Ramón Mercader

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río (born 7 February 1913[1] – 18 October 1978),[2] more commonly known as Ramón Mercader, was a Spanish communist and NKVD agent[3] who assassinated Russian Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940 with an ice axe. He served 20 years in a Mexican prison for the murder. Joseph Stalin presented him with an Order of Lenin in absentia. His mother participated in the preparation of the assassination, waited for Ramon near the house of Trotsky but escaped to Moscow. With the exception of Ramon Mercader all other persons who participated in the preparation of assassination obtained Soviet awards as well. Ramon was not awarded because nobody could learn how he behaved during the trial and how he would behave in prison.[4]

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Mercader and the second or maternal family name is del Río.
Ramón Mercader
Born
Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río

(1913-02-07)7 February 1913
Barcelona, Spain
Died18 October 1978(1978-10-18) (aged 65)
Havana, Cuba
Resting placeKuntsevo Cemetery, Moscow, Russia
Other namesJacques Mornard; Frank Jackson; Ramón Ivánovich López
OccupationWaiter, militiaman, soldier, agent of the NKVD
Spouse(s)Roquelia Mendoza Buenabad
Children3
Parent(s)Caridad Mercader, Pablo Mercader Marina
Conviction(s)Murder
Criminal penalty20 years imprisonment

Mercader was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union after his release in 1961. He divided his time between Cuba and the Soviet Union.

Life

Mercader was born on 7 February, 1913 in Barcelona to Eustaquia (or Eustacia) María Caridad del Río Hernández, the daughter of a Cantabrian merchant who had become affluent in Spanish Cuba, and Pau (or Pablo) Mercader Marina (b. 1885), the son of a Catalan textiles industrialist from Badalona. Mercader grew up in France with his mother after his parents divorced. She was an ardent Communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and served in the Soviet international underground.

As a young man, Mercader embraced Communism, working for leftist organizations in Spain during the mid-1930s. He was briefly imprisoned for his activities, but was released in 1936 when the left-wing Popular Front coalition won in the elections of that year. During the Spanish Civil War, Mercader was recruited by Nahum Eitingon, an officer of the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, an agency preceding the KGB), and trained in Moscow as a Soviet agent.[5]

His cousin, actress María Mercader, became the second wife of Italian film director Vittorio De Sica.

Mercader's contacts with and befriending of Trotskyists began during the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell's biographer Gordon Bowker[6] relates how English communist David Crook, ostensibly a volunteer for the Republican side, was sent to Albacete. He was taught Spanish[7] and also given a crash course in surveillance techniques by Mercader.[8] Crook, on orders from the NKVD, used his job as war reporter for the News Chronicle to spy on Orwell and his Independent Labour Party comrades in the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) militia.[8]

Assassination of Trotsky

In 1938, while a student at the Sorbonne, Mercader, with the help of NKVD agent Mark Zborowski, befriended Sylvia Ageloff, a young Jewish-American intellectual from Brooklyn, New York and a confidante of Trotsky in Paris. Mercader assumed the identity of Jacques Mornard, supposedly the son of a Belgian diplomat.

A year later, Mercader was contacted by a representative of the "Bureau of the Fourth International."[9] Ageloff returned to her native Brooklyn in September that same year, and Mercader joined her, assuming the identity of Canadian Frank Jacson. He was given a passport that originally belonged to a Canadian citizen named Tony Babich, a member of the Spanish Republican Army who died fighting during the Spanish Civil War. Babich's photograph was removed and replaced by one of Mercader.[9][10] Mercader told Ageloff that he had purchased forged documents to avoid military service.

In October 1939, Mercader moved to Mexico City and persuaded Ageloff to join him there. Leon Trotsky was living with his family in Coyoacán, then a village on the southern fringes of Mexico City. He was exiled from the Soviet Union after losing the power struggle against Stalin's rise to authority.

Trotsky had been the subject of an armed attack against his house, mounted by allegedly Soviet-recruited locals, including the Marxist-Leninist muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.[11] The attack was organised and prepared by Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy director of the foreign department of the NKVD. In his memoirs, Sudoplatov claimed that, in March 1939, he had been taken by his chief, Lavrentiy Beria, to see Stalin. Stalin told them that "if Trotsky is finished the threat will be eliminated" and gave the order that "Trotsky should be eliminated within a year."[11]

After that attack failed, a second team was sent, headed by Eitingon, formerly the deputy GPU agent in Spain. He allegedly was involved in the kidnap, torture, and murder of Andreu Nin. The new plan was to send a lone assassin against Trotsky. The team included Mercader and his mother Caridad.[11] Sudoplatov claimed in his autobiography Special Tasks that he selected Ramón Mercader for the task of carrying out the assassination.[12]

Through his lover Sylvia Ageloff's access to the Coyoacán house, Mercader, as Jacson, began to meet with Trotsky, posing as a sympathizer to his ideas, befriending his guards, and doing small favors.[13]

On 20 August 1940, Mercader was alone with Trotsky in his study under the pretext of showing the older man a document. Mercader struck Trotsky from behind and mortally wounded him on the head with an ice axe while the Russian was looking at the document.[14]

The blow failed to kill Trotsky, and he got up and grappled with Mercader. Hearing the commotion, Trotsky's guards burst into the room and beat Mercader nearly to death. Trotsky, deeply wounded but still conscious, ordered them to spare his attacker's life and let him speak.[15]

Caridad and Eitingon were waiting outside the compound in separate cars to provide a getaway, but when Mercader did not return, they left and fled the country.

