On August 20, 1940, one of the main organizers of the October Revolution received a fatal blow to the head and died a day later.

If a hundred years ago the word "showman" existed in Russian everyday life, it would certainly have been applied to Lev Davidovich Trotsky. He loved to have everything revolve and revolve around him, and he himself, in dazzling white, would lead all this. For a long time it was so, but the last 10 years of Trotsky's life, completely different people became its directors. They drove Lev Davidovich around the world and, finally, getting very close, with the blow of an ice ax, removed him forever from political and, in general, from any reality.

Fatal 38

Trotsky's whole life is worthy of an adventure novel. To begin with, he did not see the light of day, but on November 7 (in a new style). Exactly 38 years later, he will rightfully consider himself a man without whom the Bolshevik October Revolution would have been impossible.

But to foresee this in 1879, in the village of Yanovka, Kherson province, where our hero was born, was unrealistic. The father of the future Trotsky was what would later be called a kulak - he had a powerful farm, farm laborers, but David Leontievich Bronstein and he himself labored from dawn to dawn. Leiba (that was Leo's name at birth), the fifth in a row, was capable, and his father spared no money to give him an education, which at that time boys from Jewish families could count on. So Leiba went to Odessa, and then to Nikolaev. In Nikolaev, he was not really carried away by revolutionary ideas, but saw how many people around them were carried away, and decided that it was worth it.

The biography of the young Trotsky resembles the biographies of those who stood at the origins of the revolution. Arrests, prisons, exile. In 1898, while in Siberia, he married the same exile - Alexandra Sokolovskaya... He has two daughters. This was the end of Trotsky's everyday life. August 21, 1902 - which is typical, also exactly 38 years before his death, he fled both from exile and from his family.

Gold heels

He showed up in Austria, then moved to London. He did this using a fake passport, where he entered the noble surname Trotsky (according to one version, this was the name of the head of the prison). In London, Trotsky collaborated with Lenin and his newspaper Iskra.

Lev Davidovich had not only pronounced literary abilities, but also an oratorical gift. He knew how to make the right impression on people. Therefore, he always had the necessary connections and money. And he did not seek unnecessary protection, including Lenin's. On the contrary, he joined the Mensheviks, for which he received from Ilyich the characterization of a "political prostitute."

Before the First Russian Revolution of 1905, Trotsky traveled extensively across Europe, made acquaintance with prominent revolutionaries, each of whom had his own view of the future of Russia. But as soon as there was a smell of fried in his homeland, Trotsky immediately threw himself into the revolutionary heat, for which he was subsequently arrested. From under arrest, he again escaped, carrying away gold coins in his heels. By that time he got along with another revolutionary, Natalia Sedova, who became his civil and final wife.

In the native element

wikimedia

It is interesting that in 1908 Trotsky began publishing the newspaper Pravda in Vienna, and only four years later the same name was used by V. Lenin for his new organ. Trotsky was mortally offended by Ilyich. But this did not stop them from uniting in 1917. It is curious, again, that Trotsky this time was traveling to Russia from New York, in Canadian Halifax he and a group of comrades were thrown off the ship and wanted to be arrested, since Trotsky was already well known for his speeches and his interesting acquaintances. But the Provisional Government stood up for a prominent figure, and Trotsky found himself in raging Petrograd, where, as they say, he campaigned for a new revolution 24 hours a day. Even Stalin later he recognized his great services in the fact that the Petrograd soldiers and sailors easily went over to the side of the Bolsheviks.

In the first Soviet government, Leon Trotsky, who did not have a higher education, headed the People's Commissariat (Ministry) of Foreign Affairs. Then he held the post of Minister of Military and Naval Affairs, was in charge of railway transport. He did not disdain the "Red Terror". "Famous" for killing the captain Shchastny.

A hereditary nobleman and officer Alexei Shchastny managed under the noses of the Germans in the spring of 1918 to withdraw the Russian Baltic Fleet from Helsingfors (now the capital of Finland Helsinki) to Kronstadt without losing a single ship. Naturally, he gained great popularity in military circles. And Lev Davidovich did not like to share influence. It was Trotsky who then invented the phrase "enemy of the people" and achieved the execution of Shchastny.

Went around the world

1929 g.

But Trotsky himself did not have long to taste the sweets of power. Lenin died in 1924. Trotsky hoped that he would now become the first person in the party. But internal strife pushed Stalin to the top, and Trotsky recklessly declared himself in opposition. The only thing he achieved was the removal from all posts, and subsequently - the expulsion in 1928 of Alma-Ata.

There he would have calmed down, but Trotsky still believed that he had very great influence. In the capital of Kazakhstan, he formed a whole headquarters near him. All this ended in expulsion from the USSR.

Trotsky had at his disposal a large personal archive. After all, he corresponded literally with the entire revolutionary world, which had its own intrigues and incriminating evidence. Stalin could not come to terms with the fact that suspicious evidence could surface at any moment. The hunt began, first for the archive.

