More Facts about Trotsky’s Murderers

The Mind Of An Assassin, by Isaac Don Levine. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 21s. AMONG the many important points made by Nikita Khrushchev to the closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 24 and 25, 1956, was his frank admission in relation to Stalin’s brutal treatment of opponents and especially those who were characterized as Trotskyists.

‘In his “testament”, said Khrushchev, ‘Lenin warned that “Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s October episode was of course not an accident.” But Lenin did not pose the question of their arrest and certainly not their shooting.

‘Or let us take the example of the Trotskyites. At present, after a sufficiently long historical period, we can speak about the fight with the Trotskyites with complete calm and can analyze this matter with sufficient objectivity.

all around Trotsky were people whose origin cannot by any means be traced to bourgeois society. Part of them belonged to the party intelligentsia and a certain part were recruited from among the workers. We can name many individuals who, in their time, joined the Trotskyites; however, these same individuals took an active part in the workers’ movement before the Revolution, during the Socialist October Revolution itself, and also in the consolidation of the victory of this greatest of revolutions. Many of them broke with Trotskyism and returned to Leninist positions. Was it necessary to annihilate such people? We are deeply convinced that, had Lenin lived, such an extreme method would not have been used against any of them.’

Probably few in Communist Party circles in Britain today would care to deny that not only many ‘Trotskyites’ but Trotsky himself fell victim to Stalin’s ‘annihilation’ methods of dealing with political adversaries. The brutal murder of Trotsky and all the meticulous planning which led up to it on that warm summer day of August 21, 1940, in Mexico, remain very much a terrible skeleton in the Stalinist cupboard.

Vv Mercader, alias Jacson, the man who drove the ice-pick into Trotsky’s brain will be released from his prison in Mexico City next August, exactly twenty years after he carried out that foul deed on behalf of his master in the Kremlin. He and other people who were actively implicated in the murder and are alive today constitute a terrible danger to all those bureaucratic elements who cling to Stalinist policy in practice, whilst they mumble pious words about mistakes having been made and comrades posthumously rehabilitated. The Harry Pollitts, Andrew Rothsteins, John Gollancz and John Ross Campbells cannot claim to be cleansed from the crimes of Stalinism.

Interest in this subject is bound to be heightened by the publication on March 25 of a book by American journalist Isaac Don Levine, ‘The Mind of An Assassin’ (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 21s.). It is necessary, however, to treat with great caution the story which is told by Levine. The author is one of a band of reactionary American publicists whose talks are frequently beamed to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by the American State Department. Mr. Levine has a definite object in trying to cash in on the rightful indignation of the Labour movement against Stalinism. He wishes to make use Reviewed by G. HEALY of the crimes of Stalin to whitewash capitalism by implying that Stalinism equals Communism.

He attempts, therefore, to depict the murderer Mercader as the Communist man of the future, a robot in every sense of the word, who plods irresistibly on his foul mission as if guided by some remote-control bureaucrat thousands of miles away. Levine is not concerned with an examination of the historical basis of Stalinism and the parasitic role of the Soviet bureaucracy. He portrays ‘plots and conspiracies’ as if they were the normal mode of conduct in the Communist movement.

Vv From this point of view he is not over-careful in his handling of certain facts. One of his assertions is that Louis Budenz, who for a time in the early 1940s was editor of the New York Daily Worker, was congratulated by the Kremlin for a report which he is supposed to have made to the GPU agent Roberts in New York. This report was to the effect that Trotsky was expelled from Norway because Soviet diplomats in that country were able to produce for the Norwegian government of the day a statement alleged to have been made by the Reverend A. J. Muste that Trotsky had plans for the ‘violent overthrow of the Soviet regime’. This is highly questionable material. At the time Trotsky was in Norway the Soviet government had a fishing trade agreement with the Norwegian government, which was regarded as very important to the economy of that country. To have Trotsky expelled from Norway was not a big job for the Soviet bureaucrats; all they had to do was to threaten the termination of this agreement. There is absolutely no evidence that Muste ever made any report such as Budenz is supposed to have reported.

Levine’s book produces important evidence concerning the background to Trotsky’s assassinatidn, but the credit for this cannot be extended to Levine himself. He has drawn heavily from the writings of others, especially David and Lilia Dallin, who have specialized in exposing a Soviet agent known as Mark Zorin, alias Mark Zborowski, alias Etienne, as he was known in European Trotskyist circles in the years before the war. Etienne was responsible for the murder of Sedov, Trotsky’s son. This man is now serving five years in an American penitentiary, and in his declaration to the FBI he admitted that he was an agent of the GPU, although he denied having carried out the crimes attributed to him. Levine says:

‘Zborowski was tried and convicted on charges of perjury in New York early in December, 1958, receiving the maximum sentence of five years. Although the United States Attorney accused Zborowski of having served the cause of Soviet Russia and international Communism from the very beginning of his adult life, the defendant could not be brought to justice here for his criminal acts committed in France in connection with Stalin’s operations against Trotsky.

