What happened between stalin and trotsky
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Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río assassinated Trotsky. With his action he not only made Lenin’s great intellectual and close friend disappear, but represented the apex of one of the longest dramas of 20th century history: the laconic and enigmatic Russian Revolution consuming itself. This is his story.
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This is the parable of the depersonalization of a human being who blindly and unconditionally followed a doctrine, becoming the walking stick of the bureaucracy that led him. His fable is about manufacturing the most obedient Soviet individual of all, and his understanding, which in the terms of Hannah Arendt, does in no way symbolize the justification for his criminal acts.
For Arendt, the phrase “understand what happened” only means “rationalize what happened,” since the work of the intellectual is to think as objectively as possible, moving away from reproducing discourses that deny the reality of the facts and that process the ideas of forgiveness or forgetfulness
The theoretical company that Arendt manages tries to clarify the institutional cir
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Assassin at Large
Statement by the International Committee of the Fourth International
Security and the Fourth International
News Line, 4 January 1977, Page 7
The man who assassinated Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s co-leader in the Russian Revolution, is still on active service with the murderous Soviet secret police.
Ramon Mercader del Rio, now aged 65, works full-time on the secretariat of the exiled Spanish Communist Party. He was described to us as an aid to Dolores Ibarruri, known as “La Passionaria”. For her part in the murder of POUM leader Andreas Nin in 1928, she has been aptly named “La Assassinaria”.
After his release from a Mexican prison in 1960, Mercader was spirited aboard a plane to Cuba. According to a recently released Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) despatches dated 18 May and 23 May 1960, Mercader left Havana on board the merchant ship Dolinsk for Riga, capital of Latvia.
His first home was in Prague where he joined a small circle of Spanish Stalinists carrying out
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Forgotten Assassin: Ramón Mercader, The Man Who Murdered Leon Trotsky
Lee Harvey Oswald, Gavrilo Princip, Nathuram Godse and Sirhan Sirhan comprise the most famous assassins of political figures in the 20th century. Their murderous acts not only changed history but also guaranteed them everlasting infamy and a kind of immortality.
However, some prominent assassins have become forgotten in the mists of time -- one of them was born 100 years ago in Barcelona, Spain.
Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río, a Spanish communist and agent for Russia’s notorious NKVD intelligence agency, murdered Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940 under orders from Joseph Stalin.
Trotsky, once one of the most powerful and influential members of the Russian Communist Party and founder and leader of the Red Army, grew dismayed by the rising power of Stalin in the 1920s in the wake of Vladimir Lenin’s death. Sensing a dire threat to his supremacy, Stalin removed Trotsky from power in 1927, forced him out of the party and deported him in 1929 to Turkey, where he rem
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