20.8. 1940 Russian revolutionary Trotsky assassination victim

Already in 1929 Stalin got rid of his greatest opponent, Leon Trotsky, whom he forced to leave emigration. Later in 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, an assassination orchestrated by Beria on Stalin's orders.

Three months before Trotsky's murder, agents from Stalin's office attacked the home of his opponent in Coyoacán, near Mexico City. You'd think after that, he'd be careful who he trusted. But then Ramón Mercader appeared on the scene, and he got into the home of a Russian revolutionary.

He claimed to be a committed revolutionary himself, even though he was one of Stalin's agents. "One day Trotsky was sitting at his desk reading an article that Mercader pointed out to him. At that moment, Mercader pulled a climbing axe from his coat pocket and smashed Trotsky's skull with it," Benjamin Black describes the events at the time in his book Graves Opened.

The axe was hidden by the assassin under his cloak. "In a desperate reflex, Trotsky bit the attacker's hand and then collapsed to the ground. The patrolling policemen rushed in and incapacitated the attacker. A Green Cross ambulance took the wounded man to hospital and several surgeons were called in, including a renowned American specialist," Bernard Lecomte writes in Secrets of the Kremlin: A Century of Glory, Lies and Horror.

The wound was fatal, the cleaver struck his brain, and Trotsky died the morning after the assassination. A Mexican court subsequently sentenced Mercader to the maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Stalin awarded him the Order of Lenin in absentia. When Mercader was released from prison in 1961, he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

The purges of the enemies of Stalin's regime were carried out under the leadership of Lavrentiy Beriy. "Let our enemies know that anyone who tries to raise his hand against the will of the party of Lenin and Stalin will be ruthlessly crushed and destroyed," Beria declared in June 1937.

And in that very year it was only a matter of time before Stalin summoned his favourite to Moscow. It happened a year later, and after Yezhov's execution, Lavrentiy became the new head of the Main Administration of National Security (NKVD). By this time, a large-scale purge had been underway for two years among Stalin's opponents, or rather among those who were identified as opponents. And it was Beria who had been organising the purges in Georgia since 1936.

To give you an idea, four thousand members, often friends and acquaintances of the politician Grigory Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze, were expelled from the Bolshevik Party there in protest. In the Transcaucasus, some ten thousand people were eventually executed and many more were deported to the gulags. Clouds were also gathering over Beria's hitherto protector and Stalin's friend Ordzhonikidze. He was found dead on 18 February 1937 before he was due to speak at a party meeting.

Sources:
Vladimir Liska, Grey Eminences of European History
Bernard Lecomte, The Secrets of the Kremlin: Centuries of Glory, Lies and Terror
www.nationalww2museum.org