Thread by @andrey_botea

For history buffs (and not only).

The assassination of Lev Trotsky, the number one target on Stalin's list.

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On the afternoon of August 20, 1940, while feeding his rabbits, Lev Trotsky waited for the inevitable.

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Taken in the collimator and blacklisted by Joseph Stalin, the intellectual architect of the Ru Revolution knew that neither the armed guards of his Mexico City complex nor the thousands of miles between him and Moscow could protect him from the Soviet dictator's deadly touch.

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Any thought of finding a shrine in exile had been destroyed like his bullet-riddled bedroom when Stalinist agents stormed his villa less than three months earlier in a failed assassination attempt.
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A Soviet anti-Trotsky propaganda poster from 1936.
Photo: Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images

Trotsky, at the age of 60, had been accustomed to dangerous enemies since his early days as a revolutionary student in Russia. The tsarist government had twice exiled him to Siberia for his Marxist convictions.

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Meanwhile, the man born Lev Davidovich Bronstein escaped to London with a forged British passport, under the name of Lev Trotsky, and met his revolutionary colleague VladimirI Ilici Lenin.

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During the Russian Revolution of 1917, he staged a coup d'état on the caretaker government along with Lenin and formed the Red Army, which defeated the anti-Bolshevik White Army in the ensuing civil war.

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Trotsky seemed to be Lenin's natural successor, but he lost the power struggle to Joseph Stalin after Lenin's death in 1924.

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Trotsky became increasingly critical of Stalin's totalitarian tactics, and his belief in a permanent global proletarian revolution was at odds with the thinking of his rival, who believed that the survival of communism was possible only in the Soviet Union.

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Sensing a threat to his power, the Soviet dictator expelled Trotsky from the Politburo and the Communist Party before expelling him completely from the country, exiling him to present-day Kazakhstan in 1929.

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After a four-year stay in Turkey and brief stops in France and Norway, Trotsky was granted asylum in Mexico in 1936.
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(Trotsky's Mexico City House. Photo: Wikimedia)

The exiled dissident settled in Coyoacan, a green neighborhood in Mexico City, where he kept in touch with American and Mexican supporters and had a relationship with the painter Frida Kahlo, while organizing the Fourth International to fight against capitalism and Stalinism.
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Trotsky may have been far from Stalin's eyes, but it never escaped his mind. While the exile continued to attack his enemy, Trotsky was found guilty of treason by a court (in fact, a judicial masquerade) and sentenced to death.

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In the early hours of the morning of May 24, 1940, 20 gunmen stormed Trotsky's fortified villa to carry out the sentence.
They they filled the house with bullets, but missed their target and had to retreat.

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The bodyguards of the outlawed politician, mostly young American Trotskyists, expected the next attempt is with bombs, so they raised the outer walls of the complex, built windows and added watchtowers, and the costs were borne by American benefactors wealth.

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"Thanks to the efforts of our American friends, our peaceful home in the suburbs is now, week after week, turning into a fortress and a prison at the same time," Trotsky wrote to one of his supporters.

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Nearly three months later, as the chased outlaw was scattering food for his pet rabbits, one August afternoon, his guards tied a loud siren to the roof when they noticed a familiar face at the gates of the complex.

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Frank Jacson had been a frequent visitor in recent weeks. Sylvia Ageloff's boyfriend, a confidant of Trotsky in Brooklyn, Jacson was considered by the guards a "man of the house".

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Wearing a raincoat folded over his left arm, a strange choice of clothing on such a sunny afternoon, Jacson also had an article he had written with him, asking Trotsky to revise it.

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Trotsky led the visitor to his office. Suddenly, Jacson pulled a pickaxe with a shortened handle and a sharp steel tip out of his raincoat and stuck it in Trotsky's head.

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Although he was bleeding profusely, the exile managed to fight the attacker, while the guards hurried into the office.
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Trotsky on his deathbed. (Photo: Enrique Diaz / Bilderwelt Gallery / Getty Images)
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The guards found a dagger hidden in a secret blood-stained raincoat pocket and an automatic pistol in Jacson's hand. The bodyguards disarmed the attacker and began hitting him with a rifle butt until Trotsky begged them to stop.

"Don't kill him! He needs to talk! ”

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After all the preparations to prevent an attack from the outside, the final attack came from the inside.
He was rushed to the hospital with his aggressor, and at first,Trotsky he seemed to be feeling well after an emergency surgery.

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The next day, however, he suddenly fell into a coma and died.

It was the evening of August 21, 1940.

[end of part 1]

[ part .2 ]

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Just a few salons away, another drama unfolded. Jacson, who was beaten, had a confession letter with him, probably to be read in case of his death.

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In the letter,he claimed that it is a disappointed Belgian Trotskyist, named Jacques Mornard who attacking his former hero because Trotsky had refused to bless the future marriage to Sylvia Ageloff and had tried to force him to launch an assassination plot against Stalin.

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NKVD agent Ramon Mercader in a Mexico City hospital after the attack on Trotsky.
(Photo: Enrique Diaz / Galder Bilderwelt / Getty Images)
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Destroyed after the murder, Ageloff confirmed that Jacson's real name was Mornard, but without the woman's knowledge, this was not the true identity of the killer.

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Their relationship had been a complete ploy, part of a Stalinist plan to assassinate Trotsky that had been in the pipeline for years.

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The real name of the assassin was Ramon Mercader, a Spanish communist recruited by the brutal Soviet intelligence agency NKVD during the Spanish Civil War.

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Pretending to be the Belgian playboy Mornard, the handsome Mercader began to seduce Ageloff after meeting her in Paris during the meeting of the Fourth International in 1938.

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The following year, the Stalinist agent pursued her to the US using the passport of Frank Jacson, a Canadian who had been killed in the Spanish Civil War.

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When she persuaded Ageloff to move to Mexico City, the traitor used her ties to Trotsky to gain access to the complex and gain his trust.

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Mexican authorities have sentenced Mercader to 20 years in prison.

Although the Soviet government denied responsibility, Stalin secretly gave the assassin the "Order of Lenin".

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One year after his release in 1960, Mercader traveled to Moscow and received the "Soviet Union Hero Award".

The assassin split his time between Cuba and the Soviet Union, dying in 1978.

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Trotsky's ashes, one of Stalin's millions of victims, were buried under a massive monolith on which the sickle and hammer had been engraved in the garden of his home in Mexico City.

[ the end]

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