The Mind of an Assassin, by D. Levine

[p021] The Mind of an Assassin. By Isaac Don Levine. Weidenfeld and Nicol- son. 1960. 18s. The Politbureau resolution exitling Leon Trotsky in 1929 spoke of this as a means of discrediting him and making it possible to portray him as a traitor. The uninterrupted analy- sis of the successive mistakes of the Comintern upon which Trotsky im- mediately embarked, and the raising of the standard of the Left Opposi- tion, soon convinced its master that he bad made a mistake. When Trotsky was eventually struck down in his study in August, 1940, that act was the culmination of a series of preparations extending over several years and embracing many countries. It was a tribute to the GPU’s choice of the man for the job, as well as to the technical excellence of its work, for that for almost a de- cade he was able to conceal his identity and origins. Levine draws on a number of already known sources to fit together the story of the operation, fills it out with some account of other activities of the GPU at the time and adds some original material on the assassin’s family background and supposed psy- chological make up. However sus- pect his motives—and those who do not tust their own discernment in such matters, or are not prepared to check up from other quotes, may treat much of the story as invalid simply because it comes from a tainted source—there can be little doubt that the main facts in the case are as Levine states them. The self-styled Belgian, Mornard, alias Jacson (the name on _ his Canadian passport originally issued to an International Brigader), who, with a skilled stroke, drove the al- pine axe into Trotsky’s brain, was, in reality, a Spaniard and a former officer in the Spanish Republican Army. Ramon Mercader, to give him his real name, was thus an authentic ‘anti-fascist’, and it is not difficult to discern in his make-up some of the traits often to be found in the Stalinised intellectual of that time, and since. He was, indeed, a dedicated man; he surrendered him- self completely to the GPU; he per- formed with a lethal weapon and not with a typewriter and put into prac- tice the anti-Trotskyism which, for others, was simply verbal. He was part of an international murder machine devoted to spying on and hunting down _ Stalin’s _ political enemies on the left and defectors from his service. To this end it was necessary to peretrate into the Trot- skyist organization and convincingly play the part of a supporter. Thus the agent Zborowski—later to be picked up and sentenced in the USA —under the pseudonym of Etienne, played a leading role in the Fourth International for many years while betraying his associates, including Trotsky’s son, Sedov, to the GPU assassins and supplying regular in- formation to the Kremlin. When he departed to temporary obscurity in the USA others took over the work, for one can be sure that an organ- ization as experienced as the GPU would always have replacements to hand. In order for Mercader to carry out his task he, too, had to evince an interest in Trotsky’s politics and be- came the lover of an American girl who had access to his household. This required patience and dissimu- 55 Summer Books lation of an exceptional kind: the creation of an artificial personality and its maintenance for some time during an intimate relationship and with a wealth of circumstantial de- tail. To those who came into con- tact with him before the assassina- tion Mercader appeared a colour- less person; but this was clearly part of his act. He was, as Joseph Han- sen, Tiotsky’s chief secretary, put it later, ‘a person of high ability in the kind of work required in such organizations as the Soviet secret police ... he must have been selected after the most careful consideration, observation and testing.’ What does Levine add to this? Indeed, despite the title of the book, its attempt to plumb the mind of Mercader is a failure. Levine tries to make a Freudian type analysis second-hand on the basis of tests carried out by Mexican psychologists during the assassin’s prison life. These lead him to assert that, for Mercader, Trotsky was ‘the symbol . of his father whom he had disowned and hated.’ The assassination was thus the working out of an Oedipus comolex by a ‘happy robot’. Levine switches from Freud to keys pro- vided by the State Department to unlock the allegedly political sym- bols imprisoned in the mind of the assassin; in either case credence is stretched to breaking point. Mercader, it seems plain enough, was the apotheosis of the Stalinist. He was not merely a thug; and a robot would be unpromising material for a psychiatrist. That he was ‘happy’ seems equally questionable. He was in the machine and being in could not extricate himself without risk to his own life and possibly that of members of his family. For 20 years he has had time to mellow and

[p022] 56 reflect in the not too arduous con- fines of a -Mexican prison—doing satisfying work, earning money and with a mistress on call. What his mind is really like as a result of this experience and in the light of what has hapened in the world outside, Levine does not know. Has he, like his once equally dedicated mother, broken with Stalinism? Will he ever spill the beans? Will he become a victim of the machine he once served? Or will he simply relapse unscathed into the obscurity from which his crime has lifted him? The answers to these questions may be fascinating, but they are not par- ticularly important. What is needed, however, is more information about the other crimes of Stalin (against his left opponents) and their perpetra- tors in Europe and America, especi- ally ihe operations of Etienne and his successors. TOM KEMP. Socialist Legality?