During the afternoon of August 20, 1940, in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacán, Leon Trotsky (b. 1878) was murdered by Ramón Mercader (1914 - 1978). Mercader (alias Jacques Mornard) was a Spanish Communist and a Moscow-trained agent of Joseph Stalin's secret police, the NKVD.
The attached article pertains to how Mercader was able to find out where Trotsky lived, how he was able to gain access to his victim, and how the Mexican prosecution built their case against him.
This article first appeared in 1959, shortly before Mercader was to be set free after having completed his 20-year incarceration within the gray walls of the Lecumberri Penitentiary, where he was constrained in semi-luxurious accommodations, complete with a telephone, silk pajamas, a book collection, newspapers and weekly conjugal visits - all courtesy of the "Worker's Paradise".
Click here to read a 1938 interview with Leon Trotsky.
The historian Henry Steele Commager oddly ranked Karl Marx at number 31 insofar as his impact on the American mind was concerned - click here to understand his reasoning (his pull seems strongest now)...
Additional magazine and newspaper articles about the Cold War may be read on this page.
