The many attempts to assassinate Trotsky

Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in the house in Mexico City where his grandfather was murdered in 1940 with an ice-pick. Volkov had grown up in that house surrounded by 20-foot garden walls and watchtowers with slits in them for machine-guns. The protection was no defence against Trotsky’s eventual assassin, the Spanish-born Stalinist Ramón Mercader, who very ably infiltrated Trotsky’s Mexico circle and, on 20 August, struck the revolutionary on the front of his head with that gruesome weapon. Trotsky bellowed in pain but managed to fend off his assailant before collapsing. His bodyguards hurried in and beat off the intruder; Trotsky was rushed to hospital, where he died the following day.

Almost all of Trotsky’s relatives were afterwards murdered by Stalin. ‘I am the only person in my family to reach my age,’ Volkov said to me with some pride. After Lenin, Trotsky was the most important leader of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. A hero to the Russian masses, he held very decided views about communist strategy, and became fiercely opposed to Stalinist tyranny. The walrus-moustached vozhd (leader) had sabotaged the workers’ revolution by confining it to one country, Trotsky believed; in his view Stalin was ‘an outstanding mediocrity’.

The Man Who Loved Dogs, by the Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura, is a long (really too long) thriller about Mexico’s most famous assassination case. Having been jailed by the Mexican authorities for 20 years on a murder charge, in 1960 Ramón Mercader went to live in Fidel’s revolutionary Havana. A year later, in 1961, he transferred to Moscow, where the Khrushchev regime declared him a hero of the people (even though Khrushchev had earlier denounced Stalin as a mass-murderer).