Forgotten Assassin: Ramón Mercader, The Man Who Murdered Leon Trotsky

By Palash Ghosh @Gooch700

02/18/13 AT 10:24 AM

Lee Harvey Oswald, Gavrilo Princip, Nathuram Godse and Sirhan Sirhan comprise the most famous
assassins of political figures in the 20th century. Their murderous acts not only changed history but
also guaranteed them everlasting infamy and a kind of immortality.

However, some prominent assassins have become forgotten in the mists of time -- one of them
was born 100 years ago in Barcelona, Spain.

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río, a Spanish communist and agent for Russia’s notorious NKVD
intelligence agency, murdered Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940 under
orders from Joseph Stalin.

Trotsky, once one of the most powerful and influential members of the Russian Communist Party
and founder and leader of the Red Army, grew dismayed by the rising power of Stalin in the 1920s
in the wake of Vladimir Lenin’s death. Sensing a dire threat to his supremacy, Stalin removed
Trotsky from power in 1927, forced him out of the party and deported him in 1929 to Turkey,
where he remained for four years near Istanbul.

After brief (and harried) stays in France and Norway, the heavily guarded Trotsky eventually
moved to Mexico, where he continued to oppose Stalin and his policies -- a stance that marked
him for death.

Trotsky wrote prolifically in Mexico, including a book titled “The Revolution Betrayed,” a vitriolic
attack on Stalinism. (This period coincided with the Great Terror in Russia, whereby Stalin purged
tens of thousands of former communist party members, including sham trials, imprisonment and
execution of many of Trotsky’s former Bolshevik allies.)

However, Trotsky’s years in Mexico were not entirely unpleasant -- he and his family resided in the
Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City, where he became intimate with married painters Diego
Rivera and Frida Kahlo. (Trotsky and Frida even had an affair.)

But Trotsky was living on borrowed time.

Enter Jamie Mercader.

Mercader’s Cuban-born mother, Eustaquia María Caridad del Río Hernández, who raised him
alone in France, was an ardent communist and fanatical Stalinist who fought in the Spanish Civil
War and also worked for the Soviet underground.
Caridad hailed from a wealthy and aristocratic landowning family in Cuba, while her husband, Pau
Mercader, was a rich Catalan industrialist whom she quickly grew bored with and divorced. (As it
turns out, “Mercader” means “merchant” in Catalan.)

Growing up in France, Mercader embraced his mother’s ideology, then worked for various leftist
organizations in Spain and eventually came to the attention of NKVD recruitment officer Nahum
Eitingon, who took him to Moscow to train as a Soviet agent.

Mercader’s road to his fateful encounter with Trotsky took some unexpected turns. While
studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, he met Sylvia Ageloff, an American friend of Trotsky. As a Soviet
spy, Mercader pretended he was Jacques Mornard, the son of a Belgian diplomat and a Trotskyite.
Handsome, well-groomed and fluent in French and English, Mercader made a perfect spy for the
Soviets.

The following year, Mercader followed Ageloff to the U.S., where he assumed the false identity of
a Canadian name Frank Jacson.

By October 1939, Mercader moved (with his now-lover Ageloff) to Mexico City, where Trotsky and
his family were living in exile. Trotsky had already survived prior assassination attempts by other
Soviet agents. One of those agents, a man named Pavel Sudoplatov, claimed in his memoirs that,
upon receiving the directive to kill Trotsky from Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s fearsome chief of state
security, he selected Mercader to carry out the murder of Trotsky.

Using Ageloff as a link, Mercader (as Jacson) befriended Trotsky, pretending to be a sympathizer in
order to put the doomed man at ease.

Trotsky’s trust in Mercader eventually cost him his life -- on Aug. 20, 1940, Mercader attacked his
host with an ice pick, failing to kill him. As Trotsky’s guards seized Mercader, Caridad and Eitingon
(waiting outside in getaway vehicles) fled after Mercader failed to show up. Trotsky reportedly
ordered his bodyguards not to immediately kill Mercader since he could provide answers behind
the conspiracy to assassinate him.

But Trotsky died the next day in the hospital from brain injuries and blood loss.

Under questioning from Mexican police, Mercader claimed to be Jacques Mornard and alleged he
quarreled with Trotsky because the Russian exile refused to bless his impending nuptials with
Ageloff.

Mercader received 20 years in prison, while any charges against Ageloff were dropped.

According to a document written by Nick Lloyd for the Barcelona Metropolitan, Mercader’s true
identity was not revealed until 1952, 12 years into his incarceration, when a Mexican prison guard
overheard him singing a nursery rhyme in perfect Catalan (the language of his native Barcelona).

Upon Mercader’s release from prison in 1960 (after revealing nothing about his involvement in the
conspiracy to kill Trotsky, claiming he acted alone), he was welcomed and feted in Cuba by new
communist dictator Fidel Castro. The following year, he traveled to the Soviet Union, where
Alexander Shelepin, head of the KGB (by then the dominant Russian intelligence agency) honored
Mercader with the Hero of the Soviet Union award, the highest such decoration Moscow offered.

Mercader’s mother, the redoubtable Caridad, would work for the Cuban embassy in Paris until her
death in 1975. Reportedly, she was fond of the luxurious life in France, although politically she
remained a devout Stalinist.

Mercader would subsequently spend the rest of his life shuttling between Havana and Moscow
until his death in Cuba in 1978. He was later buried in the Kuntsevo Cemetery in Moscow.

One year before his death, in 1977, Mercader wished to return to Spain, given that Fascist dictator
Francisco Franco was dead and the Spanish Communist Party was legalized. Santiago Carrillo, then
the general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain, who was seeking to break from Moscow,
offered Mercader a chance to return home but only if he wrote his memoirs and revealed the
identities of all Soviet agents working in Spain as well as their controllers in Moscow.

Mercader, a dedicated Stalinist till the very end, refused.

Trotsky’s grandson, Vsevolod Volkov, who as a boy came home to find his grandfather dying in his
study, wrote many years later: “The plot [to kill Trotsky] proceeded in stages: Stalin, Beria, Eitingon
... Caridad Mercader and her son, the catalan Ramón Mercader (alias Jacson) were the people who
murdered the founder of the Red Army and the comrade-in-arms of Lenin.

……………………………………………………

Ramon Mercader

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río (7 February 1913 – 18 October 1978) was a Spanish communist
who became famous as the murderer of the Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky in 1940, in
Mexico. Declassified archives have shown that he was a Soviet agent.

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.

This name uses Spanish naming customs; the first or paternal family name is Mercader and the
second or maternal family name is del Río.