During his early involvement in Russian socialist politics, Trotsky clashed with Vladimir Lenin over how a revolutionary party should be organized (such clashes would later serve Stalin well when he depicted Trotsky as hostile to Lenin’s ideas). The remainder of his life, one can say, without exaggeration, was based around a single, ultimate goal: worldwide workers’ revolution. At the age of eighteen, he enthusiastically embraced Marxism. Trotsky’s struggle against Stalin and Stalinism, the subject of this article, was a crucial part of his life’s final decade.īorn Leon Davidovich Bronstein to a family of Jewish farmers in Ukraine in 1879, Trotsky came of age among the revolutionary movements operating in the ultra-repressive atmosphere of the Russian Empire. From the fictionalized version in Unforgiving Years, the excellent novel by Victor Serge, his one-time comrade, to the 1972 movie, The Assassination of Trotsky, where Richard Burton portrayed him, the lurid details of Trotsky’s death have often commanded more attention than his extraordinary life. Mercader’s vile act closed the long, bitter conflict between the two men. With his nemesis murdered and Mercader, the murderer, denying any Soviet involvement (he would eventually serve 20 years in a Mexican prison), Stalin could feel a deep satisfaction. The individual, who, more than any other, symbolized opposition to Stalinism, had been eliminated. Trotsky prevented Mercader from inflicting another, fatal blow and battled for his life until his bodyguards arrived. With Mercader beaten unconscious and the police called, he collapsed into the arms of his wife, Natalia Sedova. The next day, Trotsky succumbed to his wounds, dead at the age of 60. The wound inflicted was three inches deep. Reeling, the old revolutionary found the strength to fight back against the assassin. As Trotsky leaned over his desk, Mercader viciously struck him on the right side of the head with a pickax, its handle cut down to hide it more easily under a raincoat. On the afternoon of August 20, 1940, Ramón Mercader, a young Spaniard in the hire of the GPU, Joseph Stalin’s secret police, seized the moment. Under the alias of Canadian businessman “Frank Jacson,” he had infiltrated Leon Trotsky’s household in Coyoácan, a borough of Mexico City, several months earlier.
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