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How Did Leon Trotsky Die? Inside The Brutal Assassination Of The Russian Revolutionary
Public DomainLeon Trotsky succumbed to his wounds a day after being attacked with an ice pick in August 1940.
The death of Leon Trotsky in the summer of 1940 wasn’t necessarily a surprise to the Russian revolutionary. He knew that Joseph Stalin wanted him dead. He just didn’t know who was going to do the killing.
He found out on August 20, 1940. That afternoon, Trotsky was sitting in his study in Coyoacán, a leafy suburb of Mexico City. It was quite a different setting than he was used to.
The man who had once commanded the Red Army, who had stood beside Lenin during the most tumultuous days of the Russian Revolution, was now living behind fortified walls topped with watchtowers far from the country he had helped liberate. His guards were armed. His windows were bricked up.
There had already been an attempt on his life just three months earlier, when a squad of gunmen riddled his bedroom with bullets while he and his wife took cover beneath their bed. But on this particular day, Trotsky had allowed a trusted acquaintance into his inner sanctum: a young man he knew as Frank Jacson.
In reality, however, Jacson was a Soviet agent named Ramón Mercader — and his goal was to kill Trotsky by any means necessary. As Trotsky bent over an article Jacson had brought him to review, the spy reached into his coat and pulled out an ice pick. With a sudden, vicious swing, he brought the tool down on Trotsky’s skull.
And with that, Leon Trotsky’s death was ascertained.
The Origins Of A Russian Revolutionary
Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on Nov. 7, 1879, in what’s now southern Ukraine. He was the son of illiterate Jewish farmers, but he was brilliant and bookish from an early age. As a teenager, Trotsky was drawn to politics and swept up in the underground opposition to the czarist autocracy that percolated through Russia’s schools and cities. By 17, he had abandoned his studies to become a full-time revolutionary, organizing workers and printing illegal pamphlets.
Public DomainLeon Trotsky in 1902, around the time of his first exile in Siberia.
This didn’t go unnoticed. At 19, Trotsky experienced his first taste of Siberian exile, but prison only hardened his resolve and sharpened his theoretical understanding of Marxism. It was during his escape from Siberia in 1902 that he adopted the name “Trotsky” — purportedly borrowed from one of his former jailers — and made his way to London, where he met Vladimir Lenin and other exiled revolutionaries who were plotting the overthrow of the czar. This marked the beginning of a lengthy series of events that would ultimately lead to Leon Trotsky’s death 41 years later.
Though Trotsky didn’t initially side with the Bolsheviks in the split within Russian socialism, his skills as an orator and organizer were obvious, and they were ultimately useful to Lenin.
The failed Revolution of 1905 only further solidified Trotsky’s prominence. He had emerged as a leading figure of the Saint Petersburg Soviet, the workers’ council that challenged the czar’s authority. He also worked as the editor for the council’s newspaper, penning most of its proclamations and motions.
Public DomainLeon Trotsky’s mugshot after his 1905 arrest.
This work led to his arrest once again, but during his trial, he delivered a defiant speech that made him famous across Russia:
“When the soldiers, sent out into the streets to repress the masses, find themselves face to face with the masses and discover that this crowd, the people, will not leave the streets until it has got what it wants; that it is prepared to pile corpses upon corpses; when they see and are convinced that the people have come out to fight in earnest, to the end — then the soldiers’ hearts will falter, as they have always done in all revolutions, for they will be forced to doubt the stability of the order which they serve, they will be forced to believe in the triumph of the people.”
Once more, Trotsky was exiled, but there was no doubt among the people that he was one of the greatest leaders of the revolution.
The Architect Of The Russian Revolution
On the way to Siberia for his second exile in 1907, Trotsky managed to escape and fled abroad. During this time, he primarily worked as a journalist reporting on the Balkan Wars, but he also penned some theoretical works and remained in touch with international socialist circles, even as he continued to disagree with the Bolsheviks’ strategy.
When World War I broke out, Trotsky was in Vienna, but he soon left for Switzerland so he wouldn’t be imprisoned for his Russian citizenship. By November 1914, he’d moved to France, where he continued his anti-war journalism. Unfortunately for Trotsky, the French government would eventually expel him in 1916 for his revolutionary activities.
Public DomainLeon Trotsky imprisoned in St. Petersburg in 1906.
Trotsky then tried to settle in Spain, but he was kicked out of the country almost immediately, prompting yet another move in January 1917 to New York City. He did not remain long, though, as the February Revolution sent him rushing back to Russia.
Upon his return from New York, Trotsky made the somewhat shocking decision to align himself with Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Despite his disagreements with Lenin, Trotsky saw in him a decisive leader. If things had gone differently, this choice could have seen Trotsky become the next head of the Soviet Union. Instead, it led to Leon Trotsky’s death.
“Lenin saw, of course, as clearly as his opponents that the democratic revolution was not finished, that, on the contrary without really beginning it had already begun to drop into the past,” Trotsky wrote in The History of the Russian Revolution.
“But from this very fact it resulted that only the rulers of a new class could carry it through to the end,” Trotsky continued, “and that this could be achieved no otherwise but by drawing the masses out from under the influence of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries — that is to say, from the indirect influence of the liberal bourgeoisie.”
Public DomainFrom left to right: Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Lev Kamenev. 1916.
It was Trotsky, though, who chaired the Petrograd Soviet — a powerful council that functioned as a “second government” in opposition to the Provisional Government — and masterminded the October Revolution that would ultimately see the Bolsheviks capture the Winter Palace and seize power. Then, as the Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later the Commissar of War, Trotsky proved himself an administrative genius and military organizer without equal.