Trotsky planned to settle in Germany, but managed to get only to Turkey. However, in this country, he could easily become the prey of white emigrants who have a big grudge against the fiery revolutionary. In 1932, part of the famous archive was suspiciously burned down in Trotsky's house. He moves to France and tries to attract the attention of the international social democratic movement, and the tricolor republic shows him the door - France was fed up with its revolutions.

Then Trotsky turns to Norway, which hesitates, fearing for the fate of contracts with the USSR, which buys Norwegian herring. Trotsky is too big a fish to give him refuge with impunity.

And at this time the NKVD is not asleep, which is introducing to the son of Trotsky Lev Sedov, the right hand of his father, his agent Zborovsky... Zborovsky tried to make sure that some part of the famous archive still ended up in Moscow. Trotsky later sold what remained to the United States, since over time they began to lend him less and less money - he was rapidly losing influence in the world.

Still, Trotsky does not manage to live long in Norway. There he writes his work "Revolution Betrayed" and as a "fee" receives a raid on his own house.

Mexican passions

Finally, in December 1936, Trotsky was invited by Mexico - a socialist president came to power there, revolutionary passions are boiling there, which suits Lev Davidovich very much. In Mexico City, the former Russian minister does not stay anywhere, but in the house of a famous artist Diego Rivera, and, despite love and gratitude to Natalya Sedova, he manages to have an affair with Rivera's wife, an artist Frida Kahlo.

Trotsky eventually made up with his wife, but neither Stalin nor the NKVD wanted to forgive him. Moreover, the disgraced revolutionary continued, as best he could, to persuade the international workers' movement: in the USSR, nothing is happening at all that "the great Lenin bequeathed." He even organized his own Fourth International. And besides, he persistently sought a visa to the United States, where it would be much more difficult to get it.

Cloak and ice ax

In Moscow, a plan was drawn up to physically eliminate Trotsky. The operation was led by famous scouts Pavel Sudoplatov and Naum Eitington.

Trotsky could not help but guess that it was no coincidence that people from his inner circle died, in particular, two secretaries. In 1938, after a trifling operation, his son, Lev Sedov, his father's closest assistant, died. In an obituary, Leon Trotsky directly blamed the death of the NKVD's son.

The first attempt on Trotsky himself took place on May 24, 1940. The leader of the attackers was another famous artist - Siqueiros, an ardent admirer of Stalin. At night, hundreds of bullets were fired at Trotsky's house, where his wife and 14-year-old grandson were in addition to him, but he suffered, and that only slightly, only an innocent teenager.

The next attack was entrusted to a certain Ramon Mercader, whom Eitington met during the Spanish war. Mercader had experience in combat, but here he acted differently. His girlfriend got a job at Trotsky's secretariat. Having approached Lev Davidovich himself, Ramon began to visit him. Lev Davidovich considered Mercader to be a capable journalist.

On the evening of August 20, 1940, Mercader brought another article to Trotsky for discussion. Despite the heat, he was dressed in a raincoat, under which he hid an ice ax and a knife. Trotsky bent over the papers and at that moment received a terrible blow to the back of the head. The blade entered the body by seven centimeters, Trotsky screamed. Mercader, who intended to finish off his victim with a knife, was frightened. He was immediately grabbed by the guards, who were assigned to Trotsky's house.

The mortally wounded man lived another day and died on August 21. In the USSR, an article in Pravda was devoted to his death, to which he personally had a hand Joseph Vissarionovich... It is clear that he did not grieve over the death of his former associate in the party.

Mercader served 20 years in prison. At first he was constantly beaten, and then the regime became much more liberal. The killer even got married. Subsequently, he received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, became Ramon Ivanovich Lopez... Despite the fact that Stalin had been lying in his grave for a long time, Lopez-Mercader was blessed in the USSR with awards, an apartment, and work. Then he moved to Cuba, but was buried in Moscow, at the Kuntsevo cemetery.

“Encyclopedia of Death. The Chronicles of Charon "

Part 2: Dictionary of Chosen Deaths

The ability to live well and die well are one and the same science.

Epicurus

Trotsky(real name Bronstein)

Lev Davydovich

Former associates, Stalin and Trotsky became sworn enemies. Assassins-mercenaries persecuted the leader of the opposition until the end of his days.

Leon Trotsky - nee Lev Davidovich Bronstein - was one of the organizers and leaders of the October coup. After Lenin's death in 1924, a fierce power struggle broke out between Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin won this fight by forcing his rival to leave Russia. Over the next ten years, Trotsky sought refuge in various countries - Turkey, France, Norway, but everywhere his presence turned out to be undesirable.

Finally, in 1937, the disgraced ideologue of the revolution found his last refuge in Mexico. Meanwhile, his former adherents and associates in the Soviet Union were severely repressed, and Trotsky himself was declared an enemy of the people. Stalin declared that this "traitor to the cause of the revolution" was creating a powerful base abroad for espionage and terrorist activities against the USSR. In reality, Trotsky's only weapon was his sharp pen. The famous writer Bernard Shaw said about the style of his works: "When this person cuts off the head of an opponent, he lifts it up to show that it has no brains."

