Ramón Mercader

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This is a Catalan name. The first family name is Mercader and the second is del Río.
Ramón Mercader
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Born Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río
(1913-02-07)February 7, 1913
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Died Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist.
Havana, Cuba
Resting place Kuntsevo Cemetery, Moscow, Russia
Other names Jacques Mornard, Frank Jacson
Occupation NKVD agent
Criminal penalty 20 years imprisonment
Spouse(s) Roguelia Mendoza
Parent(s) Pau Mercader i Marina (father)
Eustaquia María Caridad del Río Hernández (mother)
Conviction(s) Murder

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río (February 7, 1914[1] – October 18, 1978)[2] was a Spanish communist and Soviet agent[3] who assassinated the Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky in 1940, in Mexico. He served 20 years in Mexican prison for the murder. Joseph Stalin presented him with an Order of Lenin in absentia. Mercader was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union after his release in 1961.

Life

Mercader was born in 1913 in Barcelona to Eustaquia María Caridad del Río Hernández (b. 1892), the daughter of a Cantabrian merchant who had become affluent in Spanish Cuba, and Pau Mercader i Marina (b. 1885), the son of a Catalan textiles industrialist from Badalona. Mercader grew up in France with his mother after their divorce. Caridad was an ardent Communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and served in the Soviet international underground. As a young man, Ramón 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 coalition Popular Front won in the elections of that year. During the Spanish Civil War, Mercader was recruited by NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) officer Nahum Eitingon and trained in Moscow as a Soviet agent.[4]

His half-sister, the actress María Mercader, was 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[5] relates how English communist David Crook, ostensibly a volunteer for the Republican side, was sent to Albacete where he was taught Spanish[6] and also given a crash course in surveillance techniques by Ramón Mercader.[7] Crook then, 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.[7]

Assassination of Trotsky

In 1938, while he was a student at the Sorbonne, Mercader, with the help of the NKVD agent Mark Zborowski, befriended Sylvia Ageloff, a young Jewish American intellectual from Brooklyn and a confidante of Trotsky in Paris, and assumed the identity "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."[8] 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 which had 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.[8][9] Mercader claimed to Ageloff that he purchased forged documents to avoid military service.

In October 1939, Mercader moved to Mexico City and persuaded Ageloff to join him there. The Russian Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky was living with his family in Coyoacán, then a village on the southern fringes of Mexico City, after being exiled from the Soviet Union, following the power struggle against Stalin's authority that he lost.

Trotsky had already been the object of an armed attack against the house where he was living, mounted by allegedly Soviet-recruited locals, including the Stalinist muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.[10] 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, Lavrenti Beria, to see Stalin in person. Stalin told them that "if Trotsky is finished the threat will be eliminated" and gave the direct order, “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year."[10] After the attack failed to eliminate Trotsky, a second team was sent, headed by Eitingon, formerly the deputy GPU agent in Spain and also allegedly involved in the kidnap, torture and murder of Andreu Nin, with the plan of using a lone assassin. The team included Mercader and his mother, Caridad.[10] Sudoplatov claimed in his autobiography, Special Tasks, that he personally selected Ramón Mercader for the task of carrying out the assassination.[11]

Through his lover Sylvia Ageloff's access to the Coyoacán house, Mercader, as Jacson, began to meet with Trotsky personally, posing as a sympathiser to his ideas, befriending his guards and doing small favors.[12]

On August 20, 1940, Mercader attacked and fatally wounded Trotsky on the head with an ice axe while the exiled Russian was in his study.[13]

The blow failed to kill Trotsky instantly, who got up and grappled with Mercarder. Hearing the commotion, Trotsky's guards burst in the room and nearly beat Mercader to death, but Trotsky, heavily wounded but still conscious, ordered them to spare his attacker's life and let him speak.[14]

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.[15]

Mercader was turned over by Trotsky's guards to the Mexican authorities, to whom he refused to give his real identity. He would only identify himself as "Jacques Mornard". Mercader claimed to the police he had wanted to marry Ageloff, but Trotsky had forbidden the marriage. He alleged that a violent quarrel with Trotsky had led to him wanting to murder Trotsky. He said:

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...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.[8]

Mercader's true identity was confirmed by the Venona project.[16] In 1940, Ramón Mercader was convicted by the Mexican courts of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Ageloff was initially arrested by the Mexican police as an accomplice, as she had lived together with Mercader on and off for about two years up to the time of the assassination, but charges were quickly dropped.

