Leon Trotsky was born Lev Bronstein in 1879 in the village of Yanovka in the southern part of what is today Ukraine. His parents were Jewish landowners who lived a quiet life in the village, but. Trotsky, born Leiba Bronstein in 1879, was the son of a hard-working and successful Jewish farm owner in the southern Ukraine. Although he learned Yiddish and Hebrew as well as Ukrainian - the. Leon Trotsky was born Lev DavidovichBronstein on November 7, 1879, in Yanovka, YelisavetgradskyUyezd, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire, to David LeontyevichBronstein and Anna Bronstein. He was born in a wealthy family with his father working as a farmer.Despite being Jewish, they were not very religious.
Born | Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río 7 February 1913 |
---|---|
Died | 18 October 1978 (aged 65) Havana, Cuba |
Resting place | Kuntsevo Cemetery, Moscow, Russia |
Other names | Jacques Mornard; Frank Jackson; Ramón Ivánovich López |
Occupation | Waiter, militiaman, soldier, agent of the NKVD |
Spouse(s) | Roquelia Mendoza Buenabad |
Children | 3 |
Parent(s) | Caridad Mercader, Pablo Mercader Marina |
Conviction(s) | Murder |
Criminal penalty | 20 years imprisonment |
Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río (born 7 February 1913[1] – 18 October 1978),[2] more commonly known as Ramón Mercader, was a Spanish communist and NKVD agent[3] who assassinated Russian Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940 with an ice axe. He served 20 years in a Mexican prison for the murder. Joseph Stalin presented him with an Order of Leninin absentia. His mother participated in the preparation of the assassination, waited for Ramon near the house of Trotsky but escaped to Moscow. With the exception of Ramon Mercader all other persons who participated in the preparation of assassination obtained Soviet awards as well. Ramon was not awarded because nobody could learn how he behaved during the trial and how he would behave in prison.[4]
Mercader was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union after his release in 1961. He divided his time between Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Mercader was born on 7 February, 1913 in Barcelona to Eustaquia (or Eustacia) María Caridad del Río Hernández, the daughter of a Cantabrian merchant who had become affluent in Spanish Cuba, and Pau (or Pablo) Mercader Marina (b. 1885), the son of a Catalan textiles industrialist from Badalona. Mercader grew up in France with his mother after his parents divorced. She was an ardent Communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and served in the Soviet international underground.
As a young man, Mercader embraced Communism, working for leftist organizations in Spain during the mid-1930s. He was briefly imprisoned for his activities, but was released in 1936 when the left-wing Popular Front coalition won in the elections of that year. During the Spanish Civil War, Mercader was recruited by Nahum Eitingon, an officer of the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, an agency preceding the KGB), and trained in Moscow as a Soviet agent.[5]
His cousin, actress María Mercader, became the second wife of Italian film director Vittorio De Sica.
Mercader's contacts with and befriending of Trotskyists began during the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell's biographer Gordon Bowker[6] relates how English communist David Crook, ostensibly a volunteer for the Republican side, was sent to Albacete. He was taught Spanish[7] and also given a crash course in surveillance techniques by Mercader.[8] Crook, on orders from the NKVD, used his job as war reporter for the News Chronicle to spy on Orwell and his Independent Labour Party comrades in the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) militia.[8]
In 1938, while a student at the Sorbonne, Mercader, with the help of NKVD agent Mark Zborowski, befriended Sylvia Ageloff, a young Jewish-American intellectual from Brooklyn, New York and a confidante of Trotsky in Paris. Mercader assumed the identity of Jacques Mornard, supposedly the son of a Belgian diplomat.
A year later, Mercader was contacted by a representative of the 'Bureau of the Fourth International.'[9] Ageloff returned to her native Brooklyn in September that same year, and Mercader joined her, assuming the identity of Canadian Frank Jacson. He was given a passport that originally belonged to a Canadian citizen named Tony Babich, a member of the Spanish Republican Army who died fighting during the Spanish Civil War. Babich's photograph was removed and replaced by one of Mercader.[9][10] Mercader told Ageloff that he had purchased forged documents to avoid military service.
In October 1939, Mercader moved to Mexico City and persuaded Ageloff to join him there. Leon Trotsky was living with his family in Coyoacán, then a village on the southern fringes of Mexico City. He was exiled from the Soviet Union after losing the power struggle against Stalin's rise to authority.
Trotsky had been the subject of an armed attack against his house, mounted by allegedly Soviet-recruited locals, including the Marxist-Leninist muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.[11] The attack was organised and prepared by Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy director of the foreign department of the NKVD. In his memoirs, Sudoplatov claimed that, in March 1939, he had been taken by his chief, Lavrentiy Beria, to see Stalin. Stalin told them that 'if Trotsky is finished the threat will be eliminated' and gave the order that 'Trotsky should be eliminated within a year.'[11]
After that attack failed, a second team was sent, headed by Eitingon, formerly the deputy GPU agent in Spain. He allegedly was involved in the kidnap, torture, and murder of Andreu Nin. The new plan was to send a lone assassin against Trotsky. The team included Mercader and his mother Caridad.[11] Sudoplatov claimed in his autobiography Special Tasks that he selected Ramón Mercader for the task of carrying out the assassination.[12]
Through his lover Sylvia Ageloff's access to the Coyoacán house, Mercader, as Jacson, began to meet with Trotsky, posing as a sympathizer to his ideas, befriending his guards, and doing small favors.[13]
On 20 August 1940, Mercader was alone with Trotsky in his study under the pretext of showing the older man a document. Mercader struck Trotsky from behind and mortally wounded him on the head with an ice axe while the Russian was looking at the document.[14]
The blow failed to kill Trotsky, and he got up and grappled with Mercader. Hearing the commotion, Trotsky's guards burst into the room and beat Mercader nearly to death. Trotsky, deeply wounded but still conscious, ordered them to spare his attacker's life and let him speak.[15]
Caridad and Eitingon were waiting outside the compound in separate cars to provide a getaway, but when Mercader did not return, they left and fled the country.
