In August 1940, a man walked into a fortified house in Mexico City carrying a mountaineering ice ax hidden under his raincoat. 20 minutes later, the founder of the Red Army was lying on the floor of his own study, blood pouring from a wound in his skull. The weapon was not chosen by accident. It was chosen because it could be hidden, because it was silent, and because the man holding it had been training for this single moment for almost 3 years. The victim was Leon Trosky, the man who had built
the largest revolutionary army the world had ever seen. And the order to kill him had come from the one person who feared what he represented more than anyone else on Earth, Joseph Stalin. If you want to understand how the Soviet state hunted its own founders across three continents, hit that subscribe button and stay with us because this story is darker than most history books are willing to admit. Leontrosky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on November 7, 1879 in a small farming village in what
is today Ukraine. His parents were Jewish farmers, prosperous enough to send him to school in Odessa where he first encountered the writings of Karl Marx as a teenager. By the age of 18, he had abandoned his studies, joined an underground workers union, and adopted the revolutionary cause that would define the rest of his life. In 1898, the SARS police arrested him for organizing factory workers. He was sentenced to four years of internal exile in Siberia and it was there in the frozen wilderness that he forged the
prison identity he would carry for the rest of his life. The name Trosky was borrowed from one of his jailers written into a forged passport when he escaped in 1902 and fled across Europe. For the next 15 years, he was a stateless agitator moving between London, Paris, Vienna, and New York, writing for revolutionary newspapers and predicting the collapse of the Russian Empire. When that collapse finally came in 1917, Trosky returned to a country in chaos. Within months, he had become chairman of
the Petrorad Soviet, the same position Stalin would later treat as a stepping stone to absolute power. And on the night of October 25, 1917, it was Trosky who personally directed the armed uprising that overthrew the provisional government and handed power to the Bolsheviks. Lenin himself admitted that the October Revolution would not have succeeded without him. But the revolution was only the beginning. The new Soviet government inherited a country with no functioning army, surrounded by hostile foreign powers and
facing civil war on every border. The old imperial Russian army had collapsed. Soldiers were deserting by the hundreds of thousands. Counterrevolutionary forces known as the whites were advancing from the south, the east, and the north. The Bolsheviks had perhaps a few thousand armed volunteers with no officers, no discipline, and no chain of command. In March 1918, Lenin appointed Trosky as people’s commasar for military and naval affairs and gave him a task that almost everyone believed was
impossible. Build an army from nothing. Build it fast and use it to save the revolution. What Trosky did next would change the course of the 20th century. He made a decision so controversial that members of his own party demanded his removal. He recruited former Imperial Russian officers, the very men who had served Thesar, into the new Red Army, tens of thousands of them. He promised them good salaries, good food, and protection for their families. But he also made it clear that betrayal would
not be tolerated. In December 1918, according to documented Soviet military records, Trosky issued an order stating that the family status of every former Tsarist officer must be registered and that any act of treason would result in the arrest of that officer’s wife, parents, and children. It was a brutal system, but it worked. By the end of the Civil War, the Red Army had grown to over 5 million men. It had defeated the White Armies, repelled foreign interventions from 14 nations, and secured the survival of the Soviet
state. Trosky led much of this war from an armored train. He traveled to every major front, delivering speeches to demoralized units, executing deserters, promoting commanders on the spot, and rebuilding shattered divisions within days. Eyewitness accounts described him sleeping only a few hours a night, working through documents by candle light while his train rolled through the steps. He personally signed thousands of military orders during these years, and his speeches at the front were credited
with turning back entire white offensives. By 1922, when the Soviet Union was officially formed, Leon Trosky was the second most powerful man in the country. He sat on the original pilot bureau. He was widely considered Lenin’s natural successor and he had built almost single-handedly the military foundation of the entire Soviet state. Then Lenin died. If you are finding this useful, please drop a like and let us know in the comments which Soviet leader you want covered next because the men
who replaced Trosky would prove even more dangerous than the enemies he had defeated. Lennon’s death in January 1924 triggered a power struggle that Trosky lost almost before it began. His rival was a man he had personally underestimated for years, the general secretary of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin. Where Trosky was a brilliant theorist and a celebrated war leader, Stalin was a patient bureaucrat who had spent years quietly placing his supporters in every key administrative position. By the time Trosky realized
the danger, the party machinery already belonged to Stalin. In 1925, Trosky was removed from his post as commisar of war. In 1927, he was expelled from the Communist Party. In 1928, he was internally exiled to Kazakhstan. And in February 1929, he was deported from the Soviet Union entirely, placed on a steam ship with his wife and son, and dropped on the shores of Turkey. What followed was over a decade of exile that took Trosky from Turkey to France, from France to Norway, and finally to Mexico,
where he was granted political asylum in January 1937. He settled in a house in the Coyoan district of Mexico City, eventually moving to a fortified compound on Avanita, Vienna. By this point, Stalin had already begun the Great Purge, executing tens of thousands of Soviet officials, including most of the Red Army generals Trosky had personally trained. Stalin had also tried Trosky in absentia for treason, finding him guilty and sentencing him to death. But Trosky kept writing. From his desk in Mexico, he produced articles,