‘The first break in the far-flung espionage web around Trotsky, leading to the downfall of Soble and Zborowski, was made by Alexander Orlov, who confided his suspicions ‘to the Dallins. Orlov had learned in Moscow of the reports of the mysterious Etienne, which Stalin cherished on the inside doings in the Trotsky camp.

The source of material in Levine’s book on this matter leaves no doubt that Etienne is a guilty man. Speaking about the death of Leon Sedov, Trotsky’s ‘son, Levine says :

‘Leon Sedov was taken ill with abdominal pains, and had to be rushed to a hospital for an appendectomy. Mrs. Dallin and her good friend Zborowski took elaborate precautions to prevent the NKVD from finding out where Sedov was going to be operated upon. Zborowski ordered an ambulance and accompanied Trotsky’s stricken son to a small hospital in Auteuil, the head of which was a Russian emigre physician. To protect the patient from Stalin’s killers, Zborowski had him register under the name of Martin, posing as a French engineer. The operation was successful and there was steady improvement thereafter, so that the special attending hospital nurse was removed. -‘Then, suddenly, Sedov died. Immediately before his death he was found pajama-clad and in delirium wandering around the corridors of the hospital. The surgeon who had operated upon him was so puzzled by the death that he asked Mrs. Sedov whether her husband had ever tried to commit suicide. .His mother, Natalia, subsequently added what she cailed bizarre details: that the hospital was frequented by pro-Stalinist Russians, that her son had been addressed in Russian by a physician, and that he had been given something to eat in the hours between regular meals.’

The merit of Levine’s book is that it brings together a large body of factual material which proves beyond doubt the identity of Trotsky’s assassin and the fact that he was an agent of Stalin and the GPU. We challenge the London Daily Worker to disprove this material. For instance, Caridad Mercader, the mother of the assassin, is now resident in Paris. She was a key figure in the Soviet GPU’s behind-the-scenes planning of the murder. Immediately after Trotsky died she went to the Soviet Union with her companion Eitingon, the man who was in charge of GPU activity abroad. Incidentally, this man disappeared or was shot during the purge of Beria’s group.

J. R. Campbell’s explanation of the murder of Trotsky, given at the time, was that it was carried out by malcontent Trotskyists. We challenge Mr. Campbell to now come forward and justify this explanation in the’ light of the facts which have been presented.

It will be no use Mr. Campbell claiming that Isaac Don Levine is an agent of the State Department. That is all very well, but what we are concerned with here is an objective appraisal of the facts in Levine’s book.

Vv Perhaps John Gollan would also like to comment now onthe disappearance of Rose Cohen in Moscow during the purge years of 1937-1938. Your silence will not help you for long, gentlemen of King Street. Levine’s book must be answered, not for its author’s sake, but because of the facts he presents regarding Mercader.

Levine has, of course, another purpose in mind in his intermixing of correct facts and reactionary aims. He would like to depict the international Trotskyist movement as _ overrun with Soviet agents and spies. Levine reflects the spy. mania of cold-war McCarthyism. He tries to depict Trotsky as a naive old gentlemen who, whilst he plodded on with his peculiar ideas, was nevertheless blind to the reality of the Stalinist murder-threats.

The method used by Levine is quite consistent in this respect. He is not interested in the historical significance of Trotsky’s political struggle against Stalinism. Indeed he wants to dispute this by obscuring Trotsky’s Marxist method in the fight against Stalin with the impression that spies were crawling all over the Trotskyist movement. There is no doubt that Stalin sent agents of the GPU into Trotskyist organizations. There is no doubt that Etienne, who worked with Mercader, was one of Stalin’s leading agents, but Marxists, and Trotsky was the foremost Marxist, do not consider that a panic reaction is the answer to spies, not only agents of Stalin, but also agents of Scotland Yard and the FBI. The MARCH 26,° 1960 struggle against these vermin is basically a political one. It is a question of programme and an understanding of the class struggle in the construction of the revolutionary party. It is entirely to Trotsky’s credit that he never panicked, but concentrated his attention on the political aspects of Stalinism. In other words his very greatness was that he did the opposite to what Levine believes him to have done. Even when his son lay dying in Paris, Trotsky used the occasion to establish Marxist understanding of such terrible crimes in the minds of revolutionary youth all over the world. His words on the death of Sedov will remain one of the great classics of Marxist writing for all time.

It was within the framework of his political exposure of Stalinism that Trotsky, contrary to what Levine would have us believe, constantly warned about the murderous intentions of Stalin and his agents. The Trotskyist movement all over the world issued declaration after declaration exposing the murderers of Ignace Reis and Rudolph Klement. That is the side of Trotsky and the Fourth International which Levine wants to conceal.

Levine's book should be read by the widest possible number of active workers in the Labour movement. But it must not be taken as the last word. No Marxist can be complacent about Stalinism and its counter-revolutionary role. There are a number of questions which will have to be answered concerning the role played by Etienne and his allies, if he had any, in the world Trotskyist movement—a movement which inevitably must attract intense attention from the agents of the Soviet bureaucacy. The answers will be found in the course of political struggle as well as in a constant checking of a multitude of historical facts brought to light by such people as the Dallins and Isaac Don Levine.