of the PRT [Revolutionary Workers' Party], Mexican section of the Fourth International), Marguerite Bonnet (executor of
Natalya Trotsky's will) and the Soviet historian Podslekoldin.
The presence should be noted of the Soviet ambassador in Mexico, Oleg Darusenskov, who gave the museum a copy of an anthology of Trotsky's works that has just been published in the USSR in a press run of 150,000 copies. It includes notably, Results and
Prospects, New Course and Lessons of October, His participation in this event, as well as many articles that appeared on this occasion in the Soviet press, clearly mark the beginning of a de facto rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky.
The PRT organized five days of discussions, in which between
400 and 500 persons participated, and a national rally attended by a thousand people. *
Bulletin of the Opposition published in
Paris and later in Berlin was relatively widely read in the Soviet Union, and it constantly attacked Stalin and his regime.
Trotsky by no means wanted to be only a
"living conscience" for the political forces that were gradually turning against his victorious rival. He tried to offer a ready made alternative. Such a scheme — which had precious little political realism about it
- was taken seriously by many people in the West.
Trotsky, thought, in considering the
Soviet political perspectives, that it was either Stalin or Trotsky. Stalin also got himself all worked up over this conjecture.
And every day, he said, "Too bad for the one who loses."
Stalin's secret police murder oppositionists
Through former White officers, the
GPU did away with Ignacy Poremski
(Reiss), a former Comintern functionary who went over to Trotsky; as well as, Klement, a Trotskyist Fourth International leader who had earlier been Trotsky's personal
They murdered secretary.
Lev
Sedov, Trotsky's oldest son and most important political collaborator.
In the Soviet Union, they imprisoned almost all members of Trotsky's family.
Trotsky's youngest son, Sergei; his older brother, Aleksandr Bronstein;
and his
28 bourght store i
Olga Kemeneva, were brought before firing squads.
International Viewpoint #191 • October 1, 1990
But Trotsky was still alive! He was badly shaken by the destruction of those close to him. But he did not break. He still had the strength to launch an international counter trial to the Moscow Trials, putting Stalin's "administration of justice" in the dock in its turn.
He began this work in Norway in difficult circumstances. At the time, activists of the local fascist movement (probably on the initiative of GPU officials) wrecked the home in which he was a guest, and, not finding him at home, they announced that they would soon finish him off.
Trotsky and his entourage then decided to ask for asylum in Mexico. They thought that in this faraway coun try, where the president and many influential political leaders respected Trotsky, Stalin's diplomats and secret service officers would not be able to move around as freely as in the Old World.
Initially, that proved to be true. Trotsky was able do his work without distractions in the home of the world famous painter Diego Rivera. However, after he fell in love with his host's beautiful wife, he moved into a regular fortress. The house was surrounded by high stone walls topped with barbed wire. The outside was watched by Mexican police, the inside by mainly American bodyguards.
The American guards, however, were not sufficiently far seeing. On May 24, 1940, a commando group made up of Mexican Communists wearing police
The organizers of the May assassination attempt proved to be dilettantes. The person responsible for the action, GPU colonel Eitingon (who was later jailed as a collaborator of Beria, and since has published scholarly articles in Moscow under an assumed name, and is even getting an academic degree), could see that it would be hard for a group to break into Trotsky's villa again.
The guard towers were reinforced with machine guns, and police patrols were stepped up in the vicinity.
The solitary assassin from
Catalonia
It was probably at that time that the idea was put forward of having a supposed follower of Trotsky, a "solitary assassin," do away with him. They found their man in the Catalan Ramón Mercader, whom the world came to know first as Frank Jacson and Jacques Mornard. wormed his way into the affections of one of Trotsky's female collaborators. His amatory success (not immediately, to be sure) opened his way into the carefully guarded villa.
An accommodating, well young man, he swept almost everyone off their feet, with the exception of Trotsky.
The exiled political leader's grandson, Esteban Volkov, told me not long ago how Mercader took in the guards, how he did little favors for the family, how many times he took him, a bored little boy, out for car rides, how he won the confidence of Trotsky's wife, Natalya Sedova
Finally, he made a breakthrough with Trotsky himself, who, with all his burden of work, regretted the time spent in the society of uninteresting people. He began to receive Mercader. The rest is well
After he was certain that guards would not search him, on August 20, 1940, Mercader, in his raincoat, slipped a dagger and an icepick into Trotsky's study. With the latter, he dealt a powerful blow to his victim from the back, while the unsuspecting Trotsky was reading a manuscript by Mercader. The mortally wounded man lived another day, and remained conscious almost to the end. Loudly, so that his entourage would understand him clearly, he hailed his movement, the Fourth International. To his wife, however, he spoke softly, as at the time of their first meetings
Then, on August 21, his heart stopped beating. When he read the secret dispatch from Mexico, Josef Stalin could breathe freely. He had waited for this moment for more than 15 years. *