books, and a constant stream of criticism directed at Stalin’s regime. He founded an international organization called the fourth international intended to challenge Stalin’s control over the global communist movement. For Stalin, this was intolerable. The order went out from Moscow. Trosky must die. The operation was assigned to a senior NKVD officer named Leoniding given the code name operation duck. The first attempt came on May 24th, 1940. A group of armed men led by the Mexican muralist David
Alfaro Siceros stormed the Coyoakan compound at dawn and opened fire with machine guns. They sprayed the bedroom with hundreds of rounds. Somehow Trosky and his wife survived by rolling off the bed and hiding in a darkened corner of the room. After the failed raid, the compound was reinforced with electric gates, watchtowers, and Titan security protocols. But a second plot was already in motion, one that did not require gunmen at all. It required only a single trusted insider. His name was Rammon
Marcott. He was born in Barcelona in February 1913 to a wealthy family, but his mother, Kared del Rio, was a fanatical communist who had been personally recruited by Soviet intelligence during the Spanish Civil War. She handed her own son over to the NKVD as an operative. In 1937, Ramon was summoned to Moscow for training where he learned the arts of deception, sabotage, and combat under the code name Gnome. In 1938, he was placed at the Sorbon in Paris, posing as a wealthy Belgian student named Jacqu Morar, the supposed
son of a Belgian diplomat. He spoke fluent French. He was handsome, well-dressed, and trained to charm. His target in Paris was not Trosky directly, but a young Brooklyn-born social worker named Sylvia Agelof, who was attending a meeting of the fourth international and was a personal confidant of Trosky. Through a planned chance encounter arranged by another NKVD operative, Merkar was introduced to her. Within months, she believed they were in love. When Sylvia returned to New York in 1939, Merkar followed her under a new
identity, that of a Canadian businessman named Frank Jackson, using a passport stolen from a dead Spanish Republican volunteer named Tony Babich. Sylvia eventually traveled to Mexico in 1940 to work as a translator for Trosky, and she brought Merkar with her. He spent months building trust inside the household. He drove Trosky’s grandson to school. He brought small gifts for the guards. He smiled at the secretaries. By August, he was considered a friend of the family. On the afternoon of August 20, 1940,
Merkar arrived at the compound carrying a typed article he claimed he wanted Trosky to review. Under his raincoat, despite the warm Mexican summer, he carried three weapons. a 45 caliber star pistol, a long knife, and a shortened mountaineering ice axe suspended inside his jacket by a length of string. The ice ax had been chosen with terrible care. It was a tool Merkar knew well from his mountaineering training, and the pickend was capable of delivering what his handlers believed would be a single fatal blow, silent enough that he
could escape the compound before anyone realized what had happened. Trosky agreed to read the article in his private study. He sat down at his desk. Marcott stood behind him, watching the back of his head, waiting. According to Merkar’s own confession to Mexican investigators, he closed his eyes for a moment, raised the ice ax, and drove it down into the top of Trosky’s skull. What happened next was not the silent execution his handlers had planned. The ads of the axe, the wide flat end,
struck Trosky and fractured his parietal bone. But Trosky did not die instantly. He let out a long, terrible scream that filled the entire house. He turned around, grabbed Mkoter’s hand, and bit it. The bodyguards burst into the room. They beat Merkar to the ground, and one of them was about to shoot him when Trosky, still bleeding from his head, ordered them to stop. According to multiple eyewitness accounts, Trosky said, “Do not kill him. This man has a story to tell.” He wanted the assassin
alive. He wanted him to talk. Trosky was rushed to the Cruz Verde Hospital where doctors operated on him for nearly 5 hours. He remained conscious for much of the time, dictating final statements to those around him. He told his wife that he loved her. He told his secretaries to continue his work. He died the following afternoon on August 21, 1940 from massive brain hemorrhage. He was 60 years old. The world lost the last surviving founder of the October Revolution who could still challenge Stalin in print. Ramon Marcott was
sentenced to 20 years in a Mexican prison, the maximum allowed by law. He refused to identify himself or his employers for the entire duration of his sentence. The Soviet government denied any involvement. But when Merkar was released in 1960, he traveled to Moscow where he was personally awarded the title of hero of the Soviet Union. The medal was pinned to his chest by the chairman of the KGB. He lived out the rest of his life between Moscow and Cuba, dying in Havana in October 1978. His mother, Kerad, was also decorated by
the Soviet state and lived in comfortable retirement in Paris until her death in 1975. The ice ax itself disappeared from Mexican police custody for decades, passed from hand to hand as a private trophy before finally surfacing in 2005 and ending up in a museum in Washington. The Mantrosky built into the most feared military force on Earth, the Red Army, would go on to fight the largest war in human history just one year after his death. None of those soldiers would mention his name. Stalin had erased him from every
photograph, every history book, every official record. But the army that defeated Nazi Germany at Stalenrad in Berlin was at its foundation the same army Trosky had created in 1918. It was perhaps the crulest irony of his death. The system he built ultimately produced the man who ordered his murder. If this story changed how you think about the founding of the Soviet Union, hit the like button. Subscribe to Army History for more documented accounts of how power consumes the very people who create it. and tell us in the comments
which other revolutionary leaders met.
