Mercader’s mother, Caridad, a Spanish Communist, seems to have become sexually entangled with Eitingon during the Civil War in Spain, when she had worked in the liquidation squads. The NKVD made a practice of securing the passports of members of the International Brigade who had been killed. Mercader was given one which had originally belonged to a Yugoslav-Canadian volunteer killed in action early in the war. It had been reforged under the name of “Jacson’—a curious example of the absurd slips which crop up in these otherwise highly skilled operations, though in fact this attracted no attention.
The plot now reached into the world of outwardly respectable New York Leftism, which at the time was seething with intra-Communist intrigue, and provided a ready recruiting ground for Yezhov’s men. In fact, general supervision of the murder seems to have come under the purview of the permanent Resident of the NKVD, the Soviet Consul-General in New York, Gaik Ovakimian, who was later exposed, in May 1941, and expelled from the country.
The details—some of which are even now a little obscure—do not concern us here. But it is at least interesting to note—in this, as in the great espionage cases of the 1940s and 1950s—how many people, of whom their non-Party acquaintances would have certainly denied any possibility of their joining in such activity, were, from factiousness, revolutionary romanticism, and even idealism, to become willing or half-willing accomplices in a vulgar murder.
These put Mercader in touch with Sylvia Ageloff, an American Trotskyite who was a social worker. He seduced her and entered into a relationship with her which passed for marriage. She was entirely innocent of the planned crime. Through her, he was admitted to the Trotsky household.
Over the next few months, Mercader made five or six visits and, as Sylvia Ageloff’s husband, became reasonably established. On 20 August, he arrived at Trotsky’s villa, ostensibly to have an article he had written criticized. He wore a raincoat. A long dagger was sewn into the lining. A revolver was in his pocket. But his actual weapon, a cut-down ice axe, was in his raincoat pocket. (An NKVD murder—of a Soviet Ambassador—by a strong assassin using an iron bar is reported by the Petrovs.) Mercader was an experienced mountain climber, and his choice of the ice axe as an assassination weapon was based on considerable experience of its use and power. Outside, his car was parked facing the right way for a quick move, and around the corner another car with his mother and an agent was waiting. Eitingon, in yet a third car, was a block or so away.
Trotsky had two revolvers on his desk, and the switch to an alarm system within reach. But as soon as he started to read Mercader’s article, the assassin took out his ice axe and struck him a “tremendous blow” on the head.
Mercader had planned to leave quickly. But the blow was not immediately lethal. Trotsky screamed for “very long, infinitely long,” as Mercader himself put it, “a cry prolonged and agonized, half-scream, half sob,” according to one of the guards—who now rushed in and seized the assassin.
Trotsky was operated on, and survived for more than a day after that, dying on 21 August 1940. He was nearly sixty-two.
Mercader, coming to trial after Siqueiros, seems to have hoped that he, too, might get a light sentence. Perhaps the judge would hold that he had been teaching Trotsky how to climb the Alps. But he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, which he served. Even after his identity had been established by fingerprints, he refused to admit who he was or why he had committed the murder. The official Stalinist version was that he was a disgruntled Trotskyite, and that the NKVD had nothing to do with it.
Mercader’s imprisonment was passed under conditions superior to those prevailing in Soviet prisons and camps. The Mexican Revolution had effected genuine reform. A visitor notes, “His cell, spacious and sunny … with a little open-air patio in front, contained a neat bed and a table loaded with books and magazines.” He was also, under Mexican law, allowed women in his cell. (On his release, he went to Czechoslovakia, moving from that country, when it became too liberal, to Moscow in 1968, though he is later reported in Havana.)
Eitingon and Seilora Mercader left by the prepared escape route. She was received in Moscow by Beria, presented to Stalin, and decorated, for her son and herself.96
And, indeed, the destruction of Stalin’s last great opponent must have caused great satisfaction in the Kremlin. For once, it might have been noted, a prediction of Trotsky’s had been literally fulfilled. He had written of Stalin, in 1936: “He seeks to strike, not at the ideas of his opponent, but at his skull.”
14
Byron
After the Bukharin Trial, Stalin and Yezhov turned their attention to the remnant of opposition at the top.