Trotsky was taken to a hospital in the city and operated on but died the next day as a result of severe brain injuries.[16]

Official copy (dated 1944) of the sentencing decision passed by the Mexican court on Mercader, listed as "Jacques Mornard Vandendresched or Frank Jackson"

Trotsky's guards turned Mercader over to the Mexican authorities, and he refused to acknowledge his true identity. He only identified himself as Jacques Mornard. Mercader claimed to the police that he had wanted to marry Ageloff, but Trotsky had forbidden the marriage. He alleged that a violent quarrel with Trotsky had led to his wanting to murder Trotsky.

He stated:

... instead of finding myself face to face with a political chief who was directing the struggle for the liberation of the working class, I found myself before a man who desired nothing more than to satisfy his needs and desires of vengeance and of hate and who did not utilize the workers' struggle for anything more than a means of hiding his own paltriness and despicable calculations ... It was Trotsky who destroyed my nature, my future and all my affections. He converted me into a man without a name, without country, into an instrument of Trotsky. I was in a blind alley ... Trotsky crushed me in his hands as if I had been paper.[9]

In 1940, Jacques Mornard was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison by the Sixth Criminal Court of Mexico. His true identity as Ramón Mercader eventually was confirmed by the Venona project after the fall of the Soviet Union.[17]

Ageloff was arrested by the Mexican police as an accomplice because she had lived with Mercader, on and off, for about two years up to the time of the assassination. Charges against her eventually were dropped.

Release and honors

Shortly after the assassination, Joseph Stalin presented Mercader's mother Eustaquia Caridad with the Order of Lenin for her part in the operation.[18]

After the first few years in prison, Ramon Mercader requested to be released on parole, but the request was denied by the Mexican authorities. They were represented by Jesús Siordia and the criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón. In 1943 Caridad Mercader applied to Stalin personally for her part in the secret operation to release Ramon Mercader.[19] In 1944 she obtained a permit to leave the USSR. However, contrary to the agreed upon conditions, she not only led the attempt of release of Ramon at a distance, but traveled to Mexico, where she was known if not as the mother of Ramon, but as the organizer of the assassination. That undermined an undercover operation that was being prepared to get Ramón Mercader out of jail.[20] Caridad Mercader's presence proved to be counterproductive, because she improved the life of Ramon in prison most significantly but the Mexican authorities tightened security measures, causing the Soviets to abandon their efforts to release Ramon. Though Caridad reported very important things to the Mexican authorities, Ramon served 20 years and 1 day in prison (including the time under initial investigation and trial) according to the initial trial.[20] Ramón, who according to his brother Luis never shared his mother's passion for the communist cause,[21] never forgave her this interference.[22] After almost 20 years in prison, Mercader was released from Mexico City's Palacio de Lecumberri prison on 6 May 1960. He moved to Havana, Cuba, where Fidel Castro's new socialist government welcomed him.

In 1961, Mercader moved to the Soviet Union and subsequently was presented with the country's highest decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union, personally by Alexander Shelepin, the head of the KGB. He divided his time between Czechoslovakia, from where he traveled to different countries, Cuba, where he was the advisor of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, and the Soviet Union for the rest of his life. He married a Mexican named Rogalia in prison after 1940 and had two children. They were declared his and his wife's adopted children, the biological children of Spanish Republicans, after his death.[23]

Ramón Mercader died in Havana in 1978 of lung cancer. He is buried under the name Ramón Ivanovich Lopez (Рамон Иванович Лопес) in Moscow's Kuntsevo Cemetery.[2] His last words are said to have been: "I hear it always. I hear the scream. I know he's waiting for me on the other side."[24]

Decorations and awards
  • In 1967, West German television presented L.D. Trotzki – Tod im Exil ("L. D. Trotsky - Death in exile"), a play in two parts, directed by August Everding, with Peter Lühr in the role of Trotsky.
  • Joseph Losey directed the film The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) featuring Alain Delon as Frank Jacson/Mercader and Richard Burton as Trotsky.
  • David Ives' play Variations on the Death of Trotsky is a comedy based on Mercader's assassination of Trotsky.
  • A Spanish documentary about Mercader's life, called Asaltar los cielos ("Storm the skies"), was released in 1996.
  • A Spanish-language documentary, El Asesinato de Trotsky, was co-produced in 2006 by The History Channel and Anima Films as a joint US/Argentine production, and directed by Argentinian director Matías Gueilburt.[25]
  • The Trotsky assassination is depicted in the film Frida (2002), with Mercader portrayed by Antonio Zavala Kugler (uncredited) and Trotsky by Geoffrey Rush.[26]
  • Trotskyist veteran Lillian Pollak depicted her friendship with Mercader, then known as Frank Jacson, and the assassination of Trotsky in her self-published 2008 novel The Sweetest Dream.[27]
  • A 2009 novel by U.S. writer Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna, includes an account of Trotsky's assassination by Jacson.
  • Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes' 2009 novel El hombre que amaba a los perros ("The Man Who Loved Dogs") refers to the lives of both Trotsky and Mercader.[28]
  • The 2016 film The Chosen, directed by Antonio Chavarrías and filmed in Mexico, is an account of Trotsky's murder, featuring Alfonso Herrera as Mercader.
  • Trotsky, a 2017 Russian Netflix series, features Konstantin Khabenskiy as Trotsky and Maksim Matveyev as Mercader, referred to in English subtitles as Jackson, a variant of his pseudonym.

