Leon Trotsky

Struck down on 20 August 1940 in Mexico City by Ramon Mercader wielding an ice axe; the exiled revolutionary died the next day.

Overview

Trotsky, co-leader of October 1917 and founder of the Red Army, had been expelled by Stalin, deported, and hunted across the world, settling under guard in Coyoacan. Mercader, a Spanish communist recruited by the NKVD under a false identity and a staged romance with Trotsky secretary, was admitted as a confidant of the household. He struck Trotsky in the head with a concealed mountaineering pickaxe during a discussion of an article; Trotsky fought back and died in hospital the next day. Mercader served twenty years in a Mexican prison, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union after his release, and was unmasked definitively only decades later. The killing remains the emblem of Stalin reach against his enemies, and of the murderous logic of the purges abroad.