Trotsky Assassinated: Stalin's Rival Dies in Mexico

Ramon Mercader drove an ice axe into the back of Leon Trotsky's skull in a study in Coyoacan, Mexico City, on August 20, 1940. Trotsky, 60 years old and living in fortified exile, had been seated at his desk reviewing a manuscript that Mercader had asked him to critique. The blow did not kill him immediately. Trotsky fought back, biting Mercader's hand and struggling with his assassin before guards rushed in. He died the following day in a Mexican hospital. Stalin's most dangerous rival had finally been eliminated. Trotsky had been second only to Lenin in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, commanding the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and serving as a principal architect of the Soviet state. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky lost the power struggle with Stalin and was progressively stripped of his positions, expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. From abroad, he continued to write, organize, and denounce Stalin's regime as a betrayal of the revolution. Stalin's response was systematic extermination. During the Great Purge of 1936-1938, virtually every surviving Old Bolshevik who had been associated with Trotsky was executed or sent to die in the Gulag. Trotsky's children were targeted: one son died under suspicious circumstances in Paris, another perished in a labor camp. In May 1940, a group of Stalinist agents led by the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros machine-gunned Trotsky's bedroom in Coyoacan. He survived only because he and his wife had rolled under the bed. Mercader, a Spanish communist who had been recruited and trained by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, spent months cultivating access to Trotsky's household by posing as a sympathetic Belgian businessman. After the assassination, he was beaten nearly to death by Trotsky's guards and served 20 years in a Mexican prison. Upon release, he moved to Cuba and then the Soviet Union, where he received the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. Trotsky's murder eliminated the last credible alternative to Stalinist orthodoxy within the communist movement and ensured that the Fourth International he had founded would remain a marginal force in global politics.