Posted on 09/17/2017 3:54:02 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Weapon used in 1940 assassination to go on display next year – but why did Ramón Mercader, armed with a gun and a dagger, resort to the ice pick?
n the evening of 20 August 1940, a man known as Frank Jacson called at a large house in the suburbs of Mexico City, and asked to see the ‘Old Man’ – as everyone called its celebrated resident, Leon Trotsky.
Red Famine by Anne Applebaum review – did Stalin deliberately let Ukraine starve? A vivid account exposes the myths of the catastrophic Ukrainian famine of 1932-3 Read more A few minutes later, the tip of the axe was buried more than two inches into Trotsky’s skull, becoming arguably the world’s most infamous murder weapon.
The axe was fleetingly displayed at a police press conference, but then disappeared for more than six decades.
Next year, however, the bloodstained relic will go on public display at Washington’s International Spy Museum, which will reopen in a new building to accommodate thousands of other artefacts that have emerged from the shadows.
The story of the ice axe is a convoluted one, befitting the extraordinary and macabre story of the Trotsky assassination. After the 1940 press conference, it was stored in a Mexico City evidence room for several years until it was checked out by a secret police officer, Alfredo Salas, who argued he wanted to preserve it for posterity. He passed it on his daughter, Ana Alicia, who kept it under her bed for 40 years until deciding to put it up for sale in 2005.
Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, offered to give blood for a DNA test – but only on condition that Salas donated the weapon to the museum at Trotsky’s house, preserved intact from the time of the murder. Salas rejected the deal.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Only good thing Stalin ever did.
(Politburo awkward silence, much clearing of throats)
Ewwwwww.
Dead commie = Good commie.
Trotsky, had he beaten out Stalin for power would have been much more dangerous, because he was focused on World Revolution.
True that.
he was the turd who basically built the “Red Army”, wasn’t he?
Exactly.
Saul Alinsky is a continuation of the Trotsky line.
As are the Antifa, Black Lives Matter and Occupy of today.
Trotsky and his wife
Julius Rosenberg may have been involved in the assignation.
I suppose that's one way of looking at it.
I'm not up on the bloodthirstiness of Stalin v. Trotsky.
OTOH, Trotsky would have stirred up trouble on the Southern border during the WWII, trying to relive his WWI "achievement".
Stalin even told Trotsky the wrong date of Lenin’s funeral so Trotsky couldn’t even make it.
Gee, in that picture Trotsky looks like he would fit right in with today’s liberal college professors.
based on what?
Stalin wasn’t into the “Internationalist” thing. His goals were more along the lines of traditional Russian imperialism.
I can’t remember the places I read it, maybe some Venona papers. Rosenberg drove to Mexico for some “project” for the Party.
The pickaxe was supposed to do the job silently so as to facilitate the assassin’s escape past Trotsky’s guards afterwards, but the assassin’s nervousness caused him to flip the pickaxe the wrong way prior to striking.
Had he hit Trotsky with the pointed end, he would have killed him instantly; instead he struck him with the blunt, wide edge, fracturing his skull instead and allowing Trotsky to fight back and scream for help.
I don’t know if Trotsky would have been as ruthless and paranoid as Stalin in terms of killing so many tens of millions of his own citizens; but Trotsky already had his hands caked with the blood of millions who died during the revolution and under Lenin.
Let’s give him his due in one regard; as a military commander he was responsible for winning the civil war. His leadership abilities far exceeded Stalin’s, hence the latter’s hatred of him. Lenin - with Trotsky’s aid, had prepared to sideline Stalin from the Party leadership before his death, but his repeated strokes and rapidly failing health interfered before the plan could be implemented. Stalin had manouvered himself (and his loyalists) into becoming Lenin’s ‘caretakers’ as Lenin’s health declined.
Trotsky, had he somehow risen to the top, would indeed have been internationally far more dangerous than the more cautious Stalin ...
Then Stalin later on killed the loyalists.
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