Source: The Militant, Vol. 10 No. 33, 17 August 1946, p. 7.
Transcription/Editing/HTML Markup: 2021 by Einde O’Callaghan.
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(Twelfth in a series on the Moscow Trials and their signified)
Throughout the Moscow Trials, Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov were named by Stalin’s frame-up machine as the principal defendants. This fact was of sinister significance. It meant both these great revolutionaries had been marked for assassination. Stalin intended to cap the bloody edifice of the Moscow Trials with their bodies.
The GPU got Leon Sedov February 16, 1938, in a Paris hospital. He was so well on the way to recovery from an operation that the hospital left him unattended a short while. A few hours later he was found wandering in the corridors in a delirium that astounded the surgeons. He died without recovering from this mysterious delirium.
Stalin’s professional killers had tracked Sedov for months, stole his letters, tapped his telephone and even rented an apartment next to his. At least one previous attempt on his life had failed, according to facts established by French and Swiss authorities. Undoubtedly the GPU had succeeded in dogging him to the hospital despite the efforts to get him there secretly.
Stalin’s professional killers now began closing in on Trotsky. The Militant of April 16, 1938, (then called the Socialist Appeal) reported that “Mink, well-known GPU Assassin, Is en route to Mexico.” “Trotsky’s Life is Menaced!”
The contest was completely unequal. Stalin had a vast government apparatus. He had the most ruthless, powerful secret police in the world. He had national organizations ready to carry out his bidding. He had unlimited funds. He had the choice of a number of variants. He could try poison, machine guns, hand grenades, mines, or even a bomb from an airplane. If one means failed, he could try another. He could choose the time.
Trotsky on the other hand could find exile only in Mexico. He lived in poverty. His followers were few and lacked finances. Nevertheless, Trotsky organized the best possible defense under the conditions. He was a fighter to the marrow of his bones.
Step by step, the GPU inched its preparations forward. The Stalinist-controlled officials in the Mexican unions began a rabid campaign against Trotsky. They slandered the founder and defender of the first workers’ state in history. Refusing to recognize the right of asylum, they called on the government to throw him out of Mexico. Lombardo Toledano led the pack.
They went so far as to accuse Trotsky of meddling in Mexican affairs. This drew a sharp rebuke from Cardenas, the president of Mexico, but the campaign continued. The official organ of the Mexican Stalinists called for “Death To Trotsky!”
When Trotsky pointed out that this campaign was simply preparation for an attempt to murder him, the Stalinist press screamed that the founder of the Red Army was suffering from a “persecution complex!”
On May 24, 1940, the GPU struck. They succeeded in entering the guarded home early in the morning. A gang dressed as Mexican police, headed by the well-known artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, over-powered the police detail. While part of the gang placed bursts of machine gun fire at the rooms of the guards, others went directly to the bedroom of Trotsky and his wife Natalia.
They directed a cross-fire of machine gun slugs into the beds of Trotsky and Natalia. But the old couple had awakened at the shots in the patio. They lay flattened on the floor in a corner while the assassins fired into the room.
Then as the assassins left, they tossed incendiary bombs. They kidnapped the guard on duty, Robert Sheldon Harte, a member of the New York local of the Socialist Workers Party.
A month later the police found Harte in a shallow grave covered with lime. The GPU assassins had fired two bullets into the youth’s head and buried him in the cellar of a cabin they had rented in the mountains nearby.
The Stalinist press immediately set up a howl that the murderous attempt on Trotsky’s life had been organized – by Trotsky himself! They called it “international blackmail.”
But the Mexican police succeeded in discovering the facts. Trotsky named David Alfaro Siqueiros as one of his possible assailants. Siqueiros went into hiding. Later when he was apprehended, he admitted leading the assault.
He was never punished. GPU gold goes far. The latest report from Mexico is that Siqueiros has made formal application to become a member of the Mexican Communist Party. This simply means he is no longer useful in the secret GPU apparatus.
The Mexican police soon arrested most of the members of the gang. The bulk of them were well-known members of the Mexican Communist Party! Two Stalinist women had rented lodgings near Trotsky’s home to worm information from the police detail. One of these women was the wife of David Serrano, a leading figure of the Communist Party of Mexico. Pavon Flores, member of the Central Committee of the Mexican CP, was detailed to defend these Stalinists in court.
Trotsky predicted that the Stalinist murder machine would make another attempt. What means they would use could not be predicted, of course.
Back in 1938 the Stalinists had succeeded in planting an agent among the Trotskyists. He went by the name of Jacson. Although he never joined the Fourth International he succeeded in establishing himself as a sympathizer through a device sucess-fully used by Czar’s Okhrana against the Bolsheviks of Lenin’s day. He married a devoted follower of Trotsky and lived as her husband. Through this treacherous means Jacson was able finally to gain entry to the Trotsky household.
On August 20, 1940, he brought an article he had written to Trotsky. Always ready to help a younger person who indicated interest in political questions, Trotsky agreed to give his opinion. As the great revolutionary leader sat down to read the article, Jacson raised a pick-axe high in the air and buried its point in Trotsky’s brain.
Even with this mortal wound, Trotsky still fought with all his energy. When the guards seized Jacson. Trotsky asked them not to kill the assassin. He could better expose Stalinism alive than dead.
On August 21, 1940, Trotsky died from the blow that had been ordered by the monster in the Kremlin.
Jacson had written a “confession” which the police found in his pocket. The GPU had prepared this in order to throw the blame for Trotsky’s death on Trotsky himself in case Jacson was killed. This “confession” like the “confessions” in the Moscow Trials is the most damning evidence of the GPU’s guilt.
It follows the identical pattern of the “confessions” in the Moscow frame-ups. Jacson claims as did Zinoviev, Kamenev and the others that he became a “devoted disciple” of Trotsky, He then claims the Fourth International ordered him to go to Mexico. Here a variant appears. In the Moscow Trials, these “devoted disciples” who had spent years cursing Trotsky were taken immediately to see the head of the Fourth International when they went abroad. But Jacson was told, he says, “I must remain some distance from the house in Coyoacan in order to call no attention upon me.” This was actually how Jacson acted – he stayed away from the house, even while his wife visited Trotsky.
Then like the Moscow defendants who confessed according to GPU blueprints, Jacson was filled with “disillusionment” and the “greatest contempt for this man.”
Like the Moscow defendants “it was proposed to me that I go to Russia in order to organize there a series of attempts against different persons and in the first place against Stalin.” The very wording of the Moscow “confessions” which the Dewey Commission proved were frame-ups!
How was Jacson to get across the vigilantly guarded borders of the Soviet Union? Here is what he told the police under questioning: “Trotsky was going to send me to Russia with the object of organizing a new state of things in the USSR. He told me that I must go to Shanghai, on the China Clipper where I would meet other agents in some ship, and together we would cross Manchukuo and arrive in Russia. Our mission was to bring demoralization to the Red Army, commit different acts of sabotage in armament plants and other factories.”
The same confession as the leading defendants in the Moscow trials, even though Jacson is an unknown individual and doesn’t speak a word of Russian! The mythical plane in which Pyatakov flew from Berlin to Oslo has now been converted into the China Clipper!
And then Jacson inevitably reaches the same conclusion as all the defendants in the Moscow trials: “I came to the conclusion that perhaps the Stalinists were not so far from the truth when they accused Trotsky with preoccupying himself with the working class as if it were a dirty sock.” The Moscow defendants were led out and shot by Stalin after thus confessing. Jacson has met a better fate. Held in a Mexican prison, the GPU keeps him supplied with money.
Last updated on: 18 June 2021