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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 35, 31 August 1940, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Leon Trotsky predicted that Stalin’s GPU would arrange for the assassins to label themselves as “Trotskyists” – just as the GPU’s agent who murdered Trotsky is now attempting to do.
For the express purpose of making this prediction, Trotsky invited the press to his home on August 6 – just two weeks before he was murdered.
The two chief figures who organized the May 24 attempt to kill Trotsky were already known then: David Serrano, member of the Political Buro of the Communist Party of Mexico, seized and arrested by the police and now awaiting trial; and David Alfaro Siqueiros, a Stalinist of fifteen years standing, president of the Mexican equivalent to the Abraham Lincoln Battalion (Spanish Civil war veterans), for whom the Mexican police are seeking. In addition nine other Stalinists are awaiting trial, among them Serrano’s wife; these nine have admitted their complicity.
Here is what Trotsky told the reporters August 6. We quote verbatim from El Universal, Mexico City daily, August 7:
“The object of my invitation to the press”, said Trotsky, “is in order to point out to the press the new myth that the GPU is concocting in Mexico. It will appear that the GPU desires to convince humanity that David Alfaro Siqueiros is my agent. And that by my initiative he organized the assault! What preoccupies me most is the attempt of the GPU to revive the theory of self-assault, a thing which is very difficult since the body of Robert Sheldon Harte (Trotsky’s secretary, murdered by the May 24th assailants) has been found and since the confessions of those arrested.
“But the GPU has in its hands Siqueiros and, through the lawyer Pavon Flores, acting as intermediary, they have hold of David Serrano. Serrano was six years in Moscow, from where he was sent to Spain, and nobody goes out of Russia without the authorization of the GPU. Serrano participated in Spain as an agent of the GPU and came as a high agent of that body to Mexico. That is the reason why he entered the Political Buro of the Central Committee of the Mexican Communist Party ...
“It is very important for these gentlemen to throw all the blame on Siqueiros and for them to say that everything was organized by him.”
Trotsky concluded the press interview of August 6 with the following predictions:
“Will not the GPU demand of Siqueiros, under pain of death, that tomorrow he declares himself to have been secretly a Trotskyist? Will not Siqueiros declare that he killed Bob Harte in the course of a ‘self-assault’ (i.e., a staged affair)? Will not David Serrano confess that he has been simply an agent of the Dies Committee for the organization of political assassinations? Isn’t El Popular (Toledano’s organ) already preparing an editorial article on the same theme? We know in advance its style of patriotic indignation! Well, let them try it! Moscow has had for a long time its classical system for affairs of this kind. We await with serenity the new intrigue. We shall help the investigation to discover the logic of this masquerade.”
This “classical system” is now being followed by the GPU assassin who murdered Trotsky. He, too, labels himself “Trotskyite”. At what moment the blow would fall, Trotsky could not know. But the alibi of the assassin, he predicted in advance.
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Last updated on 18 August 2020