August 21, 1940- On this day Leon Trotsky died from wounds he suffered in an assassination attempt, the previous day by a Spanish born NKVD (pre-cursor to the KGB) agent Jaime Ramon Mercader in Mexico City. The attack was organized by Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy director of the foreign department of the NKVD. Sudoplatov claimed that, in March 1939, he was ordered by Stalin that “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year.” The previous year Sudoplatov ran an operation that assassinated Yehven Konovalets, head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, in Poland, under orders from Stalin.
Two previous attempts to kill Trotsky had failed, one in March 1939 and one in May 1940. A new plan was hatched to send a lone assassin against Trotsky. Mercader, who had been recruited by the NKVD during the Spanish Civil War, gained access to Trotsky through his lover Sylvia Ageloff, a confidante of the former Bolshevik leader, and posed as an admirer. On 20 August 1940, Mercader was alone with Trotsky in his study under the pretext of showing him a document. Mercader struck Trotsky from behind and fatally wounded him on the head with an ice axe while Trotsky was looking at the document.
The blow failed to kill Trotsky, and he got up and grappled with Mercader. Hearing the struggle Trotsky’s guards burst into the room and beat Mercader nearly to death. Mercader was handed over to the police and Trotsky was taken to a hospital and operated on but died the next day as a result of severe brain injuries. During his trial, Mercader recounted the assassination, “I laid my raincoat on the table in such a way as to be able to remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head.” Mercader was later convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was released from prison in 1960 and was presented with the USSR’s highest decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union, personally by Alexander Shelepin, the head of the KGB.
Trotsky’s assassination, while remembered for its brutality, was not the last time the Kremlin had political enemies or other problematic individuals abroad assassinated. In 1955 a KGB asset Bohdan Stashynsky poisoned prominent Ukrainian nationalist figure Stepan Bandera with cyanide gas in Munich, under orders from Soviet KGB head Alexander Shelepin and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. In 1987 Bulgarian dissident and defector Georgi Markov was killed with a ricin-tipped umbrella most likely by a KGB assassin while walking on London’s Waterloo Bridge. The 1981 assassination attempt against Polish Pope John Paul II by Turkish-citizen Mehmet Ali Ağca is also believed to have been organized by the KGB and its Bulgarian counterparts, who viewed the Pope as a threat to communist rule in Eastern Europe.
In today’s Russia, directed assassination against Kremlin foes at home and abroad are on the rise once again punctuated most recently by the suspected poisoning of leading Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and the 2018 attack on a former Russian military intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, in the United Kingdom with a high-tech nerve agent. These attacks are not only increasing in their frequency but their brazenness and sophistication, once again proving the power of Stalin’s famous quote, “Death is the solution to all problems. No man, no problem.”
Tragedy and Farce 