Ramón Mercader
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Ramón Mercader | |
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| Born | February 7, 1914 Barcelona, Spain |
| Died | October 18, 1978 Havana, Cuba |
Jaume Ramon Mercader del Riu Hernández (February 7, 1914 – October 18, 1978) was a Catalan Communist who served as a foreign agent of the NKVD during Joseph Stalin's time as ruler of the Soviet Union. In that role, he became famous as the assassin of Stalin's great rival, Leon Trotsky.
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[edit] Life
Mercader was born in 1914 in Barcelona, but spent much of his youth in France with his mother, Eustacia María Caridad del Río Hernández, after she separated from his father, Don Pablo Mercader Marina. As a young man, he 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 the democratic election.
By this time, his mother had become a Soviet agent herself, and Ramón followed in her footsteps, traveling to Moscow shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to train in the arts of sabotage, guerrilla warfare and assassination. He was given the codename Gnome by his superiors.
Mercader's superiors at the NKVD selected him to assassinate Trotsky, who had been forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1929, after losing a power struggle to Stalin, but who had continued to antagonize the Soviet leader with his writings and political activities in exile. In October 1939, Mercader slipped into Mexico with a fake passport identifying him as Frank Jacson [sic], a Canadian citizen.
[edit] Assassination Efforts
A first assassination attempt against Trotsky had occurred in Mexico City on May 24, 1940. This first attack was led by GPU agent Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich; some Trotskyist sources indicate that Mercader's mother was closely involved with this attempt as well.[1]
After this first attempt, Mercader, who had avoided raising suspicion during the May 1940 attack, befriended an unmarried secretary of Trotsky's. Through her, he began to meet with Trotsky personally, in the guise of a Canadian supporter of Trotsky's ideas. On August 20 the same year, Mercader fatally wounded Trotsky with an ice axe in his study at his home in Coyoacán (then a village on the southern fringes of Mexico City)[2]. Trotsky's guards burst in and nearly killed Mercader, but their leader ordered them to spare his life, yelling, "Do not kill him! This man has a story to tell."
He was turned over to the Mexican authorities, to whom he refused to give up his real identity. Nevertheless, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison. It was not until August 1953 that his true identity was discovered, and his NKVD connections were not revealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union.
[edit] Release and honors
After the first few years in prison, he requested release on parole, which was denied by Dr. Jesús Siordia and criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón. He was eventually released from Mexico City's Palacio de Lecumberri prison on May 6, 1960 and moved to Havana, where Fidel Castro's new revolutionary government welcomed him. In 1961, he moved to the USSR and was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal — the country's highest decoration — one of only eight non-Soviet citizens to receive the award. He split his time between Cuba and the USSR for the rest of his life, revered by the KGB (the successor to the NKVD), and died in Havana in 1978.
He is buried (under the name of Ramón Ivanovich López) in Moscow's Kuntsevo Cemetery and has a place of honor in the KGB museum in the Russian capital.
[edit] The Manchurian Candidate
The sleeper assassin in the novel and film The Manchurian Candidate is named Raymond. He has been programmed by his mother, a Soviet agent, to follow orders unflinchingly.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Walsh, Lynn (1980). Forty years since Leon Trotsky's assassination Militant International Review. Summer.
- ^ Trotsky murder weapon may have been found (archive link, was dead; history), CNN, July 11, 2005
