Irony or simple malice, The Parliamentary Channel of the National Assembly rebroadcasts a documentary on the assassination of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), the very week when we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the disappearance of his sponsor, Joseph Stalin ( 1878-1953). “Operation Duck”, piloted from Moscow, aimed to complete the elimination of the capital enemy of the “Red Tsar”.
Almighty in October 1917, set back upon the death of Lenin in 1924, become an outcast, in turn expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), deported, expelled and systematically extradited from countries which welcomed, Trotsky, founder of the Red Army, remains a fighter, a militant for the worldwide spread of the proletarian revolution.
In Mexico, where he settled in January 1937 with his wife, Natalia Sedova (1882-1962), in the Casa Azul (“blue house”) of the painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, he wrote and refuted the responsibility for the crimes that imputes Stalin to him, who condemned him to death in absentia. If the American Dewey Commission (April 1937) absolves him, the net tightens and this is where the man in charge of liquidating the hero of 1917 enters the scene.
Coming from the wealthy Catalan bourgeoisie through his father and from the Cuban aristocracy through his mother, Ramon Mercader (1913-1978) shares a maternal devotion to Stalin. Recruited by the NKVD (future KGB), he will be the armed wing of the plot. At the cost of secret agent training where his charm proves his trump card. Nothing is missing from this romantic intrigue: borrowed names, occupations and nationalities… A sentimental idyll with the naive Sylvia Ageloff (1910-1995), a New York Trotskyist militant whom Mercader met in Paris, served to integrate Trotsky’s inner circle .
Benevolence without nuance
Archive images and sober reconstructions thrill the slow convergence of the two destinies, the prey facing the hunter. With, as a bonus, the testimony of Trotsky’s grandson, Sieva – renamed “Esteban” upon his arrival in Mexico in August 1939 – who, returning from school on August 20, 1940, met the defeated and groaning murderer, supervised by the police, even before measuring the crime that had just taken place in the library.
One is surprised, however, at the unqualified benevolence of the brushed portrait of Trotsky. Admittedly, the man hunted down, betrayed, hurt by the disappearance of all his children, some murdered both in the USSR (Sergueï, in October 1937) and in Paris (Lev, in February 1938), arouses empathy, but from there to erase any allusion to his repressive and brutal practice of power…
As one remains perplexed about the personal motivations of Mercader, who assumes without qualms a mission that he pays for with twenty years of imprisonment and which only earned him, released in 1960, a very discreet Soviet recognition, decorated, under another assumed name, of the order of Lenin without being treated as a hero. Mercader-Mornard-Jackson-Lopez is an enigma whose secret remains to be revealed.