See also

References
  1. Other sources date Mercader's birth on 7 February 1914
  2. Photograph of Mercader's Gravestone
  3. "The New Trotsky: No Longer a Devil" by Craig R. Whitney, The New York Times, 16 January 1989
  4. L. Mlechin, P. Guontiev. The state corporation of killers. //Novaya gazeta. 08.2020
  5. "Soviet Readers Finally Told Moscow Had Trotsky Slain", The New York Times, 5 January 1989.
  6. randomhouse.co.nz-authors Gordon Bowker Archived 2015-12-22 at the Wayback Machine biography in Random House website
  7. "The Spanish Civil War and the Popular Front", lecture by Ann Talbot, World Socialist Web Site, August 2007
  8. "The Guardian's Prism revelations, Orwell and the spooks" by Richard Keeble, University of Lincoln, 13 June 2013
  9. Sayers, Michael, and Albert E. Kahn (1946). The Great Conspiracy against Russia. Second Printing (Paper Edition), pp. 334-335. London, UK: Collet's Holdings Ltd.
  10. Hansen, J. (October 1940). "With Trotsky to the end," in Fourth International, volume I, pp. 115-123.
  11. Patenaude, Bertrand (2009). Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky, p. 138. London, UK: Faber & Faber
  12. Bart Barnes (27 September 1996). "Pavel Sudoplatov, 89, dies". The Washington Post
  13. "The fight of the Trotsky family - interview with Esteban Volkov" (1988), In Defence of Marxism website, 21 August 2006
  14. CNN, (11 July 2005). "Trotsky murder weapon may have been found" Archived 2005-09-12 at the Wayback Machine
  15. Deborah Bonello and Ole Alsaker, (20 August 2012). "Trotsky's assassination remembered by his grandson", The Guardian
  16. Lynn Walsh (summer 1980). "Forty Years Since Leon Trotsky's Assassination", Militant International Review
  17. Schwartz, Stephen; Sobell, Morton; Lowenthal, John (2 April 2001). "Three Gentlemen of Venona". The Nation. Retrieved 27 June 2014.
  18. Don Levine, Isaac (1960), The Mind of an Assassin, D1854 Signet Book, pp. 109-110, 173.
  19. The letter to Stalin of Caridad Mercader.
  20. Hernández Sánchez, Fernando (2006). "Jesús Hernández: Pistolero, ministro, espía y renegado". Historia 16 (in Spanish) (368): 78–89. ISSN 0210-6353.
  21. Juárez 2008, p. 107.
  22. Mercader & Sánchez 1990, p. 101–102.
  23. Arrigabalacha ABC (Spain): Moscow traces of a Spaniard who murdered Trotsky.
  24. Borger, Tuckman (13 September 2017). "Bloodstained ice axe used to kill Trotsky emerges after decades in the shadows". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 November 2017.
  25. "Documental argentino revive a León Trotsky" ("Argentine documentary revives Leon Trotsky"), El Mercurio, 12 August 2007 (in Spanish)
  26. "Frida" in IMDBase
  27. Pollak, Lillian. The Sweetest Dream: Love, Lies, & Assassination; iUniverse; May 2008; ISBN 978-0595490691
  28. "El hombre que amaba a los perros" ("The Man Who Loved Dogs") in Toda la Literatura review, 2009 (in Spanish)

Further reading
  • Isaac Don, Levine (September 28, 1959). "Secrets of an Assassin". Life: 104–122. Retrieved 6 March 2013.
  • Cabrera Infante, Guillermo (1983): Tres tristes tigres, Editorial Seix Barral, ISBN 84-322-3016-2.
  • Conquest, Robert (1991): The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-507132-0.
  • Andrew, Christopher; Vasili Mitrokhin (1999): The Sword and the Shield, Basic Books, ISBN 978-0-465-00310-5.
  • Padura Fuentes, Leonardo (2009): El hombre que amaba a los perros, Tusquets Editores (Narrativa), ISBN 978-84-8383-136-6.
  • Jakupi, Gani (2010): Les Amants de Sylvia, Futuropolis, ISBN 978-2-7548-0304-5.
  • Wilmers, Mary-Kay (2010): The Eitingons, Verso, ISBN 978-1-84467-642-2.
  • International Committee of the Fourth International (1981): How the GPU Murdered Trotsky, New Park, ISBN 0-86151-019-4
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