Stalin set before his special services the task of destroying the hated enemy. The notorious NKVD, which in those years successfully combined punitive functions within the country with covert operations abroad, accumulated considerable experience in performing tasks of this kind. In the 1920s and 1930s, hundreds of those who fled the Soviet Union disappeared, were killed or committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. A similar death overtook Trotsky's personal secretary Erwin Wolff, but it was not proven that this was the work of the NKVD, although few doubted that Stalin's secret department had a hand in this.

The NKVD decided to murder Trotsky with the hands of its agent Ramon Mercador. The 26-year-old son of an influential Spanish communist was a participant in the Spanish Civil War, which ended in the defeat of the Republican forces. Many opponents of the Franck, fearing reprisals, left the country. Among them were Caridad Mercador and her son. Ramon, who had already mastered the initial course of terrorism in Barcelona, \u200b\u200bcontinued to improve his skills in one of the special schools of the NKVD, specializing in secret assassinations, sabotage, intelligence and guerrilla warfare. From Moscow, he was sent to Paris, where he "accidentally" met an American woman named Sylvia, who turned out to be Leon Trotsky's courier. Ramon, according to the documents of Jacques Mornard, was a man of pleasant appearance and without much difficulty persuaded Sylvia to marry him. The trusting bride agreed.

From Paris, the young couple arrived in New York, and from there they flew to Mexico City. Jacques Mornard, who instantly turned into Frank Jackson, at first unsuccessfully tried to infiltrate the local Trotskyists. Meanwhile, the Mexican Communist Party, apparently on instructions from Moscow, decided to "duplicate" the actions of the special agent and organized its own conspiracy to assassinate Trotsky. On May 24, 1940, his villa was attacked. More than twenty masked militants literally turned the whole house upside down, but the owners managed to hide. Fate itself preserved the Kremlin exile: Trotsky, his wife and grandson did not suffer.

After this scandalous incident, which became the property of the world press, Trotsky turned his house into a real fortress, where only people who were especially devoted to him were allowed. Among them were Sylvia and her husband Frank Jackson, who managed to gain confidence in the "teacher".

At first, the young man, who showed an increased interest in Marxism, seemed to Trotsky too intrusive. But in the end, the old underground fighter, who considered it his sacred duty to raise a young generation of fighters for the "world revolution," gained confidence in the charming American.

Despite the hot day, on August 20, 1940, Frank Jackson appeared at Trotsky's villa in a tightly buttoned raincoat and hat. Under the cloak of a "family friend" there was a whole arsenal: a climbing ice ax, a hammer and a large-caliber automatic pistol.

The guards, who often saw this man in the house and habitually considered him "theirs", took the guest to the owner, who was feeding the rabbits in the garden. It seemed strange to Natalya, Trotsky's wife, that Sylvia's husband had arrived without warning, but the guest was asked to stay for lunch.

Refusing the invitation, Mercador-Jackson asked to see an article he had just written. The men went into the office. As soon as Trotsky went deep into his reading, Jackson pulled an ice ax from under his cloak and stuck it in the back of the victim's head. Considering the blow not reliable enough, the assassin swung the ice ax again, but by a miracle Trotsky, who had retained consciousness, grabbed him by the arm, forcing him to drop his weapon. Then he staggered out of the study and into the living room. "Jackson!" He shouted. "Look what you've done!" The guards who came running to scream knocked Jackson down, who was aiming at his victim with a pistol. “Don't kill him,” Trotsky stopped the guards. “We need him to tell everything ...” With these words the wounded man lost consciousness.

A few minutes later, Mercador Jackson and his victim were taken to the metropolitan emergency hospital. The persistence with which this mortally wounded man fought for his life shocked even the doctors. In their practice, there has never been a case that a victim with such a monstrous injury - a cut skull - lived, periodically regaining consciousness, for more than a day ...

More than thirty thousand people visited the coffin with Trotsky's body in five days. Even those who did not share his communist convictions paid tribute to this violent revolutionary.

Ramon Mercador, aka Frank Jackson, aka Jacques Mornard, was sentenced to twenty years in prison. After leaving a Mexican prison in March 1960, he settled in Cuba. Shortly before his death in Havana on October 18, 1978, Trotsky's killer received the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union.

The documentary tells the story of the events of 1937 and Stalin's confrontation with the destroyers of the Soviet state. Lenin's entourage did not expect that after the death of the leader of the world proletariat, Stalin would come to the fore - a person not of their clan, for whom the ideas of the world revolution would fade before the desire to revive the great Russia. Exactly 75 years, Stalin defeated the 5th column in the USSR. The final chord was the elimination of Leo (Leiba) Trotsky-Bronstein.

Operation "Duck": how Trotsky was liquidated

In 1929, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the USSR. Very soon Stalin became convinced that this was a mistake. Once in the West, Trotsky, with his characteristic energy and talent, launched a large-scale struggle against the Stalinist USSR and personally against Stalin, gathering more and more new supporters among foreign communists under his banner. By the end of the 30s, Stalin managed to completely destroy all the Bolshevik leaders inside the country who seized power together with Lenin. Only Trotsky survived.

