Assassination of Leon Trotsky

Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist Leon Trotsky was assassinated in August 1940 during his exile Mexico City by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader.

After a failed attempt to have Trotsky murdered in March 1939, Stalin assigned the overall organization of implementing the task to the NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov, who, in turn, co-opted Nahum Eitingon.

[1] On 24 May 1940, Trotsky survived a raid on his villa by armed assassins led by the NKVD agent Iosif Grigulevich and Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.

The moment Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head.

When he was released from jail in 1960 and arrived in the USSR in 1961, Leonid Brezhnev signed a sentence to award Mercader the Order of Lenin, the Gold Star, and the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union "for the special deed".