Trotsky was taken to a hospital in the city and operated on but died the next day as a result of severe brain injuries.[16]
Trotsky's guards turned Mercader over to the Mexican authorities, and he refused to acknowledge his true identity. He only identified himself as Jacques Mornard. Mercader claimed to the police that he had wanted to marry Ageloff, but Trotsky had forbidden the marriage. He alleged that a violent quarrel with Trotsky had led to his wanting to murder Trotsky.
He stated:
... instead of finding myself face to face with a political chief who was directing the struggle for the liberation of the working class, I found myself before a man who desired nothing more than to satisfy his needs and desires of vengeance and of hate and who did not utilize the workers' struggle for anything more than a means of hiding his own paltriness and despicable calculations ... It was Trotsky who destroyed my nature, my future and all my affections. He converted me into a man without a name, without country, into an instrument of Trotsky. I was in a blind alley ... Trotsky crushed me in his hands as if I had been paper.[9]
In 1940, Jacques Mornard was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison by the Sixth Criminal Court of Mexico. His true identity as Ramón Mercader eventually was confirmed by the Venona project after the fall of the Soviet Union.[17]
Ageloff was arrested by the Mexican police as an accomplice because she had lived with Mercader, on and off, for about two years up to the time of the assassination. Charges against her eventually were dropped.
Shortly after the assassination, Joseph Stalin presented Mercader's mother Eustaquia Caridad with the Order of Lenin for her part in the operation.[18]
After the first few years in prison, Ramon Mercader requested to be released on parole, but the request was denied by the Mexican authorities. They were represented by Jesús Siordia and the criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón. In 1943 Caridad Mercader applied to Stalin personally for her part in the secret operation to release Ramon Mercader.[19] In 1944 she obtained a permit to leave the USSR. However, contrary to the agreed upon conditions, she not only led the attempt of release of Ramon at a distance, but traveled to Mexico, where she was known if not as the mother of Ramon, but as the organizer of the assassination. That undermined an undercover operation that was being prepared to get Ramón Mercader out of jail.[20] Caridad Mercader's presence proved to be counterproductive, because she improved the life of Ramon in prison most significantly but the Mexican authorities tightened security measures, causing the Soviets to abandon their efforts to release Ramon. Though Caridad reported very important things to the Mexican authorities, Ramon served 20 years and 1 day in prison (including the time under initial investigation and trial) according to the initial trial.[20] Ramón, who according to his brother Luis never shared his mother's passion for the communist cause,[21] never forgave her this interference.[22]After almost 20 years in prison, Mercader was released from Mexico City's Palacio de Lecumberri prison on 6 May 1960. He moved to Havana, Cuba, where Fidel Castro's new socialist government welcomed him.
In 1961, Mercader moved to the Soviet Union and subsequently was presented with the country's highest decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union, personally by Alexander Shelepin, the head of the KGB. He divided his time between Czechoslovakia, from where he traveled to different countries, Cuba, where he was the advisor of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, and the Soviet Union for the rest of his life. He married a Mexican named Rogalia in prison after 1940 and had two children. They were declared his and his wife's adopted children, the biological children of Spanish Republicans, after his death.[23]
Ramón Mercader died in Havana in 1978 of lung cancer. He is buried under the name Ramón Ivanovich Lopez (Рамон Иванович Лопес) in Moscow's Kuntsevo Cemetery.[2] His last words are said to have been: 'I hear it always. I hear the scream. I know he's waiting for me on the other side.'[24]
(1879–1940). For most of his life Leon Trotsky was a “man without a country,” banished from one land to another. He was born in Ukraine of Jewish parents named Bronstein. In 1900 he was exiled to Siberia for his revolutionary activities, but he escaped abroad by using a forged passport bearing the name Trotsky. Returning to Russia in 1905, he was again exiled, and again he escaped.
Early in 1917 Trotsky went to New York City and became an editor of the Russian socialist paper Novy Mir (New World). After the revolution he returned to Russia and associated himself with Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik movement.
When the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government, Trotsky became commissar of foreign affairs and later commissar of war. He organized the famous Red Army.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky and Joseph Stalin struggled for leadership of the Soviet Union. Trotsky lost, and in 1928 he was exiled again. While living abroad he continued through his writings to fight Stalin’s regime. In 1937 he sought refuge in Mexico. He was assassinated at his fortified villa near Mexico City in 1940.
In The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1937—one of a number of his books translated into English—Trotsky voiced his indictment of Stalin. Other works translated into English include Defense of Terrorism (1921), Lenin (1925), My Life (1930), and The History of the Russian Revolution (1932).