By destroying the core of the "fifth column", Stalin delayed the collapse of the Soviet Union for half a century and won a serious victory before the Great Patriotic War, equal by its standards to the defeat of Hitler's Germany.

After leaving the USSR, Leon Trotsky eventually settled in Mexico, under heavy guard and local police and his own supporters. The hunt for him began in the spring of 1939. The coordination of all work to eliminate Leon Trotsky was entrusted by Stalin to the deputy chief of foreign intelligence of the NKVD, Pavel Sudoplatov, who was to report directly to Lavrentiy Beria about all the details of the preparation for the operation, code-named "Duck".

The leading role in the preparation of the operation was assigned to Sudoplatov's friend and comrade-in-arms, Naum Eitingon. In a short time, Eitingon was able to deploy a wide network of agents in the United States and Mexico, completely independent of the residents of Soviet intelligence (it is this network that will later be used in the operation to extract "atomic secrets" of the United States).

Eitingon created two independent groups directly to assassinate Trotsky. The first group (the "Horse" group) was led by the prominent Mexican artist David Siqueiros. At the head of the second group (the “Mother” group) was Caridad Mercader, whose family was the vice-governor of Cuba and the Spanish ambassador to Russia. Carried away by the ideas of the anarchists, she fled with her four children from her rich husband and in 1938 began to cooperate with Soviet intelligence. Her eldest son died in Spain, her middle son, Ramon, fought there in the partisan detachment.

At the beginning of 1940, Joseph Grigulevich was sent to Mexico, who created a third group there, a reserve one. Grigulevich knew about the existence of the Siqueiros group and collaborated with it. It was Grigulevich who contacted a certain Sheldon Hart recruited in New York, one of Trotsky's bodyguards. And when, in the early morning of May 23, 1940, Grigulevich knocked on the gate of Trotsky's villa, Sheldon Hart, recognizing him, opened the gate slightly. This was his fatal mistake: behind Grigulevich there were Siqueiros militants.

David Siqueiros and his men burst into the territory of the villa and for twenty minutes fired at both windows and closed doors from machine guns. These people were not professionals and did not check what they got as a result. And it turned out a miracle: Leon Trotsky and his relatives managed to lie down on the floor and were not injured at all. Only Sheldon Hart was "injured": his body was later found in the garden ...

When, many years later, Joseph Grigulevich was asked why he had to kill his own agent, he answered quite logically:
- What was to be done with him? After all, it had to be hidden and then illegally exported from Mexico. In a word, you will not end up with trouble! And then - get into the skin of Siqueiros. After all, he telegraphed to Moscow that Bob Sheldon had betrayed them, and therefore they fired into an empty bed. Moscow ordered: shoot the traitor! What we did ...

Mexican police soon arrested David Siqueiros. He was tried and, in the end, acquitted: Siqueiros explained the unsuccessful attempt on his life by the fact that, in fact, there was no real attempt at all, but only a peculiar, with noise and shooting, demonstration of a negative attitude towards Trotsky (in addition to “ Self-portrait "1943, in the title of this article you see Siqueiros's painting" New Democracy ", 1945).

Late in the evening of May 1940, after listening to Beria and Sudoplatov, Stalin authorized the completion of the operation by the forces of the Mother group.

To avoid another failure, Eitingon personally prepared Caridad Mercader and her son Ramon this time. All the nuances of the upcoming operation were thoroughly discussed. As a murder weapon, they decided to use either an ordinary knife or a climbing ice ax with a shortened handle.
The murder was supposed to look like an act of revenge on Trotsky on the part of a young man in love and completely lost his head - for this purpose it was decided to use Sylvia Agelof, Trotsky's employee, whom the handsome Ramon had already managed to seduce and whom he promised to marry.

Everything was prepared. Caridad blessed her son. She and Naum Eitingon were to wait for Ramon in the car.

And on August 20, 1940, Frank Jackson (no one knew anything about the Spanish partisan Ramon Mercader then), a close friend of Sylvia Agelof and a Canadian businessman sympathizing with the Trotskyists, entered Trotsky's office. When Trotsky, sitting at his desk, plunged into reading an article by Jackson-Mercader, Ramon hit him on the head with an ice pick. Trotsky was not killed on the spot and screamed wildly. “Imagine, after all, I went through a partisan war and stabbed the sentry on the bridge with a knife during the Spanish Civil War, but Trotsky's cry literally paralyzed me” - this is how Mercader later described what happened in a conversation with Pavel Sudoplatov. The bodyguards who screamed, tied up Mercader.

The next day, despite all the efforts of the best doctors, Leon Trotsky died.

A dog's death. The lynching of Trotsky was carried out, Stalin's task was completed. Glory to heroes!

A long-term investigation began. During daily interrogations, Ramon Mercader (then, however, none of the police officers knew his real name) categorically denied any connection with Soviet intelligence, explaining the murder he committed by reasons of a purely personal nature - jealousy. The option prepared in advance with the "bride" worked. Of course, Sylvia Agelof did not even suspect that Mercader already had one bride in Moscow (she died of tuberculosis in 1942).