Release and honors

Shortly after the assassination, Joseph Stalin presented Ramón's mother Caridad with the Order of Lenin for her part in the operation.[17]

After the first few years in prison, Mercader requested to be released on parole, but the request was denied by the Mexican authorities, represented by Dr. Jesús Siordia and the criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón. After almost 20 years in prison, he was released from Mexico City's Palacio de Lecumberri prison on May 6, 1960 and he moved to Havana, Cuba, where Fidel Castro's new revolutionary government welcomed him.

In 1961, Mercader moved to the Soviet Union and was subsequently presented with the country's highest decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union, by the head of the KGB Alexander Shelepin. Later, he divided his time between Cuba and the Soviet Union for the rest of his life.

Ramón Mercader died in Havana in 1978. He is buried under the name "Ramon Ivanovich Lopez" (Рамон Иванович Лопес) in Moscow's Kuntsevo Cemetery.[18] His name still has a place of honour in the Museum of Security Services in Lubyanka Square, Moscow.[2]

Accusations amongst followers

Joseph Hansen, who was, at the time of the assassination, a guard of the Mexican house where Trotsky lived, and subsequently became a leader of the Socialist Workers Party, the main Trotskyist party in the U.S., was accused in the 1970s by the rival Workers' League and its British sister organization, the Workers Revolutionary Party of being "a double agent of the FBI and the GPU," as well as having assisted Mercader to penetrate Trotsky's inner circle of friends and acquaintances.[19] Hansen refuted the charge in a lengthy pamphlet.[20]

Decorations and awards

In popular culture

  • 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 Assassination of Trotsky, a film released in 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, while a Spanish-language documentary, El Asesinato de Trotsky, was co-produced in 2006 by The History Channel and Anima Films, and directed by Argentinian director Matías Gueilburt.[21]
  • The Trotsky assassination is depicted in the film Frida (2002), with Mercader portrayed by Antonio Zava (uncredited) and Trotsky by Geoffrey Rush.[22]
  • 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' novel El hombre que amaba a los perros ("The Man Who Loved Dogs"), Tusquets, Barcelona, 2009, refers to the lives of both Trotsky and Mercader, exploring the motivations and historical context of the assassination.[23]
  • Trotskyist veteran Lillian Pollak depicted her friendship with Mercader, then known as Frank Jacson, and his eventual assassination of Trotsky in her 2008 novel The Sweetest Dream.[24]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Other sources date Mercader's birth on February 7, 1913
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Photograph of Mercader's Gravestone
  3. ↑ res=950DE5D7163EF935A25752C0A96F948260 "The New Trotsky: No Longer a Devil", by Craig R. Whitney, New York Times, January 16, 1989
  4. ↑ "Soviet Readers Finally Told Moscow Had Trotsky Slain", New York Times, January 5, 1989.
  5. ↑ randomhouse.co.nz-authors, Gordon Bowker
  6. ↑ "The Spanish Civil War and the Popular Front", lecture by Ann Talbot, August 2007
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Orwell and the spooks" by Richard Keeble; online International Journal of Radical Mass Media Criticism
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Sayers, Michael, and Albert E. Kahn. The Great Conspiracy against Russia. Second Printing (Paper Edition). London: Collet's Holdings Ltd., 1946, pp. 334-5.
  9. ↑ Hansen, J. "With Trotsky to the End" in Fourth International, Volume I, October 1940, pp. 115-123.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Patenaude, Bertrand Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky, Faber & Faber, London UK, 2009, p. 138
  11. ↑ New York Times, September 28, 1996
  12. ↑ Testimony of Esteban Volkov, grandson of Trotsky, 1988
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ "Forty Years Since Leon Trotsky’s Assassination" Militant International Review, summer 1980, from Marxist.net
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Don Levine, Isaac (1960), The Mind of an Assassin, D1854 Signet Book, pp. 109-110, 173.
  18. ↑ Ramon Mercader at Find a Grave
  19. ↑ International Committee of the Fourth International (1981): How the GPU Murdered Trotsky, 1981, ISBN 0-86151-019-4
  20. ↑ http://www.amazon.com/Healys-Big-Lie-Slander-Campaign/dp/0873486838
  21. ↑ El Mercurio, 12 August, 2007
  22. ↑ "Frida" in IMDBase
  23. ↑ Toda la Literatura review, 2009 (in Spanish)
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

Further reading

  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  • 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.

External links

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