When counter-revolutionary White forces rose up against the Bolsheviks, Trotsky was forced to create a Red Army essentially from scratch. To rally troops, he traveled across the country in an armored train, turning what had been nothing more than a ragged collection of workers and peasants into a disciplined fighting force. His leadership was instrumental to the Bolshevik victory.
By 1920, Trotsky was the second most powerful man in Soviet Russia — and to many, the obvious successor to Lenin.
But Trotsky’s strengths were also his greatest weaknesses. He was intellectually arrogant, struggled to form political alliances, and — most dangerously of all — he was prone to making enemies. He was a theorist and orator who was not necessarily prepared to face the brutal internal politics of the Communist Party. He was not his rival. He was not Joseph Stalin.
How Joseph Stalin’s Rise Led To Leon Trotsky’s Death
Lenin had achieved a great goal in overthrowing the czar’s regime and installing his Bolshevik socialist leadership, but his victory was short-lived. In the early 1920s, Lenin suffered a series of strokes, which pushed the question of his succession to the forefront — and tore his party apart.
Public DomainLeon Trotsky speaking from his armored train in the early 1920s.
While many viewed Trotsky as a logical choice to take Lenin’s place after the leader’s death in January 1924, he was not able to leverage politics in the same manner as Joseph Stalin. Stalin, as General Secretary of the Communist Party, had quietly built a power base through his control of party appointments. Trotsky may have been brilliant and charismatic, but Stalin was cunning and patient.
Stalin had begun painting Trotsky as an arrogant latecomer to the movement, a divisive figure whose theories threatened the revolution itself. The portrayal stuck.
By 1927, Trotsky had been expelled from the Communist Party, and two years later, he was forced to leave the Soviet Union entirely. This began an exile that would take him from Turkey to France to Norway. And wherever he went, Stalin’s agents followed, looking for any chance to bring about the death of Leon Trotsky. So it was that Trotsky was forced to watch from abroad as Stalin consolidated absolute power and began his Great Terror.
Public DomainJoseph Stalin wearing his Order of the Red Banner in 1921.
“He is gifted with practicality, a strong will, and persistence in carrying out his aims,” Trotsky wrote of Stalin in My Life. “His political horizon is restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive… And the fact that today he is playing first is not so much a summing up of the man as it is of this transitional period of political backsliding in the country.”
Of the hundreds of thousands of people killed in Stalin’s Great Purge, many were former comrades of Trotsky who were forced to confess under torture to being part of “Trotskyist conspiracies” that only existed in Stalin’s paranoid mind. The message was clear: Leon Trotsky was the enemy.
The Assassination Of Leon Trotsky
U.S. National Archives and Records AdministrationLeon Trotsky (center) poses with American followers in Mexico a few months before his death.
In 1937, after Norway bowed to Soviet pressure to expel Trotsky, the revolutionary found refuge in Mexico. He was welcomed by the government of President Lázaro Cárdenas and housed initially in the Blue House of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Trotsky eventually settled in Coyoacán with his wife, Natalia, converting what was once a modest villa into a nearly impenetrable fortress. Here, he continued writing, producing searing critiques of Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution and warning about the rise of fascism in Europe.
But he was a man haunted by loss. Stalin’s purges had already killed his children, his followers, and his hopes of returning to lead a reformed Soviet Union. Still, he had allies. Or, at least, he thought he did.
Ramón Mercader was the perfect weapon. Born in Spain to a communist mother who was an NKVD agent herself, he had fought in the Spanish Civil War and been recruited by Soviet intelligence. His mission: the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
According to a 1940 report in Time, Mercader assumed the identity of Frank Jacson and began dating Sylvia Ageloff, an American Trotskyist. Through this relationship, Mercader gradually gained access to Trotsky’s compound — and his trust, which was an impressive feat given how paranoid Trotsky had rightfully become.
Public DomainLeon Trotsky’s body shortly after his death.
On May 24, 1940, an assassination attempt on Trotsky had failed spectacularly. A group of around 20 men, led by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, dressed in police uniforms and stormed Trotsky’s compound, firing more than 200 bullets into his bedroom. By some miracle, both Trotsky and his wife survived by rolling under their bed.
Yet, Trotsky never grew suspicious of his young new friend.
So, in August 1940, “Jacson” approached Trotsky and asked for critique on an article he’d written. Trotsky, ever the teacher, invited the young man into his study. As Trotsky bent over his desk to read, Mercader struck. The ice pick penetrated nearly three inches into Trotsky’s skull, but the old revolutionary refused to die quietly. He fought back, biting Mercader’s hand and wrestling with his assassin until guards burst in.
“Don’t kill him,” Trotsky told his guards. “This man has a story to tell.”
Trotsky was rushed to the hospital, where he underwent surgery and initially seemed to be doing well. However, he slipped into a coma and ultimately succumbed to his wounds the next day. Leon Trotsky died on Aug. 21, 1940, at the age of 60. Before he lost consciousness, however, he reportedly delivered one final statement:
“I am close to death from the blow of a political assassin, who struck me in my room. I struggled with him. He had entered the room to talk about French statistics. He struck me. Please say to our friends: I am sure of the victory of the Fourth International. Go Forward!”
Mercader, meanwhile, was immediately arrested and sentenced to 20 years in a Mexican prison. He never revealed his true identity or Soviet connection during his trial, maintaining his cover story. Upon his release in 1960, he moved to the Soviet Union, where he was secretly awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal — the country’s highest honor — for murdering the man who had helped create it.
After learning about Leon Trotsky’s death, read about how Joseph Stalin ultimately died. Then, learn about the descent of Vasily Stalin, the dictator’s troubled second son.
The post How Did Leon Trotsky Die? Inside The Brutal Assassination Of The Russian Revolutionary appeared first on All That's Interesting.
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