The ice ax that killed Trotsky later mysteriously disappeared. According to recent reports, police officer Alfredo Salas, having decided to keep the historic ice ax, secretly hid it all these years.

The real name of the killer would probably have remained unknown to Mexican justice, if not for an accident: Ramon's mother, Caridad Mercader, confidentially opened the veil of mystery to her good friend, a prominent Spanish communist. When a prominent Spanish communist fled from the USSR to the West, he told the secret services the real name of the assassin of Leon Trotsky. This happened only in 1946. After reviewing his Spanish dossier, Ramon Mercader stopped denying and hiding his real name, but he continued to resolutely deny his connection with Soviet intelligence until his release.

Maybe Navalny will also bang? SAMSUDE ALIVE!

By the way, about Caridad Mercader. Immediately after the assassination attempt, Eitingon and Caridad went underground and hid in Cuba for six months. Then they ended up in New York together, then in Los Angeles and San Francisco, then in China, and finally, in May 1941, they arrived in Moscow. In his memoirs, Pavel Sudoplatov strongly denies that Caridad Mercader was Eitingon's mistress. Maybe so - who knows now ...

Ramon Mercader was sentenced in Mexico to twenty years in prison. After the events of 1946, the conditions of his detention in prison improved dramatically. Earlier in Moscow, it was decided, in the words of Pavel Sudoplatov, "not to spare any money." In the prison, Mercader had his own separate cell or hotel room with all the amenities, including its own courtyard and TV. From time to time he was taken out to dine in a metropolitan restaurant. A certain Roquella Mendoza - a woman who helped Ramon "with the housework", a former cabaret artist - soon fell in love with her ward, and Ramon Mercader was allowed to retire with her twice a week. Later, Roquella Mendoza became the wife of Mercader and came with him after her release to Moscow, where she worked as an announcer in the Spanish edition of Moscow Radio.

Of course, Stalin was quite pleased with the results of Operation Duck, but he prudently decided to distribute awards only after the return of the "characters and performers" to Moscow. Immediately, according to Pavel Sudoplatov, "Beria asked me if Caridad, Eitingon and Grigulevich managed to escape and hide safely." I have already told about Nahum Eitingon and Caridad Mercader: having made an almost round-the-world trip, they arrived in Moscow in May 1941. Grigulevich immediately after the assassination attempt fled from Mexico to California.

In early June 1941, by a secret decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Mercader Karidad Ramonovna and Eitingon Naum Isakovich, at the suggestion of Beria, were awarded the Orders of Lenin "for completing a special assignment." By the same decree, Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov received the Order of the Red Banner, and Grigulevich Iosif Romualdovich received the Order of the Red Star. Two more participants in the operation also received awards, but - but Ramon Mercader was not among them: after all, he was somewhere far, far away, in a Mexican prison, and in the opinion of the leadership, there was no need to rush with the official award.

Ramon Mercader stayed in prison for exactly twenty years, from call to call, categorically refusing, as reported, from all the tempting offers to organize his escape. He was released on May 6, 1960, and soon from the revolutionary Havana went to the USSR by motor ship. After some time, he already received documents in Moscow in the name of Ramon Ivanovich Lopez. The Soviet intelligence operation, code-named "Duck", was finally completed. And the then chairman of the KGB of the USSR, Alexander Shelepin, introduced N.S. Khrushchev a petition to confer on comrade Lopez the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. They especially emphasized the fact that for all 20 years Ramon Ivanovich "kept secret his connection with the state security organs of the Soviet Union."

A secret decree conferring a high rank on Lopez was signed by L.I. Brezhnev on May 31, 1960. By a special decision of the CPSU Central Committee, Ramon Ivanovich Lopez was enrolled in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee as a senior research fellow. He received a state dacha, a spacious apartment in Moscow, and then a substantial pension. A few years later, in the early 70s, he was allowed to go with his family to Cuba. There he advised Cuban comrades on the issues of labor re-education. There, in Cuba, Ramon Mercader died in October 1978.

But he was not buried in Cuba. According to the last will of the deceased, his ashes - without undue publicity - were transported to Moscow. Here, at the Kuntsevo cemetery, his grave is located. On the granite monument his photograph with the Star of the Hero and the inscription: “Lopez Ramon Ivanovich. 1913-1978 ". And just below - his real name: "Ramón Merkader del Río".

The awards for the success of Operation Duck were presented to Naum Eitingon, Karidad Mercader and Pavel Sudoplatov on June 17, 1941, just four days before the German attack on the USSR. Soon Caridad Mercader was evacuated. In 1944, she was allowed to leave for Mexico, later Caridad settled in France. She, as well as her children, received special pensions from the state security agencies of the USSR. Caridad Mercader died in Paris in 1975.
"After my death ... ungrateful descendants will heap heaps of garbage on my grave, but after many years the wind of history will scatter them" (IV Stalin)

Taken from: www.vilavi.ru/prot/card/card1.shtml

Leon Trotsky is known for his revolutionary ideas. Together with Lenin and Stalin, he became the organizer of the Civil War, the founder of the Red Army. After Lenin's death, he led the opposition. Stalin understood the danger from his former comrade-in-arms, so he deprived him of his Soviet citizenship and had a hand in his death. The article is devoted to the question of where Trotsky was killed.

