Page 217 - The Chief Culprit

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Trotsky Murdered, Molotov in Berlin

Hitler will send his main forces west, and Moscow will want to use the advantages of her
position.
—L. T, J ,

n August 21, 1940, in Mexico, Leon Trotsky was gruesomely murdered. An agent
of the NKVD, Spanish Communist Ramon Mercader (also known as “Jacques
OMornar Vandenrein” and “Ramon Ivanovich Lopez”) posed as an idealistic
Trotskyite and penetrated Trotsky’s inner circle. Trotsky liked the essays Mercader wrote and
the pleasant young admirer became a fixture at Trotsky’s home. On the day of the murder, the
two of them were alone in Trotsky’s office. Trotsky was bent over his desk reading an article
by Mercader when his guest pulled out an ice-pick from inside his trench coat and crushed
Trotsky’s skull with a monstrous blow.
Mercader was arrested at the scene of the crime; but he refused to testify. e Mexican
court sentenced him to twenty years in prison. On May 6, 1960, three months short of com-
pleting his term, he was released for good behavior. Mercader returned to the USSR and was
awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union with the “Golden Star,” and the highest gov-
ernmental award, the Order of Lenin. He was given a position as a researcher at the Marxism-
Leninism Institute of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union Communist Party. At that
time, people joked that, after becoming a staff fellow at such a respectable academic institu-
tion, Mercader was writing a multi-volume dissertation on the topic of “Alternative Uses for
Ice-Picks.”
Some said that Trotsky’s murder had no meaning, that Trotsky had few followers, lived
in remote Mexico, and posed no threat. It was said that the murder was Stalin’s personal ven-
detta and a manifestation of his paranoia. But some ambiguities remained. Why was Trotsky
in Mexico in the first place?
Trotsky reached the peak of his career in October 1917. Under his leadership, the
Bolsheviks engineered the state coup and the takeover of Petrograd (St. Petersburg), the

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