, ON THE RELEASE OF LEON TROTSKY'S MURDERER
Leon Trotsky's murderer has been freed twenty years after he committed his crime, and has left Mexico for Czechoslovakia, with a passport issued by the Czechoslovak authorities in the name of Vandendrescht, one of the alleged names of Mornard.
Stalins sunder ar Tepression of the minering point ie
curred after the monstrous Moscow Trials, the mass purges of Soviet and foreign communists in the USSR, the Stalinists' bloody repression of revolutionaries in Spain, and the murders and suspicious deaths of oppositional communists (among them Ignace Reiss, Rudolf Klement, and Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son). It occurred a few weeks after an unsuccessful attempt on Trotsky's life committed in Mexico by notorious Stalinists, among them the painter Alfaro Siqueiros.
Politically, there was no doubt that the crime had been ordered by Stalin.
In the Mexican court, the murderer, who had never been a member of a section of the Fourth International or of any oppositional communist organization, pleaded that he had been a Trotskyist disillusioned by the counterrevolutionary activity which Trotsky wanted to make him carry out: by raking up again the theme that the GPU had forced upon the accused men, in their "confessions" at the Moscow Trials, the murderer brought a new proof concerning the instigators of the crime. As a result of the testimony given there, the court rejected the explanation given by the murderer.
But at this trial, in 1943, the exact identity of Mornard had not yet been determined. And so his links with the services of the NK VD could not be determined in a juridically unquestionable way. It must not be forgotten that this period in the war was scarcely propitious to the search for the demonstration of truth. It is sufficient to recall that during this period the US authorities prevented the publication of Trotsky's book, Stalin.
Since that time the Mexican authorities have continued their researches, whose results, communicated to writers like Gorkin and Isaac Don Levine, were brought by them
54 to the attention of the public. Photographs, fingerprints, enabled them to determine, beyond any possible question, that Mornard's real name is Ramón Mercader del Río, that he was a member of the Spanish Communist Party, that his mother, Caridad Mercader, was an agent of the special services of the NK VD, friend of its top chief, General Leonid Eitingon, and that Caridad Mercader and Eitingon precipitately fled Mexico on the very day of Trotsky's murder. We may point out that General Eitingon was liquidated at the same time as Beria, after Stalin': death.
We leave aside the testimony of Enrique Castro Delgado, former member of the Political Bureau of the Spanish C P, who declares that, in conversations at Moscow during the war, Caridad Mercader told him that she had had her sou used by the NK VD, that he was the Mornard who had killed Trotsky, and that for this he had been decorated with the Order of the Red Flag. We have no doubt of the veracity of the testimony of Castro Delgado-all the more so in that Caridad Mercader, upon the freeing of the alleged Mornard, dodged the questions of Paris journalists and disappeared from her home.
The data collected by the very source of the crime.
But one new fact has just been added—one which is, il might be said, the authentic signature of the instigators crime. Mornard remained silent during twenty years of prison; they needed to be certain that he would remain silent once he was free. In order to emerge withut any scandal from prison and disappear, he obtained a passport from the Czechoslovak autorities. They had no administrative reason for showing a generosity without precedent — and probably without a future — to a person who had never claimed to be a citizen of their country. There is only one serious and unquestionable explanation. By issuing a genuine passport to the alleged Mornard or Vandendrescht, they avoided any public appearance of the Soviet authorities, desirous of blurring the traces of committed by Ramon Mercader twenty years ago at Stalin's order.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
What interests us is not the fate that they are keeping in reserve for their agent, but historical truth.
At the XXth Congress of the CP of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev admitted part of the crimes of Stalin. But the greatest names of the October Revolution and of the Communist International — Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rakovsky — have never been rehabilitated, and now the Soviet government has just shown that it is being watchful lest the truth about Trotsky's murder be
To excuse himself for his obedience to Stalin's criminal orders for many years, Khrushchev declared that any resistance to Stalin would have been repressed and the people woald not have understood. Strange justifications for someone who claims lo be a communist leader, to be afraid of repression and not to be immediately understood by the masses! But today, now that he no longer fears repression and can make himself understood by the masses, he wants to prevent the truth from being known about the murder of the man who was the soul of the Soviet revolutionaries' resistance to the strangling of workers' democracy by Stalin.
Thus the Czechoslovak passport issued to Ramón Mercader not only confirms the fact that it was Stalin who ordered the murder of Trotsky, but also reveals that the Moscow bureaucracy, now "liberal," takes over the responsibility for Stalin's crime against the companion of Lenin, the organizer of the Red Army, the champion of Bolshevism in its struggle against rising Stalinism.
The enormous edifice of lies erected by Stalin quickly collapsed a short time after his death. The ruses, the petty devices, the lies by omission and by half-truths, used by the "liberal" bureaucrats, will be equally powerless to stop the forward drive of Soviet society. Lenin will be the tolal denunciation of Stalinist crimes and the reëstablishment of Soviet democracy.
THE INTERNATIONAL SECRETARIIAT OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL May 1960