A bit of history

Leiba Bronstein (birth name), the future revolutionary, was born on 11/07/1879 in the outback of the Kherson province. His father was an illiterate, but a wealthy landowner. Since childhood, Leiba felt superiority over other people.

As a boy, he showed an interest in studying, so he was sent to Odessa. He studied at St. Paul's School. At seventeen, the young man got into a circle of socialists. He was carried away by the works of Marx. From that time on, he plunged into revolutionary activity.

For his active position, Leiba was imprisoned for two years and exiled to Siberia. A couple of years later, he managed to escape with a fake passport. In the document, he indicated the name of Leon Trotsky. The same surname was borne by the senior warden of the Odessa prison.

In 1902, Trotsky joined Lenin in London. Thanks to his eloquence, he took a good position in the Bolshevik movement. Soon he went over to the Mensheviks and as a result decided to create his own current.

In 1905 he returned to his homeland. Soon Trotsky was exiled to an eternal settlement in Siberia. He managed to escape and settle in Vienna and later in Paris.

In 1917, the revolutionary arrived in Russia. He led the October Revolution, which overthrew the Provisional Government. Trotsky became People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, then People's Commissar for Military Affairs. His responsibilities included the formation of the Red Army. He was one of those who carried out the "Red Terror".

During these years, Trotsky collaborated with Lenin and was very popular in Bolshevik circles. He planned to move from "war communism" to NEP. But he failed to lead the revolutionaries. Stalin achieved the deprivation of his Soviet citizenship. But back to the question of where Trotsky was killed.

Exile

In 1929, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the country for organizing an anti-government demonstration. However, he did not stop fighting Stalin. Lev Davidovich described his activities in his autobiography "My Life".

In his essay "History of the Russian Revolution" he proved that Tsarist Russia had exhausted itself, therefore the October Revolution took place.

Trotsky was sent to Turkey. In 1933 he settled in France. In 1935 he ended up in Norway, but could not stay there due to the disagreement of the authorities. His documents were taken from him and he was kept under house arrest. But this was still not the place where Trotsky was killed.

Under house arrest, he decides to leave for Mexico.

Moving to Latin America

In early 1936, the revolutionary arrived in Mexico. This is the country where Trotsky was killed. Stalin could not leave him alive, because he feared possible consequences. However, putting the plan into action was difficult.

Trotsky and his entourage wanted to achieve a move to the United States, but their requests were rejected every time.

Trotsky's financial situation deteriorated significantly. He lived off donations and royalties from publications. The revolutionary was forced to sell his archive. He also started breeding rabbits and chickens.

House-fortress

Mexico agreed to accept Trotsky after the socialist Lazaro Cardenas came to power. In January 1937, the exile arrived in Mexico City. His home was the villa of the artist Diego Rivera. At this time, he had a short affair with Rivera's wife Frida.

But the revolutionary did not come to do his personal life. He established a relationship with his wife and launched a vigorous activity.

Fearing for his life, Trotsky made a fortress out of his house. He allowed few to come to him. His wife Natalya and a grandson from his eldest daughter were constantly with him. All the children of the revolutionary died.

The house was constantly monitored by NKVD officers. At least that's what the host's guards and secretaries were talking about. It doesn't matter which country he moved to, for example, Argentina. Trotsky was killed, wherever he lived, Stalin would not leave him alone.

The Mexican authorities guarded the mansion. Even the closest supporters of Lev Davidovich were under suspicion.

Assassination attempt in May 1940

Mexico, the country where Trotsky was killed, granted him asylum, thereby extending his life for several years. At least that's what his wife said. The assassination attempts on Trotsky did not stop. One of them happened in the spring of 1940.

It all happened suddenly. Several dozen armed men drove up to the mansion. They disarmed the guards and opened fire on the house. The spouses who were in the bedroom managed to escape. They took refuge in the corner of the room under the window, and the bed protected them from several hundred bullets.

David Siqueiros confessed to the assassination attempt. He was held in prison for a year, after which he was expelled from the country. Many are interested to know not only where Leon Trotsky was killed, but also who did it.

Historical background about Ramona Mercader

The son of a Spanish communist took part in the destruction of Trotsky. His name was Mercader Ramon. After studying at the Lyceum, he served in the army. He took part in the youth movement in Spain. He was arrested, but with the arrival of the Popular Front he was released.

Under the name of Jacques Mornard, he moved to France. In the new country, he met a US citizen who was Russian by birth. The girl's name was Sylvia Angelova-Maslova. She was a supporter of Trotsky. Her sister worked as a secretary for Lev Davidovich. Sylvia fell in love with Jacques. In 1939, the girl returned to the United States. Mornar followed her a couple of months later.

He began to call himself the Canadian Frank Jackson. He explained the name change to his beloved by his unwillingness to serve in the army. The man moved to Mexico, where he soon invited Sylvia. She got a job with Trotsky, and Jackson sometimes gave her a lift in his car.

Gradually, the doors of the mansion opened for Mercader. He was always looking for an excuse to visit the house once again. From the documents of the secretary, it is known that the man visited the mansion twelve times. In time it took four hours and twelve minutes.

August 20 events

Now let's get back to the main questions of the article. In what year was Trotsky killed and where? It happened in 1940 in a mansion where a revolutionary lived in Mexico City.

Mercader went to Trotsky under the pretext of discussing the article. The man held a cloak and hat in his hand. They went to the study. The assassin put the cloak on the table so that he could get the ice ax hidden in his pocket.

Trotsky was taken to the hospital, where he lived for another twenty-six hours. He fell into a coma. The doctors could not save him, important parts of the brain were affected. This is where Leon Trotsky was killed - in the city of Mexico City.

Mercader trial

Mercader did not act alone. His associates managed to escape. They were the murderer's mother Caridad and her lover Eitington, although Mercader denied this. His trial took place three years later. He was sentenced to twenty years in a Mexican prison.

In detention he was often beaten and kept in a cell without windows. Ramon got married in prison. It came out in 1960. A year later, together with his wife, Mercader moved to the Soviet Union, where he was awarded the Star of the Hero of the USSR. He spent the last years of his life in Cuba. Trotsky's killer died in 1978. His ashes were buried in Moscow, as requested by Mercader himself.

So, the city where Trotsky was killed is Mexico City, but what happened to the ice pick?

Murder weapon

The ice ax was saved by eyewitnesses of the 1940 events. In 2018, it will be shown to the general public at the Espionage Museum (Washington).

The house where Trotsky was killed is preserved in many photographs. There is a museum dedicated to the activities of Lev Davidovich. It was opened in 1990. The museum contains a library of the revolutionary's works, as well as his documents and Trotskyist literature. Archival photographs from the crime scene have also been preserved.

On the territory of the mansion there is an obelisk on which Trotsky's name is written. The monument also has a symbol of Soviet power in the form of a hammer and sickle.

In 1927, Joseph Stalin, together with his associates, tried to get rid of Leon Trotsky, who had fallen into serious disgrace due to an alternative demonstration in the decade of the October Revolution, by sending the latter into exile in Kazakhstan.

“In 1928, when I was expelled from the party and exiled to Central Asia, it was still impossible to talk about not only execution, but also arrest: the generation with whom I went through the October Revolution and the Civil War was still alive,” Trotsky himself wrote, explaining why Stalin was forced for the first time to confine himself to only exile.

Expelled from the party, Trotsky did not stop communicating with his supporters, many of whom were also sent into exile. In addition, he was in active correspondence with many leaders of the Marxist movement, which led to the fact that in October 1928 they tried to ban Trotsky from writing letters and demanded that he stop all political activity. However, he did not go for it. And in January 1929 it was decided to expel Trotsky from the country.

Together with him, the revolutionary took his own archive, which contained many secret documents.

Trotsky hoped to get to Germany, but only Turkey agreed to accept him. From the Soviet Union, he sailed on a steamer with the symbolic name "Ilyich". It is interesting that Trotsky was accepted in Turkey. By the way, back in 1912, long before his expulsion, Trotsky wrote an article under the loud title "Decomposition of Turkey and the Armenian Question", in which he described the situation in this country in a rather critical form. Now he was to see Turkey, reborn as a result of Ataturk's reforms.

Trotsky first lived in Istanbul. And then, fearing both Soviet agents and the leaders of the White movement who settled in Turkey after the October Revolution, he moved to the island of Buyukada, located near Istanbul. In early March 1931, a fire broke out in his villa, as a result of which the archive was damaged, which Stalin for some reason allowed Trotsky to take with him.

In 1933, deprived of USSR citizenship and gifted with a French visa, Trotsky moved to Marseille. No one liked this: under the control of Stalin and Hitler, under various formulations, they accused him of trying to ignite the flame of revolution in France and embroil it with the USSR and Germany, respectively. In addition, at the beginning of the year, Trotsky's daughter Zinaida committed suicide, which could not but leave an imprint on his activities.

On December 27, 1933, Trotsky completed the draft program "The Fourth International and the War" and sent it to his supporters.

And in 1934 he spent wandering around France, never settling in any of the cities or villages, in order to leave this country in June 1935. Trotsky went to Norway, where he was invited by the Social Democrats who had come to power. Nevertheless, pressure from Stalin forced the Norwegian authorities to put Trotsky under house arrest.

Holidays in Mexico

After Lazaro Cardenas had won the elections in Mexico, he immediately sent Trotsky an invitation to his country. In December 1936, the Norwegians put the restless revolutionary on a freighter and sent him to the other side of the ocean. In Mexico, Trotsky was expected and received pompously. And he settled in a villa with the artist Diego Rivera, an active supporter of the left and husband of Frida Kahlo.

It so happened that Trotsky had an affair with her, which the revolutionary's wife did not immediately notice, the reason for this was that her husband and the artist communicated in English, which she did not speak. This even led to a brief break between Trotsky and Natalya Sedova.

The anticipated reconciliation came after Trotsky wrote to his wife a letter that became known as "Trotsky's letter to his wife on July 19, 1937". Due to the norms of Russian legislation, it is not possible to cite its text. Life in Mexico seems to have improved, but in February 1938 in Paris under mysterious circumstances after an operation, Lev Sedov, the son and main comrade-in-arms of Trotsky, died. This event forced Trotsky to act: already in September in Paris, his comrades-in-arms confirmed the Fourth International, the goal of which is a world revolution.

It is quite logical that such a development of events could not but grieve Stalin, who instructed Beria to eliminate the restless revolutionary. Similar attempts have been made before, but none of them has been successful. They decided to liquidate Trotsky with the help of veterans of the partisan struggle in Spain. The operation was led by the deputy chief of Soviet intelligence Pavel Sudoplatov and the scout Naum Eitingon.

After a while, they tried to assassinate Trotsky with the help of a group led by the Stalinist artist Jose David Alfaro Siqueiros. The Mexican, together with his comrades, on May 24, 1940, arrived at the house of the revolutionary. The attackers were dressed in the uniform of Mexican police officers, thanks to which they easily entered the territory of the villa where Trotsky lived. The attackers fired about 200 machine-gun bullets from the street in the direction of the bedroom, but Trotsky remained alive and well. It was decided to use a different version of the murder, for which Ramon Mercader, a Spanish communist recruited back in 1937, was brought in.

Mercader took part in the war in Spain and had sufficient combat experience to eliminate Trotsky. He attracted the attention of the Soviet special services thanks to his mother Caridad Mercader del Rio, who began working for them even earlier than her son. It was she who blessed her son to commit the murder.

First, however, Mercader went to Paris, where he seduced Sylvia Ageloff, who was Trotsky's translator and partly acted as his personal secretary. Mercader traveled under the name of the Canadian businessman Frank Jackson. Together with his "beloved", Mercader went to Mexico and became a visitor to Trotsky's house.

On August 20, 1940, Mercader came to Trotsky's villa in order to show him his article on the surrender of France. Under his cloak, Mercader had a climbing ice ax, which he did not fail to use to strike Trotsky on the back of the head when he began to read the text he had brought. Mercader inflicted a 7 cm deep wound on Trotsky, but did not kill the revolutionary: he pounced on the killer and strangled him until the guards came running.

Nevertheless, Trotsky's days were numbered: on August 21, he died, despite the doctors' attempts to save his life.

“A man has descended into the grave, whose name is pronounced with contempt and curse by the working people all over the world, a man who for many years fought against the cause of the working class and its vanguard, the Bolshevik Party. The ruling classes of the capitalist countries have lost their faithful servant. Foreign intelligence services have lost a long-term, inveterate agent, organizer of murderers, who did not disdain by any means to achieve their counter-revolutionary goals, "- said in the issue of the newspaper Pravda, published on August 24, 1940.

Stalin personally edited this article, entitled “Death of an International Spy”. He also wrote its final paragraph: “Trotsky became a victim of his own intrigues, betrayals, betrayals. This is how this despicable man ended his life ingloriously, going down to the grave with the seal of an international spy on his forehead.

Post mortem

Ramon Mercader was captured by Trotsky's guards and beaten. He spent 20 years in a Mexican prison, and at the trial denied any connection with the USSR: Mercader insisted that Trotsky interfered with his intention to marry Sylvia Ageloff and tried to involve him in a secret terrorist organization, whose members set their ultimate goal to kill Stalin. The assassin claimed that Trotsky's death was the only way to avoid it.

Mercader spent his first six years in a windowless cell and was regularly beaten.

Subsequently, the conditions of his detention changed, and Mercader began to live in a kind of VIP-cell, denying himself nothing, and even getting married. The Mexican authorities tried to establish his identity and nationality, but could only come to the conclusion that Mercader was neither Belgian, nor French, nor Canadian. It was possible to expose him only by the beginning of the 1950s, but Mercader refused to recognize the true motives that prompted him to kill Trotsky.

On May 6, 1960, the killer was released: he had a Czechoslovak passport and a ticket to Cuba, from where he was supposed to go to the USSR. Upon arrival in Moscow, he received a passport in the name of Ramon Ivanovich Lopez. And already on May 31, an order was issued: Ramon Mercader received the star of the Hero of the Soviet Union from the hands of the then head of the KGB Alexander Shelepin and the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Leonid Brezhnev.

Subsequently, Mercader was admitted to the position of Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, where he studied the history of the Spanish Civil War. In addition, he received a pension from the KGB, as well as an apartment in Moscow and a state dacha. In the mid-1970s, Ramon Mercader moved to Cuba, where he worked for the Foreign Ministry.

Mercader died in 1978 on the Island of Freedom, and his ashes were buried with honors in Moscow, and Trotsky was not rehabilitated even during perestroika. The decision to rehabilitate him was made already in 1992, when the country in the creation of which Trotsky was directly involved no longer existed.